An Argument Worth Clarifying

America struggles with community. It seems to be all about either independent individualism or building cults. But the reality is that businesses only grow if they manage to be in, or create through intentional efforts, community.

For this motive, it seems appropriate to write today to business owners, city representatives, and capitalists at large. You need to know why community and culture, independent from your balance sheets, matters precisely for your balance sheets.

America in recent decades has struggled to balance what capitalism means in relation to community as a nation and on more localized terms. More than ever, the term ‘business’ is getting a bad, selfish, and villainized rap, while ‘community’ is getting a socialist, unrealistic, and unsustainable rap. Those trying to sort out this loss of understanding between culture and capitalism seem all too few and far between.

Therefore, let me address, as a business owner, what it means to need community.

Community supports capitalism.

Community can create capitalistic opportunities.

Community sustains capitalism.

But it must be clear that unless concerted efforts are applied and well understood by capitalists in a community, CAPITALISM DOES NOT CREATE OR SUSTAIN COMMUNITY.

I say this as a repeat, successful small business owner that learned this lesson first-hand running an athletics program in a small town in Connecticut in my twenties. When I came in, turnover was high and security for the program’s future was almost non-existent. Everything teetered on the budget. I needed to grow the reputation of the business but I had no space to purchase marketing and the record for past marketing had extremely poor results.

So, I began analyzing what was happening within my business space to find out how my customers related to each other, to my staff, and to the broader community.

I found from my investigations one very important detail: only a few of clients were friends with each other. 

I’d expected to see a classic case of needing to work on more staff outreach. I was doing nothing to promote friendships to initiate around my space or events, nor was I recognizing the need for people to develop relationships that didn’t directly pertain to my product -- ice skating lessons -- or my staff. To be honest, I hadn't even thought that part of my job. But with few other low cost ailments to resolve, correcting this became a goal. I needed to build the community around my business -- meaning building community for my customers and those that had not yet or would never affiliate with my business via purchases.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, low and behold, once I corrected this and started concerted efforts to hold space for community development, I no longer needed an advertisement budget. My comfort with forecasting future business became ever more relaxed because of the relational shifts among my clients -- no longer strangers gathered a couple times a week in my space for their kids to learn something, head-downs in their smartphones, instead circles of community were forming and intermixing with each other and growing in-turn naturally to pull in more and more community that grew my customer base without me buying their attention. Why? Because their trusted friends and family were showing them everything they needed to know without me. 

When the culture around my business practice shifted to include community improvement and support as an important responsibility of being in-business, holding space for community growth became the nutrient that sustained my business.

I began thinking, who can I connect while they are here? Who would be helpful to one another? How can I grow opportunities for people to meet instead of just bump into each other? What can I create to grow connections between not just my business and my clients, but client to client that may then professionally or socially aide those clients in a mutual manner?

The logic is simple and it comes down to the numbers for those of you that need it put that way:

Business is expensive.

Marketing is expensive and risky.

The most effective marketing strategy is word-of-mouth from a trusted source (typically a friend). I realized very early that only through this practice was I going to sustain my business.

Having no community (speaking not about client community, but about general, exterior to your business, local community) means little to no friendships in a close network to aide your business. 

While people have friends these days, more and more those friends are spread by half-hour, hour, state, and continental distances. Beautifully wide networks are afforded due to technology but that makes word-of-mouth, the least expensive marketing strategy, incredibly difficult for a business reliant on proximity customers and workers because while you may have wonderful customers that happily brag about your services or products to their friends, those friends are not logistically capable of becoming your customers or representatives.

I’ve termed this ‘wasted-word-of-mouth’. 

You work so hard to ensure people want to positively share their experiences with you, but you don’t see the benefits in any financial means. Therefore, you have no greater security for your sustenance in the market.

On the other hand, if a strong community exists in proximity to your business, there is likely to be strong word-of-mouth spread to your local potential customers, resulting in higher customer rates and genuinely invested representatives. And (the part you, capitalist person, ‘really’ want) more profit that can sustain your business and cause it to grow!

(For those of you that want this to be a more honorable motive, unfortunately sometimes the best battle is fought using the arguments that want to be heard so bare with me… )

My logic on this concept was further solidified when I worked with 10 top, world-class companies in Italy in the summer of 2016. There I saw that lasting companies had realized this local networking need from their inception. Sustainability came from creating a community that believed in the values of the capitalists at work. That meant ‘corporate responsibility’ in a very different way than what might be seen here as ‘generous’ or ‘charitable’ corporate actions. Instead, continuous community enrichment and engagement facilities, programs, parks, green spaces, and everyday services were incorporated into their ‘responsibilities’.  And every company looked different in how this played out for the size, need, and cares of that organization -- THIS IS NOT A DESIRE FOR MORE LEGISLATION addressing ‘all the things businesses must do’. NO! I understand quite well that the American culture has gone too far to villainize companies and business owners -- similar to the way we’ve gone way to far to bash teachers for school results. But that’s another blog entry. These problems will not be solved with more legislation (or standardized testing).

THESE PROBLEMS WILL ONLY BE SOLVED WITH A SHIFT IN CULTURE AND METHODOLOGY.

This writing is to work toward that shift. To lend some logic to the reasons for cities and companies alike to look at their environments -- not just your product market, not just your customer target, rather your physical surrounding environment outside your office: What would help form community?...bring people together regardless of financial means?...make community discussion and collaboration space to grow local networking?

Even in the highest of Universities you find a concerted effort to bring the most diverse community together for discussion -- such as at my alma mater, Yale University where their non-traditional undergraduate program integrates students from alternative environments and ages (non-academic lifestyles prior to entering Yale’s academic rigor) in order to afford all students more perspectives in discussion and debate. Additionally, these top universities work hard to provide strong scholarship programs to afford as broad of a socio-economically diverse population opportunity to be involved as possible. This is explicitly due to the known richness and improved outcomes of such interdisciplinary, inter-social-tier, inter-economic-status, diverse-perspective collaborations.

UNLESS YOU EXPECT YOUR BUSINESS VENTURE TO BE A FLASH-IN-THE-PAN event that only needs those capable of paying your bills today, it behooves your future to invest in and support, even take on organizational responsibilities, that build your local civil community. Be those free events for parents to bring their young children together to play, events for people of a neighborhood to have a common meal or interesting experience (such as craft and communal art projects), or simply the maintenance of green-space and open-gathering areas that others may utilize to bring the community together, THESE ACTIONS ARE INTEGRAL TO THE FUTURE STRENGTHS OF THE NETWORKS THAT YOU WILL RELY ON TO BUILD YOUR BUSINESS.

Start moving the mark on corporate ‘responsibility’ today. IT’S NOT ABOUT SPENDING MONEY. It’s not even about attracting people with money to spend. Money doesn't buy community. It’s about concerted efforts to create a healthy community through your voice and your spatial awareness.

Go.