Hello friends and supporters,

At Purpose Group, we buy, grow, and hold purpose-driven businesses. We believe business should be a force for good in the world, and we’re inspired to help prove that notion one portfolio business at a time.

We continue to enjoy getting to know the team at Gerald Printing & Liberty Imaging, the business we acquired in May of this year. If your business is in need of any customized apparel or customer holiday gifts, please let me know, and I’ll connect you to a sales manager at Gerald. I can personally attest that they provide the highest quality products and exceptional customer service.

Our criteria in the businesses we look for is simple:

• Enduringly profitable

• Minimum $1M EBITDA

• Over ten years in business

• Industry Agnostic (though we prefer business-to-business companies)

• Within a 6-8 hour drive from Atlanta

Note: We give a $50,000 check to anyone who helps us find a business to acquire…just saying.

A “leadership-empowerment company”

The idea of helping more companies bring their Purpose to life (through The Purpose Playbook™️) while inspiring their team members toward the growth of the business is what drives us forward, and it all starts with leadership.

I often refer to our business as a “leadership-empowerment company.” At the heart of what we do is helping leadership teams build and grow great businesses.

Since starting Purpose Group, I’ve been asked many times, “How can you expect to put Purpose into the businesses you acquire?”

As I see it, there are two answers to this question. The first and easiest answer is: we don’t expect to do that. We aren’t trying to “put” Purpose into our companies — we believe every company has a unique Purpose within it, and it’s our job to help the team members of our companies find and bring to life their company’s Purpose. And then to live it every day.

The more practical answer is that we have a proven process that we deploy over a roughly 12-month time period to help our businesses authentically and collaboratively find and embody their Purpose, with an operational framework that ties their business success to their Purpose, Vision, Tenets, & Values (PVTV™️). We call this The Purpose Playbook.

(Chunks of The Purpose Playbook exist in the four books I’ve written in The Turnaround Leadership Series, and I’m currently writing a fifth book to bring the concept to life in more depth. The name of that book will be, wait for it…The Purpose Playbook.)

Over the following several newsletters, I’ll break down how The Purpose Playbook works.

It all starts with TRUST

The first of three core components of our process is to build a trusting and capable leadership team. Without a leadership team that believes in and supports each other, none of what we want to accomplish is possible.

Earlier this month, I took the Gerald leadership team through a two-day trust-building workshop modeled after Patrick Lencioni’s, The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (one of my top five favorite business books and probably the one I’ve gifted the most to other leaders). We spent those two days in a conference room at a hotel in Bowling Green, breaking down walls, “getting naked,” and starting the slow yet critical process of building trust between the entire team. (I LOVED IT.)

Having run this process with many teams in the past, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw from this group. While we will need to work through the typical dysfunction you find in a team, they are all very passionate about the business. That is not a coachable attribute, and it gave me the confidence that this talented group of leaders will continue building a great business.

Building trust with anyone, especially within a company, is an ongoing, never-ending process. In Q1 of 2024, we’ll be taking Gerald Printing through step 2 of our model: PVTV™️. More on that in my next update.

Thanks as always for your support and belief in what we are building at Purpose Group. We appreciate you being on this journey with us.

And as always, I hope you’re happy.

If you want to pick up a copy of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, I highly recommend it.