022: How to Find Your Purpose and Incorporate It Into Your Business

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. We're talking about purpose today, the difference purpose can make in a company. And our guest is fellow coach Ted Sarvata. Ted is an all around purpose guru as well within the community. And it's a subject that's very near and dear to both of us. So I thought we'd connect and just kind of talk through what we do with purpose and where we connect and where we differ on our approaches to leveraging purpose within companies that are scaling up. Welcome to the show, Ted.

Thanks, Bill. Always happy to talk about purpose.

Yeah. And you're up in Portland.

That's right.

And you have two eight year olds now.

Yeah, they just turned eight this month.

And they had Carrie's birthdays. Right.

They were born on 8808 and this was the year they turned eight.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Numeric symmetry, always amusing.

Absolutely.

Of course, our calendaring system was different. Right. You'd be different.

It's completely arbitrary.

Oh, beautiful. All right, so purpose. So first of all, right, we're going to talk about how do you discover your purpose and what are the issues with getting to purpose? And then we're going to talk about what do you do with purpose in a couple of different areas. So first of all, purpose discovery. How do you engage this with people? Do you know anything different? What does it look like?

Well, a lot of times I find that the owner started the business for a reason. And if we simply ask the question, hey, why did you start this business? Then you get a proxy for purpose or you get close to purpose. I find that people need permission to really have that be the reason that they tend to think that, well, that's just my personal dream or that's just about me. And that's not about the business. But you know what? People bought into their vision to join the company. And so their individual purpose and why people joined initially, that often is the right answer right away. That can be simple for. For a business that is still run by the founder.

Right, right. I think that's the case as well. Except sometimes they'll express purpose in a very personal way. And what needs to happen is we need to sort of shift the personal motivation to something more universal. Like somebody will say, well, I just started this one for freedom. I'm like, okay, why this one and not that one? And then that reveals a little bit. Well, because I knew this and I loved that and I love doing this kind of work and that starts to reveal back something else, then the other side of it. If it feels a little bit personal, you just ask, is this something that you wish for everyone or that you think matters on the planet? And then that often elicits something that might be the same thing that is deeply motivating to them, or it gets you in that ballpark.

Yeah, absolutely. And for a business that's not run by the founder, sometimes it can be either a little more tricky or it can just be a more fun group process where the whole team gets to weigh in. I have a client right now where they are run, owned and run by second generation. It was started by the owner's father.

Yes.

And that process was really fascinating because the father started the business. Seemingly he started the business just because there was a. There was an opportunity in the world and he needed to feed his own family. And so as we started to dig in and find out what this leadership team really values and what this current owner really values, you know, the son of the founder, they settled on the word family as their purpose, which was really fascinating. And it really fit. And everybody knew it was the right answer when. When it was said out loud.

Yes. Well, I think that it's fantastic when you get there. And I think people, some people, some of our folks may love purpose. They may be purpose junkies like you and I are, but there are other people who are like, oh, that's kind of woo. I don't want to go there, I'm afraid. I, like, I'm uncomfortable with that whole thing. And I, I had one of those recently. It was similar kind of thing where we went to a group conversation and we teased it out and I sent people out on a walking exercise. I'm like, go out in pairs and entertain this question. And really, when you're the person listening, really bring deep listening to help the other person say something and see something that they didn't realize they were about to say. And that's a powerful thing to do, sending people out. And then they all came back and they threw stuff up on the wall and. And they got to, we keep the world working.

Oh, nice.

It's really beautiful, right? And it just went thunk, right? It like clicked in for everybody and including the owner of the business who wasn't the founder and who had a great deal of anxiety about getting this right. It's like, oh, I don't know. And it's kind of woo. And I don't know if we'll get that. And I never do. Well, with these things. And I'm like, look, you do well, you collectively as a company is always more interesting than each of us as individuals. And this really proved it. It was powerful, it was palpable. You could feel people were excited about that whole thing. Yeah, yeah.

Actually, I'm just reminded of another example of a client that I took this through where they had a hired gun CEO who was brought in to replace the founder by the board. You know, the board of the investors brought in the CEO and they, they provide a software product for healthcare providers. And so you could say it's some kind of commodity. It's boring stuff like back end billing. Like ugh, you know, you have to have it, but it's not sexy.

Right.

What was amazing about their discovery process around purpose? They ended up coming up with something like, let's see if I get the words exactly right. It's something like making healthcare work super powerful.

Yeah, everybody loves that.

Yeah, everybody loves it. And, and I got really inspired by it because imagine your nonpartisan, it's totally nonpartisan, it's absolutely not political at all. But imagine your doctor or your physical therapist or your whoever doesn't have to worry about billing because they know it's just going to get paid for and therefore they can spend 20% more time or 30% more time with each patient because they know they're going to get paid for that time and they don't need to cram so many patients in a day. And you could just think about one thing after another after another. If billing works, everything else kind of flows. Even though their motivation is not about billing, their motivation is not about getting paid. But it is their business. They want to help people. In order to help the most people, why not have software that actually works to get them paid for the work they do? It just totally makes a ton of sense.

Well, absolutely. Look, you can only pay bills with cash.

That's right.

You can only keep people employed with cash. That's right. People may love you, but you miss one payroll and it's a big moment. You miss two and you're out of business.

Yeah.

That'S a critical thing to be able to execute. Well, I'm reminded of a company that I took over some years ago and I was trying to figure out my relationship to it because I had no background in the industry. Then I realized that our products gave our buyer our customer confidence. They made them feel special and they empowered their self expression. And that became core to the purpose of the company, empowering everyone's unique self expression. And it's how I related to something that I had no relationship to before then. Because helping people find their own unique self expression, empowering, that was something that motivates the heck out of me, even though I didn't know anything about the other.

Very cool.

Yeah, beautiful. All right, so then let's say we got purpose, right? Yeah. And we've gone through the process. So in our work we will do something. So we'll ask, we'll often reference the various coaches, we'll reference the work of Simon Sinek and start with why. And both the book and the TED talk that you can find online. It's about 17 minutes and worth, worth a look as you begin this conversation. But then we really just ask people, what do you do? Why do you do what you do? And we kind of keep peeling back that thing. As Vern says, you keep peeling that back. And then one step before just saving the planet is something a little bit more specific to your work and is probably in your purpose one or two steps back from that. And we set up people to do it. And then if we're working in a group setting, we'll have people bring forward a few candidate ideas. We'll often work with post its and we'll start to synthesize those until something gets kind of emerges. Right. That's where alignment occurs. So that's kind of the process that I think you and I both fall into slightly different degrees. So then once you've got that, then what, what are we doing with it? What do you do with it from there?

Well, the key thing for me is just to ask, all right, well, what does it mean? What difference does it make now that we have this purpose? And that could mean that something small happens, like a poster goes up on the wall or that a meeting happens where they let the whole company know about it. Or it could be that it needs to be baked into the quarterly planning process and when they choose their quarterly priorities, that something new needs to be created. I had a client recently where we asked the question, all right, what difference does it make now that we have this purpose, this purpose of family, this purpose, this example I just told you about, we ended up using that as we created their new long term goal, their new big hairy, audacious goal, bhag, which many people may be familiar with. They were not motivated by a revenue long term goal or by knocking off a key competitor or by having a certain number of employees or any of the other things that sort of were obvious and came to mind as a big Goal and thinking about their purpose of family. They had, the previous year, started a giving campaign where they gave, I think they gave, I can't remember, a quarter percent of gross profit. They decided to give to charity. And so the total they had given the previous year was around $7,000. And as we started thinking about a goal, they started to get really excited about, what if we gave away $100,000, you know, what if we gave away $200,000? And as the number started to get higher in the room, I started to notice the CEO looking more and more uneasy and sweating, and he looked a little bit green, the owner of this company. And eventually somebody said half a million dollars, and somebody said a million dollars. And I thought the guy was going to fall out of his chair. And then I saw him get out his laptop, and he started making a spreadsheet, and he started doing reinvestment. Like, what if we gave this money on Kiva, where the money gets lent out as a micro loan, and then some of it can come back or all of it can come back and we can re lend it again and so we can compound our giving. And so he started doing the math, and he started, you know, and I. I kept working with the team as he was off in the corner doing his thing, and I kept asking him to shut his laptop, and I just couldn't. I couldn't get him to turn it off because he was just so freaked out about it. So we finished the meeting, and months later, he rolled out to his team what the new BHAG was going to be for the company. Lo and behold, it was $2 million over the course of 10 years. He came to on his own. He doubled it on his own. He was so excited about employees being able to give. In addition, he upped the percentage that would go from gross profit. He said, we got to start right away because if we don't, if we wait a year, we'll never make it. What if we start counting volunteer hours that our employees give in? And what if we pay people for one day, a quarter to go do volunteer time? And we can. So he just, like, idea after idea after idea started coming out, and all of that then needed to be prioritized as part of the quarterly planning process. Because when you decide to do one thing, you have to decide, what does that mean we're not going to do? We can't just add a new thing to the top of the heap. What comes off the bottom?

Right.

So that was an important part of the process, too, is what are we saying no to as a result of doing this work that's going to make a difference in the world.

It's interesting. So you talk so purpose, right. We often think of being core or the heart of the company, strategy and marketing and many other things. But then the BHAG, this long term lofty goal 10 to 30 years in the future, then becomes a kind of a destination or a mountain to climb, something to conquer, something we're claiming now we've got from the center out to the furthest reach out for the company. And in some respects purpose becomes kind of an unanswerable or a task that you'll never complete, right? Yes. So it's a difference we're going to make without a specific goal. But the BHAG has a specific goal and is connected to the two. And then you're working back into three to five year annual and quarterly goals and connecting the dots between where we are today and where we want to get to in a 10 or 30 year time frame.

Yeah, that's right. And in their case, they already had their three year goals dialed in their three year targets. So we kind of skipped over that. And when the new BHAG was announced, I don't even think at that point we were in an annual cycle, we were in a quarterly cycle. And so it just made one of the quarterly priorities different. Whereas next time we do the annual, it'll show up there and it'll show up in the three year, but it doesn't have to right away. It's not such a linear process. Like you have to do this and then this and then this and then this. It's every time you add a piece like this, you add purpose. And then all of a sudden your quarterly priorities are going to be different whether or not you have a new bhag.

Well, when I created our bhag, I worked with a time frame that seemed to be interesting to me. And then I played with it till it was interesting enough that I was comfortable saying it. Right. And yet not too far that I felt foolish. So it was a balance of the magnitude of it was balancing those two things. And it certainly was tied to purpose. Right. You could say our purpose is helping leaders build a better world. Our BHAG is impacting 5 million leaders by 2045. And I just created something. And the moment I created it, I realized that our current way of operating was insufficient Right. To get there. And yet when I thought about a 30 year time frame, that's the number, that's the thing that Seems interesting enough for me to give my life to that. Right, fantastic. So that connects back to stuff. And then you can start to see purpose impacting the operation of the team. The monthly meeting, the daily huddle, do you do anything with it on a daily basis?

I haven't had any of my companies do anything on purpose daily. I think that's a really interesting idea. Have, have you done that with your clients?

We use it now, and I have about four or five clients doing some variation of this. I call it the manifesto.

Okay.

And the manifesto is usually purpose values, bhag, a summary of the annual and the quarterly theme. So in roughly that order. But it could be changed as fits. And then what many teams will do is read the manifesto at the beginning of the huddle and the beginning of the meeting. And so it's read with intention. But you know, that's like a 30 second thing maybe, right. And that rotates who's reading it. It goes around to different people. And then the reader or the moderator of the meeting will say, great, let's hear from a couple of you. What did you notice? What did you hear in that today? And that just encourages active listening and thinking so that they actually have to think about the relevance of whatever is there. And it leads off with purpose and ends with or in the middle is the bhag. And then there's some quarterly theme, but that then has them look for where it's impacting them in the day ahead or what they can see from it in the day behind. And all they have to do is ask like two people to talk and just keep randomizing that like, you know, let's hear from a couple of people. And then they get in the habit of the interesting thing I notice after, in one team, actually, when I first used this years ago in trying to turn a team around, I had a company in crisis and I was leading it. And what I discovered was that after, yeah, I'm not sure about the time now, but within less than a year, everybody had memorized it. And that team was very powerful. They were extraordinarily aligned. They had memorized it, they had the purpose deep in their bones, and the team accomplished what they needed to accomplish in a couple of years. And it was very, very powerful. And they were engaged in that. And so I think it does a lot to instill values. It has people ingrain deeply and infuse it into the way they operate purpose and the rest of the core pieces of the strategy. And.

And so, Bill, what do you say to those skeptics when you propose the manifesto and somebody says, well man, that sounds super boring. It's going to be the same every day. And why, why would I do that?

Well, I say, fine, fine, just do it for a while, see what happens. If we decide not to, we'll take it out. I might observe one. In fact I did recently. One team started it. I went into the leader, I went in and I, I started off our next quarterly session. I had the person who normally read the manifesto read it out for us and that person just sort of ripped through it and I was like, oh, interesting. Okay, so like a chore, like something to be done without any particular intention. I said, all right, now let me do it and then let's have you hear whatever you hear in the process and you'll hear whatever. So I just read it with intention, intention to communicate. And so then that leader said to me, well wow, you read it slower. You read it with enunciation and emphasis. I'm like, yeah, I did, but not any particular emphasis. Not like, oh, I want them to get this point or that point. I just read it, grappling with it myself in the process. Then the people chimed in, they're like, oh, I heard things I didn't hear before and so on. Just keep that up every day. Just do that.

It's really cool the idea that you can read something in such a different way. It's a self fulfilling prophecy really. If you think it's going to be boring and it's going to be wrote, if you're the one reading it, well, you're going to read it that way. But if you're reading it as if you wrote it today, that's a totally different thing and it's going to create a totally different impact on the team.

Well, that's probably even a higher level. I'll just say, listen, just read it with some intention to communicate and keep and read it as if you're trying to get it yourself and see what there is today. What relevance does it have today? So if people just do that, and I haven't had any of them object to it, I have had some people now put it into graphical form and post it around. In fact, we posted some photos recently. One client that has put these manifestos behind their customer facing workstation. So they have people who deal directly with their customers and they put it on the wall behind them. So they're talking with the customer and they're dealing with some upset or breakdown or something like that. And right behind them it says like we're in the business of happiness. Good luck trying to be crappy with that customer. They're going to look over your shoulder and point out the, the conflict there.

Oh, you talk about holding yourselves accountable. That's brilliant.

And we promised to do this and then, you know, it's right there like so. And bold and interesting enough to do that. So the manifesto is what we call it. And you know, it's like you'll see people who've got like the Holstein Manifesto is one that's known a lot and there's a variety of things like that, but it's a kind of a declaration that can be pretty inspiring. So that's execution. Right. And that's going anywhere from long term down to right into the day. The other place I like to do is hiring. And it sounds like you've had some folks play with it but not yet engage it. What's been tried?

Well, with my clients, they tend to really engage with core values in the hiring process.

Got it.

And not yet as much with purpose. I think there's an untapped potential there with my clients, they love to change their hiring practices to make sure they're getting the right people in terms of a core values fit. And that's made a huge difference. And I think that it's going to be a future step to really work on purpose in that hiring process. Have you worked with hiring directly with purpose?

So I have variations on things like the manifesto. Those elements get put into people's ads so that when they're advertising it's like, hey, this company, whose purpose is this? Who's up to that? Is working on this with these values, is looking for the next service or sales rock star, production manager, this or that. And that kind of thing then attracts more people. By virtue of looking like a company that knows what it's up to. They tend to get more applicants than when they don't have that. And those applicants then will often chime in. The more interesting applicants will chime in with, oh, I'm really inspired by your bhag. Or I'm inspired they may not refer to it that way. Right. But you're a long term goal. Or I was really inspired by your purpose or the value of this or that kind of thing. So they'll reference the things and try to establish a personal connection of what resonated for them. And then you can begin to see that person's a fit to values. And we're attracting somebody who really belongs and should be in an environment like ours.

Yeah, it makes A ton of sense that people who do that much, even just that little to connect with what the company says about itself, you can tell if it's genuine. If they try to do it just because they think you want to hear it, you're going to know. You're going to know that it's not right.

And you're going to know right from the beginning. Right? Yeah, Yeah. I think that I've only had a couple companies do it right now. I have had the opposite also. I've had people who wanted to hire me to help, say, implement top grading as a more limited engagement, rather than sort of our full Gazelles kind of engagement. And I said, okay, great, tell me why, you know, what is it that you think? Why do you think top grading and hiring now is what you need? Well, we could really grow if we just had the right people. And then I peel back who they've got, how they got them and what they've tried to do to get people. And on at least two occasions now, I've discovered somebody who wanted to go to work on people. It was really a strategy issue. I'm like, okay, you're never going to attract the right people or anyone different than you have currently if you keep going about because it's not clear to the world who you are and what you're up to. You're just another one of many, many, many in your industry. And so the work we have to do actually to get you more people is strategy work.

It's funny like that, isn't it? The problem is not always what we think it is.

No, it's often in a different place. So let's look at why you think that's the problem. And that's, of course, where we as coaches feel like we've really added some value. Other than that, go read the book and just go through the motions yourself. You can do it. There's enough of our tools available for free. People could lead themselves through a lot of it. So that's where we feel like we're really adding something.

Yep.

Yeah, well, so super helpful. So we've talked about finding purpose, the value of purpose. We've talked about purpose in the long term, purpose in the near term, on the execution side side and the planning side. And we've talked about purpose as it impacts people, recruiting, retention, all that kind of thing. Oh, I guess we didn't really talk about the. But there's a clear connect when you've done the work, personal purpose work. Right. When people begin to know what we call the oppp, the one page personal plan. When they start to think about their purpose, it doesn't ask it so much directly there. But when there's a clear personal purpose for individuals and they can see its resonance with the company's purpose, your retention and your effort, the quality of the work from each person goes up greatly.

And I have found that you need to get people over the hump of. Follow your purpose or whatever is kind of a meme in the world. And people get scared about getting the wrong one. And if you can get people over the hump of, you can change it anytime you want.

Yeah.

It doesn't have to be the right one. It's. You are bringing it into the world by saying it. You don't have to find. It's not like out there somewhere. You say it, you get to choose it.

Right.

And I think that is really powerful because people get so confused that I don't know what my purpose is. And they think they have to go look for it and they have to go on a 30 day fast and they have to climb the top of the mountain. And you don't need any of that stuff. You can just really reflect on what matters to you. And then you say this is what my purpose is. And then if next quarter or next week you change, it evolves. That's right. You learn more about yourself. And I find that just doing that work is so powerful.

Well, I thought for myself about. When I think about my whole life, my whole life turned out if I mastered my present challenges, overcame all my breakdowns right now and all the other ones that I'd have along the way. And I lived the kind of life that made me proud, that I would want my kids to think about, that I would want people to say about me. Like what would people say that I would feel good about? What would I want people to be left with from my life? Right. And what I came up with initially is still pretty valid today. And I've played with expressing it like one way for work and one way family and things like that. So it has some different expressions. Expressions. But for me, the purpose of my life is making a difference. Right. And that's just really it. And that continues. If that's what I did and that's what people said about me, my life is done and my life is successful. So what's your purpose?

You know what my purpose is, Bill. My purpose. My wife and I went through a discovery process when we met and we ended up choosing a name when we married. She didn't take My name or me Take her name. We chose the name Sarvatta. And Sarvatta is a Sanskrit word. It means wholeness or integrity. And we chose that for ourselves as our family purpose and as my business purpose. Now, we chose it because our kids get to be exactly who they are, and it's not up to our expectations to shape them into who we think they should be. But not only our kids, but each other, we get to be that for each other. We get to be in our marriage that my spouse gets to be exactly who she is, and she gets to be that for me. And we get to be that with our friends and with our parents and with my clients. I get to be that way that they get to live what really matters to them. And all the masks and all the costumes and all the rigmarole that we go through in life to be good enough and please other people and all that stuff, we can let it all go, and we can just be ourselves, and that's our stand in the world. And so that's my purpose is Sarvata, you can be exactly who you are.

Beautiful. Well, that's a great place to end our conversation today. It's been, I hope, a fantastic conversation for people. Ted Sarvatta, longtime Gazelles coach, certified B Corp. And we'll put links to your. To your podcast and to your website and stuff in the show notes so people can look there for how to get in touch with Ted. Thanks again, Ted, for being on the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, Bill.

Sa.