“Money like health, love, happiness, and all forms of success that you want to create for yourself is the result of living purposefully. It is not a goal unto itself.”
- Dr. Wayne Dyer, best-selling author
This quote from Dr. Dyer is chocked full of good advice and most likely he is right BUT what if you do not know what your business purpose is? Or perhaps you had a purpose a long time ago when you started your business and now that particular purpose has expired. Maybe you have not even noticed that it has expired. So, you are slogging along not feeling particularly energized or enthusiastic about your business anymore.
This is a good time of the year to reassess your purpose and see if you are in business with a purpose which is not as Dyer says just to make money. Making money without having it be informed by your purpose is the booby prize for a business owner. When your purpose has expired you experience a tiredness that rest will not resolve.
What do you do if you do find that your business is without purpose or has expired? The first step is to declare your former purpose complete. Complete meaning that it is whole and without flaw. You give up the right to use it against yourself. What I mean by that is characterized by beating yourself up for not noticing that your purpose is finished. Those first two steps sound easy to do when they are on paper but are very hard to do in real life. This is something that you must work on with yourself. You will know it is complete when you feel a certain space and lightness of being. When you are really complete with something a space opens for you in which you can create again.
Revising your purpose or creating an entirely new purpose will fill you with energy and intention; it will lead you to new places and new business adventures. It will also, as Dyer promises, give you results that provide happiness, and all forms of success including money.
This is an appropriate step to take during the fourth quarter of the year. This step will set you up to create new actions and intentions for your business in 2015.
Use the space below to declare your purpose complete and share your new revived purpose. I look forward to hearing from you.
Business purposes do expire or change. Maybe a high level vision or mission statement doesn’t, but sometimes they are so lofty that they feel weak…over time. I say freshen them both up each year. Invite a few trusted employees, board members or even customers to assist. Make it fun!
Here’s an example: When our company ADHERE started business, our name was different (Seymoor Technologies) and our purpose was to “provide networking and security services to small business”. Well, we had no mission statement then, and this purpose expired within ONE YEAR when we found that small businesses either A. could not afford the type services we thought they needed or B. small businesses did not think they needed those services as a priority.
This is when we changed to have our mission being “guiding businesses in security and compliance methods”. Still sounds lofty, right, well it is but that guides US! “Guiding” was our key word. We target customers who SEEK guidance in our area of expertise.
Then, our PURPOSE changed to: Providing customers with quality, affordable guidance and solutions that match their business needs.
NOW, that’s something a BIG 4 auditor can NOT do! And thus we are very relevant today and we change as needed.
Sarah