Purpose Over Short-Term Profits in Family Business

The Crossroads of Finance and Humanity

Recently, I found myself deep in conversation with a friend about the fork in the road that every business owner eventually faces. Do we pull the lever for profit, or do we take the path that honors our people and values? These are real choices. Maybe it’s deciding whether to let someone go for the sake of the numbers, or weighing what it means to carry a bit of pain now for a healthier future later. These choices sit at the heart of family business—and I feel it personally, not just professionally.

Deming called out the “emphasis on short-term profits” as one of his seven deadly sins. He was thinking about big corporations, dividends, and shareholder announcements, but let’s be honest: the temptation to chase short-term results creeps in whether you’re running a corner bakery or a global enterprise. The tighter the timeline gets—focused on this quarter, this month, these three days—the easier it becomes to lose sight of where you’re really headed. Deming’s alternative was this: constancy of purpose. That means having a vision and knowing out ahead, years down the road, with an aim and a sense of “where am I going and why am I doing this?” That mindset reframes every tough decision, guiding you by what matters most in the long run, not just tomorrow’s bills.

How Deming Showed Up in My Story

At the start of my own journey, I lived in the trenches of tech, surrounded by lean thinking and Agile teams. I loved that stuff—the process, the feedback loops, the ongoing tweaks for better outcomes. But I didn’t realize until later how much of it tied back to Deming. When we started Pomiet, it was just about building strong teams—a “teams as a service” model nobody else was really doing at the time. Our team worked by our own principles. Funny thing, looking back: those principles meshed with Deming, even though we hadn’t read his books or called it out by name.

It wasn’t until I went to my first Deming seminar in Dayton that it hit me. We could apply these principles not just to software, but to running the entire business. Suddenly, we had a structure to hang every idea on—HR, sales, accounting, you name it. That gave us confidence, clarity, and room to handle ambiguous, high-stakes decisions without panicking or getting reactionary.

The System of Profound Knowledge: Deming in Practice

Here’s the framework I share with my closest clients:

• Appreciation for a system: Understand how your processes tie together and make them transparent.

• Knowledge of variation: Accept natural ups and downs; not everything will be exactly the same.

• Theory of knowledge: Test your assumptions—plan, do, study, act—because every idea is an experiment at first.

• Psychology: Remember, you’re working with people first; behaviors, biases, and motivation matter.

This way of thinking isn’t prescriptive. It’s a grounding lens. When we faced tough choices at Pomiet—when things got messy and there wasn’t a black-and-white answer—this system helped us move forward methodically. It nudged us out of crisis mode and back toward what really mattered: quality, learning, and the bigger picture.

Let’s Bring Purpose Back

Deming isn’t a management slogan to me. It’s a working philosophy anyone can use, especially in family business where every decision ripples out well beyond profit. If you want to try it yourself, pick up a Deming book, browse training at the Deming Institute, or send me a note. I’d love to talk it over with anyone who’s curious about steering their business by purpose. From experience, it’s the surest ground I’ve found.