Last year, brothers Jarred and Adam Mait received the heart-wrenching news that their father had been in a fatal car accident. Incredibly, the shock didn’t end there. Forced to settle the affairs of their father over the course of a year, while trying to mourn him at the same time, the brothers learned they were not alone in their predicament.

“Others complained to us that there had to be a much easier and efficient way to settle an estate,” says Adam Mait. “That’s when the concept of Knowtification.com was really born.”

From a family tragedy came a new company with a purpose – to locate assets owned by the deceased, such as bank accounts and life insurance policies. Knowtification does this by sending correspondence to hundreds of financial institutions and instructing them to contact the account beneficiaries directly if there is account information in the name of the deceased.

With the full disclosure that Knowtification is a client of mine, what makes me admire companies like these is that they are so much more than “products and services.” They are born with a much larger picture in mind of leaving others in a better place than where they were. For the Mait brothers, the purpose for forming their own company grew out of making the lives of others smoother in the face of a tragedy because they knew exactly how challenging and frustrating that experience could be themselves. They do not merely help in locating assets – the bigger picture is that they help in healing.

This may seem like I’m about to veer into heady “Why are we here/what’s the meaning of life” territory, but this is more down-to-Earth than you think.

The fact is, beyond moving product or selling a service, I believe we have to have a larger reason for doing what we do. To leave others in a better place than where they were. Some people don’t care about this perhaps, but lately and more than ever, it’s become a big deal to me.

What about marketers? Agency folk have it burned into our brains that it’s all about the work, the work, the work. And I completely agree that we have to make our end result as creatively stimulating as we can from a writing and design standpoint. But dare I say it, there’s something deeper than that for me. I believe the larger purpose for me begins long before an ad is created. It occurs at the first stage of a client relationship when I’m helping them formulate a brand strategy. Because at that point, I’m giving businesses the ability to crystallize a thousand different thoughts within their own walls into a direction that makes sense and what I believe makes them unique. There’s something extraordinary about seeing the look on a person’s face when they realize how their dreams and goals can transition into tangible steps. This moment helps them cross the bridge and they’re pumped more than ever. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it just means that at that specific moment, hopefully, they’ve gained a new and unprecedented level of clarity.

Of course, that’s just my purpose and everybody is different. But my point is that even businesses that seem like they are providing “ordinary” products and services can view themselves as doing much more. One of my new favorite shows is “Undercover Boss,” in which a CEO disguises himself or herself to look like a company employee and perform a variety of tasks. The goal of the experience is to see what it’s like when the executive steps out of the boardroom and into the trenches with the rest of their staff that help make their company go on a day-to-day basis. But the end result is so much more emotional than the CEO ever dreamed, realizing that there are real people with real challenges behind the company, not mere employees. Buttoned-up C-level executives break down and cry when they come to discover about how much heart their people have. The CEO is, many times, forever changed to the point of where they implement new company initiatives framed not in driving higher sales but in making the culture so much greater and inviting than it was before. They find new purpose in what they do. And I’ll wager that it inspires them like nothing else.

What do you feel about this concept? When you dig deeper, beyond simply “what you do,” what do you see your company’s reason for being…to be?

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