If you’ve ever taken an economics course, you’ll know all about externalities – costs that businesses impose on the surrounding environment. You can think of them as spillovers, such as a factory spewing out radioactive waste into a river or a nightclub polluting the surrounding residential areas with noise.
Unfortunately for companies, generating externalities isn’t without cost. While they might not have to pay compensation directly to the rest of society, firms known to harm the community in some way get a bad reputation.
In this post, we take a look at some of the ways that small businesses can benefit the local community and reduce the harm they create.
Promote Environmentally-Friendly Operations
There are many things that you can do to improve the environmental-friendliness of your operations. Start small and then work your way up.
For instance, operating in a compact building is generally greeners than powering a large, sprawling campus. Cutting down on parking space encourages employees to find alternative means of getting to work. And using things like “green walls” can help support and sustain ecologically-damaged areas.
You can also make use of recycled materials in your fitouts and cut down on the amount of kitchen waste you produce.
Reduce Noise
Living next to a machine shop or auto mechanic isn’t pleasant. Being right next to a nightclub is even worse: the sound of the thumping bass never ends.
If you run a loud business, invest in soundproofing. Doing so will protect the community and also support workers. Most employees don’t thrive in chronically loud environments and local residents may launch a formal complaint against your business.
Once you sound-proof the walls, you should notice fewer complaints coming your direction. It’s often possible to reduce volume levels by 50 percent or more.
Create Local Jobs
You may find it tempting to hire people from outside the local area – and in some cases, it’s necessary. But if you really want to build the community, the best way to do it is to put talent to use locally.
If you create local jobs, be sure to market that fact. Don’t allow the opportunity to pass you by. When you create local jobs, you automatically improve your standing among local people. They are then much more likely to use your services, since they know that their spending is going back into the local community.
Be More Entrepreneurial
It might sound strange, but being more entrepreneurial can be a great way to help the community. Once you prove what’s possible, you may inspire action in other people.
This is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is so successful. To start, it was just a cluster of workshops all building chips outside of San Francisco. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the place. But once Intel and Micron began having real success, the region began attracting people from all over the country, and then the world.
Being more entrepreneurial helps to bring out local talent and enrich the area. It can be one of the most valuable things you do for the community.
