Do You Stick to Your Business Principles When Times Are Tough?
If you constantly change your principles based on what’s convenient, then you don’t really have any.
It took me nearly 15 years running a small business to learn something important. Despite years of formal education, the best business lessons I ever got came from my family. Not because they’re so brilliant.1 But because growing up within the business world of my parents and grandparents made me see their principles in action every day.
I didn’t formally join the business until I graduated college, but I was exposed to it constantly: at the dinner table each night; at my grandparents’ house; and during summers. Through all of it, I watched my family operate under the same code of ethics as when it was a fledgling startup in their basement years earlier, regardless of the business cycle.
Taking business classes or getting a degree is important, sure. I learned how to read financial statements, understand marketing principles, management principles, and organizational psychology. The normal things you can learn out of a textbook which are crucial to running a business. But while you can study ethics in a classroom, you don’t really understand it until you see it in practice. You have to fully immerse yourself in the day-to-day decision-making of a business.
Research backs this up. In a 2020 paper published in the Journal of Accounting, Ethics, & Public Policy, Hershey Friedman and his co-authors describe multiple studies that show “ethics cannot be taught in a classroom. Ethics starts at the top of the organization.”
Fortunately for me, between my grandparents and parents, I had two generations of ethical standards being modeled from the top of the family organization. By the time I was helping run things, I didn’t need to worry about my ethical standards or that of our companies. All I had to do was keep it going.
But that is where you can get tested the most in business. President James Garfield once said, “I would rather be beaten in right than succeed in wrong.” While it’s not about being “beaten” to me, I ran our businesses with a similar mindset. Numerous times I said to my family or my staff, “I would rather close the doors by being honest than succeed by being dishonest.”2
Most people think they have principles – until a crisis tests them. Your margins compress, a big customer tries to squeeze you, a large supplier breaks trust or threatens to cut you off. Or maybe the laws change and you’re suddenly at a disadvantage. The core question is, do your standards survive inconvenience? Or do those standards only exist when everything is good? If your standards only exist when things are good, they aren’t standards. They’re preferences.
When you run an international business for three generations, you have many opportunities to do things in a devious manner. Whether it’s skirting laws, evading taxes, skimping on paying your vendors, or cutting corners to save a buck, these scenarios arise weekly, if not more often. In 15 years working, I do not remember a single moment in which any member of my family even considered doing any of these things. Even if we knew we weren’t likely to get caught, it still wasn’t even a discussion.
I’m sure most of you will read this and say, “Of course I keep to my ethical standards. I never stray from them no matter what happens.” But let me ask you this: have you ever demanded something from a vendor that you’d refuse to give a customer? Have you ever demanded something from a colleague that you would never do yourself? Are your expectations from your customers different from how you acted with your vendors? Do you look down on any of your peers while also acting similarly?
These are questions I asked myself regularly. One of the methods in which we made decisions was to say, “If I were in their shoes, how would I feel?” I’m not saying we always made the right decision, and we certainly made decisions that others were unhappy about. But I know that each decision was made using the same set of ethics that my grandparents established in the ‘50s, long before my existence was even a consideration. And while “we’ve always done it this way” isn’t usually a recipe for success, if the ethical standards are still relevant, then I’m content sticking with it.
For me, it was more a question of being able to sleep at night. But it’s also a question of “fun”. Business is a challenge, but it’s also fun (if you’re doing it right). If you have to cheat to win, is it really that satisfying? That’s why I was so affronted by my wife’s suggestion once that I cheated at Monopoly.3 Likewise, if you reach the top in business, but you did it by stomping on everyone else and doing things in a way that would likely result in a trial, how does that feel good? To me, that wouldn’t feel like an accomplishment. The true challenge is doing everything by the book, and still achieving great success. That’s what my family did, and it’s the biggest reason why I’m so proud of all of us.
The bottom line is this: your code of ethics for how you run your business should be rock solid. It shouldn’t soften when times get tough. Rather, it should be a road map for allowing you to sleep soundly at night, knowing that you are doing it properly. Principles aren’t proven when things are easy. They’re revealed when it costs you something to keep them.
But since I inherited their genes, I guess they must be. Right? Hello? Is this thing on?
Funny how that mantra ended up coming to fruition. It’s actually a huge reason why we decided to close our business in 2026, but that’s a story for another day.
I prefer to brutally destroy my competition with my superior intellect. But she nearly divorced me the last time we played, so let’s call it a draw.