5 Ethical Business Growth Strategies For Impact Driven Entrepreneurs
These 5 strategies help you to create the right tools for your ethical business growth strategies, without marketing or sales tactics that are sleazy, manipulative and profit-first. If you’re a solopreneur, business owner, social impact startup or social impact business then this blog post was written for you!
Ethical Business Growth is an innovative, socially conscious and sustainable business strategy that helps you to build a successful business while growing it in a way that prioritizes people, the planet and community values.
Ethical business growth is about purposefully divesting from the business as usual strategies to start leading your business work through new and better values.
When we say ethical business growth strategies we are referring to strategies that help you grow your business in a more organic and respectful way.
These strategies are ethical because they intentionally avoid creating manipulative messages, profiting from your audience’s emotional vulnerabilities AKA pain points, or overtly focusing on revenue promises.
Instead, these strategies support your business growth by leveraging the power of human connections, your brand integrity, community-building, transparent storytelling and mutual trust.
Ethical business growth strategies are relevant and needed today. Here’s why:
Consumers expect brands to be socially responsible. Ethical integrity and social / environmental impact values are not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must have’ in today’s business landscape.
The online business industry is waking up and pushing back against the BS that has been running the show for too long. Small ethical business owners are leading the way with much fairer systems from better representation in marketing to fairer pay, equal opportunities to more transparency.
We need a more sustainable business ecosystem that recenters human and environmental values. Too many people are left burnt out, unable to support causes they care about and too exhausted to focus on building a better tomorrow.
Consumers and entrepreneurs seek more purpose, connection and impact in business. We’re done with empty promises, lack of transparency and unethical practices in business.
The world of online business (or business in general) is too often profit-oriented and driven by capitalist principles.
When we look at the work of online business coaches, mentors or strategists, or we read articles and books about business growth, the majority of them exclusively focus on helping business owners grow their revenue, book more clients, make more money.
When business growth = making more money, business owners are naturally placed under the pressure to turn their business work into a money machine and do everything in their power to generate as much revenue as they can.
If profit is the primary goal of our business growth, every strategy will focus on generating revenue.
This logic leads business owners to fall into marketing, sales, content and branding approaches that create harm, force people into buying, manipulate them by stressing vulnerabilities and fear, etc.
Traditional growth strategies are also very standardized and one-size-fits-all.
This means that business mentors, coaches, career coaches and marketing experts sell the same growth and success strategies (or ideas!) over and over, making entrepreneurs believe that there are only exclusive and fixed sets of solutions that lead to success.
This inhibits business owners’ unique voice and approach to business, and doesn’t take into consideration the wide range of different needs. It also unifies the business landscape, reduces brands to sales urgency and creates an exclusionary structure for business owners who want to do things differently or don’t fit with the strategies suggested.
Behind every business is a human or a team of people, all with their own emotions, unique needs, different lived experiences and ways of doing things.
Business strategy shouldn’t be watered down into a one-size-fits all. It should take into consideration the goals, needs, purpose, people and values of each individual business and be carefully designed around this.
There are many important considerations for all businesses who want to focus on their ethical business growth strategy.
The following ideas can be adapted to your business in a way that works for you. We’ve outlined 5 so you can pick and choose which one(s) speaks most to you and feels most fitting for where you’re currently at.
You might even get a boost of confidence by realizing that you’re already implementing these kinds of ethical business growth strategies!
5 ethical business growth strategies
1) Values before Profit.
A value-driven brand identity helps businesses stand out, create unique online presences and attract value-aligned audience + clients. Building a business based on a clear set of core values and sharing those values as key marketing messages can be one of the most powerful growth strategies for a business that is made to last.
What we’ve seen in our own social impact sphere is that when businesses refocus their goal setting, marketing efforts and brand identity around their values, huge shifts happen that lead to incredibly aligned projects rolling in.
2) Personal connections and community-building.
Community-first strategies help businesses grow their outreach and visibility exponentially because they leverage the power of human connection and personal experience exchange.
In the traditional growth models, we tend to believe that quantity (of money, clients, followers, etc.) is better than quality.
We think that we need to grow in numbers, and reach out to more people, expand our community, and attract more clients. But doing this often leads to overlooking the clients, the community and the resources that already exist in our work and missing an opportunity to leverage the connections we have with the people in our community.
One way to grow our business in a more ethical way is to nurture the relationship with the people around us and take the time to curate these connections, so that we get to be surrounded by a loyal, trusted audience that, eventually, will be more likely to trust our work and buy from us.
3) Content focused on relatable storytelling.
People connect through stories. Stories in business help the audience relate with the messages shared and feel a sense of belonging to the brand. Sometimes this might involve sharing a slightly vulnerable story to normalize a perceived ‘failure’ or sharing a bit more about your own background to connect with folks who have similar life experiences or could benefit from learning about your perspective.
We believe that human content focused around real human stories has the potential to make far deeper and long lasting connections than packaged up picture perfect posts devoid of relatable real life storytelling.
4) Mutual collaboration.
Setting up mutual collaborations with other business owners and finding ways to create business synergies for both leverages the power of both sides’ networking and the chance to expand the community and visibility.
For Business to Business (B2B) this could be building partnerships, working with people on a skillshare basis (e.g. web design for your business in exchange for copywriting for their business) or agreeing to refer people on to each other.
For wellness professionals it could be teaming up with another person in your industry and running an event together, or hosting an IG live on a topic of interest to your audience. This expands both of your outreach. The possibilities are endless!
5) Stepping into the role of a leader in your business work.
You are not just a business owner in your business. Your role has more expansive potential. You can position yourself as a leader in your work by being vocal about values, impact and changes you want to create in your industry, to add a unique identity touch to your work and show up as a cultural influencer in the work you do.
Learn more in our blog post; Why You Should Develop Your Leadership Skills To Boost Your Business Growth.
There are a multitude of benefits to implementing ethical growth strategies, such as:
Attracting value-aligned audiences and clients
Speaking a conscious consumers’ language
Growing your community organically for more sustainable and long lasting growth
Building trust with your audience and supporting conversion goals through trust & transparency rather than manipulation and trickery
Boosting your business reputation through integrity and credibility
Building authority through values and impact-first approaches
Building a pipeline of contacts, connections and high-converting warm leads that will compound in the long run through meaningful connections and trust.
How to apply these ethical growth strategies to create a business with impact:
See humans before leads or clients
Leverage the power of your closest people and contacts
Nurture your community
Reach out to people you vibe well with and suggest ideas for collaboration
Tell your stories, not just your expertise.
As usual, we could write a whole book on this topic but we’ve tried to keep it as brief as possible for this blog post so you have a digestible resource with tangible actions you can start taking right away.
FairForce’s work is backed by 8+ years of hands-on leadership experience in people and culture departments. Our team is equipped with a diverse set of expertise to deliver holistic consulting that supports ethical business growth led by Human-First values. We’ve seen the harm ‘business as usual’ causes. So, we’ve made it our mission to show that a kinder, fairer way of doing business is not only possible, but a powerful antidote to the ills of capitalism.