Financial Stewardship

In any business or organization, resources are required to sustain it and help it grow. How we choose to allocate those resources depends heavily on our goals. For mission-driven companies, this is often built around asking the right questions on resource allocation. Questions in which the answer will move the company closer to fulfilling its purpose and allow the creation of a meaningful change for society in some way. Whether a company is mission-driven or not, they typically have a purpose, a why, a value proposition, and values behind it. Usually, when there is no greater benefit for the social good outside of the company’s growth and profit, it can be harder to connect individuals’ work to the advancement of something meaningful for that individual on a personal level that is larger than themselves. Said another way, what would incentivize someone to work harder, longer, or step outside of their comfort zone besides money, the very resource that is paramount to the fulfillment of the mission? One of the many responsibilities of a leader in a mission-driven company is to provide a connection to the daily work that everyone is performing, such as an intangible motivating factor for the tasks that most often take money to accomplish.

For a long time, I struggled with how to clearly articulate this connection to something that can be hard to talk about with people. Even harder, I struggled to create the positive change I knew was possible, how we as an organization choose to spend money. Over the years, I have tried many different strategies to help people see a connection to our mission, as well as understand how important it is for them to be frugal with the company’s financial resources. Certain changes are easy, such as not buying name-brand products, having a no-frills office on the outskirts of the city, taking care of the property given to us to use for our position, and so many others. However, over time, it was almost as if these choice evaluations made by a lot of people each day were becoming burdensome. After all, this is not how a lot of people choose to spend their own money, but it’s how I was asking them to spend the company’s money. Large decisions that I can control were never a problem, but all the little choices add up. 500 decisions made by numerous people over the course of a 30-day period can result in the expenditure of thousands of dollars in waste. Which in turn, can lead to stagnation in our progress toward accomplishing our mission. I began to wonder if there is an actual meaning and connection that I can provide my organization between why choosing to have your company pay for coffee meetings at Dunkin Donuts instead of Starbucks can matter.

After many attempts at trying to link a shared purpose behind frugality and our mission, I gave up. I realized that the concept of being frugal was the wrong framing. It lacked the empathy, motivation, and visceral connection that would be needed for the choosing of less expensive alternatives. More importantly, frugality did not quite fit into who we were as a company, as means to accomplishing our mission. It almost came across that we were clear on our mission and explicit on our virtues, and had this vestigial idea of leadership; wanting everyone to be cheap for the sole sake of saving money. After mulling over this failure for quite some time, I began to resign myself to the fact that I would just look to systems and processes to control unnecessary spending, even while knowing that this would only be mildly successful as best.

One day, as I was working through updating our travel and entertainment policy to reflect the type of spending that would help further our mission and it dawned on me. We don’t need to be frugal or teach what it means to be frugal. Instead, we need to teach and instill the concept of financial stewardship framed in the following way, “What could we do without and by doing so would be impactful to our mission and our people?” There it was, this idea of choosing purposely to not be wasteful in a deeply meaningful way to our mission and our virtue of ‘People First’. The best part of this was that it resonated viscerally with so many more people. It was no longer asking them to be frugal for the sake of saving money, but instead, so that we could pay our people more, offer better benefits, and create training and career advancement programs. In the same way, the 500-plus decisions made monthly of possible wasteful spending worked against the company, it now worked for it. They then had to choose what they cared about, taking their coffee meeting at Starbucks or saving $10 and using the coffee machine at the office. They understood that while $10 can’t do much by itself, think of the money saved from 500 decisions like this per month. $5,000 a month can go a long way for our employees, they knew that and started to see even more progress toward our mission because of it.

Our mission, ‘To lead the way in caring for, compensating and offering careers to our people, who in turn provide unparalleled professional services to our clients’, will never be accomplished to the degree we all believe it can be if we choose to spend wastefully instead of working to allocate every dollar possible towards caring for, compensating, and offering careers to our people. We no longer chose to be frugal, we chose to honor the mission and our virtues through our financial decision.