Doing The Right Thing Should Be Easy, Shouldn’t It?

During a strategy day a few years ago, the board at Pure SEO conducted a session to determine what drives us as people and explore why we had surrounded ourselves with this team, culture and environment.

The strongest theme to emerge from that session was trust. Trust is what motivates me as a business owner and as a person. Our team felt the same, and we distilled this into an internal company statement:

“At Pure SEO, we believe in relationships that are based on trust. When we work together, we are going to do our best to serve you – going above and beyond and out of our way to do exactly what we say we are going to do. We will act in a manner that we would want and expect for ourselves, and follow an ethical path, always keeping honest and leading by example at every turn.”

Continuing from this theme, our new tagline emerged a few years later:

“Doing Digital the Right Way”

We felt this tagline captured the essence of why members of the Pure SEO team choose to work for us and what sets us apart from our competition.

In October last year, we acquired This Side Up, a specialist eCommerce digital marketing agency. We hashed out the initial terms of the deal over a couple of beers and a handshake. We did our due diligence but completed the deal on the same terms as that handshake. No material differences emerged from what we had first discussed.

The acquisition had been built on trust from the start.

Shortly after completing the deal, however, a referral partner ‘suggested’ to a This Side Up staff member that he instead become a part of their collective. That staff member agreed and handed in his notice which, in turn, resulted in that referral partner withdrawing their contact for the client we were servicing for them.

In my opinion, this type of behaviour is exactly the opposite of what we try to foster at Pure SEO. Therefore, I decided to have a frank conversation with the man at the referral partner who had been central to those decisions. Interestingly, he had a fundamentally different perspective (after telling me to put my ‘big boy pants on’). He said the employee was talking about leaving anyway so he simply suggested he would always have a job with them.

Although we found this action was legal after digging in, I still feel it does not fit at all with our ethics, morals and values. Quite frankly, although the departure costs us financially, we feel we are better off associating with and doing business with people who share those approaches to business and life.

This case and several others through the years have forced me to deeply consider how perspectives can greatly shape what we believe is right or wrong. Through our conversations, I could see that this man truly thought what he did was perfectly acceptable behaviour. After all, it’s only business. In some ways, he is right (although I would never act in the same way with a referral partner).

With all the shades of grey that different people perceive at Pure SEO, we have put together three questions that dictate the actions we will take:

If you were on the receiving end of this type of behaviour, would you support it? If the answer is no, then don’t do it.

In your gut, does it feel like the right thing to do? If it doesn’t, then don’t do it.

If what you did was on the front page, would you be proud of yourself? If not, then don’t do it!

One of the best things about the world and life is our differences as people—how we think, how we behave, and even what we value. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this experience or any of your own.

I may even use them for another column. If you are interested in sharing, contact me at [email protected]