The Market Doesn’t Care That You Care

Words by Mel Greblo

Why purpose-led businesses are harder to run – and more necessary than ever

There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with running a business that exists to do good. You are simultaneously holding a spreadsheet and a set of values. A payroll run and a theory of change. A Slack message about Q3 pipeline and an unspoken reckoning with whether any of it is working… not in the revenue sense, but in the meaning sense.

If you know that feeling, you’re probably my people. But I didn’t start there. I started in a courtroom. Not as a lawyer, but as the person trying to make sure someone was actually listening.

The business that became Humans of Purpose started life as Scriibed. A transcription company I founded after watching, up close, what a monopolised market does to a civic function. Court transcription sounds unglamorous. It is unglamorous and it’s also foundational to how justice operates. The record of proceedings – who said what, when, under what conditions – is not an administrative nicety. It is the mechanism by which accountability exists and without it, the entire architecture of due process becomes theoretical.

A broken system

What I found, working inside that world, was a market structured not around the integrity of that function but around the capture of it. A small number of players had carved out the territory. Pricing was opaque, quality was inconsistent and the people most dependent on the service – defendants, families, public defenders, regional courts, First Nations people – had the least power to demand better. To put it simply, the monopoly wasn’t maintained by excellence, it was maintained by incumbency.

I started Scriibed because I thought the function deserved better custodianship. Because I believed a business could hold a public good with more care than the market had demonstrated. And because – being honest – I had always been constitutionally unable to watch something broken and not try to do something about it. So when VIQ Solutions collapsed, it didn’t surprise me.

VIQ was a Canadian tech company that had built a significant position in court transcription across Australia. When it went into voluntary administration, it left courts without transcription services and defendants without records. And a justice system – already strained at every seam – scrambling to plug a gap that, in the logic of procurement and outsourcing, was never supposed to exist. These things, we are told, are managed by the market. The market ‘provides’… except, when it doesn’t.

This failed the way many tech-led disruptions fail: by treating a critical public service as a product optimisation problem. Strip the labour costs, automate the difficult middle, scale fast enough that the unit economics eventually work. It’s a model that functions until it doesn’t, and, what collapses isn’t just a business. It’s a civic infrastructure that real humans depend on.

I had lived that logic from the inside. I had seen the way the market’s indifference to purpose produces brittleness, not efficiency. I had watched the gap between what the service claimed to deliver and what it actually delivered widen, quietly, until it became undeniable. Yet when it fell, I didn’t feel vindicated. I felt the weight of the thing. Here we go again. The courts are scrambling. Someone needs to step in, and whoever does needs to understand that this is not, primarily, a technology problem or a logistics problem. It is a question of who holds the thread of accountability when a public function is delivered through a private vehicle.

When something breaks, something else is built

This piece isn’t really about court transcription. It’s about what I learned from being in the middle of a clearly very broken system. When I eventually stepped back from the day-to-day of transcription and began to look at the broader landscape of purpose-led organisations, I saw the same pattern everywhere. Extraordinary work, inadequate story.

Organisations doing genuinely important things, held back not by the quality of their mission but by their inability to make that mission visible – to funders, to clients, to the public, to the people they most needed to reach. The digital landscape has shifted the ground entirely. When we once relied on reputation, referral, and sector relationships we are now operating in an attention economy. The kind of intellectual presence that builds trust before a single conversation has been had, is what’s now most rewarded. And purpose-led organisations – the ones with the most to say – are now, too often, the softest voices in the room.

That’s the gap Humans of Purpose was built to fill. Not as a rebrand, more as an evolution. The same underlying conviction that animated Scriibed translated into a new domain: communications, content, story. Helping mission-driven founders, B Corps, social enterprises, and purpose-led businesses build the kind of digital presence that their work deserves.

The cost of a conscience

Here’s what nobody tells you when you decide to run a business with a conscience. It actually costs more. Not because you’re inefficient. Not because you don’t know what you’re doing. But because genuine impact work carries costs that ordinary businesses simply don’t bear. You pay living wages when the market rate would be lower. You invest in governance that exceeds what’s legally required. You hold off on the easy client because their values don’t align, even when the pipeline is thin. You build in real impact measurement – not the kind designed to look good in an annual report, but the kind that actually tells you whether anything is changing. You employ humans whose job it is to hold relationships, not just transactions.

If you’re a B Corp, this is the point: you’re structurally accountable to a wider set of stakeholders than a traditional business. That’s the whole design. But it’s also why the financials look different. Not broken – different. Different in the way that a regenerative farm looks different from an industrial one. More labour, more complexity, more time, different outputs, different timelines, different measures of success.

And yet, the market still asks you to compete on the same terms as businesses that carry none of these costs. It still asks you to price competitively against agencies that don’t pay fairly, or organisations that have never once asked: who is harmed by how we make money?

This is the structural injustice at the heart of the impact economy. And it is one that communications – done well – can begin to address. Because if people don’t understand why your costs are what they are, they can’t make an informed choice to back you. And if they can’t back you, the market will keep rewarding the cheaper, faster, less accountable alternative.

Stories that matter

The work of Humans of Purpose is to help purpose-led organisations tell stories that make the economics legible. Stories that carry not just what you do, but why it costs what it costs, why it takes the time it takes, and why that is actually the point.

Because here’s what I’ve come to believe after years working in this sector: impact organisations don’t have a strategy problem or a product problem. They have a story problem. Not in the sense that their leaders don’t have things worth saying – they have everything worth saying. But in the sense that the story isn’t threaded consistently enough through everything for the outside world to feel its full weight.

A golden thread of story is not a branding exercise. It’s a thread that’s running from your values through to your services. It’s alive and thriving in your team culture, your content, your funding relationships and carrying over to your client conversations. It is an organisational nervous system and right now, too many impact organisations are running without one.

The systems of story

This is where platforms matter. Not as a solution – I am fundamentally suspicious of anyone who tells you a platform will save you – but as core story-telling system. Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram and podcast networks. These are the places where individual leaders can speak in their own voice, build genuine intellectual credibility, and attract the humans who are aligned not just with what you do but with how you think. In a sector where trust is the actual currency – where the decision to hire you, fund you, or champion you is almost always preceded by months of steady observation – this is not a minor thing.

The individual founder as thought leader is not a vanity project. It is a growth strategy. It is also, I’d argue, an ethical one. When you put ideas into the world that help other leaders in this space think more clearly, you are contributing to the collective intelligence of a sector that needs it, and that can also influence other sectors for the greater good.

But let me be precise about what I mean, because the performance of thought leadership is its own trap. I don’t mean you need to be everywhere. I don’t mean you need to post daily or perform vulnerability for an algorithm. I mean that the ideas animating your work – the convictions, the frameworks, the questions you return to – need to live somewhere outside your own head. Somewhere the people who need to find you can actually find them.

Because the alternative is that your organisation is indistinguishable from the fifty others doing adjacent work, saying broadly similar things in broadly similar tones, competing for the same grants, the same clients, the same attention. Your story – carrying the particular logic of how you see the problem – is what breaks that pattern. It’s the thing no-one else can replicate, because no-one else is you. I started this piece with a courtroom. I’ll end it there too.

A call to action

What the transcription system collapse tells us and what the slow grind of that monopoly taught me long before – is that markets are not neutral. They carry values, even when they claim not to. They reward certain kinds of efficiency and punish others. They absorb public functions and return them stripped of the accountability those functions require.

Purpose-led businesses – B Corps, social enterprises, impact agencies, mission-driven founders – exist precisely to hold that line. To say: we will carry the cost that this function actually requires, because the alternative is someone else paying a different kind of price. That work is harder than running an ordinary business. It requires more of you. It costs more, in every sense.  It is also, I believe, exactly the kind of work the world needs more of right now.

Which means it deserves to be seen. Understood. And told – with all the complexity, the trade-offs, and the stubborn, unglamorous hope that sits at the centre of it.  That’s what we’re here to do.

If something here resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it! Get in touch or book in a Discovery session. 

Until next time,

Mel Greblo

Founder and CEO, Humans of Purpose.