temptation of sweaty cash.

Once I spoke to a music management class about Stay Human. A friend of mine was teaching the class and thought it might be a good chance for me to meet some future band and event managers, which it was. After talking for a bit about Stay Human and the like, one of them asked me if my business was a success because of our ethics or in spite of it.

I really feel like all the success that I have is because of the ethics and not in spite of it. Stay Human is a business that pushes it’s ethics right out the front and we are constantly getting positive feedback about it. I can’t imagine if an ordinary merchandise company sent out one hundred myspace messages to bands they would get ten replies saying they love what they are doing. The mission changes us from being a mundane company, into something special. Another one in the class asked me if I’ve ever been tempted by a dodgy order. Up until a point of about four years ago I had just never even been tempted to do the wrong thing. People knew we were an ethical company, they knew our prices and that was that. But one big corporate clients that we have wanted a product that we didn’t offer, temporary tattoos, they could be sourced in Australia for about .30 cents a unit, in china for .5 cents. They wanted me to get them for .10 cents. This was a huge order that would have netted us about $5,000 dollars in profit for basically sending this company in china an email with their artwork.

I’m not going to bullshit you, I was tempted. $5,000 profit was at the time about two months worth of trading profits. I was at the time pretty broke and planning to go overseas, what a nice little bonus for myself, pay back for the years of towing the line. The reason I think ethical businesses owners should think of themselves as self funded activist and not just business people servicing a niche market is because of this type of thing. A business person might be swayed by money, but an activist never could be.I wasn't about to turn the last four years of trading and talking into a lie. I was not going to make myself into a fraud and a joke for the sake of some money. So I had to say no to the order.

The funny things was in the next week I landed three really good orders from some of our other bigger customers that almost made up for it. Karma baby, karma.