How far would you go to make money?

It’s easy to have strong moral beliefs when business is good. Enough money is coming in, the pipeline looks healthy, and you have the luxury of saying no to things that don’t feel right. It gets a lot harder when the numbers start moving in the wrong direction.That’s been on my mind because I know a lot of people are feeling that pressure right now. And pressure has a funny way of making things we never wanted to do suddenly seem pretty kinda ok. 

What will you sacrifice when life gets hard?

When revenue slows, we naturally start looking for ways to protect the business. That’s part of the job. We have employees who depend on us, bills to pay, and no guarantee next month will be better than this one. Nobody gets extra points for ignoring reality in the name of their principles.

But financial pressure can also convince us that every decision that produces revenue is a good decision. We take the client we know isn’t right because we need the money. We agree to work we don’t particularly want to do. We stop investing in our people, our community, or ourselves because those things are suddenly harder to justify on a spreadsheet. We make exceptions to rules that used to matter to us because this particular exception comes with a check attached.

Any one of those decisions might be necessary. Running a business sometimes means choosing between two less than ideal options. But I think there’s a difference between making a difficult decision to get through a difficult period and letting fear fundamentally change the business we’re building.

A bad quarter doesn’t mean we suddenly have to chase every dollar, take every client, cut every investment, or abandon the things we said mattered when times were better. Sometimes the right decision is less profitable. Sometimes it’s less efficient. Sometimes it means walking away from money at exactly the moment when walking away from money feels insane.

That doesn’t mean money isn’t important. Of course it is. But profitability was never supposed to be the only measure of whether a decision was right. If it were, there would be no reason to talk about culture, community, how we treat people, what kind of work we want to do, or what kind of lives we want to have. We’d look at the number at the bottom of the spreadsheet and let it make every decision for us.

I don’t think most of us started our businesses for that. I know we didn't.

We wanted some control over what we worked on, who we worked with, how we treated people, and how we spent our time. We wanted the ability to build something that reflected what we believed. Making money was part of that, but the money was supposed to help create the flexibility to make those choices. It wasn’t supposed to take them away.

The dangerous part about compromising under pressure is that it rarely feels like compromising. It feels practical. We tell ourselves we’ll take this client just this once, make this exception until things improve, or stop spending money on something we care about until the work comes back. Maybe that’s exactly what we need to do. But temporary decisions have a habit of sticking around, especially when they make money.

Then business improves, and we discover that the company survived, but it isn’t quite the company we want to be a part of anymore.

I’m not interested in pretending there’s some pure version of running a business where we never compromise. There isn’t. We’re going to make decisions we don’t like. We’ll get some of them wrong. There may even be moments when survival has to come before almost everything else. I've definitely been there. heck we're there right now which is a part of why I'm writing this.

But I won't let fear influence those decisions. Because if the things we say we believe only matter when they feel easy, then I’m not sure we really believe them.

I know some of you are making hard decisions right now. Give the numbers the attention they deserve, but remember that the numbers don’t get to decide everything. This is still your life.

Take care of the business. Take care of the people. And don’t forget to take care of the person who has to live with the business you’re creating.