The Business Model for a Better World

This article is about why Palmer&Co exists. Not what we do, but why we believe it matters, and why the moment we’re in makes it more urgent than it’s ever been.

I had a chat with the headteacher of my son’s primary school on his first day.

He told me that schools have a perfect size. Around two hundred children. Beyond that threshold, something shifts, the culture becomes harder to hold, the sense of shared belonging starts to dilute, the institution starts to feel like a system rather than a community. He ran his school with that in mind. He knew every child by name (welcomed them all by name every morning). He built something that was, genuinely, a community.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since. Because the same thing is true of businesses. We’re dedicated to small brands, passionate, visionary founders, because we believe the future of business is in connected communities, not faceless corporations - the thousands of small, passionate brands are the ones who can change the world, if they can be seen and heard.

The numbers are not ambiguous.

The UK has one of the lowest employee engagement rates in the developed world. Around ten percent of workers feel genuinely engaged at work; invested, energised, connected to what they’re building. The human cost is harder to quantify than the economic one and considerably worse.

People spend the majority of their waking lives at work. To spend that time in a place where you feel like a resource rather than a person, where your contribution is extracted rather than cultivated, where the purpose of the organisation is abstract, absent or invisible, means there is nothing to genuinely feel part of.

Over time, this disconnect from community and purpose, where you can’t see how the role you play contributes to a greater collective goal, produces the particular exhaustion of work that doesn’t feel like it means anything.

But this isn’t inevitable, it doesn’t have to be this way.

What went wrong, and who got us here.

For too long, the decisions about how business should be organised, what it should optimise for, and what counts as success have been made by a very small number of people with very large stakes in outcomes that benefit them disproportionately. The result is a business culture built around extraction rather than contribution, scale rather than depth, shareholder return rather than human flourishing.

This is changing. Slowly, unevenly, but genuinely. The founders we work with, the people we most want to help, are building something different.

They’re asking what they believe about the world, what needs to change, whose life could be better, and whether there’s a business that grows because of that conviction rather than despite it.

These are the founders who build ecosystem brands. Not because it’s strategically clever, though it is, but because it’s the only kind of brand that makes sense when you start from genuine purpose - and it’s the only way now to truly get seen and heard.

Why it matters that more important ideas get heard.

We are living through a period of genuine disruption. The problems worth solving, in how we work, how we care for each other and the planet, how we build business communities that sustain rather than extract, will not be solved by the people who benefited most from creating them.

They will be solved by founders with genuinely different ideas about how the world should work. People who are building things that distribute value rather than concentrate it, that contribute to their ecosystems rather than extracting from them, that are answerable to something beyond the next quarter’s numbers.

A keystone brand doesn’t just grow. It makes everything around it stronger. It becomes essential to its ecosystem not through dominance but through contribution.

What we’re building toward.

Our purpose at Palmer&Co is to help more of those people with big ideas be heard. By helping them build the foundations that let their conviction travel - clearly, consistently, into the right rooms, carried by the right people, remembered by the right customers.

We built D3O without a big budget, without a famous name, in a category that didn’t exist. What we had was a clear conviction, the right story, and the relationships that carried it. We built an ecosystem before we had language for what we were doing. And it worked, because genuine belief, clearly expressed, finds its way to the people who share it.

David CAN beat Goliath.

That experience is why we do what we do - because we’ve experienced the power of it. And we want to use that power to help founders who want to build a new kind of business, a new kind of world, one designed for the future, around people, planet and contribution, not extraction.

It’s our way of becoming a keystone brand - it’s our vote for the world we want to live in.