Building Your Business from a Purpose Rather than a Career
A career is what we do to make money and progress in life. Purpose is what puts passion and a driving force behind that career. Without purpose, there is no way to move forward or expand a career, let alone a business. Without a purpose, a person cannot healthily sustain a career.
What is your business’ purpose?
Is it framed around achieving revenue? Great customer service? Being a great place to work? Being the leader in the industry? Or is it based on something greater?
The power of purpose
Focusing your business and doing what it is designed to do is your ultimate goal — as long as it is something the community needs and is willing to pay for! Otherwise, we find ourselves trying to give to the community something it can’t receive. (Think about trying to sell sand in the desert or hot chocolate in the middle of a hot and humid Minnesota summer.) No demand, no customers.
The idea is NOT to change what you love to do — but to align it to a need in the community. By aligning your personal and business goals to the needs of the community, you create something bigger than yourself — a purpose. This purpose allows both you and the community to grow and prosper.
While working with SUCCESS Computer Consulting, we saw them evolve by aligning their business to the needs of the community. SUCCESS Computer Consulting aims at making technology easier for companies in order for the companies to grow. Through an assessment, they figured out what their clients needed in terms of technology. By assessing the needs of the community, SUCCESS was able to buy technology in bulk, reducing the amount of money spent and offer quick service to computers. They also had the opportunity to work with nonprofit organizations to better the community. Ultimately, by lining up their goals with the needs of the community, they grew as a business and helped the community evolve as well.
Aligning your business with a purpose
Whether you are in business for yourself or working in a company — examining your business goals and aligning them with the needs of the community is the fastest path to professional fulfillment and financial growth.
A few questions to ask yourself:
- What would you do for FREE all day long, and truly enjoy, without getting tired?
- What have you been trained to do or have experience doing?
- What needs within the community can you solve with your skills/services?
By answering these three questions, you will begin to bring clarity around your purpose, and you can center your business around a purpose rather than a career.
Passion + education and experience + need in the community + financial compensation = a purpose-based business
The benefits of a purpose-based business
Your business becomes like a lake.
The outer situation of your business, whatever happens there, is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes stormy, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, you are undisturbed. Your business, your brand and you are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still and calm. Because you are working for something bigger than yourself and your company alone, you can remain calm in the roughest situations, just knowing that you are doing something good.
You always need to evolve and grow towards your purpose. If you don’t, you become unhealthy, physically, mentally and spiritually. To be healthy as a person and as a company, you need to perpetually evolve and grow towards your purpose, making your community a better place for all. To awaken your purpose (and also your unique self) means to awaken to the impulse to evolve, which is the creativity surging in you at this very moment; and reach toward the good, the true and the being part of something greater than yourself.