Shel Horowitz, Apex Award winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge campaign, shares 7 reasons why ethics will help your business succeed and 5 easy steps you can take towards building a more ethical business.

7. You're much more likely to build a lasting business, and build it more easily

6. When your customers trust you, they come back again and again

5. It's much easier to build joint-venture relationships that can exponentially grow your business

4. When your customers fall in love with the way you do business, they start recruiting other people to do business with you--they actually become your unpaid sales force

3. Your business will be worth far more when it's time to sell it

2. If you tell only the truth, you don't worry about being caught in an embarrassing and profit-killing lie

And the number one reason...

You never have to worry about seeing your picture on the front page, in handcuffs

Action Steps:

1. Measure the impact of any action on all stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, neighbors

2. Always tell the truth

3. Sell only products that you can fully stand behind

4. Buy a copy of the award-winning book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, which tells you in 160 pages exactly how to translate your high ethical standards into bottom-line dollars. This book has been endorsed by some of the top names in marketing, including Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup series, won an Apex Award, and has been re-published in India and Mexico. http://www.principledprofit.com

5. Show your commitment to ethics by signing the Business Ethics Pledge, with signers in 30 countries, and take advantage of the resources available to you as a signer (signing also earns you a discount on the book, as a way of saying :"thank you"). http://www.business-ethics-pledge.org

Author's Bio: 

Green marketing consultant and copywriter's award-winning latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson). Founder of the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers, Shel writes the Green and Profitable monthly column, http://greenandprofitable.com/.