80 / 20 Rule for Inscription

Albertus asks an excellent question on Croda's blog:
"Why will you spend a ton of time and money to max a profession and in the end only use a Small part of it."

I know I promised to move away from wow/glyph/gold topics but this worm was too juicy to not take the bait. Why was this an interesting question you ask? Because Critical's whole blog previously was focused on only part of the inscription profession: glyphs and DM trinkets. I never sold books, inks, pigments, raw materials and the only times I sold MFCs was to cheese off a particular competitor until they buggered off and then I stopped. I am the guy the question is exactly aimed at and it was thought provoking to say the least, thanks Albertus.

So I'm guessing most of my Critical Readers will know or have heard of the 80/20 rule yea? By having it in the title its pretty obvious that's what we're going to talk about today.

So there I was asking myself: Hmmmmm if I'm so smart why did I focus on part of the inscription profession instead of everything which is profitable. I never really thought about it back then but looking back I believe I focused on the 20% of the inscription game which gave me 80% available profit. Obviously I just made these percentages up and I have no proof but hear me out.

Firstly, lets look at all inscription items able to be sold for a profit and then chuck em into a pie chart that I just happened to have in my back pocket. You will notice glyphs and DM items make up a nice portion of the pie (and by pure coincidence happen to add up to 80%):

Secondly, lets talk about the time required to run a business focused on glyphs and DM trinkets only. Once you set up your manufacturing process efficiently, it can become 20% of your time spent on inscription. See my Critical War series and you'll notice the same smooth repeat every "work" day taking very minimal time. DM trinket manufacturing isn't shown but that's super easy as pie: collect a crapload of embers and AFK mill into embers then pull out the cheap lifes you've been snatching off the AH and then again AFK craft cards.

Why spend (possibly up to 80%) more time inscriptioning making the other stuffs which give you small (aka the 20%) profit? You shouldn't! Think big business, big total profits, big big big! Don't run a small 7-Eleven selling 100 SKUs at high profit margins slowly. Grow your business into a Walmart or a Target, something big! Be an Apple! I dont know! I dont care! As long as its something Big! Lame goals = lame results. Winners fuck the prom queen!

!!!!!! Set your goal today with big exclamation marks !!!!






Oh and dont focus on the 80% that results in 20% return !!! Phew, almost forgot the moral of today's post.