Business Case: Clarity, Vision, Growth

Tuesday, 30. July 2024

How purpose and clarity help founders thrive - an illustration of the HBR study

For the last almost 18 months, I’ve been working with the founder of Wahad. Afghan Street Food, providing professional support while he conceptualized, set up and started his business. And I am very proud to say that, after launching in November 2023, he’s now booked out until the end of the year and is considering to buy a second food truck. How was this success possible?

When I met Mohsin for the first time, he was like tumbleweed. He would bring up numbers and information about market niche and options for catering, restaurants and the like. He couldn’t explain why he wanted to go into the food business. He would get confused and off-track easily, whenever someone came along raising doubts or bringing up new ideas.

We went onto our journey with a design thinking approach, but started off formulating a strong vision and a mission statement. Mohsin is an engineer and exquisite project manager by training, so I decided to send him on an inner journey with strong visual elements, in order to bypass his sense of logic. 'OMG meditation', he half complained - but came out with a very strong and precise idea of what he really wanted: to bring Afghan food and culture to a UK audience. This core element hasn’t left him ever since.

We translated his purpose and mission into every detail of his business: from product range, menu and ingredients to communication strategy and visuals. According to our findings on target customer segments and how to address them, Wahad is today a fresh, young and healthy Afghan food business, which is particularly attractive for people who go to sports events, festivals and food markets. It is gaining more and more traction, positioning the business as a culinary jewel that is able to bridge cultures via street food classics with a healthy Afghan twist.  

I strongly believe that it is crucial to invest time in building the fundamentals of a business, i.e. the core purpose and vision. The Harvard Business Review did a study some years ago, based on +450,000 worker responses from 429 companies. They found out that purpose alone does not correlate with financial results, but that businesses where management provides clarity about purpose regularly outperform the stock market, by gaining almost 7 per cent higher returns. If he keeps growing at this speed, Mohsin will surely outperform the study results.

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