The Spiritual Reward of Small Business

Ricky Nelson wrote a hit song called Garden Party in 1972. The chorus and conclusion of the song goes like this:

“You see, you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

I don’t consider myself a very good businessman, even though I have always managed a steady profit. My many business deficiencies, however, have been compensated for over the years by associates who were drawn to work at my company and in the business community I created.

So. I am a flawed businessman. But despite that I am a successful entrepreneur. How is that? Well, it is because I have achieved my primary personal goals through my adventure in entrepreneurship. Time will tell whether I have erected a long-term, viable capitalist entity that will live on without me, but that is not my primary concern. I do and have done business because it makes me happy and free. Because it’s a gas. Because it’s a joy. Because it’s often an ecstasy of self-discovery. Because it’s infinitely not boring. Because it’s personally healing and whole-making, in addition to money-making.

Thus, my ultimate goals have not been financial. What I knew when I started my company in 1996 were my personal values and the tone of service I wanted my company to emanate. I knew I wanted to create a community I could comfortably live in, a horizontal company inhabited by peers and fellow-travelers, both in my associates and in my clients. I came out of a two decade personal history of failure in four different careers before founding my firm. I had also had issues with three different addictions. (In fact, my entrepreneurial success came directly out of disciplines developed and informed by the recovery from these addictions. Finding a comfortable center in my work was an essential part of that recovery.)

What I wanted out of entrepreneurship was a customized business community I could live in. My own private Idaho, so to speak. I had no desire to be a master of the universe. I had no desire to own a yacht. What I desired was to be happy, centered, and whole, while running a healthy enterprise with integrity and freedom, and, simultaneously, offering a needed service to the world. Those were and are my reasons to be an entrepreneur and if I went out of business tomorrow it would in no way adumbrate my personal sense of success and achievement as a small businessman.

(If you get a chance and are interested in this topic, take a look at a book called The Big Enough Company by Amy Adams and Adelaide Lancaster. It’s written for women, but I loved it.)

To me entrepreneurship is fundamentally and non-quantifiably personal and spiritual in its rewards, particularly in its ability to allow and nurture freedom and inner wholeness. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said so passionately at the end of his “I Have a Dream” speech. “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

Amen Brother Martin.