The book is called Built on Purpose, and the subtitle is Why Profit Is the Byproduct. People hear that and assume it is the soft part, the nice sentiment you put on the cover before you get to the real business.
It is the opposite. It is the most practical thing in the whole book.
Profit is not the enemy
Let me be clear, because this gets misheard in the other direction too. Profit is not greed. A thin-margin business is not humble, it is just broke, and broke cannot pay people well, cannot survive a slow season, and cannot give anybody anything. You should make real money. I want you to.
So this is not a sermon against profit. Profit is fuel. The question is only this: is it the destination, or the byproduct of building the thing right?
When money is the compass, you get misdirected
Here is what happens when profit becomes the point itself, the thing every decision is pointed at. You start taking work you should turn down because the number looks good. You squeeze the price on a customer you should be serving for life. You keep a toxic client because they pay, and watch your best people leave because of it. You cut the corner, skip the follow-up, push the sale that is good for you and wrong for them.
Each decision makes sense on its own, on the spreadsheet, in the moment. And slowly the business drifts somewhere you never meant to go. When money is the compass, you end up misdirected, because money will happily point you toward a fast dollar and away from a good business.
Chase the profit directly and you will build the business wrong. Build the business right and the profit shows up on its own.
Build it right and it follows
Now run it the other way. You read the person across the table and serve them well. You charge a fair price for excellent work and you keep your word. You put the right people in the right seats and you treat them like the foundation they are. You build systems so the thing runs without you living inside it.
Do all of that, and profit is not something you chased. It is what is left over when you build a genuinely good business. The byproduct. And it shows up more reliably this way than it ever did when you were grabbing at it.
What the profit is for
And here is the last turn of it, the reason any of this matters. The profit was never the finish line either. It is fuel for something bigger than the business: the freedom to be generous with the three things you actually have to give, opportunity for your people, time for the ones waiting at home, and money for whatever you were put here to fund.
That is the whole order, and it only works in one direction. Build on purpose. Serve people well. Let the profit be the byproduct. And then spend it on the thing it was always for.