When Purpose Demands Walking Away From Profit

Defending your long-term vision in a world obsessed with quarterly results

Author

Mario Peshev
April 08, 2025

Welcome to Legacy Beyond Profits, where we explore what it really means to build a business that leaves a mark for the right reasons.

This week we're talking about strategically giving up perfectly good revenue for a greater purpose. Wall Street is obsessed with short-term gains, but true visionaries focus on the big picture: What will you give up to build a lasting legacy?

đź“° Purpose Spotlight

Brussels Welcomes First Purpose-Driven Consultancy 

Novya has launched as Brussels' first dedicated consultancy for European nonprofits and purpose-driven organizations. CEO Benita Lipps spun off from DGA Group to introduce their European Nonprofit Excellence Framework—built from a decade of sector data. Their three-pronged approach addresses strategic innovation, operational effectiveness, and capacity building in a sector facing mounting pressure to demonstrate impact while navigating complex regulations.

Murdoch Family Drama Offers Succession Planning Gold 

Attorney Shannon West's analysis in April's Blue Magazine dissects how media mogul Rupert Murdoch's irrevocable family trust created billion-dollar succession headaches. The real-life saga that inspired HBO's "Succession" serves as a cautionary tale for business owners. West reveals how even the most powerful business empires risk spectacular implosion when leadership transitions lack transparency and proper governance structures.

Japan Tackles Burnout with Four-Day Workweek 

Starting April 1, Japan implemented amended laws mandating flexible work options, including a four-day work week. This initiative directly challenges the nation's notorious overwork culture where "karoshi" (death from overwork) claims dozens of lives annually. The reform targets Japan's record-low birth rates and particularly focuses on improving work-life balance for employees with young children, aligning perfectly with this edition's anti-burnout blueprint.

🏛️ The Psychology Behind Short-Term Thinking (And How to Combat It)

Think of short-term thinking as the factory settings of the human brain—we come pre-programmed for immediate gratification. Behavioral finance wizards Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman have mapped this cognitive operating system and found several glitches that sabotage long-term vision:

Loss Aversion: We feel losses roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains, which makes sacrificing current revenue particularly painful.

Recency Bias: Recent events have an outsized influence on our decision-making, making last quarter's performance seem more important than it actually is.

Herding: Even sophisticated investors follow the crowd, amplifying market-wide shortsightedness.

The most successful purpose-driven leaders develop specific counterstrategies:

  1. Clarify and constantly reinforce your purpose
    Unilever's Paul Polman continually tied company strategy to its sustainability mission, making it impossible for investors to forget why they existed.

  2. Redesign incentive structures
    Johnson & Johnson linked executive compensation to long-term goals like product innovation, diversity, and ESG metrics, aligning rewards with purpose.

  3. Actively shape your investor base
    Danone deliberately courted purpose-aligned investors while suggesting short-term hedge funds look elsewhere, creating breathing room for long-term decisions.

  4. Highlight long-term metrics alongside quarterly results
    When Amazon reported quarterly earnings, Jeff Bezos consistently emphasized customer satisfaction, innovation pipelines, and market expansion—not just EPS.

🗣️ Managing Investor Conversations: From Pressure to Partnership

When investors start tapping their watches, most leaders fold like cheap suits. But the architects of true legacy have mastered the art of turning investor pressure into strategic partnership. Their secret weapon? Communication that reframes the entire conversation:

Craft narratives that reframe sacrifice as investment
Share stories like CVS (strategic repositioning), Patagonia (purpose-aligned trust building), and Amazon (reinvestment over immediate profit)—examples where apparent losses drove extraordinary gains.

Acknowledge investor concerns while expanding the timeframe
"We understand your focus on quarterly returns, and we share your commitment to financial performance. Our approach simply extends the timeline to capture greater value."

Provide tangible progress indicators
Don't ask investors to wait blindly for distant results. Show immediate metrics—rising employee engagement, improving NPS scores, expanding purpose-aligned revenue streams—that validate your long-term direction.

The goal isn't to eliminate pressure for results, but to transform how "results" are defined and measured.

🚬 CVS Health's $2 Billion Strategic Sacrifice That Redefined Its Future

In 2014, CVS made a move that had Wall Street scratching its collective head: voluntarily walking away from tobacco sales across 7,600 U.S. stores—kissing goodbye to a cool $2 billion in annual revenue. Analysts called it impractical idealism. The stock dipped as expected.

But beneath the spreadsheets, something extraordinary was unfolding. CVS wasn't just making a feel-good PR play—they were rewiring their entire corporate DNA, transforming from a convenience store that happens to fill prescriptions into a healthcare company that happens to have retail space.

This apparent sacrifice unlocked massive strategic potential. By 2018, CVS announced its $70 billion acquisition of Aetna, integrating insurance, pharmacy, and retail clinics into a vertically aligned healthcare model—something that would have been difficult to justify with cigarettes still on the shelves.

While competitors Walgreens and Rite Aid clung to their traditional retail models, CVS's bold move positioned them to become the #4 company on the Fortune 500 by 2022, with over $300 billion in annual revenue.

The most powerful aspect of this story isn't just what CVS removed—it's what they made room for. By eliminating what no longer fit their purpose, they created space to become what they were always meant to be.

đź“š Quick Win: Implementing Purpose-Driven Leadership

Book Recommendation:

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin

This guide by P&G's former CEO reveals that great strategy often means saying "no" to good opportunities to focus on great ones. The book demonstrates how strategic clarity begins with deliberate choices about what you won't do.

Action Step:

See if you can find three revenue streams that feel as bad as selling cigarettes--give it 15 minutes. For each one, ask:

  • Does it create long-term brand erosion?

  • Does it pull us away from our north star?

  • Would we proudly tell our children this is how we make money?

Select one, and begin a structured process to phase it out or realign it with your purpose. That's exactly what CVS did. They walked away from $2B per year, and it paid off, because it wasn't just an exit, it was a declaration of intent.

🦅 Your Legacy Starts Today

If legacy were easy, everyone would have one. But it's not. It requires saying no to revenue that doesn't fit. It means choosing trust over quarterly wins. It demands the courage to walk away from numbers that would make your CFO smile today but make your grandchildren wince tomorrow.

This week, ponder this:

What would you stop doing today if you were truly committed to your long-term purpose?