Purpose can help solve a common dilemma in professional services firms: how to reconcile the freedom that their professionals and practice areas need to be successful, with the consistency needed to build a meaningful brand.

Sarah Walker-Smith, CEO of law firm Shakespeare Martineau and its parent group Ampa, uses purpose to connect and manage the individual brands owned by the group. In the five years since Shakespeare Martineau first clarified its purpose, the firm has almost doubled in size.

Learn how she does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

Social impact is the driving force behind Shea Yeleen, a skincare products company that supports an African supply chain employing more than 800 women who earn five times the local minimum wage.

Her latest venture is the Yeleen Beauty Makerspace, a hybrid teaching lab and manufacturing space in Washington DC designed to support women and founders of color in the beauty industry.

Learn how she does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist

A meaningful purpose will guide the behaviour of everybody in your business.

First Mile, a UK-based B-Corporation, defines its purpose as “to revolutionise business sustainability, starting with waste and recycling.” CEO Bruce Bratley uses three core values to help everyone in the business embody that purpose.

Listen to how he does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

No single doctor attends all your medical appointments. But you do. That makes you, the patient, the de facto integrator of the healthcare system.

That insight led Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli to found Patients Know Best (PKB), Europe’s largest Personal Health Record and patient engagement platform. PKB’s purpose is to give every person the ability to access their personal health record, control who can see it and use this information to manage their health and care.

Listen to how he does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

What happens when a business achieves its original purpose? Where does it go from there?

Find out how Nej Gakenyi, CEO and founder of GRM Digital, faced that unusual challenge in the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

In this episode, I’m very pleased to welcome Denise Massey, Managing Director of EIC, a platform where great businesses big and small can innovate together to create a safe, affordable, and decarbonised energy system. She shares the first thing a CEO needs to do in developing an effective purpose and describes the role their values played in building the organisation. 

Words matter when you talk about purpose. Doubly so when you lead an organization focused on language and communication. But what if that organization is not comfortable discussing purpose and strategy?

That was the dilemma facing Sara Crofts when she became CEO of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), the UK professional body for translators and interpreters.

Learn how she solved it in this episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

Loss of momentum can be fatal to any organisational change project. But committed leadership can keep the cause alive. Three years into an ongoing initiative to bring Matrix’s purpose to life, CEO Mark Inskip and his team doubled the company’s size by acquiring another business.

Despite this welcome complication, the purpose is taking root inside the organisation, employee engagement is high, and the leadership team have embarked on an inclusive initiative to develop a set of values that support the purpose.

Learn how Mark and team managed through the distractions, on this episode of The Purposeful Strategist.