When your business scales massively, you’re going to touch lives on many different levels. You impact employees, customers, entire communities. Depending on your business, your choices can impact their mood, the quality of their interactions, their outlook on their own future. You have the opportunity to shape the world, for better or for worse.

And these touchy-feely concerns shouldn’t just be side effects of your business. If you’re strategic about it, they will become the beating heart of your business. It’s not about saying, “I’m a good person, so my company will do good things.” It’s about asking: “What kind of positive impact can I have that will also support my core business?”

So, if you want to scale your impact, you have to be as innovative about this as you are about your business itself.

And struggling start-up founders may think that’s a nice idea for later on — something they can think about after they scale. But we’d argue that the best scale entrepreneurs think about their social impact from day one.

Howard Schultz has navigated these questions while tackling truly massive challenges of scale.

Today's exercise is going to help you approach the social impact of your business with a mindset of intentionality.

Get a sheet of paper, something to write with, and a ruler – if you like to keep your lines straight. Orient the paper landscape-style, with the long side horizontal. Now, across the page, draw three lines, one below the other. Make sure to leave a good amount of space in between. Draw little arrows on each end of each line, and a notch right in the middle. What you’ve just done is create three horizontal sliders.

Think of the left side of the sliders as pointing toward MAXIMUM SOCIAL IMPACT. Maybe write that on the left side of the page now. The right side of the sliders point toward MAXIMUM PROFITABILITY. Write that on the right side of the page now. Next, underneath each slider, write a product, service, feature, or initiative your company is considering taking on. You should have three in all.

Now for the tricky part. For each proposal, you are going to mark where on the slider you think it lands in terms of social impact versus profitability. Is this a feature that's going to help lots of people, but at an astronomical price? Is it something that will make tons of money but do no good in the world? Mark its place on the slider accordingly. No need to pull out market research or line-item budgets here. Just use your best back-of-the-napkin estimation.

Look at your results. Do the sliders show a lot of extreme positions? Is the needle way to the left or way to the right? If so, take a moment and think of one adjustment you could make to bring more balance to the equation.

This Action Item appears in Day 29 of The Mindset of Scale course. You can find it in the Masters of Scale Courses app, available for iOS & for Android.