Revenue is a gumball.
Or at least, that’s how some in the boardroom tend to treat it.
You shove capital into the designated slot, there’s a bit of clanking and whirring, and out pops revenue.
Is this an oversimplification? Yes. But it does help illustrate a problem, so let’s run with it for the moment.
The problem with the revenue-as-a-gumball approach is that sometimes, the gumball simply doesn’t appear. Or there are fewer than there should be.
And because the process is completely opaque, you never find out what’s wrong until it’s too late.
The trick then, is to treat revenue not like a gumball, but as the entire gumball machine.
In other words, treating it as a process within the organization, and not just a number on the quarterly report.
This means aligning all relevant people and departments, using the right tools that provide end-to-end control over the process and most crucially, maintaining constant vigilance.
Businesses that do this discover revenue generation opportunities they didn’t even know existed, allowing them not just to weather the storm of a recession but come out of it even stronger.
All it takes is a little gum-ption.
