Dialogue: Profit-makers don't deserve to be vilified

By JENNY PHILLIPS*

Businesspeople have been stereotyped by Herald columnists Gordon McLauchlan and Garth George as a group of greedy snouts at the trough wanting to know what they got from the Budget. They must be told, like demented children who have stayed up too late, that they have had their turn and must now go to bed.

I have been running my business for 20 years and am the author of eight published books. So I am both a businessperson and a writer. George and McLauchlan imply that writers are people with values, whereas businesspeople are stereotyped as petulant, ranting, strutting and greedy. So am I the good or bad guy?

Believing passionately that you can create a better product or service, and leading others with your vision until it becomes reality, is as creative and challenging an endeavour as writing a book.

Over time, it dawns on you that business is regarded by some as focused on money and, therefore, not very nice. (I believe this is taught at school).

Everyone who is reading this article is in business in some way. You take home your pay each week and endeavour not to overdo it on the Visa card so that at the end of the week you have spent less than you received - "result happiness," as Charles Dickens said in David Copperfield).

This is your profit. You need to do this to maintain financial stability and so you can save up for capital items like a car. You may be paying off a mortgage because you want to build the financial sustainability of your enterprise (balance sheet). You expect your savings to earn you a market rate of interest. Still, many people unthinkingly vilify businesspeople for doing all these things - making a profit (when profit is necessary to stay in business, not a luxury), building the sustainability of the enterprise and paying investors a market rate of interest.

The concern of business with an environment that helps to produce revenue is not about greed.

During my early years in business, my partners and I, like many novices, did very well building our business with a mix of passion and instinct, professional competence and a handful of good luck. Then a new branch had a crisis that threatened the survival of our business. We had to close the branch, but were shocked to find the finances had been drained to the point where we could not do the things for people we had always believed in, such as three months' notice and extensive career counselling. I realised that in our idealism and our desire to look after people we had let things continue to the point where the jobs of everyone in the company were at risk.

I went back to university to study finance. I learned that if you don't look after the business, you can't look after the people. It is a learning experience I have never forgotten.

Business confidence has not been talked down by spin doctors, as those of us who have been watching and listening to the decline will be the first to tell you. A survey my company did of 35 of New Zealand's top chief executives for a tertiary institution showed that the leaders of many of our big-name organisations were extremely concerned about the fragility of our economy.

Many businesspeople have learned that if revenue generation is not under control, you cannot produce the desired standard of living. They are genuinely concerned about whether a new Finance Minister might, in his idealism, end up having that same learning experience.

What has been so depressing about recent coverage is the sense of "us" and "them." New Zealand is a system. It is vital that we all be concerned about the health of all sections of our community, even if we do not personally identify with them. To say "you've had your turn, get away from the trough," is to misunderstand that unless the revenue-generation is working, there is going to be little in the trough. Some businesspeople, too, could better understand that culture and identity form the heart of a nation.

An anthropologist might tell us that trapped animals start eating each other. We all need each other to achieve the standard of living we want, so let's communicate and forget how it was done in the last century. It is vital that the potshots at business stop. Don't assume that business is bad, and that if it is big it must be worse by definition. Or that business people are greedy or evil. It's time for more good faith all round.

* Jenny Phillips is the managing director of Clarity, a management consultancy.