I met a Jesuit priest who runs a publishing house the other day. Here’s a man-of-the-cloth trying to make a buck during a recession in a business whose expertise is putting ink on paper.

Yikes, I hope he can call on You-Know-Who for a miracle or two. Ask him about how he satisfies the profit motive while sporting a Roman collar and this Jesuit will tell you simply: “No Margin. No Mission.”

So he has the same issues less sublime folk like me (and maybe you too) address every day, only inverted. Out here in the secular world our problem is: “No mission. No Margin.”

Why do you suppose so many business people can state within a tenth-of-a-percent their latest profit margin, and yet they can’t come within a country mile of finding a clear, compelling mission consistently communicated by their company? Not having a mission during The Great Recession seems like a rocky road to no margin.

Ask the Jesuit priest about his publishing company’s mission, and he’ll tell you: “Helping souls.” The Jesuits have been around for 500 years, so I suspect their mission will lead to continued margin, even though their publishing business is in an industry that’s upside-down right now for a lot of historic (maybe even biblical) reasons.

Here at Four51 our mission is: “Help businesses market and sell more while spending less.” Okay, so it’s slightly less ambitious than the Jesuits. But, for now, it’s working. We’ve been fortunate to produce margin because of our mission in a really tough economy. We’ll wait to claim complete success in another 490 years or so.

How much time are you thinking about your margin? How much time are you thinking about your mission? Here’s to swapping success stories of Mission and Margin in the 26^th century.

-tim morin

tmorin@four51.com

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