Consultant and Author
Andrew Beaupre
Andre Beaupre, who owned and operated Beaupre & Co. Public Relations in Portsmouth for almost 30 years, is the author of ‘The Purposeful Nine and Soulful Advantage,’ which highlights nine companies that have embraced the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. (Courtesy photo)
For 30 years beginning in 1983, Andre Beaupre owned and operated, with his wife Karen, Beaupre & Co. Public Relations in Portsmouth, a highly regarded communications and marketing company that helped enhance the value of technology, software, B2B and clean technology companies.
After the company was acquired in 2013 by Omnicom, Inc. + Brodeur Partners, the Beaupres stayed on as part of the senior management team. In 2017, they created Soulful Advantage, a management consulting company focused on helping companies rethink how they do business to expand their bottom line to include not just profits but people and the planet as well, a practice known as the 3Ps, or the triple bottom line.
Beaupre has parlayed that experience into a new book, “The Purposeful Nine and Soulful Advantage,” which explores how companies can realign their priorities to embrace the 3Ps while enhancing their competitiveness and bottom line. He profiles nine companies, including Hypertherm in Hanover and Red River Technology in Claremont, as examples of how it’s done.
Q. When did the notion of adding people and the planet as business objectives in addition to profit begin to take hold?
A. You look at the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and you get the seeds planted, then in the ‘80s you’ve got some businesses really starting consciously to make forward movement. In the ‘90s, a business-to-business company that most people have never heard about — called Interface, and they make commercial carpeting — laid down a philosophy of sustainability that would guide the company for a long time. That was one of the first B2B companies to do it.
The notion of triple bottom line came in 1994. The real progress and movement and momentum for corporate purpose, which is a better term than corporate social responsibility, happened in the mid to late 2000s and then in the 2010s in particular.
Q. Why is it important?
A. Companies didn’t realize that there was a direct correlation between worrying about not just profit but the people who you employed and what you did for your community and what you did for the environment, because it would turn around and it would benefit the corporation and make it even more profitable and successful in the marketplace. They began to realize that by taking care of your workplace and the people who were there every day, that would come back to you in a meaningful way that would create longevity, loyalty, and just help the purpose of the business move forward.
Q. Did you run your company with purpose in mind, or is it something you grew into over the years?
A. We were very family-driven, and personal values were what we believed in. We wanted to bring those personal values to the business. We weren’t revolutionaries by any means, but we had this value-aligned culture. Other stuff, like the planet, came in later, when we developed a recycling committee and started doing some things internally to make a difference within our business and then with communities.
Q. How can a company measure whether its soulful objectives are succeeding?
A. When you look across the companies in the book, they published these standards of momentum and progress across those dimensions of community involvement, philanthropy, sustainability, the environment, workplace culture and giving back. All those things are measured.
There’s a new stock index that was created a few years ago. It’s rooted in having companies that are stakeholder-driven, not shareholder-driven. They’ve been able to correlate that being more purposeful across these dimensions we’re talking about unequivocally creates a stronger company with better financials. That’s like one of the latest movements in purposefulness, but this one ties directly to financial performance.
Q. What motivated you to write the book?
A. I was driven by this desire to make more noise about companies that had been purposeful a long time, that were making a difference. The best corporate social responsibility companies, these B2B, private venture-backed companies, you don’t see them. And I know from personal experience that they exist, but why aren’t they mentioned?
Q. Why did you choose the companies you chose?
A. The vision was: Let’s make more companies visible, because maybe that will inspire more companies to see that being purposeful is not only good for people and the planet, but it’s damn good for business too.
