What’s your “why?”
The answer to that question might just be the secret sauce for successful entrepreneurship in your family enterprise. In family enterprises, purpose not only provides a spark of inspiration for founders, but serves as the fuel that helps keep the business going and growing across generations.
Entrepreneurship research supports the idea that meaningful purpose represents a primary driver of new venture success. Entrepreneurs with a strong sense of purpose (beyond potential financial benefits) are more committed to their ventures, more resilient in the face of adversity, and more likely to experience success. Purpose provides meaning and motivation to pursue and persevere.
Perhaps less recognized is the fact that this connection between purpose and entrepreneurship extends to established organizations. Family enterprises are uniquely positioned to take full advantage of this connection.
Alabama-based Milo’s Tea, a family enterprise that sells fresh-brewed tea and lemonade through more than 60,000 retail locations across all 50 U.S. states, illuminates the strong links between purpose, entrepreneurship and success. Third-generation family member and current chair and CEO, Tricia Wallwork joined the business in 2004 before becoming the CEO in 2012. Since that time, she has seen dramatic growth: from 14 employees to more than 1,000, and more than 25% annual growth over the past 10 years. Today, Milo’s is the country’s number-one refrigerated-tea brand, manufacturing more than 1,800 beverage units per minute across three manufacturing and distribution centers that run 24/7, 363 days a year. Purpose is at the heart of this incredible expansion.
“Purpose drives everything we do,” Wallwork says. “We see it as our responsibility to create opportunity for others, and work hard to stay true to that value.” Indeed, Wallwork’s own sense of purpose compelled her to join and grow the family enterprise after taking a different initial path: “I originally went to law school to fight for justice and help people. I didn’t realize that joining the family business would enable me to help people in an even more meaningful way”.
The key behind Wallwork’s thinking is that growth is not so much an opportunity to increase returns, but to increase the impact that the business has on others. “When I first became the leader of the company, I was desperate to grow the business because we had such a remarkable thing to offer to our fans and the world. As I learned and continued to grow as a CEO, I realized that what really drove me, and I think what drives our family, is recognizing the positive impact we can make on the world.”
Let’s consider several related ways purpose helps drive entrepreneurship — and success — in family enterprise, using evidence from Milo’s Tea, which is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year.
Purpose Provides Clarity for Decision-making and Action
Wallwork spells out the core purpose of Milo’s in simple terms: “We want to take care of all our stakeholders like family, whether employees, customers, suppliers or others”. She and fellow leaders of the business and family use that principle to make decisions other businesses might not, such as paying a true living wage and 100% of family healthcare premiums. “We want to provide pathways to prosperity for our associates,” Wallwork says. This approach translates into best-in-class service to retailers and customers.
In this way, purpose serves as the North Star for decisions and actions large and small. All employees know what to do without being told, supporting more decisive, aligned action.
Ask these questions about your business to understand how purpose might — or might not — help bring clarity to decisions and actions:
- Have we articulated our sense of purpose and related values to ourselves and our employees?
- Are we effectively communicating our purpose and values to employees and other stakeholders?
- Can our purpose be observed from the outside based on our decisions and actions?
Purpose Sparks Creativity and Innovation
The longstanding objective of delivering more and better impact for stakeholders helped the family evolve Milo’s business creatively from an original hamburger stand to a fast-growing seller of iced tea products to a large-scale beverage player with multiple business lines. “My parents noticed people came to the restaurants just for iced tea,” Wallwork says, highlighting the rationale behind that early major pivot.
When there is a clear and compelling sense of purpose, leaders and employees are more likely to find new, innovative ways to achieve it. This is a powerful engine for entrepreneurship and growth. Ask these questions to understand and strengthen the link between purpose and innovation in your enterprise:
- Do members of our organization recognize innovation as a tool not just for growth, but for increasing positive impact?
- Are people in our organization empowered to try new, innovative approaches to solve problems?
- Do we praise and reward innovation even when results are not exactly what was expected or hoped for?
Purpose Promotes Resilience
Milo’s explicitly communicates the values of “working hungry, being agile and being in it together.” The company calls this wearing the Milo’s HAT. “Those values have helped everyone take an entrepreneurial mindset to everything they do and compete to win,” Wallwork says. She highlights how this clear set of values has helped the company go up against food-and-beverage players many times its size and weather economic storms, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As those examples suggest, purpose is also a large driver of resilience, helping those in the business rally and keep their eye on the overarching objective in times of adversity — a critical component of entrepreneurship. Here are questions to ask about purpose and resilience:
- Can stakeholders, including employees, trust that the organization will maintain its commitment to values in good and bad times?
- Do members of the organization see their role as an opportunity rather than a responsibility?
- Is the organization agile and able to adapt quickly to change?
Purpose Inspires Your People
“Everyone wants to feel like what they do matters,” Wallwork says. To make that happen for employees, Milo’s communicates its core purpose and values in highly visible, mutually reinforcing ways. For example, each employee is given a Milo’s hat when they start, to symbolize the aforementioned values and emphasize that they are now part of a highly purpose-driven company and culture. Each month, the company also designates a Values Champion who exemplifies the purpose and values. Such practices have helped Milo’s win recognition among Newsweek’s list of America’s Most Loved Places to Work in 2024 and attract an outsized volume of applicants to work there — nearly 119,000 job-seekers in 2025 alone.
As the ideas above suggest, one of the largest ways purpose sparks and perpetuates entrepreneurship is by inspiring people at all levels to treat the company as their own rather than one they just work for. Ask these questions to understand and improve the link between purpose and inspiration in your business:
- Is purpose a primary reason that employees want to work for our organization?
- Have current employees, managers and leaders adopted the purpose of the organization as their own?
- Are there clear, positive connections between the purpose of our organization and the behaviors of individual organization members?
“The old-school philosophy is ‘Just make more money,’” Wallwork says. “But having a deep sense of purpose and values serves shareholders and stakeholders much better.” Milo’s offers strong proof of that connection on multiple dimensions.
A deep, well-communicated sense of purpose and the values that support it foster a greater sense of entrepreneurship organization-wide, paying dividends of every kind. Family enterprises are uniquely positioned to realize these dividends. We hope you find the ideas here of benefit as you work to define, instill and communicate the “why” behind your own family business.