Most businesses have values. Far fewer know how to use them.
In The Sustainable Business, commissioned by Brevity Marketing, founders and leaders repeatedly make the same distinction: values only matter when they change behaviour. A purpose statement on a website is easy. Living that purpose when decisions are messy, money is tight, or growth is tempting is much harder.
The difference between sustainable businesses and performative ones, the interviewees suggest, is not intention. It’s operationalisation: turning values into daily habits, guidelines for decision making and behaviours that hold up under pressure.
Here’s how the leaders in the book do it.
Values as the operating system for decisions
Several interviewees describe values not as inspiration, but as infrastructure.
Charles Robinson of Jones Robinson estate agency talks about purpose, values and mission as three distinct but connected pillars. Purpose defines why the business exists. Values underpin that purpose. Mission sets a time-bound goal. When those three are clear, he says, decision-making becomes easier because people know how they are expected to behave when problems arise.
To make this tangible, Robinson created an ethos booklet called The Way We Are. It sets out specific behaviours linked to each value and is used in training to keep delivery consistent across teams and locations. Every training session starts with a values recap, not as a ritual, but as a reminder that values are practical tools, not abstract ideas.
In the book, this approach comes up repeatedly: when values are codified, decisions become faster, more consistent and less dependent on who happens to be in the room.
Purpose as a stress test for growth
The contributors are equally clear that good intentions are not enough. Values only become real when they cost something.
Mat Rule, founder of Toca-io, describes purpose as the starting point for growth decisions and, crucially, as a stress test. Would you take on a lucrative project if it damaged the culture of your team? Would you say no to a client who didn’t share your standards?
For Rule, protecting culture means being willing to turn down work that doesn’t align, even when it is commercially attractive. Compromising values for short-term gain, he argues, erodes trust internally and weakens delivery over time. Sustainable growth, in his view, is growth that the team can absorb without losing coherence.
This theme appears throughout the interviews: values only matter if leaders are willing to uphold them when the stakes are high.
Turning values into outcomes customers can feel
Values are often described as internal, but the book shows how they translate directly into external results.
Robinson links values to outcomes in explicit commercial terms. He argues that values shape behaviours, behaviours shape service quality, and service quality shapes reputation. That chain, he says, explains why Jones Robinson can command higher fees than competitors in some cases. Customers are not just buying a service; they are buying consistency and trust.
Across the book, founders describe the same pattern: when values are lived consistently, they show up in reviews, referrals, recruitment and retention. Culture becomes visible to customers not through statements, but through experience.
Happiness, honesty and psychological safety as performance drivers
For Anna Gillings, founder of Gillings Planning, happiness and honesty are explicit values; not soft ideals, but commercial necessities.
She describes building a culture where people feel safe to speak up, challenge decisions and admit mistakes. That psychological safety, she argues, leads to better outcomes for clients because problems are surfaced early and solved collaboratively. It also leads to lower staff turnover and stronger long-term relationships.
Gillings is clear that values are tested under pressure. When deadlines loom or mistakes are made, teams watch how leaders behave. Consistency, not perfection, is what builds trust.
In the book, happiness and honesty are repeatedly framed not as perks, but as enablers of better work.
Embedding values into commercial relationships
Values, in these interviews, are not limited to internal culture. They extend into contracts, partnerships and supply chains.
Andy Best of Change++ argues that sustainable businesses must work with like-minded partners and embed their principles into commercial terms. That might mean agreeing long-term orientations, shared standards or clear rules around data ownership and governance.
For Best, values that stop at the website are fragile. Values that shape who you work with – and how – become durable.
Using frameworks to formalise, not replace, integrity
Certification appears in the book as a useful tool, but never as a substitute for values.
Charles Redfern of Organico describes using B Corp to formalise policies and set a cadence for reviewing them, including twice-yearly offsites and governance routines. But he is clear that the badge itself is not the point. Real integrity, he argues, shows up in ongoing oversight, such as Organico’s internal ethics committee and independent product scoring.
In this sense, frameworks help codify what already exists. Frameworks don’t create values; they reveal them.
Making purpose operational
Taken together, the interviews show that values become operational when they are:
- Written down in behaviours, not slogans
- Used as decision rules when growth is tempting
- Reinforced through hiring, training and empowerment
- Embedded into commercial relationships
- Reviewed regularly, not assumed
- Upheld even when it costs
Purpose, in this framing, is not a statement. It is a practice.
In the next blog in this series, we’ll explore what happens when values meet reality at scale: why evidence matters more than rhetoric, and how businesses can move from claims to proof.
Follow the series as we continue exploring what sustainable business looks like in practice by delving into the experiences of leaders who are building companies that last.
Download your copy of The Sustainable Business Book commissioned by Brevity Marketing – Download now
