‘Find your purpose’, business waffle or genuine business benefit?
‘Find your purpose’. Easier said than done. It’s hard enough from a personal perspective never mind trying to identify the collective purpose for a business. It’s not something you can invent — it’s something you know, you uncover through a process, or find over time. It’s the thread that connects the personal motivations of the business owners.
Despite one hundred and one things on the list of a startup business, defining the purpose is worthy of some effort and time. It’s something that I’m glad we prioritised early on when we set up 572. It’s become a statement of how we want to run and conduct our business. So I thought I’d write a little about how we came to our purpose, why it’s a benefit, and how we hope it will shape the business moving forward.
A background on purpose
Having read the policies and experiences of great companies like Buffer, Hiut Denim, Patagonia, TOMS, 37 signals and Apple our beginnings feel amazingly amateur, but you have to start somewhere… In getting to our purpose, ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek was a big help too.
These businesses demonstrate a tangible benefit to communicating and living to their purpose. They’ve defined their purpose, found their niche and created a competitive advantage as a result. Not only that, but it helps everyone working within the business feel good about what they are contributing towards.
We settled on ‘Forging Better Futures’. This didn’t just materialise and took some time working in the new business to understand what we were all there for, and what our common theme was.
572 was born out of extremely unfortunate circumstances. We saw the best and worst of companies and ‘business’ over a short space of time.
Forging better futures resonates with why we set up 572. It’s a statement of how we intend to do business and be in business. For us ‘better’ isn’t just profit or sales, it’s the social impact, it’s staff welfare and development, it’s the quality of work we deliver. I think it’s also a reflection of what our customers are looking for when they engage a marketing or digital product agency.
It’s driven us to work on processes and policies to uncover, and most importantly deliver a strategy to create the future we, our staff and clients aspire to.
Purpose in action…
There are countless organisations with ‘ethics policies’ and ‘CSR strategies’ who live a very different corporate agenda. It’s certainly muddied the waters and established a skepticism around CSR, purpose and values. Having a document with a carefully crafted vision typed out, however well-intentioned, is not the answer. It’s living that purpose that counts.
We’ve started to implement policies like our remote working policy and basing performance on output rather than time. Giving staff the flexibility to work around life is a big part of what better futures means to us as a team. But it’s amazing how institutionalised we can all be at times, so getting people to live this is the next step. I remembered 37 Signals changing their unlimited holiday policy to a mandatory number of holidays because their staff just weren’t taking time off. Sometimes the best policy on paper isn’t the best in practice. So for us, we’re trying to make sure when the job’s done, staff go home. When they have important things happening outside of work, they can prioritise them.
Another part of ‘better’ for us is to develop a culture of continual learning and engagement within 572. We are working hard on creating space to explore new solutions and technologies within our business. Through internal projects and client concept work, we all have space to continually learn through doing. This helps us get a deeper understanding of specific technologies and processes and allows us to share this with our clients.
Having said all this, it hasn’t been easy, and it’s certainly still a work in progress but a good purpose needs to be challenging. We wanted to set our purpose to serve as a moral compass, to help individuals throughout our business act autonomously but in alignment with the company expectations. ‘Forging Better Futures’ gives us all a point of reference to evaluate decisions against.
How will this shape our future?
Although we’ve defined our purpose, living it and filling in the detail will be an iterative process. Like all founders and business owners, we have to find a way of balancing what we’d like with commercial reality — and that can be a challenge.
There’s plenty to be done. We’ve not done enough yet to define and communicate what this purpose means for each and every one of us within the team, which sounds strange as there’s only seven of us.
It’s still easy to be blinded by issues that shout loudest, like cash flow. It’s easy to think we’ll address purpose and culture once we are comfortable, once we have reserves in the bank. But we’ve already found that just doesn’t work. Taking on jobs just to bring in cash can hurt other areas of the business. Equally, committing to policies we don’t have the finances for puts pressure that can lead to bad decisions.
It’s a balance, but our purpose gives us a lens to sense check the decisions we are making. It gives us a focus to evaluate if the business feels right at any particular time. It’s exciting as it really is never ending and if we maintain focus on it, we will be continually improving our business for as long as we’re in business — that’s pretty cool to think. We’ve already started with a good set of ethics and shared values and it’s only going to get better from here.
This blog will document our search for innovative and efficient solutions to client problems, our internal projects and the pursuit of our own better future. We want these experiments to start a conversation so feel free to chip in with your thoughts and comments.
