Turn your business experience on its head

Unthink your experience and look at things differently

“Why doesn’t your company just do a massive deal with Wal-Mart, Tesco or Carrefour and sell tons of its products through them? It would be a lot easier and they would make loads of money.”

That’s the question and statement that I hear often when I talk to people about the business I am now in. People just cannot believe that Forever Living does not do this and that it decided that it wanted to give people an opportunity build themselves a rewarding career and to do all the things that they dream about doing through hard work, perseverance and helping other people.

People just don’t believe that this is possible. They don’t believe that a company owned by a billionaire could possibly care enough about the people in its business to help them achieve all that they ever wanted to achieve.

Corporate life conditions you to think that there is only one way and that way offers ‘thin value’ to its employees. The ‘thin value’ is diminishing benefits such as your pension contributions, or an expectation of long hours for no-extra pay, or having to deal with internal politics which stop the business from helping its customers. The economies of the western world have been blown apart and are now heavily subsidised by their governments by billions of pounds because the financial system was allowed to run away with itself in the belief that it was creating value for society overall when, in retrospect, we see clearly that it was not. The system was geared up on greed and self-importance.

So, when this business asks ‘why do you want to do this?‘ to people who are interested in it, one of the answers people regularly give is ‘Because I want to help people‘. Often, though, our society mixes this desire of people with patronage or charity. But this is not the case.

This business is built upon people helping other people. That might be helping them to be all they can be in life. Or helping them with their healthy and well being. It might be helping them to set up their own business. It might be helping them to get rid of their debts.

This way of thinking works. I have been going to a business networking group for several months now. There are several regular members and some people who come as guests. All of them are from different businesses. We do some business amongst ourselves but the group is too small to rely on the individual members to get much business from them. As we have got to know each other, we have all started helping each other out with our expertise. I help someone with knowledge about internet marketing. Someone else helps me with their financial knowledge. Another person helps the group with printing ideas.

By giving our time and helping each other out, we have now started to recommend other people in the group to our own contacts. These referrals are becoming increasingly regular and lucrative. People in the group realise that it takes time to get to know someone but when you do know them you know you can rely on them. This is ‘thick value’ and it is not something which conventional business can handle easily. Everything has to be measured. Nothing is given away.

But some things cannot be measured. How do you measure trust, for example?

Quite often people are surprised when I help them out over the phone or through an email with some ideas. They are not used to it. And that’s what people find unsettling about the Forever Living business. It’s not a pushy business. It’s a helping business. It’s a business which says ‘Just try this. If you don’t like it, bring back the product, even if it’s the empty bottle, within sixty days and we’ll give you your money back. No questions asked‘. It’s business where the leaders and owners are very humble ad approachable. There are no big egos.

To finish off, I really enjoy reading Umair Haque’s blog articles. He talks about ‘thin value’ and ‘thick value’ a lot and this article is typical of his writing: ‘Is Your Business Useless?‘ is a great article which talks about the businesses which are “socially useless” and which have “created a jobless “recovery” and mass unemployment amongst the young“.

Read it and think about what it says. You might turn your conventional thinking on its head.

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