1. Ethical isn't optional: the Liberatory Business paradigm

Ever felt trapped between making money and making a difference? In this premiere episode, I pull back the curtain after my 8-month sabbatical to share a radical alternative: liberatory business.

• What if community care was the foundation of your business, not a "nice to have"?
• What if your well being, the well-being of the greater collective, and your profitability are not in competition?

Let me be honest. This path isn't simple. It's messy, complex, and demands our humility and courage. There are no perfect answers; only the willingness to ask better questions, and to live into courageous experiments.

Join me as we navigate this little-charted territory together. Whether you're struggling with ethical pricing, authentic marketing, or simply wanting your work to be meaningful in a topsy-turvey world — this conversation is for you.

Transcript

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Hey friends, welcome to my brand new podcast, Libertory Business. I'm your host, Simone Sol. I am going to talk about what this podcast is. It's about liberatory business. I'm slowly coming out of a 7 or 8 month sabbatical. And I've been deep in a hole. Processing, disintegrating, learning, rethinking everything. And I've been rebuilding the foundation of what I do. And through this process I have come to realize that The foundation of what I want to do that I'm deeply committed to is liberatory business, business and liberation together. It's a lot. And thank you so much for being here and listening. So here's the hard part about talking about liberatory business is not sexy. If you think, oh, it's sexy to me, awesome. You're my people, but you know, even for people who are smart and have good hearts, they're like, I'm not sure what that means, or it just sounds daunting. the reason that it's daunting is because it is actually complex. Liberatory business is complex. It's not simple. Let me define the terms first. I believe that doing business as a liberatory practice, not as like a nice optional thing to do. Not something that you do to be performative, but like at it, at the core, at the foundation, your business is a liberatory practice and every single thing that you do in your business either serves liberation or it doesn't being committed to every single thing in your business serving liberation. That's liberatory business. What that means is everything you do in business is a form of community care. It means everyone that encounters your business. You leave them a little bit better off than you found them. Let me repeat that. Every single human being who encounters your business, whether they buy from you or not, you leave them a little bit better than you found them. You treat them the way you would want to be treated. You treat them with the level of honesty, respect, high regard, trust, transparency that you would want someone else to treat you with. And, that's like the most simple and powerful filter that we have to run all our decisions by if we're committed to liberation. If you wouldn't want something done in a certain way to you, you don't do it to other people. We have to treat people like they're human beings, not like they're assets or commodities or data points in your funnel or customer avatars or prospects that you got to go close. Prioritizing humans, care for humans, for humanity over short term profit, even long term profit. If it happens at the cost of caring for humans, then it's worth nothing, at least in the liberatory business framework. And that sounds so simple, and yet 99 percent of businesses out there do the exact opposite, because that's the culture of business that's been handed down to us by capitalism. Even well meaning people who have genuinely good hearts and want the world to be a better place find themselves doing things that are contrary to these principles. Which seemed to be so simple because we believe, Oh, that's just how it's done. Like, turning yourself into a one dimensional brand because you think it's gonna make you more palatable to people, and if you're more complex than a one dimensional brand, everyone will be confused, right? Baiting people into webinars without telling them there's gonna be a sales pitch in the end when the entire reason you're doing the webinar is so that you can make the sales pitch at the end. There's a lack of transparency. Making pricing decisions without regard for whom it excludes, excluding anything that's not directly related to your offer from your marketing. Like, Oh, okay. I'm not going to talk about my personal life. I'm not going to talk about politics. I'm not going to talk about social justice because it's irrelevant. It doesn't apply. It's not related. It might be controversial. I don't want to alienate people. This is all very standard. You know, conventional business wisdom. And this is not how we create a world that works for actual humans. And therefore it is not community care. Now, when I say that, what people often hear, and what I've sometimes believed in the past, is that you don't matter. That your well being doesn't matter, that means you can't make money or have nice things, and that to be in alignment with liberation, you have to martyr yourself. That, you know, if you're committed to liberatory business, it means you have to give everything away. That it's always a competition. It's either you or the community. Zero sum game. Pick one. Care about the world and go broke or say fuck the world and be a millionaire. These are your choices. That is what the world would have us believe, but that is not how it works. When I say liberatory business is business as community care, that doesn't mean, it isn't. Not also for your wellness, wealth, and prosperity. And by the way, when I say these words, I'm reclaiming them from white supremacy and capitalism. From these modern, western, industrialized, perversions of what these words originally were supposed to mean. Right? I not only champion wealth, prosperity, and thriving, I believe in the true definition of these words and have nothing to do with how much you've achieved and how much you can, you know, accumulate and hoard. Outside of these toxic frames, I want you to have genuine wellness and I want you to be genuinely well provided for physically, emotionally, spiritually. The world can't be well unless you are well. How can we have community care? If you can't put food on the table, how can we have community care without you! Because you're part of the community. I want you to have a life that feels good, feels soft. A life where you don't have to fight for basic necessities. A life where you can create art, flex your creativity, treat your friends to meals, invest in the causes and things that bring you joy, for some people. It's like being able to Donate invest back in their communities for some people it's like Being able to buy really great quality paints to make art with for some other people it might be being able to Buy spices and seafood because you love to cook gourmet meals. Whatever makes you feel like your life is a place that you can rest in and be nourished by I Want you to have an abundance of that you deserve an abundance of that and I want your business to support that for you Your flourishing and your prosperity and your business being a vehicle for liberation are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they must go together. We can't keep thinking we have to choose one or the other. So of course, the juicy question is how do we create this, right? How do we have, how do we flourish, have soft, you know, beautiful life where I feel well and nourished and also have a you know, dedication to unwavering dedication to laboratory business. That's where things get complex. And my invitation to you is to really embrace the complexity, embrace the nuance, embrace the uncertainty of no one quite knowing how to do it perfectly, what the clear cut answer is. Because guess what? I don't think. There is a perfect version of this. I don't think there are clear cut answers. And when we embrace the ambiguity and the uncertainty, that's where the real Work begins. I don't know a single person who feels like they have the perfect answers for everybody because we live in this entrenched inherently oppressive capitalist white supremacist world and trying to take care of ourselves in our communities at the same time and not one at the expense of the other is an ongoing creative iterative Process it's not oh, I figured it out. There it is. It's not that it's a constant dance of experimentation Messing up learning trying again messing up again You know having a little bit more more knowledge Trying again. So that hopefully every day we're doing a little bit better than we did yesterday. That's it. Let's get comfortable with uncertainty. Let's get comfortable with nuance. Let's focus on generative experiments. With liberation that allow us to learn a little bit more than we knew yesterday To do a little bit better than we did yesterday Not having the perfect answer that finally makes you a good person. It's not about that. And anyway, there's no such thing right and When I talk about nuance and uncertainty, here's what I mean every decision in business comes with trade offs, right? Oh, I want my thing to be accessible to more people, so I'm gonna lower my price. Awesome. Now you have more accessibility, but you have less income when to support your child. When your child gets sick. Like is that a real trade off? Fuck. Yeah, it is. That is a real trade off. Okay. So I need to charge higher prices to be able to support my life and my family's life. And so I have more stability'cause I'm charging more. And some people can't afford your work who could really use it. Is that a real trade off? Is that a real ethical conundrum? Yes! But the biggest problem is when we think there is such an option that is magically all reward and zero cost. And because we are looking for the perfect solution, that where there's no cost, there's no trade off, it's all good and there's no bad, as long as we are pursuing that, we are never going to be taking any action, we're never going to be learning, and we are always going to be stuck and frustrated and not moving anything in the world forward. Because they're on planet Earth, there is no such choice, that exists without a significant trade off. The best we can do is to make choices in this moment that align with what we know for now, what we are prioritizing for now, what our values are, and what our capacity is at this moment. Knowing that those things are always shifting. You might have little capacity now, you might have more capacity later. You might have less knowledge now than you will five years from now, right? And your values might, change over time. They might be refined over time. Your priorities, like if you are a mother with a two month old, that's a very different set of priorities than if you're retired, right? So what a liberatory business looks like for all these people and all these different situations is going to be different. That's what I mean when I say embrace the nuance, embrace the uncertainty, embrace the change. The truth that there is no perfect answer you can get where someone's going to give you an A and say you got it, you're doing it right, you get a gold star, that does not exist. I know that's a little bit unsatisfying and, you know, I like clear cut things, I like definite answers and I like being perfect because I'm human and I've been programmed by this world that wants me to believe all those things are real. So it is frustrating, I wish. There were more clear answers, but what's the alternative if we decide? Oh, it's too complicated. I don't want to do it right, the only alternative is to Go with the capitalist flow to do the standard thing and now you know That's not an option for me. And I know that it's not an option for you if you're listening to this, you know So serving capitalism Not an option martyring myself not an option So we got to figure out how to do this in a way that fits where we are fits what our gifts are right what we what we are in a position to be able to give away because of what our surplus is and everybody's surplus is different. So if your heart is in the same place as mine, we're going to walk this path together. This complex, messy, emotionally uncomfortable path. Experimenting, iterating, being courageous, keeping our hearts open to being humbled. And it is a challenge, but challenges are easier when we do them together. So I hope I can be someone who walks this path with you. I'm not an expert. There are actual experts in liberation in many sub fields, and I'm their student. If I'm an expert in anything, it's incredibly effective marketing that treats human beings with the respect and care they deserve. But, I've also thought deeply and rigorously about what it means to, pursue liberation through your business in a way that goes way beyond lip service. I've conducted a lot of interesting experiments along the way over, you know, a number of years running a seven figure business. And I know some things. I figured out some things that might shorten your learning curve. I made a lot of mistakes that I learned from, so maybe you don't have to make them in the same way that I did, right? I, conducted some interesting experiments where I have interesting data points that might help you along, your journey. So, that's what I want to offer. To be your friend, cojourneer, collaborator in turning your business Into a vehicle for community care, liberation for all living beings without sacrificing yourself in the process while also creating a life in which you can be deeply well at every level. physical, emotional, spiritual, all of it. So if that sounds like your kind of thing, you're in the right place. Thank you for being here. I'll talk to you next time.