A Business Secret

There are many restaurants in the neighbourhood where I live. I have been passing by the area for the last ten years and it is very obvious that only one out of all these restaurants has been consistently doing good business. The others are still in the same condition they were in ten years ago. I asked the owner of the successful restaurant what the secret of his success was. “Very simple,” he replied, “Where other restaurants buy their supplies by the kilo, I buy them in bulk. Every time I have to buy anything I go through the whole market and buy goods at the minimum rate. Due to the large quantity of goods I buy and the making of cash payments, I get good discounts.” Then he said, smiling, “Gain has to be made from the market and not from the customer.”

Usually, shopkeepers believe that to charge the maximum amount from the customer is good business. This is just exploitation and those shopkeepers who get a bad name for exploitation can’t expect customers to patronize their shops. This is the reason for the failure of shopkeepers of this kind. The best way of doing business is that, at the time of purchasing goods, you should try to get them at the lowest price, so that you make a higher profit, even after selling at a low cost to the customer. This rule is workable for any business. In every business, a shopkeeper buys goods from somewhere which he sells to his customers. Whether this purchasing is done in one phase or in many phases, it will always have many sides to it. Usually, to save himself from hard work, a shopkeeper tries to meet his needs by taking some shortcuts. But if more effort is put in, the same commodity can be bought at a lower price.

This obviates the customer being charged more due to the shopkeeper having avoided doing any hard work.

An ordinary shopkeeper always tries to make up for his unwillingness to work hard by charging the customer more. But this way of operating does not take the business person towards great success. The best way of doing business is to sell things to the customer at very reasonable prices and try to cut costs in the phase prior to the sale of goods to the customer. Profit making should be done more from the market and less from the customers.