By Gary Moon, Managing Partner, Nfluence Partners
Sometimes businesses are about more than business. Sometimes they strive for more than revenue and ROI. Sometimes businesses emphasize purpose as well as profit, and generally doing good.
These are the businesses that cultivate greater trust among stakeholders, deeper customer understanding, and higher employee engagement. They are the businesses that understand innovation, drive change, and create real value.
Not coincidentally, they also happen to be the businesses that thrive.
Over the years entities that take this approach have adopted different monikers. Mission aligned. Purpose-driven. Conscious. Whatever they call themselves, at a time when a growing number of companies are doubling-down on a push for profitability above all else, businesses that prioritize purpose are more important than ever before.
This is precisely why Nfluence Partners is co-hosting the Mission Aligned Growth Summit at the Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel in San Francisco Nov. 14.
The summit will bring together a select group of founders, CEOs, investors and thought leaders for a series of intimate conversations about the often-competing priorities of focusing on a higher purpose and navigating a traditionally profit-centric capital markets system. Together, we’ll examine different perspectives on balancing mission and returns, and will dive into the art (and science) of focusing on both simultaneously. We’ll look at issues such as conscious M&A, managing a cap table with investors that have different priorities, and family offices and foundations as a source of capital. We’ll even discuss strategies for measuring how well mission-aligned businesses manage to stick to their missions.
We aren’t going at this alone. Our co-host, Conscious Capitalism, Inc., is a nonprofit that promotes businesses which have a broader stakeholder orientation: serving the interests of communities, customers, employees, suppliers and the environment, as well as investors. At our upcoming summit, we’ll spend the greatest amount of time on balancing the profit maximization and financial return model with this stakeholder view, delving into how a company can focus on its whole business ecosystem, optimize value for all stakeholders, and inspire engaged stakeholders that lead to a healthy, sustainable, resilient entity.
Ultimately, with this summit and with subsequent gatherings, we aim to curate a learning community interested in topics at the intersection of purpose-driven business and transactional corporate finance. We seek to build this community around conscious leaders who are driven by service to purpose, people, and this planet we call home. We want to include representatives from businesses that prioritize cultures of passion, personal growth and professional fulfillment but also realize that financial success is the engine that enables this worldview to have greater impact. To paraphrase the “Conscious Capitalist Credo,” we wish to align with leaders who endeavor to create financial, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical, and ecological wealth for all stakeholders. Professionals who self-identify as conscious but are not necessarily experts in capital markets—we hope they’ll join us, too.
At Nfluence, our mission is to help good people with great businesses thrive. Embracing mission aligned principles is a big part of this approach. We’re always excited to think critically about the ins and outs of prioritizing both profits and purpose. We look forward to expanding the conversation.