Two sets of wishful thinking have thus far dominated trade and industry:

1. The “free enterprise” practices of “pure” capitalism, including minimal regulation and private ownership of production, distribution, and exchange.
2. The business school tropes of profit maximization, capital accumulation, and “free market” competition.

I call these “wishful thinking” because they hide the true costs of unregulated business. These include

• Poverty.
• Environmental degradation.
• Crumbling infrastructure.
• Declining levels of education.
• Inadequate or expensive healthcare.
• Lower than fair compensation to workers.
• Accumulation of vast wealth into the hands of the few.

When the wealth generated by the contributions of all is unregulated, unfairly shared, unfairly taxed, and left to accumulate instead of being put to work for the betterment of all, there are many inevitable consequences:

• Poverty increases because there’s (artificially) not enough to go around.
• Crime increases as a necessity for the poor.
• The environment is degraded by unregulated industry outputs including toxic emissions and toxic landfills containing the detritous and remnants of consumer products.
• Health declines through toxic emissions from factories and landfills.
• Infrastructure crumbles because of misplaced priorities that favor the few.
• Healthcare costs skyrocket.
• Compensation stagnates because of business owner resistance.
• Society declines overall from a lack of reinvestment in all aspects of the social system.
• Infrastructure crumbles without sufficient taxes to pay for maintenance.
• Environmental clean-ups stall from lack of funding. This directly impacts health.
• Health declines forcing many into the social safety net.
• The cost of healthcare skyrockets because more people can’t afford to pay.
• The middle class shrinks or disappears altogether because, without fair compensation, they can’t afford a middle-class life.

An Alternative

There is an entire constellation of businesses that thrive in an environment of honesty and openness, passion for work, community, and fun. This form of business referred to as “clientry”* follows the basic activity model of:

• Think about it
• Speak about it
• Teach about it
• Write about it
• Coach about it
• Consult about it

Even if you run a business that sells tangible products, every transaction contains each of these basic activities. The overall context for these activities is a desire to serve and to offer the best possible version of whatever the product or service might be.

With the Internet as the Great Equalizer, it is now much easier and cheaper for the millions of small, really small, and one-person creative projects. caused-based initiatives and money-making enterprises to find and serve the audiences, clients, or customers that make up the millions of unique, new market niches.

Clientry, it turns out, is a superior strategy for launching, growing, right-sizing, and sunsetting any creative initiative that needs to be economically self-sustaining across time.

There’s a big difference between the “commitment to customers” of even the best of corporate entities and the long-term, relationships between business and client that characterize clientry.

If it is true that “business is survival of the fittest” then we need another word to describe the many businesses that pursue clientry.

One widely shared characteristic of clientric businesses is the practice of cooperation with what other business segments would call “competitors.”

Additional practices of clientric businesses include:

1. Accounting and bookkeeping. These are the bedrock of success. However, a business transaction is more than the elements of the basic accounting formula of Assets + Liabilities = Net Worth.
2. Transaction-based marketing. Every transaction includes components of:
   • Service: Personal interactions of the buyer and seller, conveniences such as parking, and esthetics.
   • Information: aka education – Articles about the product/service, training, training materials, packaging information, advertising, manuals, and advice on usage.
   • Quality: Design and functional values, durability, appropriateness, sustainability.
   • Repair: Convenience, timeliness, and ease of restoring to working order.
   • Recourse: Response of the seller to dissatisfaction of the buyer. This may range from gracious replacement to small claims court or civil lawsuit.
3. Passion for one’s work. This adds significant value to one’s business.
4. Fun in business. Business can and should be inherently fun.
5. Honesty and openness. These offer a superior strategy for success and are bound together as a foundational business practice.
   • Honesty builds trust, the foundation of strong relationships.
   • Openness is advantageous to the management, customers, and community any business serves.
6. Tradeskill. There are a unique set of skills and attitudes, culturally carried and passed along family lines or through early childhood experience–that favor success in commerce.
   • For lack of a better term, these are referred to as “tradeskill;” not the skills of a particular trade, but the skill required in any creative project, cause-based initiative, or money-making venture.
7. Less emphasis on capital. Tradeskill behaviors are more important than capitalization to the success of a business.
   • Good businesses can be started on little to no capital and failed businesses can easily have spent millions.
   • Insufficient funding can be far better for business growth than plentiful capital if enterprise leaders have strong tradeskill.
8. Clientry. Consulting, coaching & other services that are relationship-based.
   • Clientry is a focus on service and long-term business relationships.
9. Generous marketing. A generous licensing strategy for a new product or service will generally be successful in creating a larger market and giving the licenser a major market share.

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Footnote

* “Clientry” is a concept developed by Michael Phillips in his books The Gods of Commerce, 1995 and Commerce, 2004. The essence of the concept is that “Clientric businesses have one objective: to maintain a lifetime relationship with the customer.” – https://docs.google.com/document/d/12HYAppEkVmV8_tK2DJ_0jHwBl7IJiuQwVA6bHzcceOQ/

In Gods of Commerce, Phillips introduces the idea that there are three distinctly different forms of commerce:

• trade
• industry
• clientry

These three forms operate concurrently in our society and have three distinctly different structures, values, and goals.

• Trade focuses on a proper markup for each sale.
• Industry is the exploitation of economies of scale.
• Clientry is a focus on lifetime business relations.

While Phillips’ acknowledged that Karl Marx had seen the distinction between trade and industry, he claims to be the first to recognize all three.

Phillips also recognized that clientry was probably the only pure form of business that described his experience working as an advisor to small, really small, and one-person businesses. Working with hundreds of these businesses across a 20-year period from 1974 through 1994, Phillips determined that “clientry” is a form of commerce that works best in an environment of openness, community, passion for work, and fun.