30 Oct How Net Margin Is Increased By Margin

Guest Post – Dr. Patrick Ball – Family Physician, writer, and musician

We all strive. Push for better and more. This ambition or enthusiasm can be the difference between making it and not making it in a competitive, indifferent market. No pain, no gain. It can also be, with the incorrect motivation or wrong goals, an ends to our undoing.

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Margin, in the business world, is expressed as a percentage of profit when divided by revenue. Net margin is this percentage when adjusted for taxes, interest and all those other expenses that must be paid for before the owner gets paid their salary. This is the “proverbial bottom line”. What is left over at the end of the day.

This is the number that those with ambition lie awake at night and try to predict or to strategize ways of increasing and maximizing. Leveraging talents, assets, efficiency, and human resources in a constant effort to show dependable material improvement. If cash flow is like blood then margin is like breath on the lips.

Paul Escamilla in his book “Longing for Enough in a Culture of More” makes the humbling point that at the completion of creation “once all is said and done, God takes a breather. . . this is a modest God if we’ve ever seen one . . . If there is a sense in which God can be understood as modest rather than grandiose in character, then our own self–understanding may bear similar reflection”. In other words, if the very One who created everything is satisfied with calling it “good” and then calling it a day – maybe we are not above doing so ourselves.

Escamilla also argues that health is an all encompassing totality with the goal of “needing little and offering much”. There are probably several things we can try and do to approach this goal. One of the more important ones is to examine our motives. If our source of motivation in our striving is insecurity, greed, desire for control, fame or other self-related recompense then our striving will likely not have healthy boundaries or healthy outcomes.

Michael Card, the songwriter, tells the story of his physician father when he passed, “At the funeral I felt like a shadow. ‘I’m sorry you lost your father,’ one of his friends said. Without a speck of anger or bitterness, before I knew what I was saying I blurted out, ‘I never had him.’ . . . When my dad would come home at 8 o’clock for supper, he would walk past us, who were waiting for him at the dinner table, and go into his study, locking the door behind him. As a little boy, I used to get down on my hands and knees and talk to him underneath the crack of the door. . . That painful moment, preserved in black and white, (and deeper still in my sense of memory) is a parable—for life is a parable. . . . We all speak underneath the door in a thousand different ways. Our children as well posture themselves in an effort to speak past the different doors we close and lock in their faces, doors of fear at being discovered; doors, like my father’s, of simple aching weariness. If the Gospel can prevail against the gates of hell, as Jesus says they can, then maybe there is hope for us in this as well.”

Perhaps sometimes we and our ambitions are not modest enough, as in the above example of God’s modesty. But perhaps sometimes our goals are too modest. What if we are trying to create successful physical empires here and now when we should let our imaginations capture ideas of creating more permament spiritual legacies? So that our children’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will know and have the sustaining support of our “prevenient courage” (Escamilla, again) to bolster them with an intuitive, innate courage and determination from good decisions and right relationahips gone before, preceding them. We should be dealing in the currency of lives inspired, changed, hope-filled and drawn into Love’s ways – blazing trails of goodness and hope out into their future lives as we go.

Diane Ackerman says “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” Maybe we can rewrite the equations above to maximize margin by manipulating the numerator and denominator. Scheduling life-giving activities in our crazy, busy itineraries. Choosing to be intentional with time serving others – and time given simply listening to others.

Being modest in our tastes and content to enjoy the abundance of the many simple pleasures we are afforded on a daily basis. Engaging in therapeutic play that informs our work lives. Remembering that we have pre-conscious gifts for laughter before we ever even learned to speak. Treasuring relationships as much as, and more than, we treasure profit. Giving generously of what we have – to become what we must be*. Allowing for greater margin on a more substantial level.

What are we doing to create real margin in our lives? The walk with the wife, the trampoline jumping with the kids or the camping at the grandparents. Investing in the co-worker, the neighbor, the waitress working a thankless Thanksgiving shift at the restaurant. The net margin that is expressed as a percentage of quality time divided by time allotted. The proverbial “bottom line”. What is left over at the end of the day.

This is the ultimate goal for the truly ambitious heart.

Contributing author Dr. Patrick Ball is a Family Practitioner in Memphis, TN