Haves
Delta pulled the red carpet. What are you doing with yours?
Delta just stripped Congress of its perks.
Airport escorts. Expedited TSA clearance. Priority customer service. Gone.
CEO Ed Bastian made it simple: while TSA agents work without paychecks, members of Congress wait in the same line as everyone else. He called it inexcusable that frontline workers were being used as political chips. Then he acted on it.
I’m all for it.
But it got me thinking about something bigger than Delta’s fight with Washington. It got me thinking about the businesses we’re building and the cultures we’re creating inside them.
Who gets the perks? And what does that say about who you are as a leader?
I had a conversation with a business owner this past week who is in the thick of scaling. Smart, driven, doing the work. We got into benefits, and I watched something familiar happen. They started adding up the fees, the administrative complexity, the cost per employee. Health coverage. PTO policy. Team events. And piece by piece, they were talking themselves out of it.
I get it. The numbers are real. The complexity is real.
But here’s what I kept coming back to: the benefits you offer your team are not a line item. They’re a declaration. They tell every person who works for you exactly where they stand.
Are you building a business of haves and have-nots? Or, are you building something that carries people with you?
I’ve been following Adam Weisner on TikTok. He’s the President and CEO of Sherman Portfolios, author of The King’s Business, and he teaches seven laws for running a business rooted in biblical wisdom. The first law is excellent.
Purpose beyond profit.
Why does your business exist beyond just making money?
He draws it from Luke 12:15.
“Take care and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
If your only reason to exist is revenue, he says, you won’t inspire yourself and you won’t inspire anyone around you.
I’ve built and exited a seven-figure business. I know what it looks like to scale something real. And I can tell you: the businesses that last, the teams that stay, the cultures people actually want to be part of, they were never built on profit alone.
They were built on purpose. And purpose shows up in how you treat people when it costs you something.
Delta’s decision cost them something. They gave up a relationship with 535 members of Congress to stand with the people working the security lanes for free. That is purpose beyond profit in action.
Weisner has another law he calls the Hot Dog Stand Effect. The idea is simple: lead in a way that if you went and started a hot dog stand tomorrow, people would follow you. Not because of the title. Not because of what you dangled in front of them. Because of who you are and how you led.
That’s the standard. Not what you gave people when things were good. What you did for them when it was hard.
I live in Palm Beach County. You want to see haves and have-nots in the same zip code? Drive along the water. Ocean villas starting at forty million dollars and up. Then go about two miles inland. You’ll come across neighborhoods where the homes are falling apart. Same county. Same roads. Same sky.
The USA is still the only place in the world where one generation can radically change what the next one inherits. I believe that. I’ve lived it. But you have to be numb not to see what’s right in front of you.
The gap doesn’t close because we ignore it. It closes because people with resources decide to lead with something other than self-interest.
That starts inside your own business. And, it begins with identifying what is your purpose… beyond profit.
So here’s the question I want to leave you with.
If you stripped away the titles, if you pulled back the curtain on how decisions get made inside your company, who gets what, who has access and who doesn’t, what would your team see?
Would they see a leader who built a business of haves and have-nots?
Or would they see someone building something worth belonging to?
Kindness is not soft. Compassion is not weakness. Championing the people around you is not a distraction from building a great business. It is the business.
The numbers matter. They always matter. But the numbers are downstream of the culture. Get the culture right and the numbers follow.
Build something people want to stand in line for. Not because they have to. Because they believe in what you’re building.
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