If You Want To Make Money, Don't Do This

Despite the current state of the economy, I believe that it is an opportune time to be building a business or starting up some kind of side hustle. It was the idea of starting a business that has evolved my mindset and has helped me grow as a human being over the past several years.

What's also nice is that someone can still thrive during these times if they have a decent marketing plan, a reasonable ticket price for their product or service, and a strong mindset.

Today, I'd like to be putting particular focus on the mindset as I feel that is the very core of any business. I've said before in various places that a business is an extension of yourself. Your beliefs, norms, and mindset all feed into your business and will steer it based on these kinds of stipulations.

I believe in this strongly because there is one particular mindset that presents a lot of issues for startups or any person getting into entrepreneurship.

This mindset is built on starting a business for the sole reason of making money.

The keywords here are sole reason.

Of course, anyone who is starting up a business is in it to make money. An entrepreneur isn't someone who provides all kinds of value for the low price of free. They certainly provide some for free yes, but it's with the intention that you would then buy something from them eventually.

But the point is that shouldn't be the only reason for you to be starting a business. Right out the door, if you are in this only for money, you will be facing an uphill battle with the end result being in failure. Here is why.

Your Motivations Are Messed Up

I learned a few years ago that there is a lot of weight placed on the question "why?" when it comes to goal setting and motivation.

Why do you want to start a business?

Why do this out of the thousands of options?

The answers are designed to go in deep for you to find a personal reason for doing this. This is so important because it has everything to do with your motivation in any situation that involves your business.

It all comes back to your business being an extension of yourself.

When you have "to make lots of money by whatever means" as your only reason for going into business, it will begin to corrode your entire business from the top down.

You will maximize profits however you can which can translate towards going cheap, cutting corners, and finding any way to leverage your customer base by whatever means.

A fitting example that I'm familiar with is EA. It's a gaming company that focuses heavily on sports related games and they are infamous for monetizing every aspect of their games, using predatory tactics, and releasing faulty products.

In more recent instalments of these particular games they have essentially turned their games into glorified gambling games packaged in a typical video game.

EA is ranked as one of the most hated companies in America due to their sheer obsession with money. Surprisingly the company has yet to go bankrupt and my guess is because they are cutting corners in several other aspects beyond the costs associated to making video games.

Instead, my recommendation is to look beyond that and consider other kinds of motivators. Unless you really want to build a hateful and heartless company, it makes more sense to be looking at other things. Build a company to entertain people, give people genuine value, or teach people something new and exciting.

Something more than just making money.

You'll Struggle To Work On It Consistently

Expanding on the previous point, I mentioned that your why - should it be a weak one - will corrode your business but didn't go into exact details.

Going back to my example with EA games, we can start to see how money being the sole motivator can present issues.

For one, their spokesperson isn't really addressing any issues, again brushing loot box mechanics as "surprise mechanics". Furthermore when a game is released utterly broken it implies that the team behind the game didn't have much time to test it let alone make it.

In essence, the staff at EA are treated like factory workers and the games are on conveyor belts. The idea is to produce a game as quickly as possible within tight deadlines and have little opportunity to fix any issues should there be any.

It's disappointing considering other gaming companies spend a good number of months or years to work on a game depending on the size of it.

But getting back to my point, if you are focused on making money, it's no less different from how EA releases products and handles their problems.

They brush off any criticism, have little desire to improve or change, and release products that are lackluster at best most of the time.

These aren't traits to be proud of as companies today need to be adaptive, listen to their audience, and provide value to stay relevant in the growing and changing world. It's hard to do that when you focus is on profit and not on looking after your customers.

It Stifles Creativity

Even if your business is more professional-based, there is always some level of creativity involved. Approaches to attracting clients, working atmosphere, amongst other things all demand that we have some level of creativity.

Creativity can be best summarized as how you go about finding solutions and executing them. If you are more focused on turning a profit, there are certainly solutions focused on that, but if that's the only way that you think, your solutions are going to be repetitive and exploitive.

I've already talked about EA solutions which are basically this. But on the other side, these kinds of solutions prevent other solutions from being considered or even surfacing.

It Simply Doesn't Work

On a short-term basis, starting a business like this can work. There are several examples out there where a business only focused on making a lot of money and have grown to massive sizes.

However these empires will slowly begin to crumble. It can take a lot of time for that to happen, but people will eventually catch on and stop supporting a business like that.

Even though the businesses we are creating are going to get that big, the only difference between big businesses and small ones are the size, capabilities, and the ripple effect of their decisions.

If a CEO care more about the bottom line than on delivering good quality goods or services or caring about their customers, then the company will cease to be once people realize that.