Hi, everyone. Trying to make sure all the tech is set up correctly here. Hi. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started. My name is Tiffany Lentz.Thank you so much for attending the session. I hope you all are enjoying, this awesome conference. The content everyone's presenting looks amazing so far. So today, we're gonna talk about, the executive's guide to purposeful profit and how we balance mission and market for sustainable success. Very quickly, I'm gonna do a brief introduction, talk about our goals, and then we're gonna spend the majority of the time talking about what I refer to as a purposeful profit equation, and then also purposeful profit at scale. Little bit about me. My name is Tiffany. I lead all of the social impact work for Parvada solutions. I'm really a career consultant. I've been consulting for over twenty years. I've worked with companies, providing technology solutions for startups, everyone from startup size to Fortune 10 nationally and internationally.

At my previous firm, I held a couple of different roles that are relevant to this talk. One was the North America head of delivery and client experience, so overseeing delivery for a $350,000,000 business. And then also prior to that role at the same firm, I was a global managing director for, a social sector business, which I had to build myself, up to that 15,000,000 mark. And we'll talk about that in a little bit, the trial by fire there that really introduced me to this concept of purposeful profit. Now at ParaVeda, I've been here five years, and I do lead everything related to social impact, our b corp certification, our nonprofit work, our JEDI work, and very much focused on the scale and sustainability of that. And then, like most of us here, I like to give back of my time and talents.

Let's talk a little bit about Parvada just so that we have a baseline. So we are technology and strategy services providers. And we like to say that we help our clients take their ideas and turn them into impact. So I've just listed here a wide variety of services we provide, some offerings, everything from business strategy, brand to technical solutioning. We are about a 550 person company. We've been around for twenty two years this year. And so we have been practicing, potential execution impact at scale through strategy and technology services. Now the goals of this training and how some of that introduction is very relevant to the application here. By the end of this session, I would like for you to be able to answer three questions. One is what is purposeful profit?

The second is how do you future proof your business by taking mission alignment and turning it into competitive advantage? And third, how do you drive purpose driven profitability at scale? I think anyone understands we can do these things in the small, but how do we do them at scale? How do we keep purpose and purpose and profit fully aligned for the long haul? Well, I can't share any of this without telling you a little bit about my own trial by fire. So about ten years ago, eleven, actually, I was asked to build this social sector business for a larger consulting company called Thoughtworks. And everything started out great.

You know, when you start out building something that's missional and you're building software for nonprofits, everything starts out wonderful until it doesn't, until you realize that the design elements don't scale or you have too much business and you can't afford the model that you've set up.

And that is exactly what happened to me. Additionally, I realized that, that what had shifted in the company over the course of years is that purpose went from being integral to the business to purpose being my business arm. And I didn't realize those things at the time. I'm realizing them in hindsight, and it's led us to today. So here's how the story unfolds. I start building this nonprofit business unit and the goal is financial sustainability. Now I built it intentionally without thinking about the high cost centers. I built it where our clients were. So the clients I'm referring to are, say, Partners in Health, Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, not the people they serve, but the clients themselves.

So I built the software engine, the development teams located near the clients. Makes perfect sense at first. But then the problem presents itself. About a year in, the business demand is quite great on my side, but the business demand coming from the parent company is cost reduction. There seems to be only one way of doing this. It would be to offshore the work to more affordable offices. Thoughtworks was a large company. We had India and China off so offshore. We also had Brazil offshore. Let's offshore the work. But the conflict I have is one that's greater than just profit. It's actually purpose. If I offshore this work and I do it wrong, I will break a psychological contract with not only volunteers but the teams who have been building this software to serve the underserved.

So I've got quite a complex problem on my hands that is in fact purpose and profit meeting in the middle. Well, what did I do? I actually did go ahead and move the work offshore. This was the profit angle. I had to solve the profit problem. So I did go ahead and move the work offshore. However, I had to deal with the purpose problem as well. And I couldn't leave that emotional connection behind. I couldn't lose the investment that human beings, developers, had made into this work. So I ended up launching a marketing campaign. I called it powered by ThoughtWorkers, and it required transparency, communication, a different way of explaining how profit was used, how profit made in a high cost center was applied in a lower cost center. And it allowed for me to show via lo fi videos how the how the work was going further.

The mother the money was able to stretch further, and I started being able to expose and show the people who were being served. Now the story I just told you did not take days or weeks. The story I just told you in a matter of moments was three years of work. See, there's nothing in purposeful profit that correlates to instant gratification. Nothing. So while it seems in hindsight, like, of course, that would be a reasonable design, you have a pro a profit solution and you have a purpose solution, and, of course, it involves some marketing and some branding and some mix some transparency and and heavy communications, but it was not an instant solution.

And it was full of it was full of trial and error and trial and success. But where that leaves us today after looking at my own work as well as reading the stories of many others and now being at Parvada and seeing their journey and experiencing it is we've got years of navigating real world challenges and seeing how there are very specific elements that make it possible for purposeful profit to work for it to scale.

But not just key elements of the business operations, there are key elements of leadership. Leadership qualities that actually have to fit together to make this business operation unit work. The first thing we have to establish though is we have to agree on a definition. What is purposeful profit? Well, let's read the first sentence. Purposeful profit is a business philosophy that emphasizes generating profit while simultaneously pursuing a meaningful purpose beyond financial gain. These are this is not a bifurcated concept. It is an operational, it's an operational design that forces two things that feel like binaries into one design model. K? So we've got profit and we have purpose, and they have to constantly coexist. This is not easy, and it it requires some very specific thinking. Well, what are those key elements? That these what I'm referring to as pillars.

The first is, in fact, you must be purpose driven, and we'll talk about this in a moment. But if there isn't a clear purpose to your business, you're going to struggle to stay true to whatever your actual value proposition is from a purpose perspective. If purpose currently is bifurcated in your business, which is what I realized was happening to me at Thoughtworks, If purpose is bifurcated, meaning it is not core to the business, it's not measured and operational, you will struggle. Second, what about stakeholders? We're not talking about shareholders here and we're not talking about even the most obvious stakeholders. We're talking about a wider and wider swath of stakeholders in queue to including community and environment. So stakeholder acknowledgement, stakeholder management, stakeholder communication, a heavy focus on this broadening group. And then the third is, of course, integration with profit.

So as I as I will illustrate several different ways so that it really makes sense and resonates, if there isn't integration with profit, you will either file for bankruptcy or become a nonprofit. There has to be viable financial performance that is measured alongside purpose. Okay? What does it mean for leaders? This requires quite a different kind of leader, actually. I don't think you all would be interested in this topic if you didn't resonate with this type of leadership personally, which is a good thing. I'm not gonna read all of these. You'll see some there that are there's just a level of determination and there's a level of very clear communication. But the one that I want you to notice for today specifically is the very first bullet. These are leaders who delineate an ambitious long term goal for the organization. Once again, nothing about purposeful profit correlates to instant gratification. We are talking about generational goals, multi year goals, generational, multi generational lifetime goals for an organization.

So that when we have to pivot back and forth between these two poles of purpose profit, when we have to give ourselves space for trade off over time, we are doing it always in the context of that long term goal, and we are doing it always in the context of understanding where we're going and who we are serving.

Who are our stakeholders? How are we communicating with them? And how are we staying true to that purpose? Excuse me. So remember, long term goal. Do not give up on the long term goal. So now that we have a clear understanding of our definition, these key elements that are required and key elements for leadership, let's talk about what I'd like what I refer to as a purposeful profit equation. It's designed to help us assess how effectively our businesses integrate purpose and profit. And this tool is going to help you think about, as an organization, the operational elements, the offerings, the strategies that are needed, the profitability that's needed to sustain purposeful profit business. So let's dive right in. Here's the purposeful profit equation as defined by Parvada. So if we're looking at the very bottom, first is going to be our value proposition.

We will have to be sure and clear about what that is. Second, we layer on who is it that we are even serving? Who is our customer base? Who's caught who is in need of our services? Who are we drawn to? Third, we have to have this offering, and we have to make it profitable. We should also make it sustainable. Those three things together will lead us to purposeful profit. Let's double click into each one, starting with the first. Now, look, you're all business people, so I don't need to tell you what a what a value proposition looks like. This is how you get someone to invest in your business. This is how you get funding. This is how you think about what you want to form. If you are joining another company, you wanna understand what they even do. That's their value proposition. This is more than a standard value proposition.

We're talking about something that where the sum of the parts create purpose in that value proposition. So the subcomponents are obviously a sum of the organization's skills. Like, what are you able to do? If you're a software company, you're not, you're not designing animal crackers. I mean, there has to be something very specific to your skills and abilities and how you hire. And second, what's energizing and motivating for your employees and your organization? What is your brand even represent? But most importantly, if you take away one thing from this particular element, this foundational element of purposeful value proposition, it's your why. Your why. At the very foundation, your skills and abilities, your energies, but your why will give you that purposeful value proposition that is more intense and different and rich than a standard business value proposition.

Second, who do we serve? So now we know our why. We're very clear about that. And now we have to layer on more than just our average customer. It's not just who's buying what we're selling because that's quite fluid, and it doesn't leave us with a lot of, say, customer loyalty. But in a purposeful profit value proposition, this is where customer loyalty lives right here. It's the people group you're drawn to help and also the unique problems that that we are equipped to solve for them. Why are those important? Because of the third subcomponent. This is how companies choose you over the competition. This is it. If you're drawn to them and your and your solutions are designed for them, they will choose you because your values align.

This is much more than just serving a swath of customers where there is a need. Third, profitable offerings. This is this is pretty important because if you're developing something even with a people group that you're drawn to, what you're going to find is that you can't be profitable. You've actually designed a nonprofit, which is is fine, but that's not what we're here to talk about. Right? We're here to talk about a for profit. So there must be something you're building that the the market can pay and is willing to pay. Let's not forget the profitable element that we're not pricing ourselves out of a market and we're not, we're not building things that that we have to continue to get donations or grants for. These are things that the market can and will pay for. But there's an additional level of complexity, of course.

We're building and we're building an offering, a service, or product that actually has a positive impact on the planet. Where when we think of we first have to look at the profit element and then we have to say, but how is it sustainable? How is it leaving it leaving the planet or thinking about that triple bottom line, leaving the planet in a better space than we found it. These are our elements. Our why, what builds our customer loyalty, our ability to financially sustain. Okay? So I I promised you there would be three goals. There will also be four activations. There's gonna be space for us to play a little bit here today. Now I want you to take a moment and start reflecting on these elements. We're gonna do this together. Let's look at the bottom. Remember, this is our why. Alright?

I want you to take a few seconds and start jotting down some notes for yourself, whether you're building your own organization, whether you're consulting to an organization, whether you are part of a larger organization. Try to answer these questions around the very basic element, purposeful profit proposition. What is your organization actually great at? What are you skilled at? What motivates your team? What motivates you? A certain type of work, a certain type of outcome, a process that you're very passionate about. And do you have a why? As you're jotting down your own thoughts, if you are finding accelerators here, that's wonderful. If you're finding gaps, this is the place to pause and con and think about how to construct your purposeful of profit equation effectively. Where are your gaps? Where are the pieces not tying together? So take a few seconds and think about that, and then we'll move on to the next.

It would be remiss of me to not give you a real example from Parvada. So ParaVeda, one might think because I told you we're a strategy and technology services company. You might think that our goal, our purpose is to develop the sexiest software solutions we can. That's actually not our purpose. Our purpose is to develop people, our people, to their fullest potential. That's not our sole purpose. We'll get there. We'll build this piece by piece like I'm asking you to do. But isn't it strange that a technology company's actual purpose is to develop people to their highest potential? This tells you something about how we connect purpose and profit from the very beginning. Developing people to their fullest potential. Now let's look at activation two.

So we figured out our why or we figured out some of our gaps there. Let's talk about who we serve. Alright? People groups, problems, how a company might choose us based on values alignment. So I want you to take a few seconds based on some of the the the notes you've already made and think about who you are designed to serve. Who are you drawn to? These are groups of people, individuals, causes, a a hole in the market that you observe, that you are drawn to you're drawn to to fix. What are the problems that you are uniquely equipped to solve?

And then because a layer of complexity here is all about customer loyalty being built, customer loyalty is built right here. How does choosing your company align with your customer's values? How can they experience value by choosing you over another organization? This is where competitive advantage starts. When your customer chooses you over someone else for very specific reasons that are aligned to values. I'm gonna give you a few seconds to keep making some notes about where there are accelerators and where there are detractors for the second step in the purposeful profit equation. Now there's a lot on this slide. In the appendix of this deck, you'll find links to all of the research I've done for case studies and so on. So let me just draw your attention to a few examples here because what I've claimed is that in this second piece, who we serve, this is where competitive advantage is born.

Competitive advantage is born here in three through three different elements. First is customer loyalty. Second is talent attraction, and third is pricing power. So So let's look quickly at a couple of these examples because the research is there. The research actually is there there are study after study saying how who we serve and the value proposition for that drives competitive advantage. So in the first one, from a customer loyalty standpoint, look at this Deloitte study. Greater than 23% higher customer loyalty among brands that are perceived as purpose driven. So we're talking about preferred vendor status here, which is what we all want. Right? Higher RFP success rates. The example I'm just gonna read this to you because the text is a little small.

Companies like Patagonia and Doctor Bronner's win b to b distribution and retail partnership not just for quality, but because their regenerative sourcing and ethical practices reduce reputational and compliance risks for their partners. Their partners choose them because it is good for their reputation and reduces their convenience risks. And they do that because of the way these types of companies have designed themselves purposefully profitable. This allows for, for companies like that to be competitive in a very crowded field, and we all feel that. Well, next, let's talk about talent. We all we know that younger generations of talent are drawn to purposeful missions. But now we have data that shows that those types of employees are likely to stay three times longer. The example I used here is is Salesforce actually.

Year after year being the best place to work because of their philanthropic model and how their employees relate to that purpose. And then finally, there's buying power. During downturns, purpose driven companies recover faster and grew 10 times faster. So let's talk about this for a second. For most of us, time after time, buying power becomes what? It's a race to the bottom. It's like, how can I lower my price to make it work for my customer? That's not that's not what Bombas did. Bombas designed socks that people want to buy at $12 a pair because of impact, because the the purchaser can feel part of an impactful model. Bombas is not racing to the bottom with their socks. They're not selling their socks at TJ Maxx. They actually don't have to compete that way. I love T. J.

Maxx, by the way, but I don't find Bombas there because they don't have to compete that way. Their missional, their purposeful profit design model, their operational model is so strong and their brand is so strong that their pricing compow power does not have competition. What is how does Parvada exist in this space? So I've already said the first piece. I gave you a teaser of we're not building the sexiest technology. We actually are, but that's not our purpose. We're building people. We're building people to their fullest potential, but who are we actually serving? Well, we as an executive team are serving our employees, but we're actually serving our employees so that they can serve our clients. So we develop people to their fullest potential potential for the benefit of our clients and communities. We actually develop them so that they can provide excellent solutions.

We serve two parties, our employees and also our clients excellence through developing people. This is how we have developed out the second element of the purposeful profit equation. Let's look at our third activation. What about profit? We cannot forget this. So remember the warning I gave you. If this element is not if you've if you've achieved the bottom two and you haven't gotten to the point where you can produce something that the market can buy, you will become a nonprofit or you will go out of business. But it is entirely possible, in fact, probable that you can find something that is paid for by your market and also make a good profit. So I want you to pause for a moment. Look at the other notes you've made and take a few seconds here and think about the profit element. Not only how is it connecting to the other pieces, but also where have you thought about how your your own profitable offerings need to be more sustainable?

How do you need to think about the carbon footprint you're leaving? How are you think about thinking about metrics that show value to your holistic stakeholders that leave the planet better than you found it. Here's what this means for Parvada. So as I've already stated, we develop people toward their highest potential for the benefit of our clients and our communities. But what does that profitable engine look like? Well, equally complex, it is twofold. It means creating an environment for our employees where there is constant learning and meaningful work. It also means having profit margins that can sustain our mission. And our next step as required by our b corp certification is that we are responsible for our own sustainability and and the environment even as a services company.

So even for us, as I teach this, I'm living it, and I'm living the the the the perpetual unpacking, the levels of complexity of what it means to be purposeful purposefully profitable over and over again in different iterations and instant in instantiations of our own existence.

Alright. Now I wanna share a scenario with our last activation. We're gonna look at a case study, and I'd like you to think as executives, as business owners, as leaders, what would you do? So we've got a business. Socially impactful model, help small business sell to larger audiences. This is a company that built a platform for small businesses. K? Employees love working there. There's lots of meaningful, impactful social and social and environmental projects going on internally, and we're finding great statistics that small businesses have previously underrepresented people groups are thriving on this platform. All of this looks very looks very good, but then something happens. It becomes unprofitable. So you're leading this business. What would you do? Would you, a, change the social impact goals so they can be more achievable or less expensive? Man, that sounds yucky, but how often do we see companies do that?

Well, what would you do if the business became unprofitable? Would you b, cut all the social projects and all the the cost of the employees associated so you've helped with your profit? C, would you just double down on your mission and hope against hope that that will contribute to profitability, or would you do something else? What would you as a leader do? We have an amazing story to share today. This is the story of Etsy. What did Etsy do? So Etsy is 20 years old this year. They were founded in o five with a mission for giving what they called makers a venue and tools for marketing their wares and creating their own small businesses.

Now think about how revolutionary this was in o five. Like, go back pre iPhone. The iPhone came out in o seven. Right? So they are reinventing commerce, basically, when they're launching this brand new platform for small businesses. And for those of us who are around starting to shop on Etsy, it was completely revolutionary. So six years later, they they they put forward an even more ambitious mission and it is reimagining commerce reimagining commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and sustaining world. Gosh, I love that. By 2012, they've become a b corp. So they've decided that the that the way they solidify their mission is is to track more clearly and have more measurable outcomes, and hold themselves accountable to an external body.

Everything's looking great. First seven years in, they've got a they've got a purposefully profitable business. So if we were to plot them on a two by two that manages that, excuse me, measures profit and purpose, I think we would find them squarely sitting in purposeful profit. Right? They can prove it. They're measuring it. They're sticking with their goals. And then what happens? Things are not always as easy as they seem because growth happens and necessity for scale happens. So there's a phase here for Etsy where they struggle. And so they prepare to go public in '20 in in 2013. And what happens is they move from serving their makers to a group of more broad sellers, and they change the definition of seller from human to third party manufacturers.

And so what happens by the 2014 is that you see their message boards filling up with posts like, are any of you also feeling the low traffic, the views, and sales? And Etsy administrators encourage them to take advantage of the downtime. Seems like they've lost their mission of serving their sellers. And then they do in fact go public, but let's look at what happens in 2017. Will they have to actually do some layoffs including their values and impact team? They opt not to recertify as a b corp. Something's changing. By 2018, we've got some insult to injury here. So we've got increased seller fees so that they can sustain their market price and what so now they're charging the very people they built the platform for and offering them ways of marketing their business better, but, of course, only through paid subscription to Etsy. So the costs go up and up and the sellers profits go down down.

Now data also shows that around 2018, their makers many of their makers were pushed off the platform in higher numbers of low income entrepreneurs, and their employee satisfaction plummets. Etsy goes through a really difficult phase, and we don't stand here in judgment. We're learning from what happened to them. We're learning from where they had to make some hard decisions and how did they do it. And I think if we had if the story ended right there, we would say, oh, another story of a company that started with purposeful profit and just became profit. But what if there were a better way? And I like to believe that their CEO then and current CEO, Josh Silverman, actually did think there was a better way, and he re he revisited the North Star and pivoted because he understood that purposeful profit is a brave and complex journey.

So this story ends very well. It doesn't end where it was. It actually ends with where we are today, where there's a a full pivot and a refocus on the original stakeholders. We see disabilities equity index scores going through the roof. We see underrepresented communities back on their platform. And most exciting, we see in 2024 where they moved away from third party sellers to exclusively products must be made, designed, curated, and sourced by the seller. Mass production is no longer welcome on the platform. This is a good story. Etsy in twenty years time has shown us exactly the hard journey. Some of the trade offs, some of the things that worked and didn't work, some of kind of losing your soul and then re pivoting to your actual purpose.

So So we I think we can confidently say they find themselves in this purposeful profit space. And not only can Parvada enjoy this space, but we can look at them and say, thank you for setting an amazing example and showing us how hard those decisions were and how you were able to to re to realign with and reconnect with your soul. Etsy didn't they didn't struggle though because they were initially too purpose driven. It was the scale elements. So lest you think that this can continue to be done in the small and that we can that there isn't a demand, let me show you a few quotes. See, the expectation of being purposefully driven and purposefully profitable at scale is not a thing is no longer a thing of the future. It's actually an expectation of right now. Over 90% of purpose driven companies outperform the market on growth and profitability.

However, only 10% of companies that claim to be purpose driven actually deliver purpose at scale. So the challenge is there and the expectation is very clearly there. 52% of employees say their organization stated purpose doesn't drive impact in their day to day work. That is a problem and that was just in 2022. Purpose driven companies do in fact outperform their peers, but only when systematized and operationalized for scale in the organization. There can no longer be a bifurcation of purpose and profit. We can't push purpose into HR, into ERGs or CRMs anymore and expect that that is that is what society is demanding, and that's what corporate America is needing. We actually need to force the integration. So let me leave you with a few of strategies. I don't need to talk about the challenges.

We've beat that to death today. Let's talk about the strategies. Of course, there is communication. Of course, there is balancing alignment and hiring appropriately, but the the ones I want you to notice specifically for this talk today are bullets one and three. Codifying purpose operationally. You you get what you measure. So, so operationally, OKRs, KPIs, review processes have to measure purpose or it simply will not be integrated into business. Now there are great frameworks to follow for this. I wish it was cookie cutter. It is not. But there are great organizations like B Corp, like, chief executives for corporate purpose, CECP, that have amazing sets of metrics that we can draw from. We can learn from each other. We can coach each other on metrics that are working.

But if you do not have OKRs and KPIs and review processes baked into with purpose baked into them, you will not measure purpose. It will not be part of that profit that that profitable operational model. The next bullet I want you to notice is the third one, and this is what I experienced in the example I gave at Thoughtworks. There was a there was a centralization to purpose. It was centralized in my business unit, which meant it wasn't the design for the rest of the business, and that was a problem. Purposeful ownership has to be decentralized in a way that everyone is part of the solution and it and well equipped to make decisions according to both purpose and profit in their respective contexts.

These are the elements that will be key to operationalizing and scaling. Here's what happens when you don't build when you don't balance the tension correctly. Like, in the upper left hand excuse me, upper right hand corner, we know Toms, we know Patagonia. I've already shared the great story of Etsy. I've introduced you to Parvada, but there are so many examples that go south. And we actually know the ones on the left actually, we know we know companies that are profit first. But often what happens is they loo they end up with profit and they're a neutral company. Sometimes they end up in a really bad place, like Purdue Pharmaceutical. We also know Good Samaritan.

We actually know examples of companies that start out with purpose and then they either have to file for bankruptcy or they just become a nonprofit. They form they move themselves into a foundation. But that's not what's going to change corporate America for the good. And then often we don't hear about the underachievers unless it's a terrible story. Right? We don't hear about them because they start out great and then they just fizzle. And we don't often hear about companies that just file for bankruptcy because they can't manage either purpose or profit. Theranos did. We know that story and we know how much it impacted people's lives. So there are examples of companies that just couldn't balance the tension operationally. They couldn't balance the tension from a philosophical standpoint and they didn't set their metrics up for scale.

Let me leave you with this quote from chief executives for corporate purpose, CECP. From their resilience report, we firmly believe that shared resilience built on purpose, empathy, integration, congruence, and trust doesn't just lead to more resilient companies but to better ones. Now Parvada has to live with this our decisions every day. So as I've already said in our example, we, we develop people to their fullest potential for the benefit of our clients and communities. And one of the key ways that we have to choose every single day to do that is through our review process. So I wanna leave you with this illustration. Now we've all been part of review processes, and some of them are good and some of them suck. And usually, they're inconsistent. Right? It's not usually an awesome experience.

What Parvada does is very is is very specific and intentional because it is in fact our purpose to develop people for the good of our clients. So let me illustrate how this actually works at Parvada. Every single employee has a mentor and that mentor has to write a review for their mentee every six months. On average, we've tracked that a mentor spends about four hours writing a review. This is a very thorough, intentional process. Now we've got a mentee, the each employee. They have to write a self assessment. On average, we track and people say it takes them about an hour to do that. Then comes the remainder of the process, though. We expect multiple people, a minimum of five, to give feedback on each employee, and we track their time and that takes about thirty minutes per person.

Then we have a discussion process. We call it quality assurance, a discussion process about the review itself and about that employee. And we invite five of the right leaders to that meeting to go over each person's review. What this adds up to be is ten hours of billable time every six months for every single person. This roughly translates to a million to a a minimum of twelve thousand hours per year into a customized thorough intentional development process for employees. If you're thinking that that is a lot, it actually is a lot, but why? Because our purpose is to develop people so that they can provide excellent solutions to our clients. This is our relentless pursuit of purpose.

We have lots of other design elements that are related to purpose, but this is such a key one because even in challenging financial times, we've thought about how do we stay true to this? I mean, of course, we're we're creating efficiencies all over the place. Of course, we love technology. We're automating. We're using chat GPT. Things have changed in twenty two years. But anytime there's a discussion that says, oh, let's just suspend this process for twenty four months because we'll just evaluate and we can't afford it. How can we honestly say to ourselves, we develop people to their highest potential so that they can provide excellent solution to clients if we stop developing them? So every time it is considered because it has to be considered, we go right back to that North Star. It would violate our purpose. There are other things inside those poles, inside that polarity of purpose and profit that we can find ways to modify, but this thing would be a deal breaker.

So my challenge to you is don't be afraid to realize that this comes at a cost. I I call this the the purpose the, excuse me, the promise of painlessness. You know, it's the idea that investors and executives think that, they don't need to sacrifice for public good. At best, that is insincere. It is blatantly untrue. There is a sacrifice that is required on multiple fronts in multiple layers. Okay? It will require you to be antifragile and it will require you to be comfortable to get comfortable being uncomfortable. So let me leave you with thinking about when the going gets tough.

You can either lean into profit or you can lean into purpose, come hell or high water, or you can embrace that complexity and find a better way. And I would I would posit that we have lots of examples to show that purposeful profit at scale and with the tools I've shared with you today can harmoniously coexist. Here's our equation. I hope you'll try to apply it, and I hope you'll reach out, with questions and thoughts. And I hope you can honestly say that we've answered these questions today. Here's my contact information. At the end of the deck is an appendix with all the research that I've done and all the links, that can be referenced, and I hope that you'll reach out with and continue the conversation on this topic.