An honest business earns profit by making other people smile.
Businesses can have multiple purposes, but the primary purpose of every business is to be profitable. When a business doesn’t earn profit, it usually closes. It makes no sense, after all, and usually becomes impossible to keep a business open when it’s losing money and not profitable.
The question we want to address here is: What exactly is profit? To which we offer an unusual answer: Profit is the pleasure of others symbolized by money.
An honest business earns profit by making other people smile.
That’s probably worth repeating: An honest business earns a profit by making other people smile. When a business brings many smiles to many faces by providing products and services that people value, appreciate, and find helpful, that business is likely to be profitable.
To be profitable simply means that (some) people value the products or services a business offers to sell more than the cash in their pockets; some people are quite willing to trade their cash for certain products. Why might that be? Let’s explore this subject by addressing some additional questions.
Why would anyone trade cash for some product or service offered by a business? And how exactly does a business make a profit from that trade?
A person is willing to trade the cash in his pocket for a business product if he values the product more than the cash. This is often the case because it would cost the person far more than the price tag on the product if he tried to make the product himself, from scratch.
A business can usually make a product far more efficiently and at much lower cost because that’s what business is: specialized labor and resources organized to make certain products or offer certain services very efficiently. A business can charge a price that’s higher than what it cost the business to make the product, but much lower than what it would cost a typical person if he tried to make the same product on his own.
When the sale price a business charges for a product is higher than the cost to make the product, the difference is profit.
When the price a customer pays for a business product is lower than the price it’d cost him to make the product on his own, the difference is the value he receives from the efficiency of the business – and that value is why a customer is willing to pay the sales price for a product, which translates into profit for the business.
The “profit margin” for most businesses – meaning the difference between the sales price of a product versus the cost of making it – is typically quite small. Often, it costs a business almost as much to make, market, and distribute a product as the price for which the product is sold.
However, the value margin for most customers—meaning the difference between how much it costs to buy a product from a business versus how much it costs to make the product by oneself from scratch—is usually enormous. Usually it would cost a person hundreds, thousands, or even millions times more to make a product than to buy it from a business.
Imagine trying to make from scratch the ordinary devices you use every day, such as your smart phone, computer, or car. Imagine the costs in both money and time if you were to hire researchers and engineers, and try to collect all the raw and processed materials from around the world that you’d need to make any of those products.
That’s why almost always, the value for customers is much greater than any profits earned by business. Stated differently: No matter how much profit a business earns, it pales in comparison to the value that business provided for its customers. And receiving so much value from the specialized, organized productive work of people within a business is a source of great happiness. That is why the more profit a business earns, the greater the number of other people smiling with pleasure.
FAQ
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