This is the second episode in a new series about selling without being fake. In this episode, we talk about how to go beyond a transactional business into a transformational business.
Podcast Transcript:
Joshua MacLeod:
Making money is so dangerous. It’s fundamentally dangerous for your soul. Greed is like something that you have to really, really protect yourself against and cutting corners with people, cutting corners with your product, cutting corners just because you can, or cutting corners so that you can just squeeze out a little more greed will end up in such incredible emptiness.
Podcast Announcer:
Welcome to the Growability Podcast, teaching business and nonprofit leaders a more excellent way to run a business. Visit growability.com for your leadership coaching consultation and business collaboration needs. This is the second episode in a new series about selling without being fake. In this episode, we talk about how to go beyond a transactional business into a transformational business. Here are your hosts, Joshua MacLeod and Bernie Anderson.
Bernie Anderson:
Okay. I want to turn a corner here now Joshua. We also work with clients who want to build a transformational culture. How do we do that?
Joshua MacLeod:
So how do you transcend the transactional nature of business into a transformational business?
Bernie Anderson:
That is correct.
Joshua MacLeod:
That’s a great question. A good example of a transformational business, I think would be Starbucks. Starbucks has their transactional function. They offer coffee and expensive cake pops and stuff like that. But what Starbucks did is they started thinking past the transaction of the coffee and they started thinking, how do we add value in a community? What they ended up doing is saying, hey, let’s create really comfortable space for business meetings. So Starbucks kind of pioneered this third space idea. If I want to have a business meeting at my house with kids running around, that’s not professional, it might be more cozy, but it’s not cool. If I want to have a business meeting at the office, it’s a little stuffy, it’s not very relational. But hey, you go have a business meeting at Starbucks. I’ve got my transactional coffee here, but then I also have a really good meeting space, I can develop a relationship more comfortably than either at my house or at the office.
Joshua MacLeod:
If you want to move past a transactional business and really be a part of a transformational business, we really have to think about not just reaching people’s bodies, but actually reaching their soul. So when I think about transformational businesses, one tool that we like to point people to at Growability is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So Abraham Maslow was this psychologist who instead of studying what went wrong and what’s broken with people, let’s actually study and look at what works and what’s really good with really good leaders. So on Maslow’s hierarchy, I think there’s like seven layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And what we do at Growability is we simplify it down to three.
Bernie Anderson:
Maslow, turning in his grave as we speak. But yes, it’s just …
Joshua MacLeod:
Yeah. So the Growability Maslow hack. At the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I need to make sure that the individual that I’m meeting with has health and safety. If I am trying to give someone education or empowerment, and they’re afraid that they’re going to get beat up or attacked by the rival gang, or I’m trying to teach somebody how to read, and they’re just hungry because they didn’t eat. There’s no health and safety there. Is my product adding health and safety, or does my customer already have health and safety?