There is a question I’ve learned to ask before I start almost anything — a company, a deal, a project, a Saturday. It isn’t “will it work?” and it isn’t “what’s it worth?”
The question is: who is it for?
A Saturday
I said a Saturday, so here is one. Friends were in town for the weekend and we had planned the day well ahead — brunch, a day party, a night on the town. It was the one day of the weekend that was fully ours.
That morning my church called. Their musician had canceled on an event scheduled for the same afternoon, and they were asking whether I could step in. I could have said no. Nobody would have held it against me.
But the question doesn’t care what I’d already planned. Who was the day for? The plans were for me. The event was for a room full of people who would otherwise have had no music. So I put the plans aside, missed the best day with people I don’t get to see nearly often enough, and played.
I don’t tell it to sound noble. I tell it because that is the size the question usually comes in. Not a boardroom. A Saturday.
I’ve spent my life building — in real estate, in consumer brands, in programs and ventures and ideas that worked and ideas that didn’t. And I’ve seen enough of both to know that the market rewards all kinds of things, some of them worth being proud of and some of them not. Profit is a poor compass. It will point you, confidently, toward plenty of places you don’t actually want to end up.
What has held up for me is a different measure. I try to build things that leave someone better off than I found them — and to be honest with myself about who that someone is. When the truthful answer is “me, mostly,” I’ve learned to be suspicious of the whole enterprise, however good the numbers look. When the answer is a person who was handed fewer chances than they deserved, the work tends to be harder, slower, and worth far more than it pays.
This is not charity
I want to be careful with the word charity, because this isn’t that. I believe business — real business, with discipline and returns and all the unglamorous rigor that demands — is one of the most powerful instruments we have for doing good at scale. A well-run company can change more lives than a well-meaning one ever will. The task was never to choose between doing well and doing good. It’s to keep asking who the work is for, and to have the discipline to walk away when the answer stops being one you can live with.
I inherited it
I didn’t invent this idea. I inherited it. People I never got to thank once built something — quietly, for almost no reward — and aimed it at a child who couldn’t have paid them back if he tried. I was that child. Nearly everything I build now is, in some quiet way, an attempt to return a favor to someone I’ll never meet.
So that’s the question. Before the spreadsheet, before the pitch, before the first dollar: who is it for? Get that right, and the rest is just execution. Get it wrong, and no amount of success will ever feel like any.
— Mike