Profit vs Purpose

The Tension

I don’t usually do this, but I wanted to write today’s newsletter as preparation for a keynote I have coming up. The key concept of the keynote is the tension between building a profitable business and a purposeful one.

When I get introduced on stage, people naturally share my highlight reel from receiving an MBE to investing in 17 gap-closing companies or training 1,000+ new angel investors and so on. All true, but there is more value in my distance travelled rather than the shiny destination it looks like I’ve arrived at.

So when I was asked to talk about profit vs purpose, it got me thinking.

Framed that way, it would suggest a tension between the two, which is not necessarily true. To challenge this, we must first explore the obstacles an entrepreneur faces when trying to build a business.

Business Building

My first ever business was a spin-out of a university project. It was called Saffirm and my friends Abdul and Denis designed employability workshops shaped around entrepreneurial skills. It was a purposeful business where we wanted to help graduates understand their value and employability skills so that they could land the roles they desired.

The business didn’t reach a profitable status by the time we shut it down. We ended the business because we lacked confidence and felt like impostors selling these services, even though we hadn’t worked in a professional job ourselves.

At that time, I felt an entrepreneur needed to have lived experience in the product or service they provided. Since then, I’ve realised that it is a fallacy as Mark Zuckerberg, Melanie Perkins (Canva) and dozens of other entrepreneurs achieved great things when doing it for the first time.

Value: Play YOUR long game.

I built a second business 17 years ago, a music discovery platform called Mixtape Madness (my brother and friends still run it today). We built that business off the back of scratching our own itch to build a central location online to discover and consume the UK music we loved.

That business became profitable, but I left the business before it achieved that milestone. I left because my day job as a management consultant enabled me to travel the world and fall in love with entrepreneurship, which impacted how I felt about the business I was no longer in love with.

I had to feed my curiosity and operate at the edge of my comfort zone to be stretched and grow. Staying would have been too comfortable.

Value: Feed your curiosity

Overcoming Adversity

My biggest challenges and obstacles in life were not in my career or businesses that I had built. It was in experiencing the loss of my life mentor, guide and friend….my father.

I was 25 at the time and so confused, upset, angry and quite lost in all honesty. I had a new job that I started not long after my loss, and I had a manager who I felt didn’t see me or value me so I never shared what I was going through. That manager ended up cutting our ties and letting me go at the end of my probation period without any feedback during those three months.

I was back to square one and felt like I needed to get my life back together, so I focused on first principles and returned to management consulting. I joined an entrepreneurial small challenger consultancy called Elixirr.

It was the first interview in my life where I said to myself f**** it, I am going to be 100% my most authentic self. I decided life is too short to be a restricted version of myself. I add the most value when I am a full expression of myself.

Value: Be a full expression of myself

Values-driven business

Before you start a business, you do research on things like how to register a business, finding a domain name and social media handles, finding your first customers, competitors in the market and the list goes on.

How do you find your personal values?

You have to treat it with the same level of rigour and do research about yourself. Answering key questions like:

• What brings me energy?

• What drains my energy?

• What are the things that frustrate me?

• What do I care deeply about?

• What are my non-negotiables?

• What brings me fulfilment?

• What makes me feel most alive?

These are not typically the questions you can answer off the top of your head, it requires introsopection and reflection. In other words, time alone.

My life hack has been my tracker (journal), which has allowed me to connect the dots and surface how my values keep showing up in my decisions, businesses and life.

The Angel Investing School was the first business that I built intentionally with my personal values.

Play the long game became a mantra to guide new angel investors to focus on building a portfolio rather than a single investment.

Seek first to understand was a guiding principle for angel investors to be curious about founders, their context and why they were building their businesses.

Adding value beyond capital was all about writing the cheque, writing it off and going to work as an extension of the startup you are backing as an angel. Adding a lot more value than the money you invest. Put simply, be helpful.

Purpose, Profit and Values

Whether your business succeeds or fails, you can hold your head up high when you know that you have stayed true to your values. Throughout life, I’ve realised that people really respect you when you stick to your values. Even if it means saying no to a lucrative deal or firing a high performer who is toxic to company culture.

Values live on long after the profits fade away.

The sad reality is that purpose is not enough. It is what gets you started, it’s what keeps you going, but it may not result in profit. But who you are matters more than what you do.

When I walk on stage later this week, someone will read out the highlight reel again. The MBE. The 17 companies. The 1,000 angels.

None of that is the talk.

The talk is this: profit versus purpose is a false choice. The thread running through every business I’ve built, the ones that failed and the ones that didn’t, was never profit or purpose. It was whether I stayed true to my values along the way.

Purpose is not enough. Profit is not enough. Values are what’s left when both are tested.

That’s the distance travelled. Not the destination.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim

PS. you can register here for the event: https://luma.com/xs2aq6ar