What is your business for?

In growing businesses, there often comes a point where progress slows.

The company is busy.

Customers are there.

The team is working hard.

But something feels harder than it should.

Alignment takes more effort.

Decisions take longer.

Execution becomes less predictable.

At this stage, the instinct is often to look for tactical fixes: new hires, new sales approaches, new partnerships.

But in many cases, the constraint is more fundamental.

It sits beneath strategy and execution.

Clarity of purpose.

Not in a philosophical or "higher" sense.

But in a very practical one:

What is the business actually for?

For some, it's reasonable to think of business purpose as something "higher".

Often that comes from looking at it through a marketing lens.

And yet, purpose is far more practical than that.

Essential, even.

Not something to sprinkle over go-to-market messaging, but something that shapes how a business actually operates.

You see this most clearly in two situations:

When it's absent.

And when it's clear.

In one, alignment takes effort and feels fragile.

In the other, decisions move faster and work flows more easily.

Purpose touches all stakeholders.

But it's easiest to see its impact by looking at two:

One internal.

One external.

Staff

It's well understood that motivated teams want the opportunity to achieve mastery in their work. They want agency in how they work.

But they also want purpose.

Clarity on why the organisation exists binds teams together. It helps carry them through the more difficult days.

Why am I here?

It shapes how people describe their work to others. It also makes it much easier, and quicker, to align on what needs to be done.

In its absence, alignment takes more effort and becomes fragile. But something else happens too.

Teams begin to invent their own purpose. They create their own version of what the business is really trying to do.

That works for a while.

But eventually those interpretations collide with leadership, with other teams, and as new people join.

That's when friction appears.

You hear: "It's not like it used to be."

And you start to see cracks in the underlying connectivity of the business.

Partners

I have seen partner activation take weeks, sometimes months.

Multiple discussions about how commercial value might materialise. Long conversations about "mutual value alignment". In many cases these drift into good intentions that never fully materialise.

But I've also seen the opposite.

In one partner discovery conversation, activation time was effectively halved in the first meeting.

Why?

Because within the first five minutes both organisations shared their purpose.

Even though those purposes were different, they were complementary. And because both sides understood them clearly, alignment happened much faster.

Activation took a fraction of the time and cost I had seen elsewhere.

A common misconception

Another CEO conversation went down a familiar path:

"Our purpose is to reach a £X valuation and exit in two years."

I challenged that on two fronts.

First, revenue and growth are requirements, not purpose.

Second, unless staff have equity, that is your purpose, not necessarily our purpose.

Most startups begin because founders see a problem worth solving. Over time, that evolves into a clearer sense of purpose.

In the early days, that clarity is obvious. It sits at the centre of the company.

But as the business grows, and new problems and opportunities emerge, that articulation can fade into the background.

And when it does, decision consistency and operating efficiency begin to suffer.

And yet, when purpose is actively maintained, it improves the quality of decisions made across the organisation and the effectiveness of those decisions across all stakeholders.

So when I go into my next founder or CEO conversation, I'll probably still ask the question.

Not whether the business needs a higher purpose.

But something much simpler:

What is your business actually for?