Growing With Meaningful Purpose To Increase Impact To Society With Mark O’Renick
You can dream about all the success you want to achieve in life. But if you do not do anything about it, nothing will happen. Chad Burmeister discusses the quest to balance profit and purpose with today’s guest Mark O'Renick, the co-founder of Will & Grail. How do organizations and leaders achieve that quest? Mark shares his passion and how he dealt with pushbacks in his life. He explains his definition of purpose and how he makes decisions to move forward and make an impact on society. You cannot scale your business up if you’re not committed to it. Are you unsure of the direction you are taking? Then, listen to this episode to gain perspective, find your meaningful purpose, work on your dreams, and change the world.
---
Listen to the podcast here:
Growing With Meaningful Purpose To Increase Impact To Society With Mark O’Renick
In this episode, I'm with Mark O'Renick. He is the Founder and CEO of WillGrail.com. He works with purpose-driven companies and helps them in their mission to do that. I'm excited to drill down a little bit on that. In fact, why don't we start there? Purpose-driven is important in the world nowadays and always has been, but many people get it wrong. Welcome to the show, Mark. Let's talk a little bit about what your company does as well.
They do get it wrong and have for years and they still do. If you look at the definition of purpose, there are two. A reason for doing and existing. It's in the combination of those. If you can align those, that's what we call meaningful purpose. Our work at Will & Grail is to help leaders and organizations grow with purpose on purpose. It has to be intentional, so they can increase their impact in the world. We do that through a couple of things. Primarily, we align brand and business strategy. What you say and do has to align.
Purpose is a hot topic right now from a society standpoint and there are a lot of efforts out there to try to claim to be purposeful, but they don't back it up with true meaning. We get to the root of it with a definition of what we call meaningful purpose, "Are you having a profound, positive impact on lives and communities in the world?" If you're doing that, there are deep roots to it that go way back in our lives, the golden rule and many other things.
It's interesting because I talked to someone that said, "A lot of people these days are converging their business life and personal life." In 2020, it has probably been one of the compelling events that have caused that for many of us. Is there a secret sauce? I'm sure it's not a ten-minute conversation but a multi-week workshop. How does one bring those two things together? I'm happy to share what we've seen, but I would like to understand at a high level how do you bring together your personal life with your business life?
It's hard, in many cases. If you own the organization, you can make that commitment, but if you're working within another organization that has a reason for doing goals, which include making money, money is not evil. It's what we do with it that can be evil. You have to focus on that. It's challenging because personally, when I look at my purpose and you look at a profound, positive impact in the world, I want to work with organizations to help them, but I also have responsibilities to my family and community. Is that purposeful and meaningful? Absolutely. Every interaction we have has a chance to make a profound, positive impact. We need to be very attentive to that.
We do have processes to help organizations align around this sense of meaningful purpose. We have a metric called Believability that we think is the common definition of purpose so we can benchmark from that lens of meaningful purpose. If I ask, "Do you think your organization is making a profound, positive impact on lives and communities in the world?" It's not just what you say. It's what other say. It's alignment and perception. It is everything. I may think that I'm doing a great job in balancing all that, but I need to hear from others. Sometimes, I'll get carried away with the work side of it and I'll slip a little bit at home. Those feedback loops are important, but having that North Star and working every day to make that impact is the key.
Meaningful Purpose: There are two definitions of purpose: your reason for doing and your reason for existing. If you can combine and align those, it becomes meaningful.
I took an online thing. It was called ONPURPOSE.me and it's an app. It puts two against each other until you finally get down to the end. Mine was embracing grace and I thought, "That was not embrace, but embracing." Meaning it's always the thing you need to be looking, remembering and working at.
It's a journey and we have to recognize that change is a process, not an event. We can't be impatient with it. In many cases, if we keep after it, our purpose finds us eventually if we have that as the goal. Patient persistence to that is the key.
We fast-forwarded to the chase scene, as they say, which I like to do because that's fun for our readers. I like to also rewind the tape and say, “Think about where you grew up. What were some of the first memories you had as a kid? What were you passionate about when you were 5, 6 or 7 years old?”
I grew up in a small town, a suburb of Kansas City, founded by Slavic immigrants. My great-grandfather came over from Slovakia to work in the oil industry. It's very blue-collar and has a good sense of community. I grew up around a Catholic Church and faith. Early on, it was always just imagination. I would make up games with little toy animals and draw pictures. We would run around and do Huck Finn stuff, exploring the world. That imagination for me has translated into what I do now. I also have a huge Curious George collection. I find that aspect fascinating.
I'm fascinated by learning and exploring the process of growing and connecting and that potential for a lasting impact. That takes form in coaching, mentoring and working with people to, "Let's explore this together." We collectively know things about that journey that can help each other. That's the roots of it. I grew up in faith and went to a private Catholic school. I grew up around that sense of service and purpose. That's still very much part of me. In some ways, we're missing that because we don't have that grounding that is important as a society.
I love the curiosity. There's a guy named Barry Rhein and he is a successful sales trainer. It's called Selling Through Curiosity™. It's just out of curiosity. It's like, "Scratch my head. I'm curious. Seek to understand and then to be understood." A lot of salespeople, especially, hear something and then they come in and try to offer something of value and they haven't fully understood the other person. Curiosity is a positive way to go about doing that.
The old sales and marketing was tell and sell. Now, it is why and buy. It’s understanding that from their perspective and if there's value. The deal is everybody has a deal. If I can find out what somebody's deal is, right, wrong or indifferent, we all have the right to that deal. If we're offering a product from a sales standpoint, is there alignment with our deal on their deal? If that happens, it greases the skids.
I talked to Sarah Riggs Amico, who ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 in Atlanta. She was talking about the mission. She has 3,000 employees. She provided them all with healthcare, even in the downturn last time and it was very hard to do that. She's got a passion for taking care of people. No matter what background we come from, to your point, everybody has a deal, "Tell me the deal about your deal." We all need to understand where we're coming from. She was quite an amazing person who is changing a lot of people's lives over there in Georgia and with her business. I love to share on the show that we all face something that's difficult or challenging, a mountain that might have been so huge at the time and then we make it through to the other side. Is there something you're comfortable sharing of something painful or hard to get through that now, looking back, was a good thing for you?
There has been a series of them. If I were going to summarize that into one type of challenge, it's being told that I could not do something. As children, even as adults, that perspective is provided by others out of love. They're concerned when you're taking a risk or doing something, so they tell you no. I take that as a challenge because I know in my head if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. It's learning the process of how to overcome that.
In some cases, I listened to other people and didn't act. You move on and don't dwell on it, but you end up with a sense of regret. As an adult, when you're talking to people about what could happen, there's a concept called the state of liminality. Between current state and future state is this confusion. Sometimes people can't visualize what a world would be like if we balance profit and purpose if we do that in our business or have a different perspective on money and meaning. That sounds great, but we can't visualize that. In the initial conversations with people, they look at you like you're crazy. It's too hard to fathom. Understanding how to deal with the no and pushback and then providing a way forward with that, that's natural and a part of it. Some people may not be able to move, but can we help each other get past that fear, uncertainty and doubt?
Meaningful Purpose: The core concept of believability is through the lens of the world. It is the perception of making a profound and positive impact in the world.
I remember there was a speaker that came to our church in Southern California. He is an author and he talked about border blockers, border breakers and border busters. The blockers are the ones that are standing around like, "No." It’s like my dad, who is a very conservative doctor. If I said, "I'm going to go build this company, quit my day job and become an entrepreneur." "Be careful about that," but then you talk to someone else that says, "Chad, you can move anywhere you want. You can do whatever you want."
You have to have the border breakers or the border busters. They're the ones that can help you break through that barrier to say, "Yes, it can all be okay." I straddled both because my dad was like, "You tried being an entrepreneur years ago. I don't know about that." This time, I said, "I'm going to go sell stuff before I leave my day job." In one month, December 27, 2017, we signed $337,000 worth of customers." I said, "Dad, what about now?" He was like, "Yes. Now, you can do it."
It's a good level check. You have to understand how to take risks. It's an applied risk. If you're prepared for it, it's not that risky, if you've done your homework. There's a concept out of stoicism, "The obstacle is the way." There's an obstacle there. You can stop or can figure out the way around it. If you want to get to the other side, you have two choices. It’s not, "Don't do that or find a way around it," if what's behind is worth it.
It's funny because Living A Better Story and then 77Pray is an app we launched. We've invested quite a bit of cashflow in Living A Better Story and, personally, time. I moved the knob, probably not on purpose, but I'm following God in this one. It moved to 70% of my day job is doing shows like this and setting up a Living A Better Story Retreat. Mainly, my company funded a lot of that for participants because we want to change lives and we're following God.
There's a time where the CFO calls in the checks and says, "Your sales are down a little bit." I pulled back to about a 50/50 split. The cool thing with technology nowadays is you can change that. As long as you're 30,000 feet looking down, it's easy to change the mix of the flow of the river, "I want this much of this and this much of that." What happens is to have that obstacle and the goal, I'm pretty sure that within less than a year, I'll probably be 100% focused on Living A Better Story. It's amazing how that works.
It's because your purpose found you. We talked about balance and you mentioned flow. We need to live in flow and not in balance. Balance is like it's 50/50 or whatever. I'm calculating that. You don't calculate flow. You just know it. God, in His calling, provides flow. He doesn't tell us how to balance stuff.
There's a great song by Needtobreathe called Banks, like the banks of the river. It's a perfect analogy to flow because you're going down. Imagine putting your raft on there and then it bounces you back to the middle. What I found with 77Pray, the whole intent of it is to pray in the morning, read a Bible verse, act and then pray again at night before you go to bed. When you can bookend your day with, "God, what do you want for my life," the river gets a little faster and a little more exciting. It gets a little tighter because you can feel, "That's what you want me to be doing."
There's a rhythm to all of it in preparation for bookending fast river runs at a rhythm much higher than a slow river. If you have the practice and rhythm, you can make that adjustment. It allows you to speed up the impact of what you're doing.
What I've learned is, with my day job and business, for three years, we help customers prospect email, social outreach and all kinds of different amazing outreach technologies. When I go into a company that needs help, "I want to give more food to the world." "Let's talk about that. What's a gap?” We go in and my cost to solve that problem could be as little as $50 a month. To them, it feels like a $10,000 virtual assistant, like hiring two people. It's the technology that's replacing the need to have a whole lot of people so we can make a massive impact. I'm listening to people on the show and at the end, I'm usually like, "What are you trying to work on?" "I need to get my book out." I'm in the donation mode where it's like, "My day job is fine. Now, let's go help change the world." It has been a lot of fun to get into that flow. Tell me more about your business and what you're passionate about now in your day job.
We've talked about the quest to balance profit and purpose and getting organizations and leaders working toward that but having this core sense of what meaningful purpose is. This benchmark Believability, we've tested it and so it's taking it to the next level.
Tell me more about Believability. Define that for me a little more.
The core concept of Believability is through the lens of the world, "Is there a perception that what I'm doing or what my company is doing is making a profound, positive impact on lives and communities in the world? From a scale of 1 to 10, where are we and why?" When you look at that, companies get credit for creating jobs, being conscious of the environment and making a difference if their product or service is oriented that way.
There's a mashup of that. We've run it on nonprofits who are very purposeful, but people don't see that they're purposeful because they're not telling their story. What they do is there, but what they say doesn't match that. It's not putting that out there. It's the same thing that companies are saying things about. Marriott had the We Live by the Golden Rule campaign. When hurricanes came through the Virgin Islands, they sent a ship over to get people off, but you couldn't get on the ship if you weren’t a Marriott guest. This was right after they had released that campaign.
That stuff happens. It is the inflow of things as we evolve as a society and as an organization evolves the programs, practices, messaging and things. Are we telling an authentic story that we can back it up? Do I believe you stand for something good, which is making a profound impact? Do I believe you mean it when you say that? Those are the two parts. We look at that deeper, "What's the level of alignment within an organization between leadership?" Leadership tends to be around something, but they haven't done the work to gain a buy-in of everybody in decision-making every day. "Are we making decisions more on profit or purpose? What's the perception of the organization around that concept?"
Have you seen The Chosen?
Yes.
In the beginning, they show this gray fish going around in a circle. One turns blue in the credits and then another turns blue. Finally, there are thirteen bluefish. The message I've gotten is, "My mission is to turn gray fish blue." What does that mean? It's continuing to double-click on what that means. For me, that purpose of embracing grace, if I can get people to understand that, "God made you for a purpose and your lane is your lane. People pay you to be in that lane. You'll enjoy being in that lane. It feels great. You're in flow." Getting that to make it to the website, internal business plan and all of it, I can see how that could be hard. You have to have a process to be able to deliver something like that effect.
Based on that initial assessment, they would come in. We wrote back and helped them figure out what they need to improve in their area. It could be on the business product side, communication side internally or their brand. We work with them on the brand and business strategy, an advance that simultaneously and then use strategy models to help them get there. We use OKR, which is a great light framework. It's not overkill.
I love OKR. KPI is how it has always been in America. OKR seemed to be the across-the-pond approach. I like the across-the-pond approach a little bit.
It's a Swiss Army knife that's light. A lot of people spend too much time developing strategies and not enough time executing them. The whole concept of that is there are dreamers, drivers and doers. You can have a dream and do things thinking that it's heading toward that dream, but if you don't have a strategy in place to scale that and do the right thing, that's the driver function. It's connecting all of that and we provide that. We help them understand that dream of profit and purpose alignment and then we help them drive the efforts to get there.
That's neat and important, especially in 2021. If we went forward a few years from now, you're back on the show and I said, "How was has the last few years been personally and professionally?" What would you say about the last few years from now?
I'm first going to tell you that the show changed my life. Honestly, the questions are great. We all have to analyze and level-set. These are great questions that help anybody go, "Am I on the right track? Where are we headed?" In a few years, we have built out the Will & Grail platform. Believability is the de facto benchmark of where we're headed in the alignment of profit and purpose. We have a network of advisors. These can be consultants and anything from HR internal communications to marketing to a business strategy that uses this benchmark to help guide the direction for the work they're doing with organizations.
We can sit back and say, "We've touched thousands of organizations through either deep dive engagement in it or at least understanding the concepts of it, walking through, doing the assessment and understanding, "This is where we could go." We're living out this greatest commandment. I have a side project similar to that. It's some of the stuff that I had started a few years ago called Conquer for Good.
Meaningful Purpose: Money is a catalyst for impact to scale, provide services, and reach people. Resources should be invested for a meaningful purpose.
That term came out of Occupy Wall Street. It was like, "This is just the wrong argument if we agree all rich people aren't greedy and all poor people aren't lazy." Let's stop having this argument. Let’s get together and look at how we use our time, talent and treasure to solve things. We've tested it. Where it's landing is how do we unlock the stories of purpose of people who are pursuing social ventures that are making good things happen in the world? The stories we've captured so far are not faith-driven by nature, but they end up coming up.
That gives me hope and I'm feeling this from all my conversations. It doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right. We all want the same flipping thing, which is for amazingness to happen in the world and all people to be created equal. The whole thing is right there in front of our eyes and it feels like it's going to happen. The light overcomes the darkness. There's a lot of money that has been generated over the years, billions of dollars now, and people in tech companies who have a heart. I know a lot of people in tech companies who have made unicorns and now they're sitting on cash going, "How can I help?" It's like, "Let's match those people up with those people." The government hasn't traditionally been good at causing amazing things to happen. It's very inefficient.
The deal is everybody has got their deal. People in the government certainly have their deals. They're making decisions and policies that we could talk about.
We can talk about that one ad nauseam. What's cool is what you said about time, talent and treasure. On my last call, we talked about it. I'm going on a TV show, so I've been doing some research. Malachi 3:10 says, "Bring the whole tithe." I used to think tithe is 10% cash. It's time, talent and treasure. It could be 1% cash and 9% time. "Whatever you've got, if you bring it into the house, that there may be food in my house. 'Test me in this,' says the Lord Almighty, 'and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it." That's where I'm like, "I got it. It feels like we can see the light of day to that."
Money is the catalyst for impact to be able to scale, provide services, reach people and do anything. If you google the word capital, it's resources invested for a purpose. When you say capitalism, it's resources invested for a profit. Somehow, those two meanings have, "How do capitalism lose the capital part of it?" The purpose is not just to make money. It's to have meaning for impact in the world.
What a great conversation. Mark, I enjoyed the dialogue. Your website is WillGrail.com.
The other one that people can go to is ConquerForGood.com.
Mark O'Renick, what a pleasure. Thanks for coming to the show.
Important Links:
About Mark O’Renick
I've been blessed with a wide range of professional experiences, an unending curiosity for solving complex challenges, and a belief that we can do better as a society to create a world that balances profit and purpose, money and meaning.
Professionally, I've led divisional corporate turnarounds, and grew an entrepreneurial venture that achieved Inc 5000 status. Developed a business accelerator, recognized for promoting entrepreneurship and economic development. Invested in real estate in an underserved neighborhood to be a catalyst for change. Spearheaded a hackathon that won international recognition by NASA and the White House. Founded a community initiative to build awareness and connectivity with leaders working to create impact through business. Mentored folks working through the entrepreneurial journey. And helped nonprofits innovate through sound business practices.
I've learned a few things. 1. Collaboration wins over control every single time. 2. Everything we accomplish in life is through work. 3. Understanding the complexity of context drives change that really works. 4. There's no such thing as certainty, only clarity - so iterate, don't hesitate. 5. You can't gimmick your way to purpose and think it's going to work. Faux purpose is the enemy. 6. Three forces can change the world: entrepreneurial innovation, enterprise scale and egalitarian purpose. 7. Of the three types of people in the world (dreamers, drivers and doers), drivers make dreams possible. 8. Someone will always have an opinion about what you're doing. As long as you're doing good - ignore them. 9.. We're all teacher and learner. Engage with all types of people to understand how things really work (and what doesn't). 10. Love is easier than hate.
