Think about the last business decision you made. Maybe you chose a supplier, set a price, took on a new client, hired someone, or decided where to spend your time. You probably asked yourself whether it made commercial sense.
But did you also ask whether it was good for the people affected by the decision? Whether it was right for you? Or what impact it might have beyond your business?
Those questions are what prosocial entrepreneurship asks us to consider.
So, what does ‘prosocial’ actually mean?
Prosocial means acting in ways intended to benefit other people, your community, or wider society, rather than focusing solely on yourself. That doesn’t mean you can’t benefit too. In fact, looking after yourself and building a sustainable, commercially successful business is a really important part.
Prosocial entrepreneurship isn’t about putting everyone else first and somehow hoping the business survives. It’s about recognising that a business doesn’t exist in isolation. Every decision affects someone. It affects the customer who buys from you, the person who works for you, the freelancer you pay, the supplier you choose, the community you’re part of and, increasingly, the natural environment around you. And it affects you too. Prosocial entrepreneurship is about bringing all of those things into the conversation when you make decisions, rather than treating them as competing priorities.
Isn’t this just what good businesses should do?
In an ideal world, yes. But if it were already the norm, we probably wouldn’t need a term for it. Traditional business education has tended to focus on profitability and growth. Neither of these is inherently wrong. Businesses need to make money and growth can create jobs, wealth, and opportunities.
The problem comes when financial performance becomes the only measure of whether a business is successful. Because what happens to everything else?
What happens to the relationships you’ve built? The wellbeing of the people working in the business? The quality of your service? Your own health and quality of life? Your community? The environment? These things can be harder to measure than profit, but that doesn’t make them less important.
Prosocial entrepreneurship gives us a way of talking about all of those dimensions of business that can disappear when the bottom line becomes the only measure of success. It’s not a label that divides entrepreneurs into ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
It’s a framework for thinking more consciously about what responsible entrepreneurship actually looks like.
Profit isn’t the problem
One of the biggest misunderstandings about purpose-led business is that making money and making a positive difference are somehow opposing goals. They aren’t. A business has to make a profit if it is going to survive. Profit allows you to pay people properly, invest in the business, innovate, get through difficult periods, and continue providing whatever product or service you offer.
Without commercial sustainability, your ability to create a positive impact won’t last very long either. So the question isn’t profit or purpose?, it’s what are you making the profit for, and how are you generating it?
A prosocial entrepreneur doesn’t need to apologise for wanting to make money. They can be ambitious, commercially minded, and interested in growth. What changes is the definition of success. For one entrepreneur, success might mean building a £20 million company. For another, it might mean building a £200,000 business that provides an excellent livelihood, supports its employees, serves its community, and leaves enough time for them to enjoy their life. Both can be ambitious, they’re just ambitious about different things.
What does prosocial entrepreneurship look like in practice?
It’s relatively easy to say you care about people. It’s much harder to let those values influence what you actually do. A prosocial entrepreneur might ask:
Who do I choose to work with?
How do I treat the people who provide my services and supplies?
Is the price I’m charging fair?
How quickly do I pay freelancers?
Do I really need to take on that client if their values conflict with mine?
What happens to the quality of my service if I grow too quickly?
Am I prioritising a short-term win over a relationship that could last for years?
What impact does my business have on my community or the environment?
How much am I asking of myself?
None of these questions has an easy answer every time, but that’s the point. Prosocial entrepreneurship isn’t about having a perfect set of policies or getting every decision right. It’s about making decisions consciously rather than automatically defaulting to whatever appears to maximise profit in the short term.
Sometimes there isn’t a perfect answer
This is perhaps one of the most important things to understand about prosocial entrepreneurship. Real businesses are messy. Sometimes what’s good for the business isn’t necessarily what’s best for a customer, an employee, a supplier, or the environment. Sometimes doing what you believe is right has a financial cost. And sometimes there isn’t an option where everybody wins.
Being prosocial doesn’t magically remove those tensions, it asks you to acknowledge them. When faced with a difficult decision, you might ask four questions:
- What are the consequences? Who benefits, and who might lose?
- What do my values tell me? What am I unwilling to compromise?
- What are the commercial realities? Can my business actually afford this decision?
- What am I prepared to be accountable for? Can I explain my decision to the people affected by it?
You might still have to make a difficult choice, but you’ve made it consciously and that matters, because “that’s just business” can be a convenient way of avoiding responsibility for the consequences of our decisions.
Don’t forget the person running the business
There’s another part of prosocial entrepreneurship that often gets overlooked – the entrepreneur themselves. We talk a lot about businesses looking after their employees, customers, communities, and the planet. But what about the person at the centre of it all?
Entrepreneurial exhaustion is often treated almost like a badge of honour. Working late into the night, never switching off, and sacrificing your wellbeing are sometimes presented as the price of ambition. But if your business depends on one person working 70 hours a week, how sustainable is that business really?
Your wellbeing affects how you make decisions, how you treat other people, your resilience, and ultimately how the business performs. You are part of the ecosystem too. So prosocial entrepreneurship starts closer to home than you might think.
Looking after yourself isn’t a luxury you earn once the business is established. It’s part of creating a business that can actually last.
You don’t need to be a social enterprise
Maybe one of the most useful things about prosocial entrepreneurship is that it isn’t reserved for a particular type of business. You don’t have to be a social enterprise, a charity, or a B Corp. You don’t need to run a huge company or make grand gestures. A plumber can do it and so can an accountant, consultant, retailer, IT company, or restaurant.
It might show up in the suppliers they choose, the way they pay freelancers, the clients they work with, how they treat employees, how they price their services, or how they use their time.
Equally, having a particular legal structure or purpose-led label doesn’t automatically make a business prosocial. It comes back to behaviour, decisions, and one question: what impact am I having, and am I prepared to think about it?
Start with one decision
You don’t need to transform your entire business overnight. Take one decision you were going to make anyway. It could be:
Choosing a supplier
Setting a price
Considering taking on a new client
Recruiting someone
Deciding what to spend your time on
Then look at it through a slightly wider lens and ask: Is this good for the business? Is it good for me? Is it good for the people affected by it? And is it good for the wider world, including nature?
You might not have a perfect answer but you don’t need one. The important thing is that you’ve asked the question. Prosocial entrepreneurship isn’t about becoming the ‘perfect entrepreneur’, it’s about becoming a more conscious one who understands that every business decision creates consequences beyond the bottom line, and who is willing to think about those consequences when deciding what their business should look like.
For me, that’s the real value of the term prosocial entrepreneurship. It gives us a way to talk about a different kind of ambition. Not one that asks us to choose between making money and making a difference, but one that asks whether we can build businesses where commercial success and positive impact support one another.
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