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Professional wrestling, like most things in this consumer-led society, is a business.

The object of any business, no matter how big or small and no matter which field it operates in, is to make money.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall, so the old saying goes, and this is very apt in describing the demise of World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in 2001.

What the WCW didn't learn to do was living within their means.

When you have wrestlers on hugely back-ended contracts, written up in the heady days of the mid 1990s when business was booming for the WCW, this spelt trouble from a long way out for this organization.

When the cash was rolling in, the WCW were able to sign such superstar talent as Sid Vicious, Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, Bret Hart and Hulk Hogan onto huge long-term contracts, and a contract is always a contract, and must be fulfilled.

What the WCW didn't bank on was their run of success ever ending.

When the people stopped coming to their shows, and the merchandise sales dropped, and the TV ratings, etc., etc., suddenly the WCW found itself locked into enormous contracts with wrestlers whom they couldn't afford to pay.

This is what ultimately killed the WCW, and has indeed been the demise of many different businesses in many different fields over the course of many centuries.

Time is of the essence, another famous and well-worn cliche, and in the wrestling industry, it just so happened that at the time of the WCW's demise, business was booming again for the formerly downtrodden World Wrestling Federation, later to become known as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).

The lessons that can be learnt from the WCW's demise are that the WWE should ALWAYS have money left in the bank for a rainy day.

This is advice I'd give to any business, because nobody knows what is around the corner, so always have a back-up plan.

The WWE should play limits on the length of contracts they offer wrestlers, a good figure, I believe, is three years.

Three years is long enough to show a wrestler that the organization is committed to them and values them, yet not so long as to be tied down if the said wrestler, for whatever reason, doesn't work out for the company.

Also, a standard wage-paying system should be devised. If there is a set yearly salary, and then bonuses on top of that for each event appearance, scaled according to the significance of a wrestler's profile and match at each event, then this would not only be much fairer and transparent to all wrestlers in the WWE organization,

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