A five-level pyramid guides what to fix first: sales, then profit, then operational order, then impact, then legacy. At each level, ask two questions: do we have any, and is it adequate. Without profit, a business lives in constant panic.
The next level is profit. Profit is the creation of stability for an organization. If you are not profitable, if you are surviving check by check, there is a constant panic going on. How the business priority pyramid works is we simply ask ourselves two questions. Do we have any? And is it adequate? Do we have any sales right now in our organization? If you've no sales going on, you got a sales issue. If you have some sales, our question then becomes, is it adequate to support profit? And the only way to determine that is to investigate our profitability. And you ask the same question at the profit level. Do we have any profit and is it adequate to support the next level? The next level is order. Order means efficiency through the organization. This allows your business to keep operating. The next level in a business's priority pyramid is impact. Impact is the creation of transformation as opposed to transactions. It's transformational. The highest level, legacy. Legacy is the creation of permanence.
