Goodness: Smoll – Interfanatic Customer Spotlight
“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
– His Holiness, Dalai Lama XIV
As we sit, America is in tumult, reaping exactly what she sowed. It’s a lot to take in.
So let’s take a moment to appreciate goodness. There is innate goodness in all people. Some people choose to celebrate that, while some people choose to focus on our differences.
The Dalai Lama, despite his life’s journey, chooses to give us a positive nugget in this week’s quote. The roots of goodness come in the appreciation of goodness. Apparently, the corollary is also true; when goodness is lost, we have to deal with the roots of discontent, which lie in appreciation of discontent.
Right now, we have more people interested in us hearing that we can’t tell them what to do than we have people interested in speaking for the greater good. When you assert your liberty over someone else’s, the result is oppression of the other. That’s not real liberty.
Appreciating the good of others begins the growth of all goodness. And that’s what Smoll does.
Smoll appreciates the goodness of great small businesses around our country. It celebrates that goodness. It makes itself a root for goodness and appreciation for good small business.
Goodness: An Interfanatic Quality
At the end of the day, I choose to take or reject a client based on their goodness. I have a tough client right now. Extremely difficult to communicate with. But I knew that going in, and I decided to take on the project because I believe him to be a good person. I appreciate the goodness and in this case I’ll work with that despite otherwise intense difficulties.
That’s not the case with Smoll – they’re great to work with! And I think much of that comes from the innate goodness they work toward.
But, we know what it’s like to work with difficult clients and we know what it’s like to work with great ones. We always prioritize being great to work with because that’s how good things happen.
Smoll, Celebrating the Good of Local, Small Businesses
Where do you go when you need something? You go where you know. You go where you trust. Often, what you know, what you trust is a big chain. It’s the McDonald’s model. When I’m in Shanghai, I know with certainty that a McDonald’s is not the best hamburger I can get. Shanghai is filled with excellent restaurants, with even some that have hamburgers, and surely a couple that make great hamburgers. But if I don’t feel like seeking out that restaurant, when I want a burger quick and I see McDonald’s on the corner, that’s where I go. (Not me literally; I’m the type to seek out the burger if that’s what I want. But…) You know what to expect. Probably a reasonably inexpensive Big Mac and you have a pretty good idea of what it will taste like.
Then, there’s Yelp. Yelp is extortion. Often, I see small business beholden to Yelp for their shady business practices. When people go to Yelp, it’s to air grievances much more often than it is to share praise. And being beholden to Yelp is expensive. Unless you have an excellent system and process in place to ensure a good working relationship with your customers, you’re likely to get bad reviews that soil the good ones.
So that’s why there’s Smoll. It’s designed around celebrating and helping to promote the great small businesses in your community. It features special businesses from every community around the United States so that you can find businesses you’ll want to work with that you may not know about. Maybe they don’t do Yelp and maybe you haven’t heard of them. But there’s a great, hardworking team at that local small business you would really enjoy working with.
And that’s why we work with Smoll. That’s exactly what we want and what we want to do: celebrate the goodness in our local communities and small businesses.
Interfanatic: Finding and Celebrating Goodness
Let’s take a moment to find the goodness in each other – the common ground we can agree upon. We should not focus on our differences. Let’s appreciate the goodness in each of our perspectives.
This week’s image:
Interfanatic‘s founder, Ryan Delane, takes or creates every image you see in our social feed.
The purity of sunflowers – that’s some righteous goodness. My wifey bought these for our table and I couldn’t help but revel in their beauty and splash of color. It’s nice to have beautiful things around to remind you of goodness.
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