Graduate Stories – 2004

Michael Gurau, President, CEI Community Ventures, Inc., Saltwater Alumni, 2004

I think values-based work is incredibly helpful for business people. The message you should convey about Saltwater’s programs is the linkage between values and business success.

My familiarity with Tom’s of Maine led me to go and hear Tom Chappell speak at a Seven Intentions sampler. Having direct exposure to Tom and his story was inspiring because he is one of the true leaders in the natural products arena, with a very successful performance record driven by values. I wanted to learn from that. I was intrigued because Tom’s story was consistent with my personal map of what is important in life and my professional goal of making values come through in a commercially successful way.

In various stages of my career, I have made decisions driven more by family and personal issues than financial matters—a values-centric point of view. I worked in traditional venture capital for eight years, and in 1996 my wife and I were living in London when we had our first child. We wanted to raise him near her parents in New England, and picked Portland, Maine, with quality of life as the priority over my career. I knew that Maine was not a hotbed of venture capital, but I found this wonderful opportunity to join a non-profit with a social and environmental mission. I was very impressed with CEI’s initiatives, and the opportunity to run a venture capital fund using a values-based focus outweighed the risks from a business perspective. Looking back, leaving traditional venture capital in 1996 began my movement to a career track more aligned with my values.

Achieving commercial success while leading with values is a model I strive for in my work. CEI Community Ventures is a venture capital fund with a financial, social and environmental purpose—the triple bottom line. We have a tight geographical focus, identifying investment opportunities in under served and stressed communities in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Whereas traditional venture capital funds simply decide what companies they want to invest in and are off and running, typically more work is required with our investments, particularly on the front end, to help improve business plans or evaluate a market in-depth. The work is challenging. Finding companies in northern New England would normally be hard, but it’s doubly difficult given our narrower focus on distressed communities.

CEI’s structure, a not-for-profit (NFP) parent operating a for-profit subsidiary, is an emerging model for many non-profits. This can result in tension between the mission-centric sensibility of the NFP, and the commercial thrust of the for-profit. This is particularly so in venture capital, where tough decisions like layoffs, management changes and closings are sometimes part of the process. The trade-offs of prioritizing financial return versus social/environmental mission are challenging without clear road signs. We try to strike a balance that says if we are not successful financially, we won’t have a shot at being successful socially or environmentally.

I had a strong sense of my values before taking The Seven Intentions® course. I have done a lot of personal development work, mostly interior and reading rather than conferences and workshops. I think of myself as fairly self-aware: very introspective and analytical, and hopefully honest with myself. I have a good sense of who I am and how to balance work and life. Some of the backdrop to my interest in Saltwater stems from my own interest in what I’ll call spiritual development. I don’t mean that in traditional religious terms, but more of a personal sense of a greater something, a greater good. I found the Intentions consistent with everything I have accepted as valid in personal and professional development terms.

One of my team, Mike Burgmaier, came to Maine and to this job out of motivations similar to mine. When I was going to take The Seven Intentions®, I thought it important that we go through it together so we could share the opportunity to voice our values, even if it was something you wouldn’t normally do in a business context, I knew that we would be tying it back to work. And Mike took to it in the way that I did and recognized the value. I think he is as pleased as I am that we did it together.

I enrolled in The Seven Intentions® program because I wanted to clarify some things in my mind. For example, I talked about my objectives in the letter that we wrote and sent to ourselves six-months after the course, which contains things I wouldn’t have noted as concretely had I not taken the course. I also gained a clarification of process— to set in stone my commitment to being true to myself about what I believe and sticking with it.

There is an expression called Dutch blunt, which means just say what it is. Be respectful, but don’t hold back and not say something important because of fears or hurt feelings. The Intentions helped me clarify my decision to maintain absolute integrity of thought and action. Having that kind of clarity has been incredibly helpful.

I believe that values can certainly be a part of your business strategy– as a critical tactic to achieving that strategy. For industries in transition or competitive situations, Saltwater could help them respond in the best way. Every corporation has values, but they tend to be narrow, like being good to customers or being communicative. Those are values, but they don’t represent the full spectrum of important core beliefs and tenets. Innovation occurs where values are stretched beyond the normal set of business values.

I think values-based work is incredibly helpful for business people. The message you should convey about Saltwater’s programs is the linkage between values and business success. This is a commercially successful way to run your business: it’s better than doing nothing, better than what you are doing now and far from being just a cost center or nicety, it is a revenue generator and need to do. And to get to this need you have to start with yourself. You have to start with the values of the individuals within the institution.