Do Good While Doing Well
Invest for Change, Reap Financial Rewards, and Increase Your Happiness
Modeling investing in a way that is both personally and socially beneficial, Do Good While Doing Well is a persuasive business guide.
Marcia Dawood’s savvy investor’s guide Do Good While Doing Well is about profiting in tandem with making a lasting impact on one’s community and society at large.
Covering the early stages of investing in a thorough manner, this is a book that is concerned with leveraging one’s financial resources to effect change while also reaping gains. Its systematic guidance regarding “angel” investing begins by showing how startups raise capital, explaining key terms for clarity and issuing cautions about financial risk, how much is safe to invest, and how to diversify one’s investments. It uses keen examples to show why banks do not provide traditional financing to startups; how other investors evaluated the potential of companies before deciding whether to invest, asking questions such as “Will people use the product?” and “Does the company make money?”; and even how activities like golfing can expand one’s networks by fostering relationships. It notes that “a well-rounded internal and external team” is essential too.
In the process of doing such work, the book covers complicated subjects like revenue-based finance and IRA fund investing sans tax penalties with clarity—if sometimes in a too-basic manner, as where it includes Investopedia definitions. Further, some of the book’s examples are either too hypothetical or include extraneous details that distract from their central points. But its prose is conversational and convincing, and its personable examples and sparing use of humor (annual reports are said to be so stuffed with legal information that “you will be asleep in no time”) humanize the rarefied topic well.
While some of the book’s points are too obvious, as where it emphasizes that “angel” investors still prioritize financial gain above all (“There are many start-ups working on ways to improve our planet and health care, and they aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts”), its deeper analyses are persuasive. For example, it examines biases in such investment related to women and entrepreneurs of color and suggests solutions to systemic issues, with examples as of the Rising Tide Pilot Fund through which ninety-nine women partnered to create a $1 million fund as a step toward gender parity.
Concluding with a roundup of its most salient lessons, the insightful investor’s guide Do Good While Doing Well suggests using one’s funds not only to profit but to improve the world.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
