Business and politics part 2: Being aware
By Isaiah O’Connor
The last time I wrote about business and politics my personal recommendation was to keep them separate unless of course your business is in politics. This time I am going to tackle the subject of being politically aware.
There are two main questions to this point. The first is should even pay attention to politics, and second, how involved should you be. I think on this post I will only tackle the first question, and only touch on the second one.
To start off I did an informal poll in an entrepreneurship group on Facebook. The poll was asking if you should be aware, with 0 being not at all, and 10 being so aware and involved you are staffing a politician campaign. With the middle ground being that you know the issues and how they affect your business.
I had 42 poll respondents and they overwhelmingly voted for the middle ground at option 5, that is you need to be politically aware enough to know how politics affects your business.
I would have to agree. I personally voted for choice 6, which is to be more than just aware, and I will get into that on the next post in the series.
So why should you be politically aware? Because, changes in government policies surrounding your business could cause you to either gain or lose business, even tot the point of a complete loss of business.
Let us look at some examples. A monopoly gets broken up by the government. That could create opportunities for you to fill the void left by the breakup. Or a policy change makes it legal to expand your business into new markets that were previously blocked by law.
Now as nice as watching for opportunities is, they are the less likely to occur. The more likely is a policy change that could raise the cost of doing business, raise your tax burden, and/or even make it impossible to run your business.
For example, I work in the balloon industry. Currently, there has been an environmental movement that makes false claims about the hazards that balloons pose. People in this movement have lobbied local and national governments to try to ban balloons outright. I did not hear about these activists, and in my city, they pressured the city council office to ban the sale of all helium balloons on city property. This not long before Norway's national holiday, a major day for balloon sales. Some people could almost make a week or two’s wage in one day.
Yes, there was concern about the way they were sold, and the people selling without a permit on the streets and the danger of the balloons not being properly weighted so they would be released into the environment. However, all these could have been solved without a ban.
I found out about it only a week before they voted on it, and I could not get in to present my side, and since it was a council vote, I had no say in the matter. The city council did not even consider bringing in a balloon expert to counter the argument.
“The last thing you want is to wake up one day to find your business has been banned out of existence.”
So I woke up one day with a source of income, gone. They then tried to make it a full national ban, banning all helium balloon use no matter the situation. Thankfully we got wind of this in time and one of us was able to present data to the government that stalled out that attack. If we had not been paying attention we could have simply woken up one day and lost a large chunk of our sales.
This may be a bit of an extreme case but its political things like this that are able to destroy a thriving business overnight. The more common issue is the rise in the cost of doing business due to tax increases and or minimum wage increases.
Now I am going to avoid taking a stance on tax and minimum wage increases, as I want to avoid those loaded political topics. The trick is to at the very least see them coming ahead of time so that you can adapt to the changes if at all possible. You always need to be able to adapt to changes, and it is much easier to do so if you see the changes coming.
So in summary, you should pay attention to politics at least enough to see the impact they make on your business, that way you can jump on opportunities that may come, and be prepared for any difficulties that may come as well.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Entrepreneur
Isaiah O’Connor.
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