How do you grow your business while making a positive impact?

When I start a new project, I always check "where is my seed? The seed of this new venture must first be well planted in fertile soil if it is to grow and flourish, right? In this case it is about having "clarity of purpose" where your heart, body and mind are aligned for what is to come: - Getting clarity on WHY you are building this new business: where is it coming from? is it a genuine care for the cause you are looking into? - Gain clarity about your vision and purpose: What is the intended impact? Why are you seeking this impact? Is your heart in it and why? ... As you gain transparency, you increase your inner coherence and alignment, which in turn strengthens your purposeful journey toward the impact you seek.

There’s no point of undertaking any giant task in this life if you don’t know why you’re doing it. Make sure you know why you’re doing it, and what you’re ultimately working towards. It will make it easier to push through the inevitable hard days that you will have at some point!

Moving on a vision is important. Strategic mastery in tactical execution may elevate team members to believe in what is possible to both grow and impact collectively. Challenges present opportunities to grow as a team as well as individually. Their are some paths that change is needed and those actions to benefit others beyond the company walls will test a great deal. I agree with this. Eventually making the positive impact from change can inspire and show what is possible.

It's important to consider how your business model is connected to your desired impact. Sometimes, a certain business model might set incentives that conflict with your non-financial ambitions. If that which creates impact also drives your company's success, your entrepreneurial journey might be somewhat easier. Otherwise, conflicting goals might create a mission drift and force you to focus on your company's economic survival. I've seen founders lose all their enthusiasm for their venture through this process - because they didn't feel like they were still doing what they originally planned to do (.e.g, helping a certain group of people).

Growing your business while making a positive impact requires a strategic alignment of your impact goals with your overall strategy. Identify key indicators that reflect your desired impact, whether it's reducing your environmental footprint or improving social responsibility. By measuring and optimizing these indicators, you not only drive positive change but also enhance your value proposition, ultimately fostering sustainable growth with a meaningful impact.

The potency of taken action to cultivate and environment that embodies the verbal purpose by the buy in of team members paves a path for growth while being mindful of impact. The intangible wealth of having heart driven leadership that embraces growth and impact with actions to back it weight the words of purpose spoken. The ability to utilize cognitive empathy and leverage logic and emotions align well to this. I agree with this wisdom shared.

I believe that growing your business while making a positive impact begins with innovation. From my perspective, innovating for impact involves adopting a mindset that generates and tests ideas addressing both business and impact challenges. This entails customer research, empathy interviews, design thinking, lean startup principles, prototyping, validation, and scaling of successful solutions. By innovating with purpose, you not only meet customer needs but also drive sustainable growth while creating a positive influence in your industry.

A thing that I often see with technical founders is that they start with a technology and then try to identify the best problem (or more precise: a specific target group with the biggest problem) to solve with it. When you've really fallen in love with a problem, you should always ask yourself: "Is the solution/technology I am using the best way to solve this?" - if the answer is "no", you might want to switch either the problem/customer group or the technology.

The nice thing is: If your impact is part of your company's core activities and not only a side-product, then communicating your impact story is nothing else than communicating your traction. If you are in the business of reducing plastic waste, saying "our customers used X tons less plastic" is both a statement of your ecological impact and and shows potential customers that other (big) companies are already working with you. A great story for multiple stakeholders and, thus, worth working on.