Business Purpose #1: Meets the needs of our families

Business Purpose #1: Meet the needs of our families.

This seems like a pretty basic purpose and it really isn't that earth shattering, but I think it is important to state and set goals around what that will mean for us in the coming year. If we cannot meet the needs or our own families through our business or don't have a plan to get the business to a place where it can support us, then we probably should reconsider whether we should even be in this business. 

We believe it is vitally important that we build our salaries into the financial model and pay ourselves on a regular salary schedule so we can take care of our families. There may be times where we need to pay ourselves less for a while due to the nature of a startup, but our goal should be to get to a point where we are drawing a regular salary.

I've met people who don't have their own salaries built into their financial models or don't have any sort of idea what they should be paying themselves. This is very unhealthy for businesses as it creates a false financial picture and reality of their business.  It is a very healthy practice to pay yourself a salary no matter how much it is starting out. It could be $50 a week or $5,000 a month, but either way you should build it into your model even when you are starting out.

It's also demoralizing to work on something and not reap any sort of financial reward. It's human nature to want to be see the fruits of our labor and financial reward is a big piece of that. We want to make sure that we aren't robbing ourselves of that psychological encouragement as we ramp up the business. There are enough challenges and hard work ahead of us with this start up and we want all of the encouragement we can get, even if they are small victories starting out.

What's the purpose of your business?

What's the purpose of your business?

This is a question that I started exploring much more intently while living in Malawi, Africa in 2009-2010. Living in Africa causes one to return to the basics of living and surviving, which is why this question emerged for me. Business in Africa for most people is a simple means of survival. Buy $1 worth of tomatoes, sell them for $2 and feed my family the next day off of the $1 of profit. This simplistic view of business was one of the factors the led me to rethink my entire paradigm of business. (I could probably write a whole book about my business learnings in Africa, but I'll keep it brief for now.) I began reading, networking and exploring a new paradigm for the objectives of business. This learning continued as I returned back to the US the summer of 2010, but I didn't have a very practical way for it to be applied until the summer last year when I started my own business.

As I've moved down the path of starting my own business, I've been blessed to have people around me that have served as advisers and offered up their experience from which I could learn. As I've sought out advice from these people the question, "what's your business' purpose(s) or objective(s)?" has continued to surface. A few things that I've learned about the purpose of business:

• I've learned that if I/you can't answer this question (or aren't seeking the answers to this question), then we probably shouldn't be running our own business/organization.
• I've learned that if making money is my/your only objective for our business, then we will never be satisfied with our business endeavors.

So over the last few months my business partner and I have developed the purposes of Torrent Consulting and in the coming blog posts I will share these purposes. They aren't über polished or word-smithed very intensely, but I'll share them and maybe you'll find them helpful.