Why put ‘why’ at the heart of your business

Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash

One Christmas many years ago, my husband and I rented out a holiday house in the Lake District to share the festive season with our parents and sisters.

Despite torrential rain all week long we had a wonderful time.

It was also the start of what became my most successful business up until that point.

My mum brought along some home-baked granola, back before granola was really a ‘thing’.

In the weeks and months that followed I took her generously gifted recipe and started baking it to sell from my own home kitchen.

The orders started rolling in - first from small local farm shops, then bigger shops, until I got my big break with a hotel chain that operated in all the major cities in Scotland.

It felt like a big deal and the thing that would turn my business from a hobby to the real deal.

I’d branded the granola as a handmade, artisan brand and I really cared about keeping it this way.

The problem was, I’d expected that bigger orders would lead to more efficient production.

But in my small kitchen made for one, only so much was possible.

Despite every optimisation I could conjure up, I still ended up baking late into the evening and into the weekend.

There was one particularly oat filled evening when I set to work to get another hotel order out the door.

I got off to a good start but after a while my energy faded and I was overcome by that feeling of just really wanting to be in bed. 

I powered on until I clumsily dropped the final batch, spilling the perfectly clustered oat mix all over the floor.

The tears soon followed and I sat wondering why on Earth I was putting myself through this, but also knowing that I couldn’t stop.

Those early days of business are super tough - I haven’t yet met an entrepreneur who hasn’t gotten off to a messy, imperfect and unpredictable start.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight I realise how I could have set up a few of the fundamentals differently in order to find a balance between life and business that was a lot more sustainable than I made them.

But I didn’t know that back then.

I hadn’t formally studied business, but I’d read a lot about the lean startup methodologies and agile approach.

The idea is that you start with a minimum viable product and let the feedback of customers and consumers guide you to create a solution that really works for them.

That’s basically what I’d done.

As a business it worked. As a lifestyle it didn’t.

These days, I like to work to a different framework that places the ‘why’ at the very centre of my work.

A why that encompasses the bigger mission and purpose that I am contributing to, but also one that considers what I want and what works for me.

When I work with my clients I support them to take small steps, one at a time, then stop and reassess.

To constantly come back to the why at the heart of your business and see if what you are doing still feel true to that.

If it doesn’t then you adjust and tweak it next time around, rather than keep going on a linear path only to realise that it doesn’t actually take you where you want to go.

If you want to hear more about this regenerative approach then sign up for your free Starter Kit here and see how it might apply to your business.