When we moved to America, my plan was to continue doing investment banking in a more promising market. Within weeks of arriving I landed my first two clients and thought I was on my way. Instead, they turned out to be the last two M&A clients we had here. A virgin hand often wins, as card players like to say.

A year later I sold my business in Hungary and decided to make a change. Clearly, what made us successful in Hungary did not work in America, and being a lifelong student of business, I decided to join Vistage as a franchisee. My expectation was simple: they would teach me how to build a CEO peer group business. I was already passionate about frameworks, and it made sense to borrow a successful one.

Why Vistage Looked Like the Perfect Move

The Vistage franchise offered other advantages too, including stable recurring revenues—a refreshing change from the feast-or-famine world of investment banking—and the chance to build a network in Richmond, where I had no prior connections. The small business end of the market was well covered by the Virginia Council of CEOs (a low-cost Vistage alternative), so I targeted larger companies with $50–$200 million in revenues. I wanted to learn by osmosis from the people I was going to coach.

As I started building my group, I also became part of another peer group made up of 15 regional Vistage franchisees—what they called “Chairs.” In my first meeting, the older Chairs started coaching me on how to go about building a group. One foreign concept they grilled me on was my “Why” behind building a group.

When “Why” Sounded Like B.S.

Frankly, I thought it was all B.S. For goodness sake, I was just a franchisee building a money-making business. I was not thinking about “giving back” and “paying it forward” at all. Just the opposite—I wanted to learn as much as possible from these CEOs, many of whom were more experienced than me.

I could not connect at all to the idea that a higher purpose, rather than money-making, should be driving my business. Yes, I wanted to provide a superior product and service—because of my ego, and because I wanted to attract quality people. That was all there was to it.

Success… Until It Didn’t

Whatever drove me seemed to work for a while. I was the first to launch a group out of 50 Chair candidates who attended initial training in San Diego in September 2013. My group quickly grew to capacity, and I launched a second group soon after. Things looked on the up and up for my practice.

But gradually, the lack of a “right Why” started catching up with me. After the aborted launch of a third group, I realized the Richmond market was saturated. My “business” potential looked capped—and because I was focused on the money, Vistage was no longer attractive to me as a business.

Soon after, I began experimenting with leadership team coaching. I put together a talk titled “How to build a buyable business” and delivered it to other Vistage groups. A few workshops later I started landing clients for EOS implementation. My Vistage members started noticing this and became rightfully unhappy about my lagging attention on them.

That initially surprised me because I saw myself as their peer. But they signed up with the expectation that my “Why” would be to help them, rather than build my own business. I became misaligned with my own peer group practice.

The Why I’m Building Now

Fast forward seven years: I’m now building a business—Summit OS Group—which is fully aligned with my Why. I still want it to be financially rewarding, but it’s not what makes me jump out of bed each morning. My Why is to stop the failure of small businesses in America. In this country alone, nearly 10% of small to medium-sized businesses disappear each year for failing to empower, execute, and differentiate. My vision is to eradicate this pandemic I call “Business COVID.”

Why a Company Why™ Matters

Why is a Company Why™ important? The O.G. Management guru Peter Drucker stated that no business has justification to exist unless it provides value. Money is only the measure of that value, not your company’s objective.

An emotionally resonant Why helps you proselytize what you’re doing and enlist missionaries to support you. It also helps iron out the emotional roller coaster of your business: your business is no longer in a hurry, because the prize is worthy of a long quest. A powerful Why helps you and your people make right long-term decisions, instead of expedient ones.

And a good Why also makes doing business much more fun—which is super important if you’re going to make the sacrifices required to create success.

Want to Find the Company Why for Your Business?

If you’d like to explore the Company Why™, it’s included in The Summit OS® Starter Toolkit as a simple but powerful worksheet designed to help leadership teams articulate the real reason their business exists.