Our Vision
To empower resilient and sustainable businesses around the world.
It's 2032 and we look back at the decade that has been.
At how we've realised adapt's vision, to build incredible communities by empowering SMEs globally.
People and culture
We always upheld the 3 E’s (Entry, Engagement & Exit) and we maintained authenticity about our values. We've been honest and we called bullshit when we saw it.
Maximising Trust was core to our vision and we kept a laser focus on that value. It was written in stone. We adapted to markets and trends, but we refused to adapt this core company value, so important to our reason for being.
Our teams are growing in step with the organisations, and we have people beating down our door to join us. Because we have a reputation for being a wonderful place to work, where values are part of the fibre of our business, where we measure our cultural data and where we continue to let it guide us on cultivating our healthy culture.
We have a stakeholder ownership model in place where our employees have the opportunity to feel like owners in some way, and where they all have a chance to build on their own financial security and family legacy.
Customers
Resilient Business' is no longer a fringe idea, but key to sustainability conversations. Return on Vision (ROV) using long term thinking is more accepted, and people understand, it is a very different approach to short term Return on Investment (ROI).
The greater community now understands that their superannuation drives short term-ism. The asset class of equities (listed companies) have created organisations that fuel inequality of opportunity and are not designed to provide value to all stakeholders. By building strong and resilient SMEs, we have built a new asset class in service of better society with evidence of authentic Environmental & Social Governance (ESG).
Our coach-guided offering is independently a very successful arm of our business.
And adapt HQ has now been implemented for almost a decade. It is transforming how Start Ups and Micro SMEs are building resiliency, and has created an incredible revenue stream for adapt as a global technology company.
Every customer loves their ‘Leadership Operating System’
Organisation Leaders
Our Leaders became great advocates and practitioners of succession thinking. They developed our people to 'percolate' through the business. They handed over their roles at the right time.
They developed their own roadmaps so they could impact the vision of adapt while meeting their own aspirations. Our Organisational Leaders were great Total System Leaders, building leadership and innovation capability inside the business every day.
Team Assessment scores continue to be very solid over time.
Operational Leaders
The operational leaders are leading their functions with high acumen. They are highly engaged through activation of their intrinsic motivators. They regularly adopt an entrepreneurial spirit in empowering their teams, systemising the business, and innovating in their respective disciplines.
Ex team members
We continued to support high integrity exits every time. It’s the norm that people who leave ADAPT are either:
Supported by us to launch their own entrepreneurial ventures, and are now independently, extremely successful.
Have embarked on a new adventure in line with their aspirations, and they consider ADAPT ‘a wonderful place to be FROM’.
Have boomeranged back after pursuing their path, and are overjoyed to have returned to the ADAPT Family.
For the rare exceptions, we rest in the knowledge we’ve done everything in our power to enable high integrity exits.
Greater community
We are doing good community work and developing an offering to take to the Not For Profit world. We may be able to do this as a social venture (funded by adapt) so we can reduce the costs for these organisations and make it more accessible.
Our impact in the greater community has been bigger than we could ever have imagined. But now we have amazing data to help us understand this better, and design it how we would like it to continue to contribute to society.
Government
We’ve paid our dues without incident. We’ve managed to build relationships with wonderfully aligned people in state and federal government and are working shoulder to shoulder to improve the landscape for SMEs.
We’ve played a part in abolishing (or at the very least improving) the issue of payroll tax for small business.
Environment
Screw Net Zero. We're climate positive. And substantially so. Our organisations actually create an environmental BENEFIT by removing additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In addition, we empower thousands of Net Zero or climate positive businesses around the world.
We did this without losing sight of other environmental imperatives, such as sustainable solutions for water and food production.
Society
Our technology had a big impact on raising the water level of trust in society.
Founders / Owners get what they want because great and distributed leadership is central to scaling and succession. By doing so, they've created sustained wealth creation.
The people who work in these organisations are in safer spaces, both physical and psychological.
Society and community benefits from a network of SMEs venturing into every corner of our world, raising clarity and trust and impacting equality of opportunity.
The Economy sees monopoly, duopoly and oligopoly challenged because we can build long term SMEs with long term futures. We challenge the aggregation engine. Mergers and Acquisitions will still take place but Owners have more options than to exit to Public Listing or Private Equity (Circa 2022).
Today it is actually measurable how the communities in which we have a high density of customer SMEs are able to experience higher levels of trust and authenticity in everyday life.
We are considered as leaders in this space and asked about sharing our learnings more broadly.
Future owners
Our system is flourishing. All capital providers are getting healthy dividends and their original investments have been paid back.
We have researched how to support a stakeholder ownership model. A long-term, vision driven investment opportunity for all in the adapt ecosystem. This provides liquidity for the option holders and capital injection opportunities in the future. This research will seed solutions for patient capital including new banks, exchanges and government support.
Our decision to build a private company – where we could control the vision and provide sustained wealth creation – has been successful. We ultimately created profits that fuelled re-investment so we could double down on our vision.
Our stakeholder ownership model is resilient and has created a tremendous group of minority owners, who are able to contribute to, and deliver on their own financial aspirations.
Our Majority Owners and Vision Custodians remain a tiny group of very closely aligned people, guided by and supported through our Shareholders Agreements, and diligently delivering on our Vision.
Let's see what we can do over the next decade.
Love & GAS!
Bill & Gabe