The Purpose Payback

PURPOSE ISN’T OPTIONAL.
It’s the strategy.

Step Change Founder & CEO Ashton Bishop spoke with Glenn Bartlett, former Strategy Director at Step Change and founder of GreenPay, to answer a question every business owner should sit with: does your purpose actually do anything, or is it just a nice line on your website?

Watch the full interview above. Below, we unpack the key ideas and what they mean for your business.

Why does your business exist?

Not the investor answer. The real one.The one that gets your team out of bed when things are hard. The one that makes a customer choose you over someone cheaper. The one that shapes every decision, from who you hire to what you say no to.
If you can’t answer that clearly, it’s costing you more than you think.

The debate you need to know about

Two of the world’s most quoted marketing minds sit on opposite ends of this question:

Both are getting something right. Both are missing something too.

Glenn Bartlett has spent a decade on both sides of this argument.

Helping businesses find their purpose at Step Change. Investing in 22 companies as an impact-focused VC. And now building GreenPay, a payment processor that donates 50% of its profits to protecting Australian nature.

His take? The truth sits closer to Sinek. But with an important condition.

What purpose actually does inside a business

Think of purpose as a decision-making tool, not a values exercise.

When your business is under pressure, and it will be, purpose is what keeps you moving. It answers:

• Do we take this client?

• Do we build this product?

• Do we hire this person?

Without it, every decision is a coin flip.

Purpose is also your best talent tool

The next generation isn’t just looking for a pay cheque. They’re looking for a reason.

Home ownership feels out of reach. AI is reshaping career paths. The old milestones don’t mean what they used to. Young people are searching harder than any generation before them for work that means something.

If you can’t give them that, you’re competing on salary alone.

So why do some people say purpose is rubbish?

Because they’ve seen it done badly. And a lot of it is done badly.

Cosmetic purpose looks like this: a company with a profitable core business that tacks on a sustainability story it can’t back up. The purpose has nothing to do with the actual product. It’s marketing dressed up as mission.

Stakeholders see through it immediately.

The lesson isn’t that purpose doesn’t work. It’s that fake purpose doesn’t work.

The difference between purpose and positioning

These two get confused a lot. Here’s the simplest way to think about it:

They don’t have to be identical. But they need a clear through-line.

GreenPay is a clean example. Their positioning: match or beat competitor pricing, no compromise on technology. Their purpose: put nature at the heart of every transaction. One earns the right to deliver the other.

You can’t lead with purpose and deliver a mediocre product. Purpose lives on the back of genuinely good execution.

The companies that got this right from the start

The businesses we think of as institutions today didn’t scale on distribution alone.

Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Ford. They started with a genuine problem to solve: improving sanitation, making mobility affordable, meeting real needs of their era. Purpose was the engine. They’re still living off its compounding interest now.

If you’re a smaller business without that accumulated momentum, getting this wrong at the start is a much costlier mistake.

What this means for you

Ask yourself three questions:

     1.  Can you say in one sentence why your business exists, beyond making money?
     2.  Does that reason shape actual decisions inside your business?
     3.  Would your team give the same answer you just did?

If the answers feel shaky, that’s useful information.

One business putting it all together

GreenPay processes payments: credit card, EFTPOS, online checkout. The technology is world-class. The pricing matches or beats the banks.

And 50% of profits go straight back to protecting and restoring Australian nature.

That’s not a campaign. That’s a standard. Glenn’s goal is to reach a point where using a payment solution that siphons profit to offshore tech companies, when this alternative exists at the same price, becomes genuinely embarrassing.

Purpose operating at scale.