Part 1: Aligning Vendors to Meet Your Company Purpose

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. How can good companies remain good when they're working with a variety of vendors and suppliers? That's the topic today. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher.
Hey, guys. I went on this hike with my dog this past weekend, about three miles up and down.
He's 16 and a half years old. He's an old guy, but he motors along really well. There's over a suspension bridge, there's a waterfall, and he's working hard, but beaten us for sure, all the way up there running circles around us. We were just commenting on how spry and active he always is and his exercise routine and his diet. He struggled to find with dog food, where we're just now making our own, and that's the only way he can keep it down.
But we were talking about that dog food industry. It's in such chaos at times. You've got this new organic food coming on the line. They don't know what's organic and what isn't. They're trying to define that. They're trying to define what dog food is, whether it's dog food or dog feed or pet food feed. There's a difference there, and the states have all different rules, and the federal government has rules. And then you got the Supreme Court coming in here with this getting rid of the Chevron Doctrine a few days ago, where gave agencies some ability to clear up all this vagueness. So anything and everything related to this industry and this particular niche is just 1,000 times more confused now. And so my question in all of this is, why can't corporations just be good? And why can't we just have- Why can't we be friends?
Yeah, why can't we just be friends? Why do we need all of this? I mean, if Tullio, if profits of social responsibility, the sole pursuit of business, as Milton Friedman influenced everyone decades ago to think, will the consumers be taken care of or will they be taken advantage of for as long as a corporation can?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:28)
Here's the way I see it. The fact that you have to have regulation to help you serve the needs of consumers better, then you have to go and expend all this energy, both resources and money and everything to get an alignment versus just doing the right thing from the beginning and creating a model where people actually enjoy doing business with you because you're providing a quality product or service, that then you don't have to go and pivot or make changes to do a good job. So my philosophy is build a business for the long haul.
Remember the idea of the village where everybody knew the shopkeeper and whether you had a good reputation or not, it was instant and far reaching. I just think it's a question of pride in serving the needs of people. And I think some companies forgot why they started to begin with and they've just become a machine. I mean, some of the stuff they put in the foods or products are downright dangerous.
Just why? Just because it's filler and it's cheap and makes more profit. Like find another way to make more profit, right? Improve your supply chain, improve your other infrastructure so that you can do better. But don't poison people. It's probably a good policy to have. But then it comes down to like we've been discussing, if a company doesn't have a purpose, then they're gonna be like a leaf on a tree with the wind blowing. They're just gonna go left and right and go with the trends, so to speak. And the wind is really the investor. So they'll just be like, whatever the investors want, we go.
We're versus companies that are more rooted, have some purpose that deeply rooted like a strong tree that lasts hundreds of years. Their mindset's different. It's not just how they deal with their employees and their customers, but even the vendors they do business with, who they choose to do business with, who they procure products from and services from. It all comes in alignment because it's something meaningful to them as a business. So from my perspective, companies that struggle with this, the fact that you have to have regulation, it just means they're like a leaf on a tree just being blown with the wind. The wind change.
It's sad.

**Stephen Sakach** (5:07)
If I'm just solely concentrating on profits, will that stuff take care of itself? Like, oh, I can't just get away with this because it'll catch up to me and it'll ruin profits. Therefore, profits should just be the sole purpose again.