Worry In Business In Japan   There are so many things we have to worry about in business. Do we have enough cash flow to pay the bills, will we have enough left over to get to the end of the next month.  Can we meet salary, do we have enough to pay our taxes, can we meet our supplier’s payment invoice requests.  The one thing that will bring a business down and eliminate it is not enough cash flow.  Once that becomes insufficient it is game over.  So we need to preserve cash and that means you need a really accurate tracking system.  You do not want any nasty surprises about cash flow.   We worry about our clients mix.  Do we have the right balance of those we are farming, that is to say the regular buyers of our products or services.  They may not grow much but they are regular and sound repeat business.  We also need new clients though to replace the ones we lose and to expand the business or we need existing clients to spend more with us. This is the gross revenue side of the business.  As we all know, you only need a couple of consecutive months of poor revenue flows to have cash flow problems, so the regular sources of business are very important.   Then there is expenditure side of things.  We need to keep our fixed costs conservative, although that is not so easy in Japan. We want to see our variable costs/fixed costs ratio moving in the right direction.   Another area of prominence at the moment is retaining staff.  We are seeing a drying up of hires in Japan, as the population decline makes it harder and harder to hire new people.  If someone leaves, you are looking down the barrel of 18 months before you can recruit and train the replacement to get up to the speed of the person who left.  This means the retain part of our companies activities becomes very important.   The younger generation are becoming more aware that they are in demand and they unlike their parents, can move from job to job, with no stigma attached.  The grass always looks greener on the other side to them and so they will up and be moving to your competitor, unless they are properly managed. They are the first free agent era of workers in Japan.  This has never happened before, this is all new and there is no road map on how to navigate our way through these societal changes.    Many of them have a very starry eye view of work and so when they start working for a firm they realise this isn't as glamorous as imagined, in fact a lot of what they have to do is boring and the boss isn’t all that great either.  If they walk out they have taken all your training with them to a competitor. You have just lost your investment in them, plus they are very hard to replace, so you could be short of staff for some time.   The experienced workers are getting older as people want to keep on working and because we want them to keep on working.  As they get older they have various health issues so they can’t make it to work some days as they are sick.  They also face the health issues of their parents.  They have to take them to hospital or they need to stay at home some days to take care of them.  All of this is dislocating the work flow, but this is the new reality and we have to be geared up for dealing with it.  This means we need to have a lot more flexibility than before about work hours, working from home, giving people enough sick leave and recreation time to recover.   So what do we do about dealing with all this worry. Here are a few ideas to adopt to get on top of all of this.  Firstly, get clarity about what is the real problem.  When are worried we have a lot of things flying around in our brain.  We tend to be unable to get focus.  We need to stop that.  So call it out.  What is the absolute worst thing that could happen?  Name it, isolate it, focus on it.  This gives us a clear target, gives us clarity around the problem.  Next accept that it will happen.  Don’t go into denial or delusion.  Expect this will hit and hit hard. Face it.  Having done tha