Can Business Be a Force for Good?
Every morning I go to the same café. The coffee is good, but that’s not really why I keep going back. I go because of the people. They’re on minimum wage, the manager tells me, and yet they laugh, they joke, and they take time to actually talk to you. They don’t wear a uniform, and they’re allowed to just be themselves.
The café is next door to a much bigger, better-known chain, and it has twice the customers. Nobody there is trying to make a statement, they’re just running a business the right way. That, more than anything, is what convinces me business can be a genuine force for good
When people hear that phrase, “business as a force for good”, I think they picture something quite grand. A social enterprise, maybe, or a charity with a trading arm. But that’s not what I mean at all. I mean an ordinary business, making ordinary decisions, every single day, that create benefit not just for the owner but for everyone connected to it, including employees, customers, suppliers, and the community it operates in.
Profit is easy to measure, purpose isn’t
We’re taught that the sole purpose of a business is to maximize profit, end of story. It’s so embedded in how we think that we stop questioning it. I understand why. Profit is easy to measure, purpose is harder. I take my blood pressure most days because of a heart problem, but I’m not doing it to know the number for its own sake, I’m doing it to understand how my heart is actually functioning. Business is the same. If all you’re tracking is the number at the bottom of the page, you’ll miss the fact that it was never really about the number, it was about the people who made it possible.
Every business creates value. The real question is value for who? The owner? The customers? The people who work for you? Once you start asking that question, you’re already practising what I’d call prosocial entrepreneurship, building a business where doing right by people isn’t a side project, it’s just how you operate.
A new definition of success
I didn’t arrive at this conclusion because of a single lightbulb moment. It came from noticing a pattern, over years of research and running businesses of my own. The owners who went the extra mile for their staff, who were straight with their suppliers, and who got involved with their communities, tended to be the ones doing best financially. The ones chasing profit above everything else were, more often than not, the ones burning out.
That reframed success for me entirely. It isn’t about the balance sheet, it’s about how much value you’re putting back into the system around you, relative to what you’re taking out. I do a version of that question every quarter in my own business. I ask myself, am I contributing more than I’m extracting?
The short-term cost of doing things right
I won’t pretend there’s no tension between purpose and profit, because there is, at least in the short term. I’ve chosen ethical suppliers over cheaper ones. I’ve invested in training rather than cutting corners on staffing. Both of those decisions cost money in the moment. But over the longer term, they’re what builds a business that lasts. Trust helps with customer retention, and looking after people properly is far cheaper than the constant cost of replacing them.
This is where values-led leadership actually earns its name. It’s not about being nice, and it’s certainly not a luxury you bolt on once you’ve made your money. That’s one of the most common misconceptions I hear from other business owners. Your values are there in every decision, whether you notice them or not. The only real choice is whether you’re intentional about it.
What business as a force for good actually looks like
I’ve met a business owner who built his entire company around employing people nobody else would take a chance on, people who’d had a hard time and needed someone to invest in them. Another who deliberately chose local suppliers over cheaper international ones, because he understood that a stronger local economy was ultimately good for his own business too. You won’t see decisions like that in the headlines. But multiply them across ten employees, twenty suppliers, a whole community, and you start to see real, lasting change, better housing, better health, and patterns of long-term unemployment finally broken.
That café I go to hasn’t got a halo hanging over its door. It’s not trying to prove anything. It just treats people with the respect that good business, done properly, requires. That’s the whole answer to the question, really. Business doesn’t need a special category marked “force for good”. It just needs owners willing to ask, every day, who their decisions are actually for.
Maureen O’Callaghan is an expert in prosocial entrepreneurship, ethical leadership and sustainable business. As the founder of Beyond Money Education and Training CIC, her mission is to help business owners and those who support and educate them build sustainable, successful businesses which have a positive impact on people and the planet.
