One of the things I’ve been working with my team on this summer is getting very clear about what our purpose is. Why do we exist as a business?
Our official Statement of Purpose is that We provide tax services and business advice to individuals and small business owners to make life better for themselves, their families and the world around them.
That purpose is rooted in the concept of mutual flourishing, where everything grows and reaches its fullest potential, not at the expense of everything around it, but together.
It’s a really different concept than what I learned in my business education back in college which is “Your job is to maximize shareholder value as measured by the current stock price.”
That worldview is not very much in alignment with mutual flourishing, or at least not consistently.
There are lots of times when people have maximized shareholder value in ways that were very destructive and harmful to the world around them. You can probably come up with examples so I won’t give them to you, but mutual flourishing is what we’re after.
We want to offer the services that make life better for our clients, and make life better for us at the same time, and also make things better for the world at large. We do not want to offer services that are harmful to ourselves, to our clients, or the world at large even though they might be beneficial to one or two of those groups.
Mutual flourishing, all together.
We are making some changes to our business model and we’re doing that because we think it aligns better in a more sustainable way with the concept of mutual flourishing and with our purpose.
That’s why we’re taking a year-round approach to tax services and those compliance-based issues. That’s why we’re sending out these maintenance proposals.
That’s what we’re after.
We want to offer the things that we think will make life better for you as a client, for us as a firm, and for the world at large.
And that is our goal.
