We’d be surprised if you weren’t skeptical about strangers reaching out to offer you our services for free. Let us put your mind at ease: Even though we’re not asking you for a dime, we do get immense value out of helping you tell, write, and share your story.
Business and the world in general are evolving rapidly, perhaps even frenetically. Companies, other organizations, and cities as a whole that want to survive and thrive need to see what could be coming and prepare for it.
Notwithstanding the pandemic, the general shape of future possibilities can usually be anticipated, but only if you make time to step back and take the long view.1 Many businesses, especially the small- and medium-sized companies that are the lifeblood of our communities, simply don’t have the resources to devote to this.
Those of us doing this project have deep roots in the communities where we live and are raising our children. We see what’s going on in the world around us and we know that whether our communities decline or thrive will profoundly affect us and the people we care about in long-lasting ways.
We would eventually like companies, chambers of commerce, and city governments to hire us, but only if we can genuinely help strengthen local business to make our communities better places to live, work, and raise a family.
To do so, we’re conducting a substantial research project to understand the factors that lead to entrepreneurial success or failure.
By helping you tell your story, we allow you to identify or reconnect with your central purpose and to strengthen bonds with your employees, your customers, and your community around that purpose.
By giving us a deeper understanding of what’s needed for local companies to flourish, you help us strengthen our communities and our future offerings to clients.
We want to live in vibrant cities that reward people, especially those just entering the workforce, for thinking boldly and finding purposeful work that improves their lives while also benefiting the community around them.
We believe, and the research supports us, that the future belongs to companies who can edify their communities while also making a profit.2 More and more, customers are unwilling to support businesses that don’t demonstrate their commitment to a fairer and more sustainable future of shared prosperity.3
Beyond our primary purpose, we have many other ideas how we might benefit by offering you our services for free. For instance, we plan to work with public schools to provide students paid business journalism internships.
This will increase student engagement in school by linking their classroom learning to the outside world, give them resume-building practical work experience, allow them to make connections within the business community, and strengthen fundamental life and work skills that will be valuable no matter what career path they ultimately take.
In addition to benefiting the student journalists, we hope to shine a light on an often overlooked category in business: the local business owner. While the media largely focuses on celebrity CEOs of multinational corporations, local businesses are the economic engines of our communities.
The public only hears about a fraction of what goes on in the world of business and much of what we hear isn’t good. By telling the stories of business leaders like you, we’ll spotlight the local companies who improve their communities while also giving grassroots journalists the most up-to-date tools to share these stories far and wide.
Notes:
1 Confederation of British Industry, “Annual report and Accounts 2021,” June, 2022, pp. 11, 13, https://www.cbi.org.uk/media/h10g3myc/cbi-annual-report-2021.pdf.
2 Blaschka, para. 3; Confederation of British Industry, p. 30; Da Costa; Nonaka, Takeuchi, pp. 4, 8; Avery Forman, “The Moral Enterprise: How Two Companies Profit with Purpose,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, June 28, 2022, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-moral-enterprise-how-two-companies-profit-with-purpose.
3 Da Costa, paras. 12–13; Chris Kelly, “Study: 71% of Consumers Tire of Empty Promises, Spurring ‘Age of Cynicism’,” Marketing Dive, May 25, 2021, https://www.marketingdive.com/news/study-71-of-consumers-tire-of-empty-promises-spurring-age-of-cynicism/600774/; Tim Stobierski, “15 Eye-Opening Corporate Social Responsibility Statistics,” June 15, 2021, https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/corporate-social-responsibility-statistics.