Now that I have your attention, this is not a post advocating the use of cocaine, but about the choices people make in the process of running/doing business.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Evangacamp at Lijit HQ. In the discussion, the concept of “no” came up. After all, evangelists for a product/service are in the mental mindset of trying to get people to use their product/service not get them to stop.

When things broke into smaller groups, Rob Johnson of EventVue and I had quite the thought provoking discussion about ethical decision making.

My hypothesis is that there comes a moment in business, that you might never recognize as that Moment, where you have to decision between what is best for the business versus your morals and belief system.

Sometimes, the moment is clear, but more often a decision is made and a course of action taken before you realize it. Business moves fast, and its hard to slow down enough to always review each decision.

Here are three examples from my business experience:

1) Early on in my business, I was approached by an online adult company. I, personally, dont find adult material offensive, but was unsure how having an adult client would affect my company. They offered me $16,000 per DAY in revenue. What would you have done?

A competitor got their start by being a paid inclusion company for adult. Basically injecting adult results into AOL’s search (AOL allowed it, and charged for it). They now are an Inc 500 company, probably the largest paid search agency in Colorado, and do very little adult. Yet, to this day, people that knew their beginnings consider them a “porn SEO” shop.

So, what did I do? I pursued the account, which never came to fruition. If we had run that account, would my large brand accounts stayed on? I dont know, but thinking back, probably not.

2) Many of the deals we did were in the performance marketing world. Now, most of the performance marketing world is populated by hard working / hard partying types. To close a deal, I had to excessively party with the prospect. “Its just a little bit of cocaine. It never hurt nobody.” What would you have done? It was a $50,000 per month in revenue deal.

My father has a history of drug addiction, and I was deathly afraid of following a similar path. But, I also have done my fair share of partying in my life (mostly alcohol), and I knew that there was more money long term for the business. What did I do? I began to live the life of a rock star. (Must have been practice for the HamSwords…)

3) Here is a third example — its a bit more murky. Once the company got up and running, I never paid myself a salary. I just took money out of the business when I needed it. We were an LLC, and it essence there was nothing legally wrong with that model, but I also delegated most of the work to others (who got salaried). So it began to look like I was doing little work and living my rock star life, while my employees worked hard and did a great job.

Was that an ethical decision? Did I compromise my values and morals for the betterment of the company?

In this case, I did the opposite, while convincing myself that I was doing what was right. While there are times when a business decision stresses your ethics; there are also times when your ethics stress the business. In either case, the decisions are difficult. For me, what I was missing in the three examples was what I have now:

Complete trust in my ability to do the right thing, and complete conviction to do it.

I used to listen to my gut all the time, and I have begun to do the same again. At the end of the day, I know that I know what is right (not in the ethical right and wrong, but in the “I am comfortable with it” version.) And its that knowledge that drives my decision making.

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