My business, my choice. Business ethics in a new age.
Leslie F. Halleck
Plant for Profits Column
A commonality amongst many of the entrepreneurs and students I work with is a lack of awareness of how much power they actually have to create the cultural ethics in their business they also value in their personal lives; cultural business ethics that can have a big impact on the world around us. Too often, entrepreneurial hopefuls and those already running solopreneur operations or very small businesses, are overly focused on creating “the thing” they will be doing or offering (be it services or products) without much consideration for the type of people they will be serving - or want to.
The reality is that satisfaction or happiness in your own business often comes down to who you are serving, and who you have to work with to serve them. Ultimately, it’s the people who make you happy or miserable, more so than the work itself.
When you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll always find yourself doing a lot more administrative work, planning, and dealing directly with customers or employees than “the thing” you started the business to do in the first place.
So you’d better make sure you actually like the people you’re serving before you get stuck with them. From my perspective, defining your target ideal customer can include your personal values and ethics.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years doing work for customers who were difficult, made me uncomfortable, and whose ethics and values I knew didn’t align with my own. This resulted in them constantly pushing back on or rejecting my advice, which was sound and would have helped them grow, as well as expressing a general lack of respect for me personally and professionally. Ok, let’s get real, there is a whole lot of sexist behavior and consequences I’ve had to deal with over my entire career - and still do. Did some of those clients represent large blocks of recurring income for me? Sure. But the stress and strain they caused on my day-to-day just wasn’t what I had signed up for. Well, technically you can say I had signed up for it, because I took them on as clients in the first place. However I did fire my fair share. That is until a few years ago when I drew a hard line on my customer focus and pivoted to an intense focus on a new kind of customer.
In fact, these days a focus on my ideal target customer is the single most important driver of my business activities and decision making.
"The reality is that satisfaction or happiness in your own business often comes down to who you are serving, and who you have to work with to serve them."
I get it; there is an innate fear of not having enough business to be successful. Most entrepreneurs and business owners will take any work or customer they can get. Saying no to bad fits is a really tough thing to do, but difficult or bad customers aren’t a path to success. At least not success you’ll enjoy. And as we all also have the power to define what success looks like to us individually, the money may not always be worth the pain. When you cull out clients who don’t align with your values and ethics, or don’t respect you or your methods, you open up your time and space to attract better ones. In doing so, you’re also creating the kind of company culture for yourself and any future or existing employees you may bring on board. And yes, even when you are a company of one, you’ve created a company culture for yourself. How do you feel about it?
Someone online recently said to me, after I stated that I prefer to work with clients who share my values, “So you only work with people who think like you. Am I reading that right?”. Well no, they obviously didn’t read it right. What they did do was twist my words into a rhetorically inauthentic statement to push their own viewpoint wrapped up in the guise of an innocent “question.”
On the contrary, I work every day with people who have different thoughts and perspectives than me. Thoughts, however, can be discussed and evolved. Values are tougher; many of them run deep and may not be something that can change or are not rooted in rational thinking. Some "values" are downright dangerous to me personally, as human and a woman. So yes, there are certain thoughts, perspectives, and values - and the clients who hold them - that I won’t tolerate or do business with anymore. If I can pre-disqualify them with good planning and marketing from the get go, without having to put in any admin time on them, that’s a win/win.
So let’s talk about “freedom”. Something you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about is that in a capitalistic free market society, you do actually get to choose your customers and clients. Especially if you run a niche business. You do this in how clearly you define who it is you want to work with or sell to. You do this through how you craft your brand voice so that you resonate with the people you are trying to reach, and they can see themselves reflected in your brand. You do this by knowing upfront who is or is not going to be a good fit for you because you’ve done the planning. You do this by having a strong sense of your own values and ethics and making a choice to reflect them in your brand.
So why aren’t you exercising these muscles more frequently and efficiently to create your own business ethic?
These concepts are some I spend a fair amount of time on with my botanical business coaching clients and students in my horticulture business courses. At first they are surprised we’re spending so much time on the “who” versus “how” of business planning. Eventually, they realize how important it is to them to first create emotional dynamics in their business that align with their hearts, not just their wallets.
Authenticity, transparency, parity, and human rights & kindness are business ethics. The more business owners who find the courage to openly hold firm on such values and translate them into their business culture, the better.
