Following Obama Could Kill Your Business
Today the U.S. capital gains rate stands at 15%. That means if you sell a business that you’ve owned for more than a year, you owe the government 15% in taxes — $150,000 on a $1,000,000 sale.
Obama wants to raise that to as much as 28%, though. So to net the same amount with a 28% rate as you do with a 15% rate, you’d have to sell the same business for $1,180,555.55 — 18% more.
That’s bad, but it can be overcome. Besides, if it’s not this changing to affect your business, it will be something else. Part of being a business owner is constantly adjusting to market conditions that are always in flux.
So that’s not what I’m talking about when I say that following Obama could kill your business. I’m talking about these quotes from two different speeches in March of 2007:
[O]ne of the enemies we have to fight — it’s not just terrorists, it’s not just Hezbollah, it’s not just Hamas — it’s also cynicism.
My main opponent in this race isn’t other candidates — it’s cynicism.
He may be right, but if you eliminate cynicism in your business, it could have a disastrous effect. Preparing to fail is critical for any business.
Sahar provided a great perspective on that in You Got Lucky. Now What? As I told him in the comments of that post, I’m an eternal optimist. When I’m following daily metrics, a negative day is just a temporary blip, but a great day is always the beginning of an upward trend. It’s one of my biggest flaws.
And still, even though I had recognized that clearly, it still came up and bit me this year. I made plans based on the way things had always worked without preparing for a change that I knew — and always preached to others — was not only a daily possibility, but an inevitable occurrence. All that, and I still failed to plan for it. It may have wiped out one business altogether, and it came very close to wiping out another one.
So make it a habit to look at your business cynically on a very regular basis. What’s the worst that could happen? How do you create a firmer foundation? How do you make your site more defensible?
Maybe America doesn’t need more cynicism, but most of our businesses certainly do.
Dey
September 11, 2008
at 11:27 am
Shane:
This is an interesting post about foreseeability and anticipation. Cynicism to me in this case = foreseeability. As a business owner and in general one must be able to assess the market, synthesize the data of the environs, and then extrapolate the various ways that the market conditions may effect your business, plans and/or objectives. However, the difficulty is anticipating what is in most cases often unforeseeable to the untrained eye. I suppose that is why self-improvement, education, exposure and experience are crucial when assessing the business environment, and making sound business decisions.