Don't punish your customers for having ethics

One of the reasons big business are so big and successful is that they are generally very professional and organized. One place in which a lot of us small business owners fall down is that we are often less organized than or big business and unethical competition. Also as ethical products almost always cost more we should be delivering service that is equal to, if not better aswell.

Right now in the market place right now people have the choice between paying more money and going with the ethical option, or paying less and going with the unethical option. What we don’t want to do is punish people for doing the right thing. A case with a band I know happened recently. They were looking to get some garments for their band, I was overseas at the time and I couldn’t make them so they went to another ethical garment printer. The first batch got messed up by the screen printer, but were dispatched anyway, when they asked for them to be redone, they were told they could be redone for cost price. Running a small business I know where the business was coming from. Their profit margin was probably slim and to re-print the shirt they would have lost a few hundred dollars on the order. But from the bands point of view the garments were un-saleble, so they were not what was ordered.

Later when I talked to the guys from the band about the whole incident they were totally disheartened because they knew if they had gone to one of the big sweatshop garment producers, like love police or KOSM, they would have received much better service and a full refund when they needed it. It’s not about ethical and unethical business, but rather big vs small business. We just need to get ourselves much more organized. It’s fair enough we might be too broke to do full refunds, if that’s the case don’t make mistakes. If you do however make a mistake we must pay for it like any other business.

I short we can’t punish people for having morals. We have to make sure that we're giving fantastic service and competing with big businesses on delivery and professionalism, even if we can't always compete on price.