Profit Is Fuel, Not the Destination

There’s a sentence I hear from business owners all the time:

“At the end of the day, we’re in business to make money.”

And I understand it.

You have payroll. Taxes. Insurance. Vendors. Equipment. Debt. A mortgage. Maybe a family depending on you.

You didn’t start a nonprofit.

So when someone starts talking about “purpose,” “stakeholders,” or business as a force for good, it can sound like something reserved for Patagonia-sized companies with healthy margins and a whole department dedicated to sustainability.

I think that misses the point.

And I’d challenge the premise behind the original sentence.

You need to make money to stay in business. But does that mean making money is why your business exists?

Those are two very different things.

The first is a condition. The second is a purpose. Confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes I’ve watched small and midsized companies make — not because it’s wrong in some moral sense, but because it quietly caps what the business is allowed to become.

Profit matters. A lot.

Nothing here requires pretending economics don’t matter.

A company that keeps losing money eventually loses its ability to employ people, serve customers, support vendors, invest in its community or accomplish anything else it cares about.

Profit creates resilience.

Profit gives you the ability to hire another person, improve a product, survive a downturn, invest in innovation, reward employees and take risks.

So this isn’t an argument against profit.

It’s an argument about the role profit plays.

Think about oxygen.

You absolutely need oxygen to live. But very few people would say the purpose of their life is to breathe.

Profit works much the same way.

It is essential.

It just doesn’t have to be the destination.

Two models, one question

If you’ve heard “stakeholder capitalism” and “conscious capitalism” used interchangeably, you’re not alone. They overlap. But they answer different questions, and the difference matters more for a company with fifteen employees than it does for one with fifteen thousand.

Start with what they both push against.

In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote in The New York Times Magazine that business has “one and only one social responsibility — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”¹ That sentence became the operating system of American business for fifty years. Shareholders own the company. Managers serve the shareholders. Everyone else is a means to that end.

Stakeholder capitalism is the answer to Friedman.

It has an academic root — R. Edward Freeman’s 1984 book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, which argued that a company is accountable to every group that affects it or is affected by it, not just its owners.² And it has a Davos root. Klaus Schwab first described corporations as “trustees of society” in 1971, wrote the idea into the World Economic Forum’s first Davos Manifesto in 1973, and reissued it in 2020.³

It went mainstream in August 2019, when 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable — Amazon, Apple, GM, JPMorgan — signed a Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation committing to deliver value to customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders. “Each of our stakeholders is essential.”⁴

So stakeholder capitalism is fundamentally a question of accountability. Whom does the business serve? It’s a governance answer. It lives in boardrooms, policy debates and ESG reports.

Conscious capitalism starts somewhere else.

The term was popularized by Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey and professor Raj Sisodia in their 2013 book, and by the nonprofit that grew up around it. It rests on four interconnected ideas: Higher Purpose, Stakeholder Orientation, Conscious Leadership and Conscious Culture.⁵

Notice where stakeholders sit in that list. Second.

That isn’t an accident. In conscious capitalism the first question isn’t whom do we serve? It’s why do we exist? Purpose comes first. Stakeholder orientation, leadership and culture are how the purpose gets carried out. And the movement is blunt about where profit fits: “profit as a necessary means to achieving your purpose — not as an end in and of itself.”⁵

Here’s the distinction in one line:

Stakeholder capitalism tells you who to serve. Conscious capitalism tells you why.

And here’s why that matters if you run a founder-led company.

Stakeholder capitalism, as it’s actually practiced, is mostly a big-company conversation. It’s a public statement, a board policy, a reporting framework. It can be adopted without anyone inside the company believing anything.

That’s not cynicism. That’s the record.

When two Harvard Law researchers contacted the Business Roundtable signatories to ask whether their boards had approved the 2019 statement, 48 companies answered. One said yes. The other 47 said the CEO signed it without board approval — which, the authors concluded, meant the CEOs didn’t see it as requiring “a major change in how their companies treat stakeholders.”⁶

Conscious capitalism can’t be adopted that way. You can’t sign a purpose. You have to have one, and then run the company through it.

Which is exactly why it’s the version that belongs to small and midsized businesses.

Nobody’s making you file a report. Nobody’s asking for a pledge. You get to decide why the company exists, and then you get to act like it — in every hiring decision, every pricing decision, every vendor call. The stakeholder part takes care of itself when the purpose is real.

Where B Corp certification fits

If conscious capitalism is the philosophy and stakeholder capitalism is the accountability, B Corp certification is the proof layer: a third party verifying that a company actually does what it says.

It’s not fringe anymore. As of mid-2026 there are more than 10,800 Certified B Corporations across 102 countries and 163 industries, employing over a million people.⁷ Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s and King Arthur Baking are the famous ones. The majority are small, privately owned businesses you’ve never heard of.⁸

And in 2025, B Lab retired its old 80-point scorecard in favor of mandatory minimum standards across seven impact topics — the first of which is Purpose & Stakeholder Governance.⁹ In other words, the certification now requires both models: a stated purpose, and the governance to serve the people the purpose touches.

Does it pay? The cleanest data I’ve found comes from the UK, where B Lab compared small and midsized B Corps to the national average between 2023 and 2024. B Corps grew revenue 23.2% versus 16.8%. They grew headcount 9.6% while the national average shrank 0.5%.¹⁰

One caution, because I’d rather you hear it from me.

In early 2025, Dr. Bronner’s — for years the highest-scoring B Corp in the world — gave up its certification. Its argument was that B Lab had certified multinationals like Nespresso and Unilever Australia without holding their supply chains to the same standard. “The integrity of the B Corp Certification has become compromised,” the company wrote, “and remaining certified now contradicts our mission.”¹¹

Read that carefully. A company walked away from the badge to protect the purpose.

That’s the whole point. Certification is evidence of purpose. It was never a substitute for one.

Start with a harder question

What would disappear if your company disappeared?

Not your revenue. Not your building. Not your products.

What would your customers, employees or community actually lose?

That question tends to expose the difference between what a company sells and why it matters.

A landscaping company sells lawn care. What it really creates is pride in people’s homes and more time for families to enjoy them.

A financial advisor manages money. The real business is helping people feel confident about their future.

A restaurant sells food. But it may exist to create a neighborhood gathering place where relationships happen.

A manufacturer makes components. Its deeper purpose might be helping customers build safer, more reliable products while providing stable careers for generations of local families.

None of those purposes require sacrificing profitability.

Quite the opposite.

They give profitability somewhere to go.

This is where purpose stops being marketing

Businesses get this backward all the time.

They start with the question: “What cause should our brand support?”

Somebody picks a charity, adds a sustainability page to the website and starts talking about “giving back.”

Those things can be worthwhile. They aren’t conscious capitalism. And customers can tell the difference.

Unilever learned this expensively. In 2022, one of its largest shareholders publicly mocked the company for deciding Hellmann’s mayonnaise needed a purpose: “A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot … consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert — salads and sandwiches).”¹² By late 2023, Unilever’s new CEO had conceded the point: “I don’t think we advance the cause of purpose by force fitting it across every brand.”¹³

The lesson isn’t that purpose failed. It’s that purpose bolted onto a product from the outside was never purpose. It was a campaign.

Real purpose doesn’t get bolted on. It influences the decisions inside the business.

Who do we hire?

How do we treat people when business gets difficult?

What promises do we make customers?

How do we price?

Which opportunities do we pursue?

Which do we turn down?

What kind of suppliers do we want to work with?

What behavior do we reward?

What happens when doing the right thing costs us something in the short term?

That’s where purpose becomes real.

And I’d argue it’s easier at forty employees than at forty thousand.

Zingerman’s, the deli in Ann Arbor, wrote a vision in 1994 that committed its founders to something almost no food business with their reputation would choose: staying home. No franchising. No replicating the deli in other cities. Instead they’d build a community of distinct businesses in one town, run with open books so every employee could read the financials. Thirty years later that’s ten businesses, more than 800 employees and over $80 million in annual revenue — all still in Ann Arbor. And when the 2008 recession hit, it was employees who understood the numbers who proposed the reduced hours and pay cuts themselves.¹⁴¹⁵

That’s not a cause the brand supports. That’s the operating system.

Then comes the uncomfortable part: stakeholders

The profit-first model turns business into a hierarchy.

Ownership sits at the top. Everyone else becomes an input.

Employees become labor costs.

Vendors become expenses to negotiate downward.

Customers become transactions.

Communities become markets.

The environment becomes a resource.

Conscious capitalism asks us to see something closer to an ecosystem. Customers, employees, suppliers, owners, investors and communities are interdependent. Healthy businesses create value with and for those groups, rather than assuming one has to lose for another to win.

That doesn’t mean everyone gets everything they want.

It means leadership stops defaulting to zero-sum thinking.

Instead of asking “How do we extract the most value from this relationship?” we start asking “How do we create enough value that this relationship gets stronger over time?”

That isn’t just morally attractive. It’s often strategically superior, and the companies that run this way tend to have the numbers to prove it.

Dr. Bronner’s caps executive pay at five times its lowest-paid fully vested position, starts full-time employees at $27.28 an hour, and has given more than $100 million to charitable and activist causes since 1998. It also did $209.8 million in revenue in 2024.¹⁶ The constraints and the growth aren’t in tension. The constraints are a big part of why people trust the label.

Now the honest caveat, because a strong argument should survive its counterexamples.

Kip Tindell co-founded The Container Store, sits on the board of Conscious Capitalism, Inc., and wrote a book whose subtitle is literally How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives.¹⁷ In December 2024, The Container Store filed for Chapter 11 with roughly $230 million in debt, squeezed by big-box competitors and a post-pandemic slowdown in consumer spending.¹⁸

Purpose is not a moat against bad math. It never was. Which is exactly the argument of this piece: profit is the fuel. Run out and the purpose dies with the company. A conscious business still has to be a good business.

But here’s what the profit-first crowd misses.

Employees who believe in what they’re building behave differently.

Customers who trust a company behave differently.

Vendors who see themselves as partners behave differently.

Communities that want a business to succeed behave differently.

And businesses built on those relationships are much harder to commoditize.

The buyer already changed

Here’s the part I’d push hardest if you’re still skeptical.

You don’t have to take the moral argument. Take the market one.

Somewhere in the last fifteen years, products got cheap, convenient, available everywhere and largely interchangeable. Competing on price or location or convenience collapsed into coupon noise. Everyone’s ten percent off. Nobody’s different.

So buyers moved the goalposts.

Trust is now a purchase criterion on par with price and quality. In Edelman’s 2023 brand trust study, 88% of consumers said trust is an important factor in a buying decision — right alongside value for money (91%) and quality (89%). Seventy-one percent said trusting a brand matters more today than it did in the past. Among Gen Z, 79%.¹⁹

Buyers are choosing on belief. By 2025, 64% of people said they choose brands based on their beliefs, up four points in a single year.²⁰

It shows up in sales, not just surveys. McKinsey and NielsenIQ tracked five years of actual retail data — 600,000 products, $400 billion in annual sales — and found that products making environmental or social claims grew 28% cumulatively versus 20% for products that made none. And here’s the line small-business owners should underline: small brands making those claims outperformed their peers in 59% of categories.²¹

They’ll pay for it. PwC’s 2024 survey of more than 20,000 consumers across 31 countries found people willing to pay an average 9.7% premium for sustainably produced goods — even as inflation topped their list of economic worries.²²

And purpose compounds. Zeno Group’s study of 8,000 consumers across eight countries found that when people believe a company has a strong purpose, they’re four times more likely to buy from it, 4.5 times more likely to recommend it, and six times more likely to defend it after a misstep.²³

Now the objection, because you’ve probably already thought of it.

People say one thing and do another. In one widely cited study, 65% of consumers said they want to buy from purpose-driven brands, but only about 26% actually did.²⁴

That gap is real. I’d argue it’s the most important number in this article — and it argues for my case, not against it.

Look at the Zeno numbers again. Ninety-four percent of consumers say it’s important that companies have a strong purpose. Only 37% believe companies actually do.²³ The gap between saying and buying isn’t proof that buyers don’t care. It’s proof that most companies haven’t given them anything credible to buy. When purpose is a page on the website, buyers discount it — correctly. When purpose is in the product, the pricing, the service and the people, the gap closes.

That isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a business problem that shows up in marketing.

One more shift, and it’s the one that should make small-business owners smile. Edelman’s 2025 report describes a move “from We to Me.” Buyers are less impressed by grand global gestures and more moved by brands that show up in their own lives, their own community, their own daily decisions.²⁰

Nobody is closer to that than a local, founder-led business.

The giants have to manufacture proximity. You already have it.

Better decisions make better stories

This should matter enormously to marketers — and to anyone who signs off on a marketing budget.

Most companies say they want a stronger brand. But brands don’t become meaningful because we found better adjectives. They become meaningful when there is something meaningful underneath them.

You can spend thousands building a beautiful brand around “people first,” but if employees feel disposable, the market eventually notices.

You can advertise “customer obsession,” but if every internal decision favors this quarter’s margin over the customer’s long-term trust, the positioning collapses.

You can manufacture a purpose statement.

You cannot manufacture a purpose-driven company.

Which means the most valuable marketing asset a business can own isn’t a campaign. It’s a decision worth talking about.

In 2015, REI closed every store on Black Friday and paid its employees to go outside instead. That was a business decision — a costly one, on the biggest retail day of the year — made because the co-op exists to get people outdoors. It also became the story of the year. More than 1.4 million people pledged to #OptOutside, 175 organizations joined in, the co-op added over a million new members and revenue grew 9.3% to $2.4 billion.²⁵

In 2022, Yvon Chouinard gave Patagonia away — 98% of the company to a nonprofit that receives every dollar not reinvested in the business, an expected $100 million a year, for climate work. “Earth is now our only shareholder.”²⁶ Patagonia didn’t need a campaign that year. The decision was the campaign.

Neither of those started in a marketing meeting. They started with a company that knew why it existed, made a decision consistent with it, and then told the truth about what it had done.

That’s the chain:

Purpose → leadership → culture → behavior → customer experience → reputation → brand.

Marketing’s job in a company like that isn’t to invent meaning. It’s to reveal it. To find the decisions already being made for the right reasons and make sure people hear about them.

That’s a dramatically more powerful job. It’s also an easier one. Better business practices produce better stories. Better stories produce messaging nobody can copy — because a competitor can match your price, your location and your ad budget, but they can’t match what you actually believe and actually do.

So here’s my challenge

If you own or lead a business, don’t stop caring about profit.

Become excellent at generating it.

But ask yourself whether you’ve accidentally turned the scoreboard into the game.

Imagine making a decision because it’s simultaneously good for the customer, good for employees, good for the company and good for the community — and then using creativity to figure out the economics that make it sustainable.

Imagine employees understanding not only what they do, but what they are collectively trying to accomplish.

Imagine customers choosing your company not because you’re cheaper or closer, but because they trust what you stand for.

Imagine growth creating more positive impact rather than forcing you to choose between success and values.

That isn’t charity.

It isn’t corporate virtue signaling.

And it isn’t “doing good” with some portion of the money after the real work of business is finished.

That is the business.

And for small and midsized businesses, I think this idea is more powerful than it is for giant corporations.

You don’t need 181 CEOs to sign a statement. You don’t need a board vote that never happens.

You can decide what kind of company you want to build.

You can decide what winning means.

You can decide which relationships matter.

You can decide what your growth will create.

And you can begin tomorrow.

So yes — make a profit.

Make a healthy one.

Make enough to invest, grow, reward people, take risks and build something that lasts.

Then ask the much more interesting question:

What can this business accomplish because it is profitable?

Because profit can be the product of a remarkable business.

It just doesn’t have to be the purpose of one.

Sources

1. Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Quoted via Law & Liberty, “What Milton Friedman Really Said”.
2. R. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Pitman, 1984). Overview: Wikipedia, “Stakeholder approach”.
3. Klaus Schwab, “Why we need the ‘Davos Manifesto’ for a better kind of capitalism,” World Economic Forum, December 2019.
4. Business Roundtable, “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” August 19, 2019; signatory count via HBR, “181 Top CEOs Have Realized Companies Need a Purpose Beyond Profit”.
5. Conscious Capitalism, Inc., “Our Philosophy” and “Why Consciousness Is the Key”; John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).
6. Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, “Was the Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Purpose Mostly for Show? (1) Evidence from Lack of Board Approval,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, August 2020.
7. B Lab, “Companies Achieve B Corp Certification Under New Global Standards,” June 16, 2026.
8. B Lab U.S. & Canada, FAQ (“The majority of B Corps are small, privately owned businesses”).
9. B Lab, “B Lab publishes new B Corp standards, raising the bar for businesses worldwide,” April 8, 2025.
10. B Lab UK, “B Corps outperforming ordinary businesses, new data shows,” 2025 (SME B Corps, 0–249 employees, 2023–2024).
11. Dr. Bronner’s, “Statement on Dropping B Corp Certification,” February 2025.
12. Terry Smith, Fundsmith annual letter to shareholders, January 2022. Quoted in afaqs.
13. Hein Schumacher, Unilever Q3 2023 trading update, October 2023. Quoted in afaqs, “Unilever to stop force-fitting ‘purpose’ in its brands”.
14. ZingTrain, “About Us” (10 businesses, 800+ employees, $80M+ revenue) and “Zingerman’s 2032 Vision” (1994 vision, decision to stay local).
15. The Great Game of Business, “Zingerman’s Community of Businesses” case study (open-book management; 2008 employee-led cuts).
16. Dr. Bronner’s, 2025 All-One Report press release, August 2025 (2024 revenue $209.8M; 5:1 pay cap; $27.28 starting wage; $100M+ given since 1998).
17. Conscious Capitalism, Inc., Kip Tindell profile; Kip Tindell, Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives (Grand Central, 2014).
18. Inc., “The Container Store Just Filed (Neatly) for Bankruptcy,” December 2024.
19. Edelman, 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: “The Collapse of the Purchase Funnel”.
20. Edelman, 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust, “From We to Me”; 64% figure via Edelman, “The Me Era”.
21. McKinsey & NielsenIQ, “Consumers care about sustainability — and back it up with their wallets,” February 2023.
22. PwC, 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey, May 2024.
23. Zeno Group, 2020 Strength of Purpose Study.
24. Katherine White, David J. Hardisty and Rishad Habib, “The Elusive Green Consumer,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2019.
25. REI Co-op, “REI Releases 2015 Stewardship and Earnings Report,” 2016.
26. Patagonia, “Ownership”; CNBC, September 14, 2022 ($100M/year expectation).