Hello and welcome to Business 300. My name is Philip Kulenshov and this is 300

seconds about business. We're all a busy people, so I have five minutes or less to get my point across.

You're here, I'm here.

We might as well get this done.

No time to meddle with non-essentials.

In your business, there are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of things that vie for the position of first importance.

And this is why seeking to make a profit is so helpful in honing your focus, because it doesn't let you get distracted, at least not without feeling it. Your team doesn't pay you. Your software stack doesn't pay you. The customer pays you.

Too many businesses get internally obsessed and lose sight of the only person keeping the lights on.

This happens in a lot of different ways, and most of the time starts with totally relevant endeavors.

Maybe your company is struggling with team alignment or the right tools or effective marketing.

Those things and more are essential when it comes to owning and operating a profitable and sustainable business.

But the problem is when all of the contrasting business responsibilities

are disconnected, pulling the owner in all sorts of directions, while the customer continues to

receive a poor product with bad service. Businesses lose focus when they have endless team meetings

about alignment or ongoing internal debates over tech stacks, branding, tweaks, and other culture decks,

or they focus on vanity metrics that keep their heads in the sand.

Those things are important, but a business owner must ask,

does this question affect the value my customer expects to receive?

If your customer wouldn't notice the change, it probably doesn't matter as much as you think.

The customer is why your business exists in the first place. If you didn't have a customer,

you wouldn't have a business. Until someone values what you have to offer enough to pay you for it,

your business is a hypothetical. You don't yet have a business until you have a customer,

...