Never project yourself onto the industries, companies, and the people of your services. To them you are income: to you they are overhead. How can you communicate to these important people what you need? Speak their language.

As Alice clearly found, the other side of the looking glass is, very distinctly, different. Certainly, innocent Alice couldn't perceive how many looking glasses a small business must maintain. Put all the looking glasses together creates the cube of your business.

Which side of the cube are you on? To which face are you looking? What should appear on each face?

Good business administration means the viewer understands the information presented on their cube face, can act on the data in a manner you wish, and provide information or actions leading to the best path for success.

"Speak their language" is a pronoun. It's something you say to sound good, almost like you know why. And what is "their language"? Who is "their"?

First, to" speak their language", you have to know your data. Do you have enough data to create the information your viewer needs? Most of the viewers have forms to tell you what they desire. Thank goodness, for to extract the needs of the viewers would take years to distill. Imagine trying to distill what your account needs without the tax forms.

At this point we need to create a 3 dimensional view of your business. We'll call this the Cube. Within the cube all kinds of data floats around in generally unpredictable manners. Some transactional, some functional underpinning - like insurance - create your cube containing worm holes, black holes and nebulous matter, al of which happens at the same time. Add in all the human interaction of your office and keep shaking.

Come January/February you will once again explain your business to your accountant. I hope you are not about to waste his time discussing the inefficiencies of the shipping line. Nor does he or she care whether you are advertising for brand awareness or direct sales. Your accountant understands an orderly G/L account system which easily defines the parameters needed for taxes, not your micro breakdown of office supplies into cleaning supplies and paper towels. You are by no means required by law to provide your accountant with enough information to confuse the accounting process. Just the proper data and the parameters of how to handle FIFO or LIFO, how aggressive to be on assigning sales (the accounting plague of the early computer software industry), and so forth.

So now let's imagine we are inside the cube, where all data is available in the raw state, with a projector beaming its message to one face of the cube, the accountant's face. Since the accountant is directly facing the cube, other faces are not visible. This is good: don't let people create perceptions of your business, that's your job. Let them do their job with the right information making only the decisions that you assign to them. You are the commander of the cube. If you are not communicating properly to achieve the response you need, you aren't representing the cube properly.

Choose an area of interest to de-pronoun "Speak their language".