hello I’m Gary Shotton and today we’re going to talk about business ethics and while that’s a subject that we can dig into for quite a while from a lot of different directions but I’m going to dig in it from my personal experience and I’m not going to present myself as some kind of an angel that never did anything wrong but I will tell you that i have endeavored all of my business career to operate with ethics and good a definition i read is to know the difference between right and wrong and to know which of those you’re following and that’s a good definition i mean a lot of people know what’s right and wrong but they somehow immune themselves to thinking that it’s acceptable to do something that’s wrong and that and that won’t work again I won’t describe too many things but i’ll just tell you that if you own a business or in your higher upper-level management you will have plenty of opportunity to decide what’s ethical and what’s not ethical there’s all the way from when i was back and i had a trucking company i had a moving and storage business i remember it so clearly because paying my bills were just a struggle it was so difficult I mean not month after month but year after year it seems that i had more bills than i had money to pay those bills and it was always just nip and tuck it was just always just and that’s where to be honest I hated every bit of it but I’m glad I went through it because I had to learn how to juggle things just a little bit be honest with people not cheat someone collect all the money that was due me understand my accounting I mean there’s a ton of reasons that I went through that and I’m glad I went through it but I wouldn’t want to go through it again I remember Joe oh man Joe comes in one night is about seven thirty at night I was working late I had this whole stack of bills and they need to figure out how is going to pay them and who pay first and Joe walks in with an eight hundred and fifty dollar check from moving this lady that that he had just finished the job we had a methodology where the checks came in and he normally would put the check into a slot that would go into our safe but since I was working in the office he wanted to talk a little bit and tell me about the day and he brought the check in to me and I already knew about this job because I had been out courting this job and this person it was an older lady had pre paid the full amount that doesn’t happen very often and I knew that we had already been paid the full amount and here’s an eight hundred and fifty dollars check in addition double pay Wow for just a little bit i’m thinking Oh could this be God I’m telling you I just need something like this almost not tempted big time but almost work by way into justifying saying wow maybe she’d never know it no she even if she never didn’t know it I would know it and I can’t live with that because I want to operate a epical company will have a machine shop now we have these parts in the back and we have a random testing of the dimensions on one part like these parts that you’re looking at right here there could be there two parts welded together and and there could be a combined some maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of forty or fifty dimensions you know twenty dimensions on one part and twenty dimension on the other that are considered critical dimensions and there’s no way any one person is going to measure all those every time we randomly select a certain amount based on our procedure to make sure that if we maintain the same process and we find out that all the dimensions were good on this part then we have to assume and truthfully is the rest of those parts are all good parts they’re all made within dimensions but there would be a temptation to falsify something because it’s out just a little bit it’s outside its it’s acceptable tolerance and knowingly put in or mix then it could be done mix in a random amount of parts that are not correct because we know what our customer does they don’t measure every single part they can’t and the chances of them finding out or swim but that’s not ethical we can’t operate like that that’s not something we would do and our customers know that they know that they’re dealing with an ethical company could we make a mistake yes but it’s not an intentional defrauding them or making them wonder whether or not we’re slipping bad parts into them I work at my bank I have a long relationship 30 year relationship with the same bankers now they’ve changed banks they changed names on the bank a couple of times but I’ve been with the same people more than 30 years they trust me it was only about seven or eight years into the banking life you know it would be 23 years ago I got pretty good with my accounting and I started seeing that it wouldn’t be hard to change a few numbers to make things look better but no I can’t do that because I would know it whether they ever found out or not and it’s as simple as finding our income tax you know if I follow my income tax and I have equipment here i have like equipment some of them cost like a half a million dollars you know who’s going to really know if i called something that i use for my personal use my personal benefit i called it a part of the company benefit and so i would buy a let’s say making it up but by a really nice boat a couple hundred thousand dollar boat and i would call it a piece of equipment and I could name it that piece of equipment put it on the books and act like it was something functioning with this company I wouldn’t do it but I could and chances of somebody finding that or figuring that out are pretty slim you know we’ve gone through here a few years ago there was a name and it’s very public named Bernie Madoff wow what a mistake I’ve recorded the documentary on my DVRs because I like to watch things like that and I just saw the path they did a path of how deception grew and it grew and you had to tell a bigger lie to cover up for the last line you had to cover up that lie with another lie I had never known it but back before my time in the 40s we always called it a Ponzi scheme well that was named after mr. Ponzi Ponzi did the same thing he his name went into history because of him being the person that defrauded in this situation back to Bernie Madoff one of the two sons actually committed suicide the wife then changed her name so that the grandson will never ever have to bear that name that’s a big price to pay I don’t want to pay that price I’m not anywhere in those realms but I’m telling you maintaining business ethics comes from you maintaining personal ethics I was just a young man going to bible school went through a checkout line at the at the mega store and the lady gave me a five-dollar bill incorrectly I don’t know why it was it was it was five dollars and I walk two steps away i’m a person that counts my change and I turned around and said man you gave me too much change owe nobody nothing went that in history for that nobody knows that with me I’m not bragging on me but I would have known it I would have known that’s a path of unethical personal procedures and those will bleed into your company I encourage you to watch the ethics that you maintain in your company I encourage you to draw the line hard and fast little bitty things like I would never tell my receptionist that somebody in the office to just tell them I’m not in the office I’m standing right in the office how would I tell my receptions to lie on that phone call now I will tell you I’ve been known to say give me five seconds here I’m running out because I will not be in the office when you tell them I’m not in the office because I’ve got to go to this other appointment and that will be the truth once I leave the office so give me five seconds you understand it’s a funny thing to think about but ethics is a part of you and if you can’t maintain the ethics personally you’re not going to be able to maintain the ethics in your business with your wife my wife listens to all of my voicemails she has access to all of my emails she knows what and why and how I am where I’m at at all times I’m not worried about her she’s not worried about me but its ethics I want her to trust me I hope these help I hope this helps you not only in business but in your personal life share these if you would we do appreciate your help in that regard thank you