For example, a business can evolve from, say, a beer stand, to a food chain, to hotels and to whatever in the 21st century and still follow its fundamental purpose of:

‘Making people away from home feel that they are amongst friends and feel wanted.’

Or consider what you could be offering to your end user with this purpose underpinning it:

‘Serve the community by providing products and services of the highest quality at a fair price.’
Disney can evolve from small cartoons to full length animated movies, to the Mickey Mouse Club, to Disneyland, to Box Office hits, to Eurodisney and then to its own streaming channel. Who knows what Disney will evolve to in the coming years, but it will never outgrow its core task of ‘bringing happiness to millions.’

A company that has vision can and usually does evolve into exciting new business areas yet remain guided by its core purpose.

In writing a purpose for your business don’t fall into the trap of writing a particular description of your product lines or services – for example what a terrible purpose statement ‘we exist to make cartoons for kids’ would have been for Disney all of those years ago. How would that have been the ‘guiding star’ that will never be reached and take them through the exciting evolution we described above?

Try this as a method of getting to your purpose – ask yourself the question ‘why not just shut this business down, cash out and sell the assets?’ – and push for the answer that will not only be valid now but also for a long, long time in the future. We at Tinderbox have a clear why, a clear purpose of believing that ‘every business should have the chance to be successful or more successful.’ We know we will never reach our ‘guiding star’ as we will never reach all of the businesses we could help, but it provides a wonderful motivator for our team going forward.

Think about why your business exists, define your purpose and share it with your people – by doing this you form a solid foundation for your existence and can build, grow and change/pivot but always with your purpose in mind – this is the way to success and profits will follow.