It was recently brought to my attention by a colleague who is looking to buy a business that a number of factors that are currently available to him make this business viably profitable. So I asked him what happens if those assumptions break and we walked through them one at a time to see what breaks his value thesis. It turns out there were more assumptions he was making than he thought and quite a few of them destroyed the profitability of a business he was looking to buy. At different times we have different things that work for us and different things that work against us but very few things stay the same forever. Often things we previously counted on change at a moments notice and not for any reason that we caused. Life is going to keep on “life-ing” no matter what we do. So if we’re going to make a bet on future performance, it should be on factors we actually control.