Small Business, Big Change

Introduction: Changing the World Through Your Business

By Susan Chambers

INTRODUCTION: CHANGING THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR BUSINESS

IN 2011, I was inspired by a teleseminar offered through Mark Silver’s Heart of Business Inc., a mentoring and training company for heart-centered entrepreneurs and small businesses.[i] This particular seminar was about helping “heart-centered” business owners examine and redefine their relationships to money and influence and change their businesses for the better.[ii] During the question and answer segment, several participants expressed an interest in learning how they could effect change in their communities through their businesses. Hearing small business owners, many of them solopreneurs, motivated and committed to redefining how they do business intrigued me. Despite the lack of resources, many of these microentrepreneurs believed they could serve as agents of social change—and continue to make a profit. These were bold ambitions and I wondered how many others shared that vision.

At the time, what struck me was that these were individual entrepreneurs—not corporations or large companies—having a candid conversation about social responsibility and its practical applications. For a time, discussions about the social and environmental impacts of business mostly took place in the context of large companies. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) blossomed as a popular field in the 1990s and dominated the conversation on the commitment of business to the environment, consumer and employee well-being, and the health and welfare of local communities.

In retrospect, Milton Friedman was wrong when he first asserted in 1962 that the only social responsibility of a business was to increase its profits for shareholders. Yes, it’s true that businesses are expected to make a profit and corporations do have a financial responsibility to their shareholders. But it’s also true that entrepreneurs are inspired to start and run businesses for reasons that have little, if anything, to do with the accumulation of wealth for its own sake. For an increasing number of entrepreneurs, a business is as much, or more, about finding a way to express their values and purpose through their work or creating products or services that add social or ecological value—not just economic value—to the world.

We know that businesses don’t operate in a vacuum. As much as some economic theorists and our individualist culture would have us believe otherwise, we don’t live, or run businesses, in “splendid isolation.” We are interdependent with other beings and the planet, and what we do in the course of our lives and our businesses affects others. Most business owners are now cognizant of this fact. They know that destroying the physical or social environment in which they operate, alienating other stakeholders (in addition to shareholders), or causing harm to consumers in the process of generating profit will eventually jeopardize their business’ financial and organizational sustainability.

Although the CSR dialogue now increasingly includes small and mid-sized businesses, we still rarely think of the solopreneur or microentrepreneur (businesses employing ten people or less) as having any tangible stake in the CSR debate. This is beginning to change. Increasing numbers of socially conscious individuals are not only starting up microbusinesses but also staking their places at the discussion table.

The Socially Responsible Microentrepreneur

Since the 1990s, there has been a groundswell of concern among businesses of all sizes in becoming social change agents in their community and switching to business practices that are more socially responsible. The kind of serious interest in social responsibility demonstrated by the participants of that Heart of Business seminar is no longer an anomaly.

The rising awareness and drive to be both a good business (profitable) and good business citizen (mindful of its social responsibility and values) is often confounded by the lack of resources and scant knowledge base available to the average microentrepreneur. Too often, microbusiness owners don’t have the time to look for the resources that will help them learn what it takes to become a committed and yet pragmatic, socially responsible business. Like the participants in the teleseminar and several individuals interviewed for this book, I’m a socially conscious yet “accidental” microentrepreneur. I’m no stranger to barriers such as a lack of financial resources or time that stymie all small business owners. I know intimately the struggles of staying committed to the principles I believe in and making sure that they inform my business practices. It’s not easy, and I don’t always manage to execute my social responsibility (S-R) strategies as perfectly or consistently as I’d like.[iii] I imagine it’s just as difficult for other “small shops” to change their mindset and business practices, too.