Protecting What’s Important
by Colin on 06/08/09 at 6:26 am
It occurred to me today that sometimes good people don’t always win – and too often bad people do.
We were introduced to a new client at the start of February this year. His greatest problem was that he was naive to business and trusted the wrong people. He trusted that his accountant would provide advice and guidance – but just produced tax returns.
He trusted that his trusted right hand man was doing what he said he was doing – when he was really doing his own thing.
He trusted that his bank was with him and willing to help – when they were really just taking his money.
And he didn’t trust his own abilities and instincts – and tomorrow he goes into administration and will have a debt issue hanging over his head for a long time – and will probably lose his family home.
Then I have a client who treats staff as his chattels, who treats the law with flippant disregard for right and wrong and who has been non compliant for more than 10 years in every aspect of business. We get his business compliant and correct his tax issues. Even though he has earned a lot of money in the last 10 years he escapes with an effective tax rate of 10.2% for the last 10 years.
Which comes to the point. It doesn’t matter which of these cases you empathise with more. The cold hard facts are that if you are in business then you must as early as possible understand how best to protect your family’s assets.
Client number 1 above – had no asset protection strategy in place and loses a great deal. Client number 2 also has no strategy in place but by sheer luck has been able to avoid issues and we have put the correct asset protection strategies in place.
Business is just something that we do to survive. It is not the reason that most of us exist. The people that you come home to each day are the reasons that you should be doing what you are doing. Make sure that they are always looked after.
RICHARD
Oct 3rd, 2009
Naive trust has NO place in business. One might ask if you would trust yourself and the honest person would say NO. Then why would you trust any one? In reality trust is a risk management assessment. Trust MUST be backed with evidence of performance and assessment of future capacity to meet performance goals. Trust needs to be constantly monitored, reassesed and maintained.
Blind faith might suit the visionary, but the responsible person deconstructs faith into a workable reality.
admin
Oct 3rd, 2009
Yes Richard you are right.
However everyday people place trust in someone in business and too often they have not critically assessed that persons true credentials.
Your comment about trust needing to be monitored is very important and everyone in business needs to ensure that they do have the mechanisms in place to do this constantly.