Barbers end up opening barbershops. Then they realise that running a barbershop has little to do with cutting hair. Likewise, software developers also open companies but soon realise that rent, salaries, marketing, leadership, capital raising, motivating staff, creating distribution pipelines—all of the above have little to do with the technical skills that one has. In other words, business is a lot more complicated.

On the other hand, those in business get lost in the maze of responsibilities as they survive from one crisis to the next. If it’s not a cash flow crisis caused by winning a big client, it’s month end. Then some equipment breaks or an employee forgets to push a button, which affects operations. This is the other side — the chaotic side. Founders and leaders often call me at this point to assist. When we sit; I alway start with the same question:

Who do you invoice and when do they pay you?

Believe it or not, many people struggle to answer these two questions clearly and confidently, and there are understandable reasons for this. A content creator, for instance, creates for a specific audience but gets paid by Google, let’s say, or earns royalties elsewhere. Others raise money from enterprise supplier development (ESD) agencies to support other businesses and eventually get confused about who their customer really is. Venture capital firms often fund pre-revenue companies and incubate them until they figure out their economics — Google, Facebook, and now the AI companies are all good examples of this.

Regardless, there are powerful insights buried in these two questions. Put differently, A business is an invoice that gets paid. If you are issuing invoices that do not get paid, then you will soon run out of resources and be forced to close shop. If you are not issuing invoices, then you have a sales or marketing problem. Or it might be worse, you might be selling a product people do not want.

So, whether you are Elon Musk, launching rockets into space, or a street vendor, this principle applies. Are you issuing invoices and are they getting paid? If the answer is affirmative for both, then you are in business. If you are unclear about how to answer these questions, then you likely have problems in your business — or you’ll have one soon.