Your Business is Made to Impact
Your business is made to impact. Regardless of where you are located in the world, your industry or your product or service. Regardless of your revenue, your profitability or how many employees you have. Regardless of what you believe, your faith, your background or your view of the world. If your company employees 100,000 people or only 1, it was made to have an impact.
The reason this is true is that as human beings, we are all created to work and add value to the world in some unique way. It’s through our work that we create value and provide for our families in a sustainable way. A paycheck in exchange for our ability to work is the greatest form of impact the world has ever known. A well-paying job is always the first step out of poverty, no matter where in the world that job is. Even if that job does not pay enough to break the cycle of poverty, it can still be a steppingstone in the right direction towards a job that will.
With a steady income, families can break the cycle of poverty. They can pay for basic human needs such as food, clothing and shelter. They can save for emergencies or unplanned expenses, a new car, a college education or for retirement. A paycheck is what provides the opportunity to help meet someone else’s need in the form of giving.
What many people fail to recognize is that it’s employers in a free market that create this impact on the world. Your business has a tremendous impact on the world by providing the community a way to exchange their skills and talents for income. Those jobs that your company provides are solving for homelessness, hunger, and poverty in a big way. Yet most business leaders, while they understand the value of job creation on the community, crave more. We all want to have a greater impact. It’s built into who we are and how we see the world. People don’t go through their entire life without craving some form of greater meaning and purpose to their life. What we find is that it’s impacting others that brings us joy in a way that material possessions and business success never can. The question we must begin asking ourselves is how can we maximize this impact?
This is where most business leaders get tripped up in their mind about their capacity for impact. Most business leaders have come to believe that their role is to generate a profit to be able to give to charity. It’s then the job of the charity to use that money to do the “good work” and impact the community. It’s almost like there is a divide between business and nonprofits and that one is better than the other because of its perceived impact. As a result, most business owners focus on being able to give more money away as a way to create more impact.
Here is the problem with that. We are never going to be able to give enough money away to solve the world’s problems. If we truly care about maximizing our impact, we need to reframe the solution. Instead of thinking of your business only as a source of charitable giving, what if you looked at it as the actual source of impact to your community?
What you will see when you do this is that your greatest form of impact has been right in front of you the entire time. You have been so busy trying to generate a profit to give that you have missed the massive opportunity to create sustainable and scalable community impact that exists in every company around the world.
It’s critical that we all start to understand the correlation between our business success and community impact or significance. In fact, the two are linked together so well that the more significance we can have in the community through our impact, the more successful we find our businesses. The truth is that we can all have success and significance together at the same time and that they are not mutually exclusive. However, it’s very easy to miss this correlation and most people do. This is critically important for you to understand because missing this opportunity is a form of failure.
First is that you are failing to get out of your business the real value that it holds. Your business has tremendous untapped potential waiting to be unlocked. That potential is value that shows up on the P&L, balance sheet and enterprise value and it’s easy to miss if you don’t understand the relationship between your company’s business model and its ability to impact the community.
The second failure is the most painful. It’s the failure to meet the most basic needs of your employees. As the employer, you are your employees most trusted financial partner. While providing a paycheck is critically important and a major form of impact in its own right, there is so much more that you can do to meet the needs of your employees. For example, we know through research that 30% of all-American employees are living beyond paycheck to paycheck in a negative cash flow scenario going further into debt every month. The average American employee has less than $400 in liquid emergency savings and pays over 25% of their take home income on consumer debt payments not including a mortgage. This reality has left millions of people living in poverty in every neighborhood in America as the cost of living creeps up and debt rises. Currently, 1 in 9 American’s are dealing with food insecurity or hunger because of this and it’s not just an inner-city problem that you can see. It’s a silent, hidden problem in the suburbs, at work, at school in your church. It’s likely a few of your close friends and family members. In fact, there are more families living in poverty in the suburbs in American than in the city.
Think about how many companies generate a large profit and are able to give millions of dollars away per year to charities in an attempt to solve issues related to basic human needs, poverty or hunger. What they failed to realize is the fact that 30% or more of their own employees are right in front of them and dealing with those exact same issues daily. When that happens, we miss the opportunity to make an immediate and lasting impact of those who we see every day and is also part of our community.
Finally, failure to maximize your impact jeopardizes your legacy in your own community. Building a successful company that is profitable, employing people and giving are all wonderful and noble in their own right. But don’t you dream of the type of legacy that is even deeper than that? One that people can’t stop talking about and will have a ripple effect for generations? The type of legacy that inspires your entire community to step up and maximize their impact? One that your kids and grandkids are excited to continue well after you are gone?
Fortunately, there is a better way…
There is a growing movement of leaders all over the world that are transforming the way that we view business. They are beginning to view their business as a source of impact. Impact that is so deeply integrated into their business model that the more impact they have, the better their business does. This is not a side project, program or initiative that attempts to have impact at a cost to the core business like many social responsibility programs today but rather it is part of the core business strategy. These are leaders who are learning that their roles in the world are not just to be successful so that you can create significance with their giving. Instead they realize the more significant impact they have, the more success they find.
They are finding brand new fulfillment in their roles as leaders because they are able to remove the subconscious divide between business success and community impact that has so long hung over their head as a compromise between good vs great, secular vs sacred. They are able to wake up every single day and stand face to face with the impact that they are creating in their community and see it first-hand unlike ever before. No longer is giving something you do out of obligation, but it is something you do because you continue to experience the joy of being part of a sustainable and scalable solution to your community’s biggest problems.
These bold new leaders are seeing their cultures transformed systematically as one by one their employees and customers are being impacted in ways that are meaningful and unique. What these leaders know is that financial capital is not the only form of capital that they can invest in and expect a return on investment. In fact what they know is just the opposite and that it’s actually their human and social capital that has the most potential for significant returns. This leads to significant business benefits that can be connected to the P&L such as recruiting, retention, engagement, content generation, word of mouth, PR, partnerships and tax savings. The culmination of these improvements across functions of the business will lead to impact on the business’ profitability.
They are seeing their own employees being impacted in ways that will span generations. People right in front of them are learning how to emerge out of the grips of poverty, manage cash flow, create margin, eliminate debt and save for their future. All of the issues that were traditionally allocated to the government and nonprofits such as poverty, hunger, depression, homelessness and suicide are being influenced through their own company as part of their core business. They are also realizing that their employees and customers are as subset of their community and that by creating impact for their own human capital, they are ultimately impacting the community at large. It’s this sustainable community impact that creates a legacy that anyone would be proud of.
If you really think about it, the way we have been trying to solve our employees’ problems through benefits hasn’t really changed at all in 40–50 years. We are still solving for retirement with the 401k that was passed into law over 40 years ago with the Revenue Act of 1978. This included changes made to the Internal Revenue Code — Section 401(k) that allowed employees to avoid being taxed on deferred compensation. Taxed deferred retirement savings is a wonderful thing, however that is where our conversation about finances with our employees stopped and has still not evolved to this day.
Meanwhile, with the increased cost of living and the relatively stagnant wage growth that we have seen in this country the vast majority of American workers are just trying to break even on their cash flow, save for emergencies and get out of debt which we have completely ignored. The highest return on investment is always going to be had by solving for the highest felt need, issue or problem for our employees. Right now that problem for most employees is not long-term savings, but savings for today. The beautiful opportunity that you have is to just change the frame from long term savings to short term. By doing so you are now your employees most trusted and more importantly valuable financial coach. As soon as you are able to see this problem for what it is and step into it with a solution you will likely experience the greatest impact of your life.
We will teach you step by step, everything you need to know on how to build an effective employee care program that will maximize your impact to your business, employees and community. The key is to be able to truly understand the deep-rooted problems that your employees and customers face every single day and figure out how to partner with them to solve their problems. The amazing thing is that everyone whether you are the janitor or the CEO has a problem that can be solved with the right tools and mindset and we can show you how. Using a proven framework based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Need, we can now architect benefits that people respond to regardless of where you are at in life’s journey and tie that value back to the P&L of your business.
To learn more and to join a global movement of business leaders learning together to maximize impact through employee benefits, go to https://madetoimpact.com/ and register to join the movement.
