“When you find your why, you don’t hit snooze no more! You find a way to make it happen!”
Eric Thomas.
It seems like a long time has passed since the days we used to see daily work as a tedious task. Nowadays, there is another vision to it, one that sees work as a way to live a purpose and bring meaning to life. That’s what a meaningful business does.
And it doesn’t end there. Apart from impacting the team and creating a good environment to work in, a meaningful business also impacts its customers. This way, strong bonds are created.
What makes a business meaningful?
Any business starts with an individual or a small team, say, two entrepreneurs. What makes a big difference is how the business idea is rooted. Is its foundation coming from the outside or inside of the founders?
When a business is created as a result of an inner journey that starts with knowing ourselves to change and getting the confidence to create something aligned with the inner self, we can say it has meaning.
Thus, a business is meaningful when its why stems from within. In a meaningful business, team members and customers can relate and live their own why, creating synergy and coordination.
That’s because whatever the business does, makes sense to everyone: founders, team members, and customers. In other words, they do something that fulfills them.
Elements of a meaningful business
As you may expect, things get more complex when new people arrive on the team. How to stay true to the core of your business without neglecting others’ why? As an option, you can use the transformative process I created to get there.
As the CEO of Transformative Power™, I made this Transformative Power Methodology to help entrepreneurs, trailblazers, changemakers, and visionaries build or transform their businesses, and bring their vision to reality.
Have a look at the elements of a meaningful business and how I used them to build a methodology that will unleash the transformative power of your business. This is a hint of the way we could work on them together.
Vision (Why)
The Foundation
The Heartbeat of the organization.
The strategic foundation of a business is key to its success and sustainability. A clear why brings clarity to the leadership and service of the business. A non-clear why results in the constant creation of business development ideas based on reactive versus proactive approaches.
The why of the organization, whether it’s an entrepreneur or an organization that is much larger, is the most important founding principle of growth. An inner why is required to achieve goals through alignment and growth.
Most of the strategic problems that you might face are why issues; however, most people think they are sales, personal development, or marketing issues. In fact, for most of the clients I have worked with, the core issue is an unclear why or one that has not been communicated effectively yet.
I am a strategist, and I naturally resolve business problems through strategy. The why seems like a really easy question to ask and resolve. What I found is most organizations aren’t asking the why; instead, they confuse the why with the result someone desires to have from doing business with them. The why is deeper than the driver and is bigger than the result itself.
The Why Matrix
How can you connect with your deeper why? To achieve that, I have created a methodology. It’s called The Why Matrix™, a methodology using strategic questions that ease the process of understanding the deeper why.
After this foundation is created, the values come into play, and then a formula is created to become a reminder of the structural components of the why to the organization.
Once The Why Matrix™ is completed, we are ready to create together a why commitment letter and process so that you can put your why into action within the organization.
To give you an example of how important is to define a deep why, let me share my own experience with you. When I tried to start the strategic analysis of my company, I initiated with a vision but it failed to integrate the everyday components of meaning and contribution I wanted my business to have.
Without a why for your business to exist, everything will crumble down sooner or later. A living why gives clarity, direction, and transparent processes for alignment. Also, it is deeper than the vision.
In other words, the vision comes after the why as the way to envision the why within.
Voice
The voice of your business should be its natural self-expression; it is beyond the words expressing outwardly what the organization is about. The voice is painting through words the why of the organization, as well as the contribution your business is offering. Besides, it is the overlay upon which your brand interacts with the customer.
A company’s voice isn’t fully expressed until it represents authentically its inner values and core principles. If a company is a love-based organization, the company’s communication and policies need to be in alignment to be coherent.
Voice has two elements:
- A clear inner voice expressed through media and communications,
- An outer voice, that is, how you and your team interact with customers and how they receive your message.
Most organizations use Industrial Era communication-based strategies and non-meaning-based strategies. This strategy works with a box or an operating machine as a representation of any business. As a result, it doesn’t integrate the seeing, hearing, and listening aspects of human relationships.
Because of this, they are inactive brands with inactive voices, there is no engagement or relationship to build. That’s only a voice making no sounds or just sharing the sound of silence.
For this very reason, I created The WAVE™. This is a business model that focuses first on your business’s inner energy. It comes from the vision and natural resources already available within your company, to flow directly to your clients.
Visibility
This can take several forms based on the traits your business has. It can be shaped as products, ideas, and services that interact with your customers. It could be through online platforms or traditional offline channels.
Visibility is the opportunity in which your business, or anyone representing it, interacts with clients to show what you do as a team, and how your customers can be served.
Most businesses invest in visibility and face lots of frustration and little results because they are focusing on what the client wants and asks for. While this is a good thing to do, it is only a halfway process. The other half is all about the company’s core values and its why in synergy with the client’s.
When the visibility is grounded on your business’s inner why and it serves people resonating with their why, there is a harmonic rhythm between your business’s visibility and the interactions with your customers.
Investing in a visibility analysis to align your business’s core values and structures with your deeper why is of vital importance. This way you can guarantee a true connection with your customers and achieve the contribution you look for.
Village
Once you have created and built a village, a foundational structure of principles, you can attract people aligned around your business’s why.
This is better than creating a loyalty-based program that only focuses on repetitions and rewards. Instead, it is creating valuable solutions that are feeding the inner why of your organization. Moreover, the why of your customers is aligned with your company’s why.
What most organizations forget is that there is an inner village as well as an outer one. The inner village starts with the CEO or entrepreneur and their employees.
The nurturer is that individual from whom the business’s why and vision stems, that is, you. Yet as the why spreads out toward other team members, it interacts with others as well.
In these interactions, it is critical this why remains alive by communicating it effectively. The goal here is that you ensure your why is lived internally and keeps living once it is transferred to your customers through the visibility channels like its products and services.
In other words, this inner village will exist and stay strong as long as the CEO’s why synergizes with stakeholders and team members why. When the organization listens to and understands their why, you can use that to fuel your own. But, again, you want to do this carefully not to give up your why.
More on this line, your customers will influence your why too. Getting to know their why will also ensure that a bond between your organization and your customers emerges. In short, your stakeholders, employees, and customers will influence your why and you will want to make some concessions as long as it keeps it alive.
Victory
Victory is when the organization comes back to the original why, and its values, and therefore moves to a place of wholeness and alignment. It is when the organization grows and reestablishes its why and values and realigns. Alignment creates stability for the organization, as well as steady growth and contribution.
This is the foundational principle of the transformative power of your gifts as an entrepreneur and as an organization. By doing things this way, your team behind the brand becomes a service leader within its industry of operation.
That’s because your customers feel at ease in an organization with clear core principles and contributions since it is a company in which they can put their trust, and loyalty, in an organization that reflects its authentic values.
Few businesses arrive at the victory stage, because most leaders put short-term gains ahead of long-term ones. This thinking leads them toward being reactive based on environmental landscapes or poor leadership management structures.
Slowly, the organization loses its authenticity, alignment, and wholeness. Even in an entrepreneurial organization of one person, there are external conditions that guide business leaders to make different choices out of their why.
Striving for a victory that is a true contribution is one of the key aspects that keeps an organization alive, engaged, and flowing.
The glue that sticks everything together
So, a strong and clear why is what gives meaning to a business. With it, everyone related to that kind of business won’t find themselves asking why am I doing this? That’s because it is already answered and communicated.
That sense of meaning is the cornerstone, the glue that sticks everything together. That’s the way to avoid a mindless routine and find joy in what everyone does.
We can build together such a strategy. First, we will work on discovering your gifts and then bring that to your business. There is even more about this. Send me a message to arrange a short call and see what’s on the table.