Connor Brooke
When our businesses are doing well, we naturally want them to do even better. If we generate 10 leads in a month we want to generate 20 the next month. Sometimes stepping up your goals can be good for business. But if you’re high expectations become outright greed, your company may be in trouble.
Greed can wreak havoc on your business if you allow it to start influencing your actions. Here are 10 ways greed can ruin everything you’ve worked to achieve:
1. You Look for Ways to Make Money, Not Ways to Improve
Every business should want to improve customer experience. If you’re not trying to help your customer, you’re not helping yourself. Unfortunately, many businesses seem to run counter to this idea. Instead they’re looking for ways to charge their customers more rather than help them out, and that will lead to a decline in business if people feel you don’t really care about them.
2. You Make Bad Personnel Decisions
If you care only about making money, you may overlook flaws in your employees if they are still producing strong monetary results. For instance, you may ignore the sexual harassment being inflicted by one of your managers just because he happens to be a top salesman. That’s bad for the company because it will hurt morale and lead to employees leaving.
3. You Don’t Spend Money Making Your Employees Happy
Happy employees make for good businesses, because they are the bridge between you and your customers. When employees are unhappy, they won’t do their best for you, and that can actually lead to a decline in sales. Invest money in making your employees happy, whether you spring for lunch on Fridays or stock free sodas in the company fringe. It’s money that will come back into your own pocket.
4. You Forego Vacations to Work
Everyone needs a little break. Even if you let your employees have vacation but don’t take one yourself, your lack of downtime will come back to hurt you. You’ll be more productive and a better businessperson if you take time off every once in a while.
5. You Take on More Clients than You Can Efficiently Manage
You’re probably thinking more clients equals more money, so the more the merrier, right? Wrong. If you stretch your staff too thin with your workload, those clients will not be happy with your work. Worse yet, word may leak out to other potential clients that you’re not meeting deadlines or producing good work.
6. You Alienate Your Employees
Far worse than merely annoying your employees, you could alienate them if you are stockpiling all the money for yourself. When they realize they are working hard but getting little return because you’re hoarding the money you would have given for raises, you can expect them to start heading for the exits — and they won’t do you any favors by badmouthing you at their next workplace.
7. You Do SEO Too Aggressively
Yes, everyone should have a good search engine optimization strategy in place, but if you find yourself resorting to black hat tactics such as keyword stuffing or link farming in an attempt to get more business, you’re not just hurting your company’s reputation. You could even be penalized by Google.
8. You’re Not Mentoring Anyone
Mentoring doesn’t really fit in well with greediness. There’s no monetary reward for mentoring, so it can quickly fall by the wayside. This is foolish, because great mentors produce great workers who can carry on your business for years to come — and ultimately make you more money to boot.
9. You Squander Your Clients’ Trust
When it becomes clear that you only care about making money, you risk losing even the most loyal clients. They want someone working for them who sees them as more than just a dollar sign.
10. You Don’t Help Others
Greediness kills kindness, and that’s a deadly business sin. Sometimes an industry-wide collaboration or a friendly retweet of a rival’s appeal for charity donations can show your humanity and also remind you why you got into business in the first place.
Don’t let success make you forget what’s truly important for your business, its clients and your employees. If you see too many of these examples lurking in your business practices, it may be time for a change.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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How do you explain the success of big corporations then? They uniformly s**t all over the public & the environment, if not their customers. Greed and selfishness are the most central and salient aspects of capitalist ideology. How do you explain the 1% walking away with full pockets when they cause oils spills or make products that kill, whether it be a dodgy air bags or bombs for war?
Number 11:
You try to con subcontractors or freelancers into providing work for free by not settling invoices. This can hurt your business when you are sued or services or your company website is taken down because you try to get away with not paying the hosting company and/or site developer who.