Is Money Reason Enough for Doing What We Do?

image_pdf

One of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures is the 1972 musical “Cabaret” and watching Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey singing and gyrating to “Money, Money.” The 1972 movie provides a deliciously wicked peak into Germany’s decadent early 1930s Weimer Germany social scene. Minnelli and Grey nail it in this movie, especially their “money, money, money” segment. Access a short YouTube video of these two performers’ kinky song-and-dance number here.

Of course, we all want and need money. Without it we can’t buy groceries, make our home or car payments, pay for our utilities or meet any of the many other expenses that regularly show up in our mailboxes or on our computer screens or iPhones. Of course, we also need money to prepare for the time when we won’t be working: our retirements.

As business owners, many of you have the added (and very great) responsibility of generating enough money to not only to take care of yourselves and your families, but also of your employees and their families. If that weren’t challenging enough, you need to generate enough cash to maintain your business and, hopefully, grow it into a more profitable, if not larger, business.

That’s what Turf magazine is about, sharing ideas, strategies and the experiences of other successful business owners to help you make money, become evermore successful and to make even more money. Think of it as “the rising tide raises all boats,” meaning the more successful and profitable your business becomes, the better you can reward your deserving employees.

But making money is not what our magazine is all about. If we, either in print or digitally, dedicated all of our information-sharing efforts into helping you “make more money” we wouldn’t be fulfilling our larger mission. And, in my humble opinion, that wouldn’t be fun either for us to produce or for you to consume and share with others. We realize that many of you—probably the great majority of you—started your businesses because you 1.) loved working outdoors and providing services that generated immediate positive results for the people you served, and 2.) craved the freedom of calling your own shots and making your own business decisions.

Certainly, you strive to convert the services and products you provide to your customers and clients into the financial rewards they should command. In a sense, money—more precisely the amount of money—is how you keep score, right? But like all games (business, in many respects, is a game), many of you get great pleasure calling the plays in the huddle or stepping up to the plate facing a three-and-two count with bases loaded and two outs.

It gratifies you to test your mettle on the field of business, compete against other businesses you respect, come up with creative solutions to daunting challenges and score enough wins to keep playing the game. You are smart enough to know that if you put in the hours, learn about and apply proven business principles and take a calculated risk or two you have the opportunity to “play” the game at the next higher level. That’s what this industry offers you.

So, you can see that money, as vital as it is to you and your business, is mostly a measurement of success, but hardly the only measurement—a point that my longtime friend and Turf columnist Steve Rak touched upon in the June 2015 issue of Turf. His “How do You Deal with Stress” column drew a flood of positive responses from you, our readers. Money is great, but can we put a price on wellbeing?

Here’s one final thought. Norwegian poet Arne Garborg said: “With money you can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; soft beds, but not sleep; knowledge, but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; splendor, but not warmth; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness.”