Our Purpose: Building an Intentional Company Culture
This is the first post in our series on building an intentional company culture. Next, read Our Mission.
Your purpose is one of your company's most valuable assets. While this statement may seem like hyperbole, I've personally seen the enormous impact of purpose in my own company. It's foundational to your business. Your purpose dictates and guides how your company runs and how far it will go. It's your compass, telling you what to take on and what to say no to. It gives everyone in the organization a direction to work toward. You support your purpose with a common set of values shared by you and everyone on your team. Ultimately, your purpose and your core values shape your company's culture.
Finding our purpose
It took us a number of years to find our purpose as a company. We had trouble articulating it, but it just needed to be discovered. We asked questions like "Why did we start the business?", "What do we enjoy about the business?" and "What motivates us to continue?" For us, we realized it wasn't about what we do, but how we can positively impact others.
Even after that realization, it took some time for Pat and me to work out a cohesive purpose when we owned three very different companies: a manufacturing company, a mosquito control company and a lighting installation company.
So we started answering the "why" questions of our businesses by listing what we wanted to accomplish: good stewardship, building others up, providing for our families and helping others. From there, we finally discovered our purpose statement. Everyone who works at Sterling Lighting knows it well: We practice faithful stewardship over everything that is entrusted to us, and we positively influence all those who come into contact with us. It's why we exist as an organization. It also keeps out people who don't share our vision, and it gives us a unified direction we're all committed to.
Putting purpose to work
Understanding and articulating your purpose is difficult enough, but applying it takes even more creativity and effort. We've worked hard to be intentional about living out our purpose and letting it guide how we run our business.
Our purpose gives us a yardstick to measure our decisions against. Consciously or unconsciously, we always ask ourselves: Will this decision make a positive impact on the lives of our customers, employees, family members or friends? So when we design and manufacture our luminaires, our purpose underlies our choice not to cut corners to save 15% on a product that will fail in two years. Poorly made LED fixtures that need repair work after a couple of years leave a bitter taste in your mouth. By using quality materials like marine-grade, virgin brass and proven LED technology, we can offer a product you'll feel confident installing.
When we decided how to sell our luminaires, our purpose guided our choice to sell directly to contractors instead of through distributors. That may have slowed our growth, because we had to build our brand from the ground up, but it also saves 20–30% on our luminaires, savings we pass along to you. Selling directly has also let us build stronger relationships with you, our customer.
Finally, we asked ourselves what else we could do to positively impact our customers. We wanted to help fellow small business owners with something that often gets pushed aside because of the time and money involved: marketing. Early on, we visited two of our customers in Florida, Tim Pleasant and Tim Salopek, to shoot company videos and testimonials for them, and we continue to look for ways to use our video and marketing resources to help more of our customers.
Ultimately, I believe that when we fulfill our purpose, we help your business thrive. That gives you more time and energy to positively impact the people in your own life. This is why I encourage every entrepreneur to form and embrace a purpose. Once you know your purpose, you can form your core values, which determine how you act. With purpose influencing your decisions and core values influencing your actions, you begin to form an intentional culture. You'll spend so much of your life working in your business, so why create an accidental culture that doesn't match the company you want to build? Purpose is just the first step, but it's an important one.
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About the author: Damien Sanchez is co-founder and COO of Sterling Lighting and an experienced lighting designer, trained under Patrick Harders, LC, since 2006. He's also an entrepreneur who owns a service-based business.
