Breaking free from the Two Camps Trap by building a cohesive business model for impact and profit

This week I’m sharing the pattern I’ve seen business leaders fall into time and again over the last two decades; I call it the Two Camps Trap. My hope is that it helps you identify if there are elements of your thinking around the role of business and where “good” takes place that you may have adopted unconsciously and want to reconsider.

For decades now we have been programmed to put doing good and making money into two different camps. This approach sees the role of business being to focus on making money and treats doing good as being external to the business. If your response to doing good and making money is to think about making as much money as you can using your business, and then to give away as much money as you can via donations to charities or through setting up a foundation, then you are seeing doing good as happening outside your business rather than seeking to bring it inside the business. This is the External Camp.

The alternative I am offering is to instead look for opportunities to make a positive difference with the everyday decisions you’re already making in your core business activities. This is the Internal Camp or doing good inside your business.

If you look a little closer at the graphic, you’ll see how the thinking plays out. On the left-hand side you have the External Camp. There is an empty business model representing the parts that make up your business. In this approach you’re looking at your business as simply producing and delivering a product or service to your customers and working hard to ensure you’re doing that in a way that brings more money in than it takes to operate.

You then have a circle sitting outside the business labelled “Good” which references your ability to use profits from the business or the donation of your time to contribute in some way outside your business. That’s the External Camp, and it’s where most people live.

On the right-hand side we have the Internal Camp, that’s where you’ll find me sitting around the campfire with a cup of tea telling stories and doing my best to explain why every business leader should be setting up camp over here.

In this graphic you’ll notice that “good” has made its way back inside the business model. Individual parts of the business—like customer segments, value propositions, key activities, and cost structures—are now stamped with a big tick to symbolize they are actively contributing and being used to have a positive impact on people, the planet, and your profits.

I want you to get to a place where the donation of profits, the establishment of a foundation, or any other approach which sees doing good only taking place external to the business (even if enabled by it) become icing on the “doing good cake” rather than being the cake itself.

Let’s imagine for a moment that a spell is cast on your business, and it will never make a profit again and will instead only ever breakeven.

If you can conceptualize a business model that means just by operating the core business activities, you make the world a better place then you have identified the focus for your version of doing good inside your business.

Never fear, the spell isn’t real, and we will get you to a profitable business model, but the thought experiment is helpful to test whether the concept of looking for opportunities to do good inside the business has really sunk in.

Were you still thinking about doing good and making money in two categories with “good” sitting external to your business when you started reading? If you were, it’s totally fine, most people are, but I hope that this little pause to unpack what I mean by doing good inside your business has helped reframe that in your mind and can continue to prompt and challenge your thinking as you tune in and draw out what doing good might look like in your business.

Remember, doing good looks different for each of us. There is no one answer or business model. My goal in sharing what I know with you is not to make you believe what I believe or care about what I care about; it is to give you a different perspective and then the tools to draw out and create clarity so that you can bring this to life in ways that work for you.

If you feel like you need some support as you work out the practicalities of what all of this looks like in your business, please send me a private message and let’s chat. I’m pragmatic not a purist. I’m not going to guilt you into anything or encourage self-flagellation! What I will do, with your permission, is push you relentlessly to work your business model until we find the win-win.

Don’t forget you can listen to the full episode of this week’s podcast where I unpack The Two Camps Trap right here on LinkedIn. Just scroll down and hit play and you’re set. As always if you prefer the video head to my YouTube channel or check out my website for more info.

I hope you’re one step closer to becoming more tuned into the previously unconscious beliefs and the Two Camps Trap. Your Both/And mindset is the beginning of uncovering what doing good looks like in your business.