Our mission

In a lecture at a leading Business School I once began by asking three questions:

1. How many of you want to work in Business? - All hands go up

2. How many of you want to do good? - All hands go up

3. How many of you think businesses are good? - Maybe two hands.....

And here highlights the issue... some of brightest minds, with the most opportunities are already subconsciously making choices between their own financial security and doing good because no one is telling them or showing them that the two are possible together.

And so imagine what it’s like in our classrooms, our customers lives, our communities…and our boardrooms.

80% of business leaders think that purpose is central to business success and yet only 1/3 have a purpose that is even a guidepost for decision making. The opportunity to change is huge, with 82% of the worlds resources held in corporations.

The challenge is knowing where to start, how to make it central to your organisation and how to embed in a way that creates engagement, opportunities, innovation and ultimately success.

This is where Build on Purpose comes in. We bring over a decade of experience from working inside successful purpose led businesses. We have led $500m+ gritty divisions, created new purpose led brands and business models, scaled up a number of B-corps & worked with educators and leaders to build lasting capabilities.

We can work together to make business unusual, usual and therefore create opportunities for anyone to do great by doing good.

Our principles

Purpose at the start

Not just “part” of what you do or built in the silos of a brand team, campaign or CSR team. Not just the 10% of your budget spent on a cause related program. Not at odds with what you deliver everyday.

To succeed purpose has to be embedded in everything you do in order to drive the right focus, opportunities, alignment and engagement - but also to ensure the right collaboration to get there.

We work with all functions to put purpose at the heart of companies, not just brands and we know that in an age of transparency that if “you’re going to be naked, you better be buff”.

Combinary Thinking

Purpose and profit are often seen as binary and so we need to think differently to see them as amplifiers of each other. We don’t like the word “balance” as it suggests compromise between the two

To change systems/models you need to find ways of creating bold, scary, seemingly impossible ambitions together with the real expertise and awareness of all the building blocks and hurdles that exist today and stand in the way of making it possible.

We welcome the dreamers and the realists as we know that we need both to work together to get it done.

Connect the Dots

We are Engineers meets marketers, we love understanding how things work, how systems come together and see a broad perspective as essential to make large scale sustainable change - especially in a multi-stakeholder model.

We want to get to know you, your people, your consumers and their worlds in order to truly find solutions and opportunities that work for you.

We don’t want to be consultants that drop by, we work on trust, connection and have real skin in the game.

Unashamedly Commercial

In order to break the binary relationship between purpose and profit, commercial success can not be seen or spoken about as a bad thing. In fact quite the opposite, if we can correlate the two we can make business unusual, usual much quicker.

We would love a society where the people who do the best for those in the world are also the best paid and where opportunity is spread more widely.

We know from working with both Social Enterprises and Blue Chip companies that in order to make an impact, solutions must be commercially sustainable.

Passionately Human

We are all people that live and work with other people. Too often labels are put on employees and consumers (see there’s two right there) that stop us having real empathy into their lives beyond the context we are exploring. We have seen how passionate, purpose led people can make change when the right conditions are created.

We know that to change human behaviour we have to understand peoples whole lives not just how they engage with your products, services or categories.

We know that to change a business purpose has to live in a way that everyone can access it and play a role.

Consistently Brave

Bravery is different to risky. Bravery means having the conviction to take the highroad, to create the future vs. following the herd and to stand by that even when times get tough.

We love to work with brave leaders, individuals, investors and companies that are wanting and willing to take a long term view and build things that will truly make a difference.

We know that sometimes to be brave, it helps if the house is in order and so we can help there too ;)