The larger your business becomes, the more of an impact you can make on society.
Howard Schultz was seven years old when he came home from school to find his father lying in bed, covered in a cast from hip to ankle. The World War II veteran had been involved in an accident at work and was now immobilized, both physically and financially – he had absolutely no medical coverage, benefits, or protection.
Decades later, when Schultz became the owner of a little coffee operation called Starbucks, he made a deliberate decision: he’d build a company that took care of its employees, even before making a real profit. Starbucks became the first company in America to give every employee – even part-time workers – comprehensive health insurance.
Sometimes, the job of a company is to be a Trojan horse. In other words, a company can carry an embedded mission forward – and that mission might be about much more than making money.
The bigger your business, the more impact you can have. You can shape entire communities and regions, and the good you do can boomerang right back to you. When Schultz was trying to expand in China, he found it difficult to retain workers. He learned that it was partly because of the low status attached to being a barista in the culture. So he organized parents’ weekends, flying in parents from remote towns and villages to see the operation and its benefits. Not only did it make for happy families, but the goodwill helped tremendously in terms of curbing worker turnover.
Sometimes, scaling up allows you to fill a need in society. Franklin Leonard’s job was to read scripts for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way. Frustrated that only a handful moved forward in the process, he put out an anonymous call for good scripts that weren’t getting made into movies – and published the list. Leonard lost his job, but his now official “Black List” has helped numerous independent filmmakers see their projects to completion.
Scaling up puts successful entrepreneurs in the position to do the kind of good that can be exponential. Robert D. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, traces his good fortune back to his childhood. At the time, Denver was newly desegregated; its busing system meant he attended a better school across town. In 2019, Smith decided to pay his luck forward. After delivering the commencement speech at Morehouse, a historically Black college, he announced he would pay the student debt of everyone there. Scaling up his business allowed him to effectively scale up the lives of hundreds of graduates.
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