This was clearly demonstrated to me by our wine education professor, Charlie. When he was asked whether a particular wine was a dry or a sweet wine, he went into a bit of a rant (he was a character). Charlie said that dry and sweet were not mutually exclusive. The opposite of dry is wet, he said, and the opposite of sweet is savory.
A dry wine is a result of a natural completion of fermentation. The yeast can’t continue because it either runs out of sugar (food) or the alcohol level becomes unbearable for yeast to survive. A brut champagne, which most people consider dry, has a bit of sugar added at the end. By the same token, there are plenty of dessert wines, where high alcohol level naturally stopped the fermentation. They are dry by definition.
Charlie’s point was that dry and sweet were not mutually exclusive. They could coexist and we would love it.
How Do Dry and Sweet Wine Profiles Relate to Mission-Based and For-Profit Organizations?
Similarly, mission-based and for-profit are not mutually exclusive concepts. Non-profit is not synonymous with mission based. For-profit is not synonymous with greedy.
When we restarted Massaro in 2014, we defined our mission: “Authentic Leaders. Breakthrough Results”. Authentic leaders come from anywhere in our eco-system – customers, employees, vendors, partners, customers’ customers, even competitors. Breakthrough results are typically strategic, financial, growth, opportunity, career advancement, influence.
That mission has always been more important to us than profits. As such, I used to joke, calling Massaro a “mission-based for-profit” organization – it sounded like an oxymoron to most people.
In 2013, John Mackey published his book “Conscious Capitalism”, where mission loyalty is the first among four key tenets. I was thrilled to hear that the founder of Whole Foods had already successfully implemented the model I was only striving to design. Moreover, Mackey demonstrates that companies operating on conscious capitalism principles generated significantly greater returns over S&P 500 at a ratio of 10.5 to 1.
Non-profits serve two groups of people – mission recipients and donors. To a mission-based for-profit organization, they are all customers. In fact, customers that believe in an organization’s mission eagerly buy and refer business. Such was the case with Tesla customers, who paid a premium for early car models because they were passionate about investing in reducing carbon emissions.
In a way, mission-based for-profit is a modern-day interpretation of the old saying “build it and they’ll come”. The new version would sound more like “build a mission-first organization and customers will vote with their wallets”.
As humans, we all have a similar dilemma. We have to make money, and we want to make a positive difference. Although, a personal mission is a topic for another day…
If you want to have some dry sweet wine, please come on over! You know we love to entertain guests.
While we are drinking the wine, we can talk more about mission-based for-profit organizations among other things.
Sincerely,
Mikhail
Mikhail Papovsky
Founder and CEO | M A S S A R O
