Finding yourself regularly correcting decisions your team has made? Are you still the person everyone comes to when they are unsure whether to pursue an opportunity, or finding it harder to explain to new people how we do things around here? These may look like delegation, strategy or culture problems, but they may also point towards something more fundamental: Does everyone understand why this organisation exists and what that means for the decisions they make?
This is where purpose earns its keep, not as an inspirational statement on the wall, but as a practical tool for running the business.
Purpose only becomes airy-fairy when it is disconnected from the decisions of the business.
Profit matters. But is it the purpose?
Every sustainable business must make money because, without profit, there is eventually no business.
Profit is essential. But something can be essential without being the reason something exists.
If profit becomes the primary purpose, almost every decision can be reduced to: Will this make us more money? A genuine organisational purpose introduces another question: Does this move us closer to the reason we exist?
Purpose gives the business direction and profit provides the means to pursue it. Simon Sinek popularised this through the language of Start With Why: people connect not only with what an organisation does, but with why it does it. The challenge is that the why has to do more than sound inspiring; it needs to become useful.
This isn’t just for big corporations
Purpose, mission and vision can sound like big-company language, but purpose may become even more important in an entrepreneurial business as it grows.
When there are three people in the company, the founder instinctively knows which customers fit, what good work looks like, which opportunities feel right and what they are prepared to compromise on; much of the organisation’s purpose lives inside the founder.
Then three people become ten, and ten become thirty. Other people start hiring, quoting, managing customers and making decisions on behalf of the company, as the founder can no longer be in every room.
Purpose is how a founder begins to scale their original intent without having to personally make every decision.
Purpose should help you say no
Strategy is often associated with deciding what we are going to do, but some of the most important strategic decisions concern what we will not do.
A lucrative customer may take the business into a market you never intended to enter, while a new opportunity may promise rapid growth but change the experience your customers value. Neither is obviously a bad opportunity, which is precisely why the decision is difficult.
What attractive opportunities are we prepared to decline because they take us somewhere we don’t want to go?
If your purpose cannot help you say no, it probably isn’t doing much strategic work.
Nikos Mourkogiannis makes a similar argument in Purpose, placing purpose before strategy because it provides a basis from which strategic choices can be made. It helps us ask not only Can we do this? or Can we make money doing this? but also: Should we?
So what should purpose actually do?
If purpose is useful, it should find its way into ordinary business decisions:
· It should inform strategy and investment: which markets, products and opportunities fit what we exist to do, and where should scarce money, time and attention go?
· It should inform recruitment and culture: who is likely to connect with what the organisation stands for, and what behaviours should people expect from one another?
· It should inform customer and innovation decisions: who are we best equipped to serve, what might we decline, and are we improving how we fulfil our purpose or merely chasing the next idea?
· It should inform reinvention: as markets, technology and customer expectations change, purpose helps distinguish between what should remain constant and what is allowed to change.
Purpose helps leaders make trade-offs
Running a business means balancing competing interests: employees want opportunity and fair treatment, customers want value, owners expect a return, suppliers want sustainable relationships and the business needs enough surplus to invest in its future. Purpose does not remove these tensions, but it gives leadership a philosophy for balancing competing interests.
That thinking sits behind Firms of Endearment, which examined businesses seeking to create value for shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers and their broader communities. This does not mean abandoning profitability; profit becomes one important measure of organisational health rather than the organisation’s entire reason for existence.
Research by Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim, based on roughly 500,000 employee responses, found something especially relevant: simply having a strong sense of purpose was not enough to predict better financial performance; stronger results appeared where employees experienced purpose and understood clearly how the organisation intended to achieve it.
It may also matter more to your people than you realise
Deloitte’s 2025 global research found that 89% of Gen Z and 92% of Millennials considered purpose important to job satisfaction and wellbeing, while around 44% and 45% respectively said they had left a role they felt lacked purpose.
That does not mean younger employees no longer care about salaries or financial security; perhaps loyalty is becoming more conditional, with more people asking whether they believe in what the organisation is trying to achieve and whether their work contributes to something worthwhile.
From a statement to an operating system
Perhaps the question is not “Does our company have a purpose statement?” but rather: “Where does our purpose actually show up?”
Does it influence the opportunities you pursue and decline, the people you employ, where you invest, what you measure, what you refuse to compromise and how you respond when the world around the business changes?
If it influences none of these things, perhaps it really is just another poster on the wall. If it provides a reference point for decisions, priorities and trade-offs, it becomes part of the operating system of the business and, for an entrepreneur trying to grow beyond their own constant involvement, that is anything but airy-fairy.
Perhaps start here
Defining purpose does not necessarily begin with locking the leadership team in a room until somebody produces the perfect sentence. Start instead with two questions:
What does this business exist to contribute beyond making money?
If we genuinely believed that, what decisions would it change?
If you would prefer an independent facilitator to guide you through the process and its implementation, feel free to reach out.
References
Deloitte (2025). Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
Gartenberg, C., Prat, A. & Serafeim, G. (2019). Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance. Organization Science.
Mourkogiannis, N. Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies.
Sinek, S. Start With Why.
Sisodia, R., Wolfe, D. & Sheth, J. Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose.