Som Seif is the CEO and founder of Purpose Investments and Purpose Financial.
Tell us about Purpose Financial and the journey to where you are now.
Purpose Investments is the business that I founded about six years ago after I sold my previous company, Claymore Investments. The goal was to continue along the journey of helping the industry rally around its customers and improve the way we build better investment management. And now, with Purpose Financial, it’s about even broader financial services products to small businesses and consumers alike.
How does culture contribute to organizational success?
When you are building a company, it’s all about the types of people that you have around the table, the partnerships and the alignment of the interests. This is something I fundamentally believe in. It starts with the quality of people, not just intelligence, but the quality of what their character traits are.
From there, it’s about making sure they are aligned with not only your vision but also the term to that vision and the work that goes into making it happen. That’s what we’ve tried to do. It’s hard, but we’ve tried to do that from the inception of building this business.
How do you attract and retain talent that best fit the culture?
When it comes to attracting talent, we think a lot about your mission, your values, the reasons people are looking to come to your company and why they want to be a part of it.
I think a lot about what it is that motivates people to be successful. It’s about giving them the opportunity to progress their careers, their ideas, and to move forward.
Here, we care a lot about that. We drive that ability to give people the chance to have their ideas heard and then the autonomy to be successful.
What does the future look like for Purpose Financial?
When I started this company, I decided I wasn’t going to measure success by virtue of whether or not we grew to some scale & size or revenues or cash flows, but whether or not we had an impact on the industry. That’s really what matters to everybody in this company. But it’s also about our clients and our own people.
Do our customers end up being more successful or less successful? Do the people who work in this organization end up being more successful or less successful in their careers? Those two things also drive us, and if we can be measuring those elements, we will build a great organization that has a social utility as positive to society.