You must uncover the “why” that drives you and your team. A best-in-class business has a purpose-driven foundation—a corporate culture driven to build a profitable organization with a positive impact on the world. It sets a clear vision of why your company matters. This motivates employees to do their best regardless of the circumstances. It drives them to realize the company’s vision because of the intrinsic value of contributing to something bigger than themselves. However, your organization's purpose is even more essential in turbulent times because it pushes your team to overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacles they face to achieve their goals. In other words, purpose gets people up after they get knocked down because they have something important to fight for.

A strong operational framework must be built on this Purpose First foundation by setting ambitious goals, designing strategies to reach them, and continuously measuring performance. These processes are essential for successfully executing a go-to-market plan. They also allow effective decision-making to accelerate or eliminate strategies based on measurable results.

Incorporate Purpose Into Your Company’s DNA

Effective team building is one of the most essential leadership skills. It’s also one of the greatest challenges. Defined broadly, team building is creating and nurturing a corporate culture where employees can unite to achieve common goals. It involves setting high expectations and respecting each other’s strengths and weaknesses, while striving toward collective success for unified goals.

The foundation of any successful team begins with your purpose—it should be built into the company’s DNA from day one. Without it, your team won’t have the clear understanding of why they are doing what they are doing or where their efforts fit into the larger mission. To codify your company’s purpose for recruiting and attracting top talent, you must clearly define your company’s purpose and core values (aka Purpose Pillars)—the foundational beliefs that define who you are as an organization and guide future decisions.

When recruiting, it's critical to confirm candidates' alignment with your organization's purpose and their qualifications for their specific roles to build the right team for success. Qualifications should include technical and functional skills and soft skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, and leadership ability—all essential to building a world-class organization.

Optimize Company Performance

Orienting the team around the company's purpose and Purpose Pillars is critical when setting goals. All decision-making should align with these elements to stay true to your Purpose First culture. Next, establish your strategic plan with the core organizational goals and performance expectations to ensure everyone understands the requirements for collective success. This includes breaking large initiatives into smaller projects and assigning them to specific teams and individuals to complete within the established timeframe. Finally, incorporate key performance indicators (KPIs), or objectives and key results (OKRs), into the strategic plan to ensure measurable objectives are set to maximize performance over time.

Providing an ongoing feedback loop is critical to the company. This guarantees people are always aligned and working to achieve the firm’s strategic objectives and KPIs. Corporate performance is continually optimized when everyone knows what is expected, when it is expected, and how they will be evaluated for achieving it.

The StartupCo example below provides valuable tips for creating a purpose-driven, high-performance company.

StartupCo strives to be the number-one health technology app reducing work-related stress in corporate America within ten years. The startup founders' choice to market their product to companies instead of individual consumers comes with costs and benefits. The complicated enterprise sales process means more time must be allotted for a complex enterprise sell cycle, but the economics of enterprise sales should be preferable to selling direct-to-consumers. This also benefits individuals, because as employees, they are getting the same product for free or at drastically reduced prices—reason enough to justify this strategy as a way towards conquering their long-term goal.

StartupCo's mid- and near-term goals are ambitious, but attainable. With a beta launch in the next three months and a full version app release by the end of the year, their stated goal of having 24 self-insured companies use the app with a 55% employee adoption rate within 24 months is attainable. Clearly defining these benchmarks not only helps StartupCo chart its own success, but also benefits consumers using their product by reducing their work-related stress.

Originally, StartupCo’s primary focus was to launch their beta and convince the first few companies to trial the product. But once things gain momentum, they'll establish measurable KPIs that help track progress and measure success. By defining specific targets—such as the number of self-insured companies subscribing to the service, the usage rate amongst employees, the degree of stress reduction achieved with their product, and associated cost reductions for businesses—StartUpCo will be able to identify how well their efforts are paying off. This is an essential step for any company like StartupCo – by consistently tracking KPIs from the start, their team can effectively chart a path for achieving long-term success.

When building a scalable and profitable business, evaluating performance and monitoring progress is essential. The next three KPIs can help indicate how effectively StartupCo is performing financially. Consider the cost of acquiring new clients, the time it takes for those new clients to recoup customer acquisition costs, and the margins associated with revenue growth as the company scales. By implementing these KPIs, you’ll gain greater visibility into the organization's financial health and help make more informed decisions.

Once StartupCo has established the organization's goals and KPIs, the organization will assign roles and responsibilities to the appropriate departments, teams, and individuals to achieve the objectives. Everyone should clearly understand what is expected of them so that they can perform their jobs successfully and how their work contributes to StartupCo’s success.

Focusing on purpose-driven objectives while monitoring KPI progress can identify opportunities for growth that will help you realize your vision. Whether you are a first-time founder or an experienced entrepreneur, this framework is essential for success.

Additional Resources

For those looking to learn more about this important topic, go to the "Business Fundamentals" in chapter 5 of Purpose First Entrepreneur, and download the free Purpose First Entrepreneur workbook.

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