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Continuing on from Profits Above Charity if we can now agree that not being able to make a profit limits the amount of impact we can make, let’s explore the opposite:

Profit as a flywheel for positive impact.

What if, instead of seeing positive impact and profits as enemies, we turn them into a flywheel?

Imagine that the more good you do, the more customers you attract. The more customers you attract, the more profit you make. The more profit you make, the more good you can do.

While you're creating this upward spiral, competitors who do nothing different, are on a downward one. You don't have to beat them. You just have to stay in your lane and keep going. That sounds easy, but there are some caveats.

When you’re 1% better than your competitor nobody switches. Switching costs are real. Habit is real. But 10x better on something people actually care about? That's an easy choice. Even at a higher price. So you have to offer a better product/service as well as a better future.

Good products, good people, good planet. Without a good product you have no business. Without good people you'll never build it. And given that we only have one planet this can’t be an optional extra.

The flywheel only works if you resist the temptation to extract. The moment that most of the profit stops flowing back into the mission and starts flowing only to shareholders, the spiral reverses direction.

A profitable mission-driven company is not a compromise.
Charities need donors to survive. Donors are fickle.
You need customers. Customers are everywhere.

I would argue that being profitable is the most sustainable version of impact that can exist.

It might seem radical, but nothing needs to be reinvented,  we just need to manage our intentions.

see Intention Not Reinvention if you missed it.

This post is also on X/Twitter as a thread, and LinkedIn.