how "we are in business to make a profit" is like living to eat ...

the crooked nook 1

Hearing "we are in business to make a profit" usually makes me want to retch

(and I have done some serious retching this winter - trust me, it ain't pretty people although on the plus side I still sound a little bit like Demi Moore)

in fact it makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

(yes, it's going to be one of those posts)

This is not the same as saying "to stay in business we must make a profit" which is quite obvious and makes the profit a necessity rather than a goal.

Think of profit like food. 

We need food to survive, but we are not surviving so we can eat .. I hope.


(and times in my life when I am obsessing about food and in particular what I am having for dinner - by lunchtime - are times when I have let things get pretty out of whack - of course some foods are always worth obsessing over, but I think you know what I mean)

The value of our life is bigger than the necessary stuff that sustains us.

Our businesses are bigger than their bottom lines, too.

If we have a profit as goal mindset it is worth thinking about this. It's the difference between creating a passionate business that wants to get our whoseewhatsee into the right hands because that whoseewhatsee will add real value to the people those hands belong to and creating a business because we passionately want to make X amount of dollars.

It's easy to get this stuff flipped around in our heads and when we can unflip it is when our businesses - assuming we are offering something that adds value for other people - can really begin to attract the people who need us. 

If our goal is money we will be attracting people with the same mindset - so we better be really cheap or really exclusive.