How are you using your business to improve the world?
Stay up to date, get our newsletter
What sort of impact do you want to make with your business?
Hi, I’m Judi Otton from GrowthCast, and I love working with companies that have a bigger ‘why’.
Yes, of course, I love helping them make lots of money too, but it feels really good to help them make the world a little bit of a better place in their own special ways. Today, I’m going to talk about a few of them and show you that you don’t need some grand ‘I’m going to solve climate change’ thing to make a difference in the world.
The first client I want to showcase is one of my very early, long-term clients. She’s an architect in New Haven, Connecticut and she is committed to building green and healthy buildings, which is a great thing because quite a few of her projects are things like schools and medical facilities and she does a lot of other things too. But yeah, this is her niche and while her marketing team does a great job differentiating her, I was behind the scenes helping her among other things, we worked together for quite a long time, helping her build a proposal and bidding tool and process so that she can make sure that she’s making all of her projects are profitable. We also looked at her overhead rates to see where we could improve them and make sure we were including those when we created bids and proposals.
Another is a set of companies. This was a family-owned business that owned companies in manufacturing restaurants and retail. Three notoriously low-paying industries. This company was committed to providing a living wage to all of its employees. They also are in the New Haven, Connecticut area, and in New Haven, Connecticut, that’s not $15 an hour. That’s much more than that. At that time, and this also was a few years ago, it was more like $17 or $18 an hour to start. So we did this over time. It took time for them to meet their goal and we budgeted it in. We created targets when we hit this amount of sales, everybody gets a dollar increase, and we also did a lot of projects to improve their cost efficiency. This company also does a lot of other things for the community. So it’s kind of baked into their DNA. But these two examples are just two of the ways that some of the companies that I work with are trying to improve things for their employees, their community, the planet, whatever speaks to your heart. So I’d be interested. What sort of things would you like to do with your business to make this world a little bit of a better place? Leave something in the comments and I’ll be back next week with a new Fiscal Fitness Tip of the Week.