Building Successful Business based on Purpose that Still Profits: From Paul Dunn

0:00Maybe we need to say to people that you were not born to break either. So we want to do great things. Paul Dunn. Four times Ted Speaker. His charity with his wife, phenomenal out there in the world, B1G1 based out of Singapore. You're leaving a legacy. Why not? Let's think about we're living it. We're living it every single day. Creative as heck. Building great companies, advising great people. Your outcomes, your kind of success inherently tied to the success of the people that you're privileged to serve. What is success to you? How do you define success? Well, success to me is the freedom to be able to do those things that are important to me.

0:36Now you're running the massively successful B1G1. What is it about you that you create, I don't know if I want to say a following, but you can build team. People want to join things Paul Dunn does. How do you do that? Well, I think the answer to that is you don't push it, right? Because the reality is that when you push, you ever notice people tend to push back. And so you try and build something that has attractiveness, or to put it another way, you try to build things to which people want to belong. And once you understand that, it's like, you know, Seth Godin has that great quote that says, people like us do things like this.

1:19Whenever you create something, it's almost like you're creating this movement that people go, you know what? I would love to be a part of that. I would love, and not only would I love to be a part of it, but I'd love to stay forever. And when you have that mindset, when you think of it as, you know, almost like, how can I build a magnet kind of thing? What can I do to do that? Then it becomes quite different. And, of course, one of the ways of doing that, and, you know, I've got to say, it took a while to figure this one out. because when you're first doing it right when you're first starting this thing you know whatever it is that thing that you're starting you think that it's all about you that's what you think right it's not all about you it is first and foremost it's about the privilege you know the privilege you have to to serve people who are part of that and that's an interesting shift and then you get another shift which is that your outcomes your quote-unquote success inherently tied to the success of the people that you're privileged to serve.

2:26Take me through how the world has changed in business. So what we have is a shift. This is a really major shift. Brad, if I look back over all of the stuff that I read and get in front of you, I think the big word of the last decade is purpose. Everybody says, you know, you've got to be on purpose, you've got to be on purpose, you've got to have purpose, purpose, purpose. And that is correct. That's absolutely correct. But there's a level beyond that. And the level beyond that is to go from income led to impact led. There's a great book. It's called Cult Stalers by a guy called Tim Duggan, D-U-G-G-A-N.

3:05And he gives you seven key things. And the first thing he says is define your impact. Define your impact. And what he means by that is that whereas we tend to look at things rather naturally, and we have to do this, right? We do cash flow forecasts. we do all of that sort of thing, we do revenue forecasts, we do all of that, which is great. But he says, on top of that, you've got to do this impact thing, which is essentially the number of lives you're going to influence, right? That's the kind of impact thing. Next one down would be this shift from profit to purpose, right? That is crucial, is that whole thing that we talked about a minute ago, which is that shift from pushing to attracting.

3:49The next one, which I think is becoming so much more important now, it always was about value. You know, we had the value equation, right? Value is benefits divided by cost. We've had that around for quite a long time. So what we stand for is critically important, critically, critically important. And then we get down to that whole shift that we started off with, which is that shift from self to something bigger than self, or to put that very simply, a shift from me to we. How often do you as a leader communicate that to your group, to your membership, to your organization? Well, fortunately, I'm privileged that sometimes people want to listen to what I have to say.

4:32In fact, just yesterday, we were talking about doing a playbook for how you create a great company. And again, remember that where you started out, you know, is not necessarily, you know, a straight line thing. Hopefully, it's an exponential thing. They're going to be little bumps, right? Frequently, when you look at those bumps, it's because you forgot that basic principle, you got so concerned about you, right? And if you're a guy, here's what you did. If you're a guy, you go off into your cave, and you say, I'm not going to come out of there and all of that kind of stuff. That's what you do.

5:05And if you think about it, when you're in that cave, what you're thinking about is you, right but the thing that gets you out of that is the freedom to go oh this is how i felt right and talk with others about it and so on so forth someone said to me about a year ago i love this quote they said hey paul maybe we need to say to people that you were not born to break even so we wanted to do great things have you grown with your success that you think the next thing is possible or did you always envision like a billion impacts or something along those lines initially we saw it as oh wouldn't be great if there were 100 and what we knew was that it was all about measuring those impacts it wasn't about saying oh look you know someone just gave you know three hundred dollars or three thousand dollars it was all about measuring the impacts and the funny thing is you know this to be true once you start measuring those things then you focus on those things right so you make the whole thing about that and you celebrate this whole thing around creating impacts.

6:01And so these days, when we talk about B1G1, sometimes people talk about giving. And the funny thing about giving is you and I know, you and I know, right, we know that we are at our best when we're giving, we understand that. And that doesn't mean necessarily giving money, it means helping the little old lady across the road, it means all of those sorts of things. But some people still see that giving as giving away something that they have, right? Whereas when you talk about it another way, you say, well, actually what you're doing is you're creating impacts, impacts that stay with you, right?

6:37And impacts that become a great legacy for you. So that instead of thinking every day about, oh, well, not every day, but maybe at my age, you think about, you know, you're leaving a legacy. Why not let's think about we're living it. We're living it every single day. And why not just think about that other people are looking in at us as well. So why not just think about leveraging that as well? So now when you think about it, you get up, oh, guess what? I'm living it. I'm living this legacy, right, just by talking with you. And then I'm leveraging this legacy. We're leaving one. And as Steve Jobs once said, you know, the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world because the storyteller, and that's what every single one of us are.

7:20We're also story creators, by the way. He said that the storyteller is the most powerful person and the storyteller sets the vision, the values and the agenda for an entire generation yet to come. And when you get that, you get back to where we started, Brad, which is it's not about you. It's about something much bigger than you. And that's a big success podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today. Big success is what it's all about. And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button so you're here with us every single week on the Big Success Podcast.

7:58I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for. Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast.