Plenty of faith-driven founders carry a quiet guilt about running a for-profit business. The good work, the thinking goes, happens over at the nonprofit — and what you do all week is just commerce that funds it.
Bruce Ashford of The Ashford Agency spends his working life inside both models. He consults with nonprofit CEOs and small business owners on message clarity and structural clarity, and on the Unscripted Small Business podcast he pushed back on the whole framing.
You Do Not Have To Be A Nonprofit
The line came out of a conversation about whether a business owner doing social good should convert to a 501(c)(3) to unlock grants and ad credits. Ashford’s answer went somewhere else entirely.
“I think the important thing out of what you just said there is that you don’t have to be a nonprofit to do good in the world.”
— Bruce Ashford, The Ashford Agency
He does not treat that as a consolation prize for people who could not face the paperwork. He treats mission-driven business as a legitimate category in its own right — his words were that there are “a number of mission driven businesses” whose work “moves society in a healthier direction,” and that this is “a very legitimate and a very valid way of doing some of the types of things that a nonprofit does.”
If you have been treating your company as the thing that pays for the good you do elsewhere, that is a reframe worth sitting with.
Where Mission Fits In A For-Profit Model
Ashford’s practical answer is that the mission has to be declared, and the declaration has to be load-bearing. He is blunt about the current state of the art:
“Vision statements and mission statements that I see are usually really bad.”
— Bruce Ashford
His distinction between the two is the useful part. A vision statement, in his framing, is “a statement of the mountain that your small business or nonprofit intends to scale. This is what it looks like at the peak.” The mission statement is “the path we’re going to take to reach the peak of that mountain.”
And the mission statement should carry three things: what you are going to do, when you are going to do it by, and why. That last part is where the moral weight sits — his example was “we do this because every person deserves clean drinking water.”
Then, critically, it goes everywhere: “your website, your business cards, your signature line.” And then “you make sure that the rest of the business or the nonprofit actually does what the mission statement says it’s going to do.”
The Six Components Ashford Maps In A Nonprofit
Ashford consults across both models and maps them against each other. Note the direction of travel here — he divides nonprofits into six components, and describes them as parallel to the components of a business rather than identical to them.
“I divide nonprofits into six components, similar to a business. The categories are a little different, but they’re, they’re parallel.”
— Bruce Ashford
On the business side he lists leadership, marketing, sales, product optimization, management, productivity and cashflow. On the nonprofit side the substitutions are revealing: leadership becomes leadership and governance, because there is a board; sales becomes engagement, because as he puts it they “have to sell to two audiences”; and cashflow becomes financial health.
For a mission-driven business the interesting move is to run both columns at once. You still have cashflow. But if you have made a public promise about impact, you have also acquired something that looks a lot like governance and a lot like engagement.
Choosing A Cause Your Customers Already Care About (Practitioner Guidance)
Ashford did not prescribe how to pick a cause, so treat what follows as our own guidance rather than his.
The causes that survive a bad quarter are the ones that already sit inside your customer relationship. A remodeler who funds accessibility ramps, a bookkeeper who runs free financial-literacy nights, a cleaning company that supplies a women’s shelter — in each case the giving is adjacent to the competence, so it does not read as a marketing bolt-on and it does not require you to become an expert in something new.
Ashford’s own emphasis supports the general shape of this: he argues the marketing story should be one “in which the customer is the hero,” and warns that “far too many businesses” write themselves into that role instead.
Reporting On Impact Without Boasting (Practitioner Guidance)
Also ours, not his. The trap with impact reporting is that it turns the business back into the hero of its own story — precisely the failure mode Ashford named.
Two habits keep it honest. Report numbers, not adjectives: how many, over what period, verified by whom. And name the partner organisation doing the actual work, with a link, so a reader can check you rather than take your word for it.
If you would be uncomfortable putting the figure in front of the people it supposedly helped, it is not ready to publish.
More on building the business around the commitment rather than the other way round in Design Your Business On Purpose, and the wider archive lives on the entrepreneur blog.