Building a Business with Purpose and Meaning

“Find a need, fill a need,” the man being interviewed said as he began to explain how to start and

grow a business that’ll make you wealthy. This approach will work, if becoming wealthy is your only objective. But what about purpose? What about meaning? There are greater definitions of success.

Let’s start at the individual level. I retired from the military with 20 years of active service, but only 19 years after graduating from West Point. A few years into civilian life, Army friends who were getting ready to transition began asking my advice about how to decide on a new career. I drew them two pictures. The first was a Venn diagram I called Higher Calling. The first circle was “Your real no-kidding talents — not what you like to do but what other people say you’re good at doing.” The second circle was “Your driving motivation — what really gets your motor running/who do you love.” The third circle was “The world’s compelling needs.” The intersection of these three circles I called Your Higher Calling. If you get a job outside of your higher calling, success will be difficult, and whatever level of success you do achieve will still feel empty. Money itself is not evil, and making money is not wrong. But income is sweeter when how you are earning it is aligned with your higher calling.

Now, apply your higher calling to starting a business. In his book, Good to Great (2001), Jim Collins wrote that the businesses that went from being merely good to being great each had developed a “Hedgehog Concept” which was the nexus of what they could be best in the world at doing, what they were passionate about, and what drove their economic engine. That Passion circle combines the second and third circles from the founder’s higher calling. To filling in the passion circle, answer this question: Who do you love (who do you passionately want to serve) and what are their compelling needs?

Now find a way to fill their compelling need that maps most closely to what you can be best at doing (you don’t have to be best in the world just best in your town to start with). Do it in a way that is difficult for other businesses to copy and different in a way that matters to your target market (the people you want to serve). Now design a repeatable process for delivering the goods or services that meet their need profitably and at a price point they can afford.

The world would have you simply find a need and fill a need in order to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. But you can build a business that goes beyond what the world expects. You can build a business that has purpose and meaning.