Without profit, a business is doomed to fail. As ‘commonsensical’ as that may seem, there is a common theme and ongoing debate in business communities about the profit being a ‘dirty’ word.

Of course, profit can be dirty. It can be earnt in unethical ways and spent in unethical ways, however, in its absence businesses don’t exist and, if that was the case, the economic ramifications would be catastrophic. Therefore, anyone that is making a profit should be proud of their economic contribution and not have any feeling of guilt, unless that profit has been ill-gained from unethical business practices.

Where people are misunderstanding the argument or profit is the methodology required in modern business to create and maintain a profit. The question becomes, where are the profit engines of the business? The profit engines lie in our business value proposition, our team’s ability to deliver a consistently high standard, the executive leaders’ ability to read the marketplace, and accurately understand the future of client demand and our ever-changing industries.

When a manager starts with profit and works backward towards the ‘profit creators’ that are our team, the conversation is often sterile and demotivating to the individual team member. This is not to say that there shouldn’t be financial metrics and KPIs associated with team members, it’s merely identifying that staff need to be empowered and guided towards their own goal which will, in turn, create the profit you’re looking for.

A Harvard Business Review survey in 2018 stated that 58% of employees say they trust a stranger more than their boss whilst another global survey that was done by O C Tanner Learning Group identified that 79% of people leave their job due to ‘lack of appreciation’.

We encourage every manager to embrace these facts and implement strategies to remove all of these issues from their organisations. In doing so, any organization will see immediate profit benefits through reduced training costs, reduced recruitment costs, increased efficiency, and genuinely improved culture throughout the organization that, whilst being an off-balance sheet and somewhat intangible, is one of the biggest profit-making factors.