This is where things can become uncomfortable. We can talk passionately about purpose, impact, and doing business differently, but a business still needs money to survive. It needs to pay people, cover its costs, invest in its future, and be resilient enough to weather difficult periods.
For me, this is where the conversation about values-led business becomes much more interesting. Purpose and profit are often presented as opposing forces, as though choosing one means compromising the other. But what if the real challenge is learning how to make them work together?
If you’re building a business because you want to contribute something positive to the world, financial sustainability matters enormously. Without it, the purpose that motivated you to start the business can become impossible to fulfil.
Purpose needs financial foundations
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between purpose and profit, including during my PhD research. One of the things I’ve come to understand is that profit is a resource. It gives a business the capacity to do things that would otherwise be impossible.
That can mean employing someone, developing a new service, paying suppliers properly, investing in better systems, taking time to think strategically, or having enough breathing space to make decisions based on your values rather than immediate financial pressure.
When money is constantly tight, your choices become narrower. You may take work you know isn’t right for you because you need the income or accept a contract that puts unreasonable demands on your team. You might say yes to funding that pulls you away from your original mission or continue to offer something that isn’t financially viable because you’re emotionally attached to it.
This is where purpose without commercial discipline can become fragile. I’ve seen people assume that because they’re doing something good, the financial side will somehow take care of itself. But being pro-social doesn’t protect a business from poor cash flow, weak pricing, unsustainable contracts, or rising costs. In fact, the more you care about your purpose, the more important it becomes to understand the financial realities of making it happen.
Commercial discipline starts with knowing your numbers. How much is coming in? How much is going out? What does it actually cost to deliver what you offer? If you take on another person, activity, or membership, what does that add to your overheads? How many sales do you need to cover those costs?
Knowing the answer to these questions gives you information and information allows you to make choices.
When you have money coming into the business and understand where you stand financially, you have more capacity to make decisions according to your values rather than commercial necessity. That can make it easier to say no to the wrong opportunity and yes to the right one.
Values have to survive contact with reality
Having values written on your website is easy. Making decisions according to those values when doing so might cost you money is much harder. That’s where you find out whether your values are genuinely embedded in the business. If you say you value wellbeing, what happens when an important client wants something urgently and delivering it will put your team under unnecessary pressure?
If you say you value fairness, how does that affect your pricing?
If you care about sustainability, where do you source your products and how do you use resources?
If relationships matter to you, what happens when you make a mistake?
These decisions can look small from the outside, but they are where a business’s values become visible. This might look like checking in with someone who has just joined your team, apologising when something hasn’t gone right, thinking carefully about whether a partnership is actually right for both sides, or taking the time to understand the consequences of a decision before rushing ahead.
The same applies to difficult commercial choices. I’ve experienced situations where the commercially easiest option didn’t sit comfortably with my values. Those experiences taught me that being values-led can make business decisions more difficult, because your values give you more to consider.
Sometimes the right decision is to say no to an opportunity. That can feel counterintuitive when we live in a culture that encourages us to pursue every possible avenue for growth. But growth at any cost isn’t necessarily success. If a funding opportunity creates mission drift, for example, receiving the money may leave you further away from the reason you started the business in the first place.
Sometimes the answer is to change the way you work. At other times, it may mean accepting that something will take longer than you hoped or bringing other people into the team because you recognise that you don’t have every strength or skill yourself.
The important thing is that the decision is conscious. Commercial pressure will always exist. The question is whether you allow that pressure to make your decisions for you, or whether you understand your values well enough to make those decisions intentionally.
I’ve been thinking about this recently in relation to AI. Like many businesses, we can see the potential benefits. It can save time and help us work differently. But there are ethical and environmental questions too, and I realised I didn’t know enough to make informed decisions about how we should use it.
So I attended a university webinar on developing an AI strategy, including some of the ethical and environmental considerations. That led me to recognise that we need a proper AI strategy within the business, and that we need to talk about how we use AI as a team.
One of the questions I want us to keep asking is: what are we doing with the time we save? Are we using it to protect our health and wellbeing? Are we using it to develop products and services that genuinely help people? If we’re consuming the resources required to use these technologies, what is the justification?
That is what values-led decision-making looks like to me. It means being willing to stop, question your assumptions, and think about the wider consequences of what you’re doing. And when you get something wrong, learn from it.
Values-led businesses are run by human beings so mistakes will happen. What matters is whether you create a culture where people can acknowledge them, learn from them, and put better systems in place.
Sustainable growth means building something that can last
Another misconception I think we need to challenge is that values somehow constrain growth. Clear values can actually give a business greater clarity about the kind of growth it wants.
Right now, there are people interested in working with us, and that means I have to think carefully about who we bring into the business and which relationships are right for us. Which relationships and collaborations make sense? What kind of people do we want to attract? Which opportunities will strengthen what we’re building, and which might pull us in directions we don’t want to go? That’s very different from, “How can we grow as quickly as possible?”
I’m much more interested in healthy, sustainable growth. Growth that strengthens the business rather than undermining it, that creates capacity rather than exhausting the people within it, and that allows us to increase our impact while remaining true to what we stand for. That requires leadership.
The founder has an important role because people pay attention to what leaders do far more than what they say. But as a business grows, values cannot depend entirely on the founder’s personal judgement.
Leaders have strengths and weaknesses. I know, for example, that proofreading and the ‘details stuff’ are not my strengths as a bigger picture person. A sustainable business needs different people with different capabilities, and it needs systems and processes that help those people work well together.
That means thinking about values in recruitment, pay, decision-making, policies, culture and everyday working practices. Values need to become part of how the business operates. Leadership starts the process, but systems help it endure.
There’s a reason this matters beyond individual businesses. Businesses are part of the communities and systems in which they operate. They employ people, buy from other businesses, provide products and services, use resources, and influence the people around them.
We can’t separate business from the wider social and environmental challenges we’re facing. Growing inequality, climate change and economic uncertainty are not abstract issues that exist somewhere outside the business world. They affect our employees, customers, communities, and supply chains. The decisions businesses make contribute to the systems we all live within.
That’s why I keep coming back to the idea of interbeing: the recognition that we are deeply connected to other people and to the wider world around us. For me, this is ultimately what sustainable, values-led business is about.
Know your numbers, know your values, and know your customers. Understand the relationships that create genuine impact. Pay attention to the consequences of your decisions. And keep asking yourself whether the way you are making money is consistent with the kind of world you want to contribute to.
The question isn’t whether you should choose purpose or profit. The question is how can you create profit in a way that is genuinely good for people, society, and the planet?
I believe that is one of the defining questions for business in this generation. Because we need businesses that can survive financially and we also need businesses that are worth sustaining.
Maureen O’Callaghan is an expert in prosocial entrepreneurship, ethical leadership and sustainable business. As the founder of Beyond Money Education and Training CIC, her mission is to help business owners and those who support and educate them build sustainable, successful businesses that have a positive impact on people and the planet.
