Ask a company what it does, and you will usually get a clear answer. Ask why its customers are its customers, and the answer gets less clear. Ask why its employees are its employees, and you may get a list of benefits.
Then the same company asks marketing to attract more of both.
More customers. More applications. More attention. But more of whom, and for what reason?
For me, that is where the conversation about purpose should start. Not with a sentence for the wall. With the people who already choose you.
You know what they buy. Do you know why they buy it from you?
Your invoices tell you what a customer bought, how often and for how much. They do not tell you why that customer chose you instead of someone else.
Inside a technical company, the answer often sounds obvious: our engineering is better. Our quality is higher. We have been doing this for thirty years.
Perhaps. But the customer might say something different.
You answer the phone when production stops. Your engineers understand their particular process. You tell them when they do not need the expensive option. They trust you not to leave them with a problem nobody owns.
Those are different reasons to choose a supplier. They point towards different customers, different messages and different promises you need to keep.
If you assume the reason is the technology, you will advertise the technology. If the reason is something else, the strongest part of your offer may never make it onto the website.
Employees are not a separate conversation
A salary matters. So do working conditions. Purpose is not a substitute for either.
But a list of benefits does not explain why someone chose your company over another employer offering much the same.
An engineer might stay because they can follow their work all the way into a customer's plant. A technician might value being trusted to solve a problem rather than wait for permission. Someone else might care about working somewhere that does not promise things it cannot deliver.
The reasons will not be identical. Nor do they need to be.
But look for the connection between what customers value and what employees are proud of doing. That is often more useful than treating customer attraction and recruitment as two unrelated marketing jobs.
In a founder-led company, the answer may be living in one person
The founder carries the story, the value, the vision and the culture. Why the company was started. Which problems are worth solving. What it refuses to compromise on.
Much of that can live in everyday decisions without ever being explained. Customers experience it. Employees learn it by working close to the founder.
Then the company grows. New colleagues do not have that history. A potential customer sees a website that could belong to any supplier in the category.
The founder still knows what makes the company matter. The people you want to attract have to guess.
Making that foundation clear does not mean replacing the founder's story with a corporate purpose statement. It means finding out which parts of it people actually recognise and value, and making those parts something the rest of the company can carry.
Start with conversations, not a workshop headline
Ask customers:
- What was happening when you first came to us?
- Why did you choose us rather than the alternatives?
- What would you miss if you could no longer work with us?
Ask employees:
- Why did you join, and why have you stayed?
- When are you most proud of the work we do?
- What would you miss here that another employer might not offer?
Ask people with different experiences. Not only your favourite customer or the colleague who has sat beside the founder for twenty years. If you can, include customers who left and employees who moved on.
Do not put your preferred answer into the question. Listen for specific situations, not polite compliments. Compare what you hear with the story leadership tells.
Then decide what you want to attract
You can attract people without knowing why the current ones chose you. Referrals, timing, location and persistence all bring people in. But it is harder to repeat deliberately, and harder to know whether you are attracting the right fit.
For me, purpose is not just why the founder started the company. It is what the company is here to do, for whom, and why that work matters. The founder's intention is one part. What customers and employees experience is another.
You do not need to be meaningful to everyone. You need a reason the right customers can recognise, and work the right employees want to be part of. Both have to be true in practice.
That is the foundation I help founder-led technical B2B companies make clear. Before asking marketing to bring in more people, understand what they are choosing.
If your company can explain what it does but struggles to explain why people choose it, write to me.