How can you cut the high re-offending rate among UK ex-prisoners? Max Dubiel decided that the answer is coffee.

Max co-founded Redemption Roasters and opened an industrial-scale coffee roastery and barista training academy inside the UK prison system. Then he and his business partner set up a chain of retail coffee shops across London.

Learn how he did it on this episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

Once your business has discovered its purpose, it’s tempting to launch it with great fanfare and a three-month communications campaign. But some corporate cultures, particularly those that are analytical and problem-solving, will reject that approach.

What happens to your purpose when the people who buy your product or service are not the people who use it?

Joel Ratnasothy, Managing Director of Interneuron, founded the business to “to provide the health record for every citizen in every country.” The company, now part of Answer Digital, provides professionally managed open-source software as a service to the healthcare sector.

Managing through the unintended consequences of Procurement is just one of the challenges the company faces as it strives to deliver its purpose. Learn how they deal with it on this episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

Sustainable companies deliver better returns on investment and lower risk than extractive businesses. And Paul Herman, founder and CEO of HIP Investor, has almost 20 years of data to prove it.

HIP Investor uses a proprietary zero-to-100-point system (the HIP Index) to measure which companies are more sustainable or impactful and which are more extractive. After 18 years of using the index to advise investors, the results show that it pays to invest in purpose.

Purpose can help solve a common dilemma in professional services firms: how to reconcile the freedom that their professionals and practice areas need to be successful, with the consistency needed to build a meaningful brand.

Sarah Walker-Smith, CEO of law firm Shakespeare Martineau and its parent group Ampa, uses purpose to connect and manage the individual brands owned by the group. In the five years since Shakespeare Martineau first clarified its purpose, the firm has almost doubled in size.

Learn how she does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

Social impact is the driving force behind Shea Yeleen, a skincare products company that supports an African supply chain employing more than 800 women who earn five times the local minimum wage.

Her latest venture is the Yeleen Beauty Makerspace, a hybrid teaching lab and manufacturing space in Washington DC designed to support women and founders of color in the beauty industry.

Learn how she does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist

A meaningful purpose will guide the behaviour of everybody in your business.

First Mile, a UK-based B-Corporation, defines its purpose as “to revolutionise business sustainability, starting with waste and recycling.” CEO Bruce Bratley uses three core values to help everyone in the business embody that purpose.

Listen to how he does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist.

No single doctor attends all your medical appointments. But you do. That makes you, the patient, the de facto integrator of the healthcare system.

That insight led Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli to found Patients Know Best (PKB), Europe’s largest Personal Health Record and patient engagement platform. PKB’s purpose is to give every person the ability to access their personal health record, control who can see it and use this information to manage their health and care.

Listen to how he does it on the latest episode of The Purposeful Strategist.