In a business, the wrong action is not a harmless experiment. If you do what belongs to a condition lower than the one you are actually in, you end up in that lower condition. That is why doing something is not always better than doing nothing.
What a condition is, and why it has a formula
Almost every owner says it after a bad month: it was a slow month. The sentence doesn't say how slow, or slow compared with what, and above all it doesn't say what to do now. So what usually follows is one of two things: nothing, or panic.
The booklet's whole skill is reading a number, naming the condition behind it, and knowing what action fits that condition. A condition, in the source's language, is the name for where a given activity stands: the whole business, one area, a new service. A formula is the set of actions that belongs to that condition, and only to it.
According to the source there are seven conditions on a single scale, from Non-Existence at the bottom to Power at the top. Between them sit Danger, Emergency, Normal and Affluence. Each one has a formula of its own, and the formulas are nothing like each other.
That is the whole point. If the formulas were similar, getting the condition wrong would cost very little. They aren't, so the worst mistake is not getting the number wrong, but getting the condition wrong and running the wrong formula.
Two things about the scale that surprise people
The first: Non-Existence is zero, not minus. It isn't a punishment or a failure. It's where anything new starts.
Suppose a freelancer launches a new service and treats it as if it were in Normal, because his established business is in Normal. But the new service is in Non-Existence. Nobody even knows it exists yet.
The second: Affluence sits below Power. In other words, an excellent month is not the summit. It's a stop along the way.
Suppose an owner comes out of a record month and treats it as her new level. Three months later she realizes it was Affluence, and that Affluence has a formula of its own, one she never ran.
The scale is a route
The source describes the scale as a route, not a ranking. Whoever applies the formula of their condition intelligently comes through it into the next one, and from there into the one after. Climbing means passing through each condition in turn, never jumping over one.
And it works in reverse too. In the source's words:
“Most failures on post are occasioned by failures to follow the conditions”
That means failing to recognize which condition you're in, failing to apply its formula while you're in it, and failing to stop applying it once you've moved into another.
Suppose a consultant opens a new practice area and, from day one, starts streamlining the process. Nobody even knows yet that she offers it. She is running a Normal formula inside Non-Existence.
With the next area she opens, she does the opposite. For a few months she only announces herself, asks what people need, and delivers it. This time it works.
The price of a wrong diagnosis
Here is the rule the whole chapter rests on. Use a condition lower than the one you're really in, and you bring about that lower condition. Run the Normal formula while you're in Affluence, and you will drop to Emergency.
Read that slowly. The warning isn't about sitting still. It's about acting wrongly. A wrong diagnosis doesn't leave you where you were; it takes you down.
Suppose a renovation contractor has a good month and decides to ride the momentum by adding two new services. That's an action that belongs to Non-Existence, and he was in Affluence. Within two months he's in Emergency. He didn't sit on his hands. He did something, and that very something dropped him two steps.
The rule works from above as well. Bypass means grabbing work that is someone else's job and doing it yourself. According to the source, if you're in Normal or Emergency and start to bypass, you drop quickly to Danger, and the numbers plunge.
Suppose an installer, in an ordinary month, starts doing his employee's work himself because it's quicker that way. That is bypass, and bypass belongs to Danger. He ends up in Danger for real.
What the booklet has on this
In It Was a Slow Month, this chapter closes with two exercises: map, and diagnose. The chapters after it go through the conditions one by one, from Non-Existence up to Affluence, and each one brings the formula for its own condition.
Before you do anything to fix a slow month, know which condition you're in. The right action for a different condition can be exactly what knocks you down.