Purpose: How People Over Profit Leads to Business Opportunity

Does your business have a purpose beyond making money?

Want to discover how shifting your business priorities can make a huge difference?

To learn how focusing on purpose and people leads to powerful marketing, I interview Dale Partridge.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Dale Partridge, the founder of Sevenly (a company that couples t-shirts and causes) and a start-up expert. He blogs over at TheDailyPositive.com, founded StartupCamp.com and he has a podcast by the same name. Dale's latest book is People Over Profit: Break the System, Live With Purpose, Be More Successful.

In this episode we'll explore how Dale combines purpose and social to create success.

You'll discover the business system you need to break in order to be more successful, as well as social media tips to drive traffic for your business.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Purpose
Dale's story

Dale always thought he was going to be a professional baseball player. When he broke his arm the summer between high school and college, his dreams fell apart.

As a baseball pitcher, Dale felt pitchers know how to lead the team, so he decided to create a business. Dale started a fitness company, which grew rapidly but was unsatisfying. So he sold the business. After that he worked in the stock market for a while, before raising money and opening a rock-climbing gym. Dale thought things were going well until he got pulled into the yoga room by one of his business partners and was fired from his own company for being a "horrible leader."

Dale changed. He explains how for a few years he went on a frenzy starting companies before hitting a wall. Dale realized chasing profits wasn't putting meaning in his soul. He wanted to figure out how to blend purpose and profit, and this was the beginning of Sevenly. He was 25.

"I said, 'let's create a company where every week, we partner with a new charity,'" Dale recalls. "We would create products like shirts and hats and beanies and jackets, and any time somebody bought one of our products, we would give $7 to the charity that week. So if we sold 1,000 products, we'd give that charity $7,000."

Sevenly sold 800 products the first week. A few months later, they grew to 10 employees, then 20 employees, and two years later, 45 employees. Sevenly launched on June 13, 2013.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neHwgakQcGI

Dale explains that seeing money not as the primary goal, but as a byproduct of helping a million people, was the shift. He got lost in something that was so much fun and literally changing the world. Sevenly has raised $4.2 million in $7 donations.

Listen to the show to learn about the "aha" moment that set Dale on this path.

The system businesses need to break

Dale explains the cycle of companies. They often start with a cycle of honesty and move into an era of efficiency. When companies get big, they go from people over profit to people and profit, and become addicted to more. They start confusing being bigger with being better, he adds.

What often comes after the efficient era is what Dale calls the deceptive era. This is when businesspeople start to lose their soul and forget why they started the company. At that point they either go out of business, or those who stick around enter the final apologetic era. That's where they earn back consumers' trust, and go back into the honest cycle.

For example, Domino's Pizza was one of the worst companies in the world in the 1990s. They released a documentary called The Pizza Turnaround in...