Make your journey purposeful

A good business should make money. A great business should have a purpose.

Running a service-based business for the past 10 years, I always felt like our sole purpose was making money, and that never sat right with me.

Think about it.

These cool product companies all claim they are changing the world or making the world a better place. That's a purpose that is easy to communicate, sell, and have people invested in.

I used to ask myself: What is my business's purpose?

The answer is not an easy one.

Providing a B2B service, where you are mainly serving other businesses, you can't possibly claim you are changing the world. A service business's impact is much different from that of a product one. You are the mechanic, not the driver. You are the support, not the star.

However, here is what I realized during the last few years:

You don't need to change the world to have a purpose.

As long as you have an impact and you are a force for good, then you can define a purpose.

Sometimes, we don't realize what our purpose is for a long time.

I personally didn't realize it until many years of running my venture. Still, I knew money-making was never the goal. This stemmed from the fact that I never really cared about money in the first place. Money has always just been the means for us to keep doing what we do.

In the beginning, we used to build software. But as we evolved to offering specialized staff augmentation services, our purpose became clear.

What I love about running a business like division5 is the fact that we are able to provide jobs and career opportunities for so many talented people in Albania.

It doesn't look like much.

We are not curing cancer or solving world hunger. Yet, we are having an impact and helping so many young Albanians build their future here.

This is not to be taken for granted.

The past few years, so many youngsters here have left the country. We are suffering a huge brain drain and we need anything that can help counter that. We need people to stay in Albania, build in Albania, and choose Albania for themselves and for their kids.

I am happy we are making it happen for a few of them.

But purpose only works when it's truthful.

You can't fake purpose.

Purpose is not the cool words you write in a blog post or in your social media feed. It’s not a slide in your sales deck.

You can't fake it.

Even if you are able to do so for a while, you won't be able to keep it up for long.

You must want it deep within yourself, with all your heart, and your actions should be aligned with your words. It means making hard decisions. It means showing kindness when transactionally it makes no sense.

Some people fake purpose to gain an advantage. Don't be one of them. Find the thing that makes the hard days worth it. It might not be changing the whole world, but changing someone's world is a big deal.