Profit by Purpose — Why it’s good to revisit the base and check if it is still there?

Our Business Love Design team had the second Meetup, about Profit by Purpose. We wanted to see, what does our Meetup community think about purpose-driven business models, is it possible to base business decisions on whether or not they are in accordance with the company’s purpose (and is this at all possible in the Hungarian entrepreneurial environment?) And what is purpose in this context and why is it even important?

What is purpose?

Joey Reiman’s The Story of Purpose gives a methodology for building purpose-powered businesses. He states that mission defines what your company does. By formulating a vision you point out where it’s going. But the purpose is “solely” about why it exists. Purpose is the positive impact your company makes in the world, it is the reason for being. It is not CSR, it’s about how you operate in order to make money.

Once you have purpose and you know how to use it, (activate it internally and externally), it will pull the cultures and values with it, your products and services will be relevant by nature to your employees and customers, and they will become advocates of your brand.

How can we see purpose in action?

We contacted local entrepreneurs and organizations who we believed had started their operations from a purpose point-of-view (even if they were not necessarily aware of that).

6 companies agreed to be our guinea pigs and work with us; TrainedOn (building a collaboration planning tool), CókMók (supporting children in foster care), Kantaa by Cargomania (self organized bike messenger and delivery company), Dori Tomcsanyi (fashion designer), FöFi (children’s product concept by Nora Nardai), LogIQube (creating visuospatial games for kids).

We selected them to provide a wide range of business types, in order to see a diverse purpose and business means connections. Together with them, we analyzed their business models, dug deep in their product or service proposition to find the very core purpose they had when they started their businesses. We used the “story and purpose” driven business canvas by the Happy Startup School to map their mission, main motivation and working model.

Putting purpose on the test

These pre-filled canvases gave the basis of the Meetup activities. Our Meetup audience was not prepped about what would exactly happen so they could participate in the conversions as true “outsiders”. We divided the audience in small groups around the topics (each of our guinea pig companies) and then came the interesting part.

After giving a small introduction of the specific service or product they provide, each group was meticulously discussing the underlying purpose of the companies. (Bare in mind that we had a rough 1,5 hours to do that!)

The main point of the exercise was to see how the companies can or cannot connect to their customers (played by the Meetup audience) through their original business motives. Without going into details of each company’s pain or struggles, in general we can say that indeed it was a very useful exercise for them to see why are they doing the things they are doing.

Some of them understood they are currently developing a product for a different audience than they originally started, without necessarily adjusting the core values and messages for them (obviously they knew this already, still didn’t step out of the product development mode to work on this, too). Some of them realized that for their core purpose, the current product offer is not really relevant and could be changed (possibly to make more money and getting closer to the original purpose at the same time).

After the group work, the representant of each company summed up what they have learnt or realized by the help of the outsider audience. Altogether they came to the conclusions that:

• It is needed to intentionally (and periodically) revisit the founding base of the organisation or company to check if something has changed or is needed to change in order to stay true to original goal.
• It was good to revisit their founding base, it gave them new motivation to change some things.
• It is so easy to get lost in the details of the product / service development process, that without conscious attention the core values or motives can be shaded.
• Customers would only see the company’s purpose if they understand the product / service propositions crystal clear. (They must be aligned.)
• Purpose must be the guiding line in the actions, decisions.
• “Leave your ego at the doorstep” — listen to your customers (the outsiders), after all, it is them who your are operating for.

Curiosity at work

For us (as the organizers), the best part was to see real curiosity from both sides; the audience was really thrilled to see inside the businesses (very personal) motives and drivers, and the business participants were honestly open to hear their customers’ opinions and in some case their misunderstandings. As we have seen them, they enjoyed learning from each other. Also here too, we would like to say a BIG THANK YOU for the participating companies, startups, designers, organisations!

And regarding the arts of organizing a Meetup, we have to admit that this time we didn’t really think through the “audience experience”. This led to our Meetup attendees waiting for (at least) ten minutes in silence without anything happening around them. (We were in delay, but that would be quite normal when it is planned properly.) In any case, we didn’t think through our Meetup from the point-of-view of our audience, that made us a bit sloppy hosts. For next time, maybe we should dig deep in hospitality-driven design?