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Retailing With
Spirit
By Tad Crawford
Every entrepreneur begins with a
vision, but for the readers of New Age Retailer that vision encompasses
more than making money and building a successful business. The challenge to the
entrepreneur is to use the world of commerce as a place for spiritual growth. To
be practical without being spiritual will limit the potential for inner growth.
To be spiritual without being realistic will endanger the success of the
enterprise. The entrepreneur must find an alignment between spiritual
development and the activities of commerce. With these thoughts in mind, I
developed the following ten tips for New Age retailers.
***
1. Honor the realities within
which your business functions. People on a spiritual path may imagine that
special laws should govern their business dealings. To take an extreme case,
they may have an aversion to money. Or perhaps they feel that it is unfair for
one person to earn more than another, regardless of the duties performed. These
attitudes, which come in many varieties and degrees of subtlety, are
self-defeating. If you enter the world of business with suspicion and loathing,
what can the outcome be but failure? You have to believe that going into
business can be a good thing, not only for you but for those with whom you
associate and for the larger community. You have to strive to understand how
business works and exercise your values within that framework.
2. Know that business is an
aspect of community. Money reveals this very clearly. Money is a tool of
circulation. It calls forth what we have to offer one another and is a way that
we are able to share. If each of us lived alone on an island, money would be
superfluous. In a similar way, business encourages us to bring into being and
share products, services, and information. To imagine that the purpose of
business is to gain money without regard for others is to lose sight of the ways
in which business is connective and mutually beneficial. If we focus on business
as an aspect of community, it becomes easier to give fair and proper treatment
to employees, customers, and suppliers. We also become more able to look beyond
the limited sphere of our own business and play a role in the larger issues of
the world.
3. Don’t measure success only
in terms of the bottom line, but in terms of good deeds as well. For
example, you may decide that you want your business to donate inventory to help
a local charity. Aside from the tax write-off for giving away the inventory,
there is an intangible benefit that will never be reflected in your profit and
loss. But you’re doing something good for the community. This raises the
interesting question of whether your charitable and other good efforts should be
publicized (to create a "good will" asset for your business) or simply
done as anonymously as possible. Maimonides considered anonymous charity to be
on a higher level than charity in which the giver is known. As Eric Shaffert
suggests in Fung Shui and Money: A Nine-Week Program for Creating Wealth
Using Ancient Principles and Techniques, "If you really want to bring
joy into your life, try this experiment: Every day, find a small way to do
something positive for another person. . . .The offering must be made freely and
without any ‘strings attached.’ And it must be anonymous!"
Incidentally, the highest level on Maimonides’ Golden Ladder of Charity was to
make the recipient self-sufficient.
4. Lead through inner wisdom
and strength. If you have wisdom and a strong character, this will be
manifested in your behavior. In this way, your spiritual life makes itself felt
by those around you. You don’t have to preach or hold yourself up as holier or
more elevated than anyone else. You simply operate as best you can from who you
most truly are. When, day after day, you reveal these qualities to those around
you, you will serve as a model for others and also draw people to you who are
moved by inner strengths similar to yours.
5. Take proper actions without
attachment to results. This is familiar advice, but wise nonetheless.
Certainly we should take every possible step to ensure a favorable outcome, but
ultimately we have to surrender control over what will happen. For those of us
who enjoy the power and security of a sense of being in control, this is a call
to acknowledge that powers exist greater than our own. For example, I may want a
enter into a contract and do everything I can to bring it about. This is energy
well-spent, while energy given to worry (or pleasurable fantasies) about the
outcome does nothing to advance my business goals.
6. Use the energy of demons to
do the work of angels. Being in business causes many people to worry
excessively and experience lots of anxiety. If excessive worry and anxiety
helped the business, it might be worth the misery of experiencing them. But they
are of no value to the business and, in fact, are detrimental. Worry, anxiety,
and other negative states of emotion contain tremendous energy. Our task is to
harness that energy. Keep a list of things to do that can be worked on at any
time to help your business. When you feel obsessive and fearful, pull out the
list and get to work. You’ll be turning the energy around by putting it to a
positive use.
7. Treat competitors as
potential allies. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the truth is that you
are all in the same business. The sides are always shifting. One company
acquires another. An employee, maybe the CEO, moves from one company to another.
The opportunity for a joint venture presents itself. One company offers
distribution into new markets to a company with products similar to its own. If
you are trustworthy and treat people with respect, today’s competitor may be
tomorrow’s ally.
8. Seek wise advisors.
The complexity of today’s world makes it impossible to be expert in
everything. For example, I’m an attorney. I graduated from Columbia Law School
and practiced for nearly 15 years before becoming a full-time publisher. One of
the most helpful aspects of this legal background is that I know when I need
specialized legal assistance and I’m able to find the right attorney to help
me. Always be candid with yourself about what you can do and what you can’t.
For what you can’t do, start now to find the experts who will be able to help
you when you need them–an attorney (who is also able to refer you to
specialists as you need them), an accountant, an insurance agent, and experts
with knowledge particular to your field. In The Money Mentor: A Tale of
Finding Financial Freedom, I showed how a young woman was able to work her
way out of debt with the help of an experienced advisor who did "financial
planning from the heart." If you need someone to help with marketing,
cost-cutting, or ideas for new lines of inventory, admitting your limitations
can be a great way to build a successful business.
9. Learn from your mistakes.
Every entrepreneur makes lots of mistakes. The challenge is to learn from each
mistake. To learn about our business and also about our personal psychology, our
strengths and weaknesses. In publishing, for example, it’s advantageous to
print lots of books in a single print run because it lowers the unit cost per
book (while increasing the total bill). But you only have to have one bad
experience with thousands of copies of a title that will never sell to realize
that a more cautious policy may yield greater profits. Confronting that kind of
gambling–going for broke–is also an opportunity to look at one’s own greed
and need for ego affirmation. Even the failure of a business should be a
learning experience. It isn’t the end of your life. It isn’t even the end of
your career. It is simply another event from which you can learn before you move
ahead. You came to the business with a certain vision and enhanced your skills
and know-how through the process of running the business. That vision and
know-how will have value in the future. Lots of successful people have had the
experience of failure. They picked themselves up, dusted off and refurbished the
dream that got them started, and went on to succeed.
10. Remember your dreams.
Every business begins with a dream. Don’t ever forget that starting moment
when wonder filled you, your energy was called to a new task, you opened
yourself to the unknown, and you brought hope to the shaping of the future.
Every business has times of stress, times when failure seems as or more likely
than success, but keep in mind the values of the initial impulse that set you on
this journey. It is worth the struggle because it is one way in which you are
realizing your inner potential and role in the larger community.
***
If we take a moment to look at the
origins of money, we find that money and trade have a hidden connection with the
divine. In The Secret Life of Money: How Money Can Be Food for the Soul,
I discussed how early peoples–whether hunter-gatherers or farmers–had
rituals in which sacrifices were offered both as thanks for divine bounty and to
ensure its continuance. In the ancient world, religious pilgrimages may have
been an important impetus to the creation of money. Far from home, pilgrims
would have to obtain food and other supplies, both to survive and to make the
required sacrifices. So traders would be encouraged to root themselves beside
the temples, and pilgrims would bring various forms of wealth. Protected by the
sacred association with the temples, fairs developed for the purpose of
exchange. In fact, the German word for Mass–Messe–also means fair.
Because offerings made temples into repositories for wealth, including precious
metals, much of the earliest coinage came from the temples. Trade, in turn, was
facilitated as consecrated offerings moved back into secular circulation as
coinage. Against this background, it becomes less surprising that the retailer
building a business must also consider spiritual issues.
No list of tips is ever complete,
especially not in view of the varied and often changing challenges that
businesses offer. The successful entrepreneur must be like a hydra, constantly
sprouting new heads–filled with new ideas–to meet successive challenges.
That process of problem-solving and building as a business goes from one stage
to another is part of the joy of being an entrepreneur. We are engaged in what
we do and the powers of our imaginations are called forth. In these pursuits we
reinvent our business, and ourselves, again and again, discovering in both
potentials that only a dreamer might have imagined.
Tad Crawford is Publisher for both
Allworth Press and Helios Press in New York City. He is the author or co-author
of a dozen books, including The Secret Life of Money: How Money Can Be Food
for the Soul and The Money Mentor: A Tale of Finding Financial Freedom.
The legal affairs editor for Communication Arts, he has written articles
for magazines such as Art in America, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Lapis, The
Nation, New Age Journal, and Self. He has also appeared as a guest on
television programs such as Fox on Money; The O’Reilly Report; Good
Day, Wake Up; and It’s Only Money as well as numerous radio shows
including New York & Company. Other books published by Allworth Press
(www.allworth.com) and Helios Press (www.heliospress.com) that are of interest
to New Age retailers include Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming
Brands in a Consumer Democracy and Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm
for Connecting Brands to People by Marc Gobé; The Psychology of War,
The Dilemma of Psychology, and The Medium, the Mystic, and the
Physicist by Lawrence LeShan; How to Heal: A Guide for Caregivers by
Jeffrey Kane; The Money Mirror by Annette Lieberman and Vicki Lindner;
and What Money Really Means by Thomas Kostigen.
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