The most important question: WHY

Of all the questions a person can ask, WHY is the most important. As my friend Chuck Blakeman likes to say: WHY is the most human of questions, whereas the other questions are very animal questions. Who will I eat, what will I eat, when will I eat it, where will I eat it, how will I eat it. WHY requires us to dig beneath the surface. Later in this podcast, I’m going to show you 6 key aspects of your business that will get WAY easier when you have a clearly defined WHY.

OK here we go: One of the questions that I sometimes ask our customers at the accounting firm, a question to which the cast majority of us entrepreneurs have no answer, is “why does your business exist”?

Most business owners can talk about “why they got into business”. As Entrepreneurs that answer to that one is almost universal:

  • I wanted more freedom.
  • I was tired of working for other people, of 9-5 and 2-weeks/year holidays.
  • I want to leave my mark in the world, to make the world a better place.
  • I have a great idea that I need to share.

Whatever the reason for why a business owner started their business, most of us cannot clearly articulate “why our business exists”, which is sometimes referred to as the company’s Vision Statement.

GURU by Achen Henderson, for example, exists to help entrepreneurs and business leaders build great companies. I covered a few “personal whys” in the episode xx called “who serves who”, these are my guiding light for everything I do and define the kind of life I want to have. Everything that we do at work is guided by the WHY of helping entrepreneurs and business leaders build great companies. If something is happening around me that doesn’t in some way serve this WHY it needs to go, and quickly.

Let’s talk about the impact of WHY on our mental health and work enjoyment

HSBC did a study some time ago that found that two-thirds of everyone who ever reached age 65, in the history of earth, are alive today. Think about that. We have never had so much time on earth, in the history of earth. Getting old is sort of new, and so then is working into your 60s. And the research shows that the longer you work, the longer you’ll live. Said differently, early retirement often leads to an early grave – WHY is that? It’s because people need purpose, we need a WHY.

So why shouldn’t we create a work environment for ourselves and our teammate that satisfies our human need for purpose? A best-selling author and friend Chuck Blakeman talks about how the world worked before the industrial revolution. Everyone was an entrepreneur and work were very much engrained in personal life and existence. In fact, 1850 was the first year in human history when more people left home to go to work. Blacksmiths, Cobblers and Butchers of old worked out of their houses, and their work was entirely engrained in their personal lives and the social fabric of society.

It was only when factories were created, moving people to an assembly line, and taking away their ability to participate creatively in their work, did the ideas of ‘mandatory retirement age’, ‘2-3 weeks of holidays’, 9-5 M-F were invented. I’m not saying we should all be workaholics, far from it. The point here is that to have happiness at work, we need to stop equating work to something that we have to get out of the way in order to go do the things we enjoy.

The only way to start solving this riddle, for you and your team, is to focus hard on WHY your business exists, but more specifically, designing that WHY around the things you value and around achieving your goals in life. All of the best companies in the history of companies had clearly defined WHYs:

Apple: to make the best products on earth, and to leave the world better than we found it.

  • Google: “To provide access to the world’s information in one click”
  • IKEA:“ To create a better everyday life for the many people”
  • LinkedIn: “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce”
  • Tesla: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”

If you’re Patagonia, your purpose is to save our home planet. This WHY dictates literally every decision they make as a company, and it draws employees, customers, and other stakeholder to them. The company has used its profits to purchase lots of land around the world and turned it into nature preserves, to prevent the land from being developed. That’s a WHY that a lot of people can get out of bed for. Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard was so concerned that as he steps back from operations, the company may lose its way. His solution? He gave most of his family’s share of the company to a trust whose purpose is to use the profits of Patagonia (now a $3B company with $100M of profits annually) to fighting climate change. Yvon’s announcement on twitter said, “Hey friends, we just gave our company to planet earth”. Patagonia, and the Chouinard family’s success, was most certainly driven be the companies WHY.

At my accounting firm, helping business owners and entrepreneurs build great companies has its own rewards. We regularly attract team members who want to be a part of having a real and positive impact on our customer’s businesses and thus their families, rather than just filing their taxes. Our WHY acts as both a filter for hiring, and it plays into everything we do, including our bonus and profit share structure. Combined with our WHY, our Mission, and our Values become the boss. Our team is able to make decisions without consulting with me, because I’m not the boss, our WHY, Mission, and Values are. If a decision needs to be made, ask the Values for the answer. If there’s a reputation or financial risk, we should committee it. It is amazing when given context and direction of what the company is trying to achieve, how smart people are drawn to it, and when you allow them to be adults, how well the can execute a company’s directives. This is because their sense of WHY, their sense of purpose, aligns with those of the companies. Watching our customers businesses thrive as a result of our work is pretty rewarding and is certainly not something we need to ‘get out of the way’ so that we can get to the things we actually enjoy doing.

Here are 6 ways that your business will get way easier when you define your WHY.

  1. Planning or the future – my partners and I spend an entire day each November to decide what we want out of the coming year. It is literally impossible to plan for the future if you have no idea WHY the company exists.
  2. Measuring team performance and creating accountability. The metrics of our pay program and bonuses are all derived from our values.
  3. The way you structure your business. We are 100% cloud-based, but we love human interaction so we maintain an office, which people can chose to come to or not – because we measure people based on their outputs, not time in the chair. This is in line with our WHY and our Values.
  4. Hiring and retention: I’ve already mentioned how it make hiring easier. But you will be able to retain staff because your company is now focused on making meaning, rather than just making money. People want to work at places that make meaning, because we spent most of human existence doing just that. It’s only the last 200 years that has started to retire us. You WHY helps your team make meaning at work. This is what the best employers do.
  5. Marketing efforts get way more focused when you know WHY. Your WHY should shine through all of your marketing efforts, it will draw customers to you, like Patagonia. You were drawn to this Podcast because of our WHY. Think about it.
  6. Who you sell to will become a lot more obvious when you define your WHY, this makes the last point, Marketing, way more effective – because you know which customers you are targeting for your products and services.

I hope I given you some inspiration to nail down your companies WHY. Without it, we are all doomed to the ‘blind faith’ strategy of business (which is: work really hard and some Devine being will take care of the rest) … You can definitely make a lot of money using this strategy, many have. But as described in my podcast “who serves who”, you will never actually own the business and will have a lot harder time ever getting out of or selling it. It will own you. Most of us didn’t start a business so that we could be an employee in it.

Some great resources that you can read to help you in defining your WHY are:

  • Start with WHY by Simon Sinek, and
  • Making money is killing your business by Chuck Blakeman

Also, I host a 3to5 club on the first and third Wednesday of every month at our office in Calgary, AB and online. This is where a group of CEO / business owners get together to talk about the fundamentals of business and where we cover important topics like this every month.

 

Show Notes:
Book: Start with Why by Simon Sinek
Book: Making Money is Killing Your Business by Chuck Blakeman

To join 3to5 club in Canada, email Clayton at clayton@achenhenderson.ca