What's YOUR Bottom Line?
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By 
“It is not how much you do, but how much love you put in the doing.” Mother Teresa
Business owners are trained to gauge the success of their business according to the health of their “bottom line” – that is – the last line on a profit and loss statement that tells you what remains (if anything) after all your costs of doing business. This makes perfect sense – if you don’t show a profit, you don’t stay in business. But, I’m interested in what – beyond the traditional bottom line – keeps you motivated and creates that deeper and more sustaining measure of success I believe we are all seeking?
I came across a brilliant and inspiring concept this week from Tami Simon, founder of Sounds True, one of the largest publishers of spoken word spiritual teaching products that answers this very question. Tami offers a more inclusive and elegant way to relate to the idea of bottom line driven success. It has to do with creating “multiple bottom lines”. In other words, a purpose-driven AND profit-driven, business that honors the values you hold dear and wish to incorporate into your way of doing business.
“Multiple bottom lines” arose as Tami pondered a few simple but powerful questions: “How can our processes as a business reflect our products? How can spirituality be translated into organizational life? How can we form a workplace where employees can have balanced lifestyles, and can continue to evolve as human beings? How can we create an atmosphere of genuine love, a real community in which people want to participate? And how can all of this translate into profit, the “oxygen” so vitally needed to put these ideals into action?”
Here are Tami’s four multiple bottom lines:
1. Your business does something that matters in the world. This is primary. Having a sense of purpose underlying the reason you’re in business makes all the difference – not only as inspiration to keep you going, but more importantly, it’s fulfills a basic human need to know you’re making a contribution.
2. You (and your employees) are evolving by being involved in your business. It’s critical that personal growth and development be nurtured and not stunted by business. What you need for growth can be defined individually and has to do with valuing life balance in the workplace. Do you take time to meditate or go for a run as part of your work day? Do your employees feel relaxed and respected on the job while remaining productive and responsible?
3. Your work environment is a positive community where everyone wants to participate. Do people enjoy each other and add to the quality of life? You spend a significant amount of your total life hours at work. How do you feel about the people around you and how do your employees feel about each other? This makes all the difference in the world when you’re deciding to get out of bed in the morning. Also, quality community fosters participation, teamwork and engagement.
4. You must have profit – the oxygen that makes the engine go. If you’re not profitable, you’re out of business. Profit as a concept is a nice thing, but when you connect to reality – what you DO with the profit – holds tremendous power for motivation. Will you use your profits to buy new equipment, give raises, or institute additional benefits? Ultimately it’s profit that makes all the other bottom lines possible.
Begin to translate and implement what’s important to you into your business life. I find the concept of multiple bottom lines very inspiring – it’s adaptable, flexible, and can be based on YOUR individual values. Can you see how adopting the idea of multiple bottom lines can raise satisfaction and fulfillment in the workplace, reduce stress and build a company to be truly proud of?
It’s YOUR life…imagine the possibilities!
About the Author
Helaine Iris is a Life and Business Coach, who has been featured in numerous publications, including "O" The Oprah Magazine. She helps entrepreneurs and professional women accelerate their professional success, while achieving a more complete and fulfilling personal life. She combines a broad range of professional experience in her work, including management positions in the education, training, retail and international non-profit sectors. Helaine's Website.
I love it! One of the things that many entrepreneurs and business people forget to plan when they are building their successful enterprise is to create a vision of success looks like before they begin. I’m not saying they don’t do financials and all the technical things. I am saying they do not do the true vision of how the change in direction will fit into their entire life. True leadership will only come from a well-crafted, well-articulated vision of the future destination.
I really enjoyed your article – especially your ‘bottom lines’ # 2 and #3. Very interesting! I had someone ask me what I thought leadership was as it related to building a successful business and I explained that ‘results-oriented’ leadership (especially in a business environment) is not only about being consistent in your demonstration of what ‘good’ looks like, but it’s all about finding ways to further increase the ‘real’ return you’re able to receive on what you’re investing in your people while you’re working together with them on a daily basis to get the job done on behalf of the customer or client. I explained that leadership involves discovering new and more effective ways to create even greater opportunities for growth and success on the part of each one of your people, your team as a whole, your company, and also your customers and/or clients. Leadership is all about you being in the driver’s seat when it comes to you ‘being’ and ‘doing’ whatever it takes to insure the success of anyone and everyone who has a vested interest in your organization’s success. There’s a lot more to demonstrating and providing genuine leadership than most people in leadership positions realize. Thanks Helaine for your thought-provoking article.
Good article. It could be argued that point 4 should be first though as without profits the other points are irrelevant – no matter how desirable or worthy they are.
As a website business broker specialist I speak with a lot of business people looking to buy a business and I have to remind many that it is not always about the bottom line – it should be a business that you can be passionate about and grow with. Great article and will use this to steer website business seekers in the right direction
David
Internet Business Broker
Measuring success is difficult…that’s why it always gets reduced to a number. They’re easier to figure, document, and compare. But we all know that what you’re talking about is not only success, but fulfillment as well. The problem is that we all stay so busy we can never stop to ask ourselves the important questions or do the self-assessment you discuss.
Small business owners are especially bad at this because there is never enough time in the day to get everything done. And we try to do it all ourselves even when we know it would be more effective to hire someone else to do it for us. But we rationalize that we can’t afford it. After reading your article, though, I would argue that we should use every resource we can find to allow us to find true fulfillment…which usually means slowing down a little.
Outsourcing is making its way to the small business and entreprenuer world as well now through web sites like Elance, rent-a-coder, and others. These resource can let small business owners focus “on” their business and get away from the tedious things they have to do every day.
Excellent criteria for any businessperson to follow to virtually assure business and personal successes. And your follow up statement that the business owner implement these four streams based upon the owner’s personal values is the final clue to true success.
And statistics of successes and failures have proven these four points to be true when they implemented by each owner to fit the uniqueness of each owner.
Great article, Helaine! My first introduction to this notion was through the concept of the “Triple Bottom Line”: people, planet, profits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line
Interesting now to see Tami’s expansion on this idea. As a new subscriber to Solostream, I look forward to reading more. Thanks!