Helping others is something that people everywhere could do more of. When you help someone else, you’re giving up your time and resources to improve someone else’s life; a truly noble cause in itself. Whether it’s just helping with a tire change, giving money to charity, or donating your business space to a public event, when you help other people, you’re doing a greater good for the community.
As a business owner, helping others can do a lot for your business’s image (and yours, as the owner). Let’s take a closer look at some of the most important ways helping others can benefit your business.
Good Publicity
When you’re building your business image, good publicity is an important step in the process. How the public views your business can affect sales, reputation, and the overall success of the business in the future. If you’re helpful, productive, and care about your community, your customers will love you for it.
When you help others, you’re displaying an image of selflessness, and, let’s be honest; businesses aren’t exactly known for being selfless most of the time. Some of the biggest businesses in the world don’t seem to care about anything but their own profits, so it’s important to differentiate yourself from this negative stereotype.
A Sense of Community
As a business owner, you actually have a much more profound impact on your community than you may realize. As a business, you pay taxes and provide a product or service for the public that can either affect people in a negative or a positive way. Just how much influence do you have? Let’s dig deeper.
Say you’re providing safety equipment for a manufacturer. Your equipment keeps employees from fingers and other objects caught up in the machinery. In the last five years, your equipment has reduced workplace accidents by over 65%, thus improving the lives of those employees and reducing accidental costs for the business. You’ve helped improve the community just by producing a specific product.
The businesses within our community have the ability to make great change and improve our lives on a daily basis. There are products out there that people simply couldn’t live without (just look at the toilet paper rush recently).
Personal Satisfaction and Confidence
As a business owner, your personal satisfaction, growth, and confidence are key parts of the business. You’re running the show, so you’ll want to find some satisfaction in what you do, be confident in your ability to do it, and experience personal growth from it. Helping others can bring about an amazing sense of self-confidence, fulfillment, and happiness.
How do you feel when you help someone? If you could feel that way all the time, would you? When you, as the business owner, are happy and fulfilled, it shows in more ways than one. The business itself will flourish, your community and your employees will see you as strong and compassionate, and you’ll be able to attract new customers.
Networking
Let’s not forget that for a business to thrive, it needs to make connections. As a business owner, networking should be a top priority. Building a network of people and businesses to pull resources, information, and wisdom from will help you grow both as a business owner and a person.
When you help someone else, they tend to remember your name or brand. You’ve made a valuable connection that can bring about more business and opportunities to grow. You might have inadvertently helped the future CEO of a huge corporation that will sponsor your brand later on. Or, you might have helped someone with a huge fan base on social media who can advocate for your brand.
Employees
Helping others shows great leadership, and your employees are watching everything you do as their leader. If your mission is to help others and make the world a better place, your employees will feel a much greater sense of satisfaction and fulfillment working for your organization.
That same feeling you get from helping others will affect your employee morale. If your business is selfish, focused only on profits, and doesn’t care for others, your employees may feel an identity crisis working for you. Give them purpose and make them proud to work for your business by helping others.
You can even extend some of that “help” to the employees themselves. Perhaps you can offer tuition reimbursement or some other aid to help employees advance. Offer opportunities for growth, salary increases, and more.
The Bottom Line
If more people and businesses focused on helping others, it’s safe to say the world might just be a better place. Remember that even as a business, you’re still a part of a larger community, and are therefore responsible for how you interact with and impact that community as a whole. Make your impact a positive one by helping others any chance you get.
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