How Growth and Purpose Create Lasting Impact

One summer evening, my brother Doug and I drove back to the Salt Lake Valley from a trip to St. George. The desert road was desolate and long. I decided to leverage our time together to convince my brother that he needed to grow his business—a wealth management firm started by our father.

I am a natural builder and am very entrepreneurial at heart, so I was having a hard time understanding why I couldn't convince him to grow. Coming from my world of tech, I tried everything I could to convince him of the business benefits of growth, encouraging him to focus on increased funds as an incentive. He wouldn't budge. I couldn't understand why; the answer seemed so obvious.

As we talked, however, we slowly became aligned and eventually reached a clear moment of unlocking between our two perspectives. As he explained his reason for going into business and how it wasn't to make money but to protect families, I realized that his job as a wealth advisor put him in a unique position to protect family trees. He wasn’t just looking after someone's assets but how they managed those assets in a way that protected the emotional strength of a family for generations to come.

My brother wasn't motivated by money but by the people he could help!

There are hundreds of people who stem from a single individual. How well my brother does his job will affect hundreds of people’s lives. For him, it’s not about earning money to earn money.

As I explained how growth and wealth amplify every intention, my brother began to realize that even if money wasn't his focus, it could increase his opportunity to do good and make a difference in his clients' lives.

I walked away from that conversation, convinced that hundreds of individuals could benefit from giving one person the opportunity to build and maintain something of value. Though I understood that prosperity is in fact finite, with the right frameworks in place, it can create a positive impact for years to come.

He walked away from that conversation, encouraged to grow his business, not for the money, but for the opportunity to be a positive influence in his clients' families for years to come.

It's a ripple effect. Each life acts as a stone thrown into time and space. There will be ripples that spread and become pervasive. Each person must decide for themselves if those ripples will have a positive or negative influence, and they also have some control over how significant an impact their life has or how sustaining their ripples are.

We both felt inspired to build as big as we could! The bigger we built, the bigger the stone we could drop in the proverbial waters of life, and the bigger the ripples of impact to those around us. This was the origin of the concept of a Factory for Good. At that moment, I realized that the more our factories output money, the more family trees we could affect and the more change we could actualize.