In times of financial pressure, it’s tempting to focus your energy on profit rather than the wider concerns that underpin your business, such as your ethical standards. But these standards are essential to helping your business stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons. Finding creative solutions can help you balance profit with maintaining the standards you choose to operate by.
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In today’s video, I talk about the ethics around focusing on the profit-making part of your business, especially when you’re under financial pressure.
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Avoiding the Slippery Slope of Profit Versus Ethics
Recently, I met with a customer who’s experiencing a little financial pressure in their business. They wanted to talk about some useful strategies to help manage this – what they should focus on to help ease the financial pressure, and how much energy they can divert to the things that they want to do but that are not yet ready to make their business much money.
The temptation at such times is to focus on the activities that make the most profit – which eases the financial pressure. However, for this particular business, the activities that were making the most profit were not focused on their ultimate goals for the business – the meaningful societal goals that embody the mission of the business as well as its ethical standards.
The desire to focus on the profit-making part of your business – especially when you’re under financial pressure and in ‘survival mode’ – seems logical, and there’s no denying that profit is important to any business. I’m sure that focusing on profit is what most business strategists would suggest you do in this situation, too – get the money and survive first, and then you can worry about your ethics later.
However, I would argue that it’s a very slippery slope you’d be sliding down – before you know it, you could find yourself immersed in a process of running things in a way that doesn’t fit with your ethical standards. One day, you may find that you’re at the head of a business that isn’t aligned with your values because you’ve focused too much of your energy on the bit that makes money.
Remember: Profit Is Fuel, Not Purpose
When I first sat down to do freelance marketing, I developed a set of marketing principles, and one of these principles is that profit is fuel, not purpose. It is important to emphasise that while profit isn’t something you should ignore, it’s also not something that you should prioritise.
This naturally raises the point that was troubling the client I mentioned: “But what happens when you’re under financial pressure – that’s what matters the most, the profit!” My view is that it is at times of financial pressure when you should be especially careful NOT to focus on profit because it is at that point that you will be making decisions that affect the rest of the business – perhaps even the lifetime of the business. Businesses that focus entirely on profit often start from a place of surviving by focusing on profit.
If you’re under financial pressure, take a moment to step away from thoughts of profit, and consciously bring forward in your mind the ethical standards that you don’t want to compromise on. Remind yourself of that boundary and re-establish that boundary – and from that point, you can start to look for other solutions rather than sacrificing your values and your ethics to make that profit.
Finding Solutions without Compromising Your Ethical Standards
The customer at the heart of this story edits a lot of content. The business has a number of video editors, and so the question that needed to be answered was: “How long are the video editors spending on our content, and is it worth them spending all that time editing the videos and getting things exactly the way they want it to look? Are we making money from that?”
As we explored the situation further and looked towards the company’s standards, we noted that the video content is the business’s art, and so the question became: “Is it worth it to make the art the way we want it to be?”
Our discussion concluded with the decision to organise a meeting with the other video editors so that they could come to an agreement about the real question for them: “What’s the creative standard that we don’t want to compromise on – what’s the minimum creative standard that we’re going to meet in order to publish a video?” We identified the question they needed to answer to ensure that standards were never compromised in the pursuit of profit.
Shaping Your Business Around Your Ethical Standards
Earlier in my career, I came across this phrase that really didn’t sit well with me:
“Employees need to shape themselves around the business, rather than the other way around.”
I really disliked that turn of phrase and that attitude. In my view, the business should shape itself around your standards, not the other way around! A more useful phrase to keep in mind is:
“The business should shape itself around your standards, and not the other way around.”
I invite you to think about that phrase when you’re considering what the ethical standards are in your business – what are you unwilling to compromise on, and what will you find creative solutions for in order to make sure that you maintain those standards?
If you would like to discuss the areas in your business you are unwilling to compromise on – and identify ways to balance your focus so that profit remains fuel, not purpose – please do get in touch.