If you are involved in a business, forget about profits and focus on business karma. You don’t have to be Indian to understand how important karma is. Of course you need to be in a profitable business and yes you need to look at margins. But, don’t spend 100% of your analytical hours focusing on that. Focus instead on being helpful. What’s important is how helpful you are to others.
Do you create good biz karma?
Do you get your work done on time and correctly? Do you communicate adequately with clients when something needs to be told to them or do you keep them in the dark? Do you offer free tips out of the goodness of your heart? Do you give a little extra?
Karma in the directory business
I am in the directory business and during the last year I have had a conflict of interest that has caused me a lot of grief. As a directory owner, I want to make sure that the listings on my sites, particularly with high rankings on my sites are good quality listings. Can you imagine that you are a regular person looking for a service provider on a directory and find a horrible service provider? That will influence your decision to use that directory again. It is better to use good directories that give you consistent good results.
My tough choice
Unfortunately, the choice I had to make was between pleasing those who used my directory to look for services, and those who paid me to advertise their services. I decided that if the absolute worst service providers on my directory didn’t login regularly to their listing (which was required in writing) that I would remove them. On the one hand, they would not get what they paid for from their point of view. But, on the other hand, my policies page allows me to remove them for failure to login, so legally they were not being cheated out of what they paid for — they were cheating me and themselves. But still I wondered about the karmic effect of removing so many listings for failure to login.
The realities of business karma
It took a few months for me to find out what the real effects of my actions were. I had no idea what it would be, but I knew that the universe would respond somehow or another. Since I had removed people prematurely based on technicalities in my rules, and didn’t inform them, I noticed that many services that I had paid for were removed from me after I had paid for them. No huge disaster happened. But, I was paying for an old server which I had been told was cancelled. I paid for fixing my email system on my site which broke two months after it was fixed at great cost. My assistant stopped doing certain phone calls which I had assumed she was still doing. So, I learned my lesson. Half of the problem was not giving people what they karmically deserved regardless of the terms of my contract. The other problem was not telling them.
The solution
So now, I am telling all customers who did no login that they better login or they will be removed — unless they are the bottom 3% in which case they are so horrible, that I would rather sacrifice my karma in order to have them off my site. In life sometimes doing the right thing involves a sacrifice or two, and I know the price I’ll have to pay as well. So, I am warning clients, and giving them a few days to login. If they do not, then I’ll remove them. Now the ball is in their court. We’ll see if the karmic effect is better. But, my site continues to get excellent traffic and great revenue, so I am not too disappointed with my little karmic experience.
What goes on in your business?
Are you doing little secretive or unpleasant things to others that you should not? There is a karmic effect for this. They only way to find out what it might be is to stop doing whatever you’re doing and see what changes in terms of how other people or organizations treat you! I encourage you to find out and learn!
Good business karma show the real way to do the business which really gives the way.