Business Development can mean anything. Here’s how we made it stand for something.

Having worked for several Fortune 100 companies throughout my career, I came to believe the majority didn’t care about their employees, their customers or the world around them.

Instead they focused on revenue, stock price and making sure both go up and to the right. Is that wrong? After all, a company, at its core, isn’t responsible for making the world a better place.

Is it?

Increasingly, I’m finding that businesses with an admirable set of core values are the ones I support with my dollars. That’s because customer expectation is evolving.

As consumers, our purchasing habits are shifting in favor of the companies with values matching our own. When a brand stands up for something we believe in, we establish a connection far beyond utility.

WeTransfer is the first company I’ve worked for that truly believes it can use its platform to change the world for the better. By building a useful product, creating a community and treating that community with respect, WeTransfer has built trust with its users. And we take that trust seriously.

Our deep-rooted values not only help drive our brand and business strategy, but our revenue too. In fact, in Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras cite that “visionary” companies — those guided by a purpose beyond making money — return up to six times more to shareholders than their explicitly profit-driven rivals.

I’ve always looked up to brands like Patagonia, who backs up its good intentions with real actions. For example, any revenue the company receives by licensing IP is donated to charity. That’s a running total of $89 million spread over 954 environmental groups to date (you can find out more here). Patagonia creates fantastic products without cutting corners, consistently operating in the interest of customers, employees and global growth without a sole focus on revenue and profits — it seems to be working.

I realized embracing WeTransfer’s values myself could guide my work in business development and my prospecting process completely changed.

I asked myself: Can we find companies that practice profit with a purpose, are mission-led and focus on their customers with an obsessive passion? And, if we find them, can we partner with them in a way that benefits both our respective communities?

Based on this, WeTransfer has developed a framework that makes the values of a specific company a priority throughout the lead generation process. We now screen a company’s mission and vision before even picking up the phone — keeping our own values at the forefront of our minds at every point in the process.

This principle has brought us closer to the companies we admire. Companies like Mozilla, whose pursuit of a safe and open internet closely aligns with our own. In fact, take a look at this PSA we made about Net Neutrality that Mozilla organically promoted on our behalf.

We’ve also partnered with Slack, who works to “make work simpler, more pleasant and more productive”. As a company that aims to enable the effortless transfer of ideas, it’s safe to say we’re closely aligned. That’s why we’ve launched an integration that makes sharing files in and out of Slack even easier.

It’s a partnership we’re truly proud of and we can’t wait to see what comes next.

While I never had a class on values in business school, it’s long been assumed that a company’s values should be used as a strategic driver. I say we take this once step further and extend those values to the people we do business with too.