Prosperity in The Age of Decline: How to Lead Your Business and Preserve Wealth Through the Coming Business Cycles

Chapter 8Business Growth Strategies and Tactics from Now through 2029

Change is coming—it always is. Business growth strategies and tactics for the run-up to the coming Great Depression include:

• See the future before it shows up on your income statement.
• Know how to play offense and defense.
• Understand that the rules are changing.

This book is about seeing the future in broad terms so that we can all prosper professionally and personally. Looking for the trends we describe to develop and anticipating how you are going to interact with those trends is part of a successful forward-looking strategy. But there is no use having a successful long-term strategy if you don't have some complementary tactics to work through the myriad of month-to-month, year-to-year, and cycle-to-cycle twists and turns that are going to define the short term reality as we progress through the long term. It comes down to a process of metrics and making decisions based on those metrics. Our favored means of measuring business activity are monthly data, moving totals, and rates-of-change. Our first book, Make Your Move, does a good job of explaining how to develop and read these metrics, so we are only going to summarize that process in this book.

Monthly Moving Totals (MMTs)

Moving totals are the sum of the monthly total data for a stated number of months. For example, the 3MMT for November would be the sum of the September, October, and November monthly data. When December data become available, September ...