Think of all the good your shop does for your community:

• You collect items which, while unsalable in your business, are useful and needed in various charities around town. Quite possibly you even donate your time, sweat, and gas money delivering these items around town.
• Perhaps you maintain consignment accounts whose proceeds go directly, as cash (always needed!) , to charitable causes. Perhaps you actively seek out non-profits to partner with in this way.
• You donate door prizes and silent auction items and things for goodie bags to charitable fundraisers. Maybe you take out ads in the Band Boosters program or give the local theater group some costumes and props.
• Unsold items are carefully sorted by you for donation where they will do the most good.
• You donate space and your traffic to the Pep Squad booth selling Christmas wrap, the Girl Scouts with their cookies, the animal shelter with their hug-a-pup event.
• Your provide a sales outlet for handmade crafts from the assisted-living crafts programs or a venue for the community college’s interior design classes. Maybe you do presentations on entrepreneurship at a local school or give a “dress for success” show at the women’s resource center.
• You donate a portion of sales proceeds from various events (bag sales? dollar racks?) to local non-profits.
• You provide X jobs for the community and plow back $Y into your community…a substantial figure, when you count consignor/seller income from selling through you, salaries, rents, local business supply purchases, on and on…)

Do you get full value from the good you do in your community?

Do you publicize your good deeds and the helping hands you extend to a broad spectrum of local assistance?

It’s one thing to donate clothes to a church’s free clothing pantry or to give $1 per bag sold at your bag sale to the emergency shelter. It’s another thing to let your marketplace know that you are fully vested in, and active with, people helping people right here at home. That, when they patronize your business, they are taking part in a network of loving concern that reaches not only their lives, but their neighbors’ as well.

Think of it this way: when you let people know that you’re doing good, you’re inspiring them to do the same.

Toot your horn. Modesty only becomes those who sit back and don’t do anything to interweave their lives with others’.

Be bold in declaring that when folks do business with you, it benefits not just them, but also your community. Step up and say

“We step up and we thank YOU for doing the same by dealing with us.”