At its most basic level, business is about pursuing ideas and opportunities with the goal of making a profit. Effective business managers understand how the four main functions of business all work together to help identify good business opportunities. To find opportunities and run a business, a manager must first have a solid strategic understanding of products, markets, competitors and the internal structure of their organization. This is the area of business strategy.
Managers are after profits and profits are earned by creating sales revenues and keeping costs low.
Marketing expertise is needed to assess customer needs and market demands and to also create ways for the product or service to get noticed. Such activities bring the sales dollars in. Operations is focused more on costs. The goal here is to understand the system by which a product or service is ultimately produced and delivered, and to then design and manage that system in an efficient low-cost manner. In terms of basic business management, finance provides a numerical guidance system, a sort of radar, which managers can use to fine-tune an evaluation of a new product, idea or opportunity.