Ep 009 | Competing On Purpose | feat. Bruce Taylor

You built the business, and you could sell it tomorrow to the highest bidder and walk away rich. Bruce Taylor did the opposite, handing EnviroStewards to his own employees rather than to the multinational that would have paid more. In this conversation, Colt sits down with Bruce to unpack the economics of that choice and the triple bottom line behind it, where economic, environmental, and social return all count. You'll hear why he treats profit like blood, something a company needs to accomplish its mission but never the reason it exists, how root-cause systems thinking lets his engineers save clients tens of millions instead of selling them equipment they don't need, and why he tells owners they cannot compete with big firms on salary but can win decisively on purpose. Bruce also explains how a $100 biofilter saves the poorest families $1,000 in medicine, and why that conviction keeps his people from leaving. If you have been trying to out-pay larger companies for talent and losing, this one is for you.ABOUT THE GUEST Bruce Taylor is the founder of EnviroStewards, an engineering firm he launched in 2000 after a decade with multinational consultancies, work that once included water recycling on the NASA space shuttle. He started the company the year the Walkerton water crisis hit, added roughly one employee a year to reach a team of twenty, and carried them through 2008 and 2020 without a single layoff by having everyone share the reduced hours. He is the author of the textbook Sustainable Business, and through the company's hybrid mission he teaches communities in South Sudan and Uganda to build water purifiers from local materials, work that has reached 20,000 families and now runs alongside the Cup for Cup program and an annual film festival in Kitchener. Converted at 25, he built the firm on the values honor God, serve people, care for creation, and married his wife in South Sudan in 2007.