Four Pillars of Healthy Business-Building

Through our entrepreneurial endeavors we can embody the values and practices on a micro level that we hope to permeate our culture and systems on a macro level. The more we do this, collectively, the more chance we have of making impact and positive societal change.

The Big Whisper was born from observing just how unhealthy many norms of business culture have been for the last century. To name a few: Hyper consumption and materialism. Profit worship, growth for greed’s sake, favoring the needs of a small few at the top over the collective. This kind of business culture has contributed to a lot of the environmental depletion, social disconnection, inequitable distribution of wealth, and mental illness of today.

These realities reveal that we have an opportunity to make this world healthier when we build our businesses differently. Below we have articulated four pillars that provide a foundation for building healthy businesses.

1. Fulfills Emotional/Personal Needs of Founder

Make sure your ground is fertilized in order to grow the things you plant.

In order to build a venture that makes an impact and helps others, it starts with you building from a place where you feel nourished. When we honor ourselves, we learn how to honor others—eg. our community, our customers. When we nurture our inner-self, we’re able to build with more integrity and provide more value.

When we go inward to really learn the truth of ourselves, what drives us, what will make this entrepreneurial journey fulfilling for us, it gives us the self-knowledge to make choices that are aligned for ourselves and our mission. In building from this place of aligned decision-making, that clarity and authenticity will be felt by the people who engage with us and the brands we build.

Go inward to build with strength outward.

Guiding question: What will make this entrepreneurial journey fulfilling to you?

2. Meets Emotional and/or Social Needs of Customers

The purpose of anything is to change somebody. -Seth Godin

Healthy business-building philosophy embraces the idea that business is a vehicle for positive societal change. The best way to make that change happen is to create an offering that provides an emotional and/or social benefit to your customer and to help usher your customer through some sort of personal change or evolution.

Whether it be creating a community focused on emotional healing through writing. Or making toothpaste that comes in pellet form in a glass jar—that cuts down on production waste, helping people maintain oral hygiene and make more environmentally responsible choices. Whether it be a CBD smoke that’s created with the intention to help people quit cigarettes. To a chic, biodegradable tote bag that’s both fun to wear and net-net better for the environment. To a learning platform that helps women entrepreneurs share knowledge and strengthen their entrepreneurial muscle (us ;)).

All of these companies are real and are actively trying to help someone change for the better in some way. When you build from this place of meeting an emotional and/or social need with your offerings, you cultivate a real sense of understanding and connection with your customers. And it’s from this place of connection and relationship with your customers that additional offering ideas are born—for you to deepen and/or expand upon that emotional and/or social need you’re fulfilling for them.

Guiding question: What emotional and/or social needs are being met for your customers through what you offer or intend to offer?

3. Is Environmentally Responsible

The earth is our environment to protect and the garden to tend to. -Pope Francis

Our businesses can be a vehicle for helping to repair the environment. We acknowledge that it can be difficult and in some situations more costly to ensure no harm to the environment with our businesses. More than anything this environmentally responsible pillar is accountability for the pursuit of no harm to the environment. In that pursuit it may involve some harm but the aim is for that harm to be as minimal as possible and for us to continue striving to get to a place of no harm—then beyond that, in time, actively help to nurture the environment with our businesses.

To build with environmental responsibility at the heart of our endeavors is to educate ourselves about the impacts of different production and operational choices and opt for the choice that has the least to no carbon footprint and/or the choice that actively gives back to the environment in some way.

Another lens to approach the environmental responsibility pillar is to apply the principles of a “circular economy”:

Guiding question: What are you doing to ensure no to minimal environmental harm and/or what are you doing to actively nurture the environment with how you’re building your business?

4. Is Profit Oriented

A company's bottom line profit margin is the best single indicator of its financial health and long-term viability.

We know a business needs to make money to stay alive and to grow. This pillar is more to emphasize the importance of focusing specifically on profits—the amount of money we’re generating after sales revenue comes in and we deduct all the expenditures associated with running our business. We’re underscoring the importance of profits—versus focusing purely on sales revenue, audience growth and outside investment capital—as the core indicator of business viability.

While, yes, sales revenue and growing our audience/community/customer base are important, the emphasis needs to be on what will your profit be from that growth. Because profit is the most real, it’s the actual cash you have to use to operate and grow. If you have big sales but also a lot of operating costs that revenue that makes the profit margin very slim, then sales revenue is misleading the viability of the idea. Likewise, if you grow a big following but are not transacting with that following, that’s not going to yield the tangible resources needed to grow the business.

And, likewise, while, yes, investment capital can be helpful and may be needed to start a business or to reach new growth goals along the way, anchoring these investments in knowing that the aim is to get get to profit (sooner than later), will likely lead to more strategic choices with how that money gets allocated.

The primary point of this pillar is to make that more precise distinction between sales revenue and profit as metrics for business viability. This pillar is also a response to business conversations that push for “raise big money first figure, out business viability later”—while in some specific cases this may make sense for a business, those occasions are extremely rare.

Guiding question: In what ways are you making profit and/or seeing pathways to profit with what you are building?*

*As you get started and reflect on this question, the aim is not necessarily to know the answer with certainty of how you will make profit—a healthy amount of experimentation will likely be necessary to determine that. Rather, this question is more intended to anchor your ideas in knowing that profit is the aim, to help hone focus as you iterate and experiment.