Common Thriving wasn’t going to be a business.

Photo of an aspen forest by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

The signature line and the someday nonprofit

Some time in the last year, I adopted an email signature on a whim: “Toward common thriving, Joel”.

A client was curious what the signature meant, and I thought a bit before responding. My “whim” had, apparently, long been simmering before bubbling up in an email signature. It’s a core ideal for me. Thriving should be common, as in widespread, frequent, broadly shared. And thriving should be common, as in something we all share in. And individual success should happen in ways that build up the common good.

And, I thought, that would be an idea worth building an organization around at some point. These days, good two-word domain names are incredibly scarce, but I looked–and, shockingly, commonthriving.org was available. I registered the domain, as well as the .com.

Naming the consultancy

Months later, as I prepared to bring my coaching/consulting business to the public, I was racking my brain for a name. I’d registered the LLC several years ago with a placeholder name, but needed something that represented me, that I could own.

I started with some horrible ideas. Polyscopic Business Growth, anyone? And an unromantic, oh-so-pragmatic one I almost committed to, Real-World Business Growth. And others. Tap into my rural-Kansas roots? Evoke grand success?

But then it hit me. I already had a name I loved. And with it, the deep “reason for being” of the business itself, the thing that gets me excited about actually working in this space.

And Common Thriving LLC was born.

I do value deep analysis from multiple perspectives, an idea I tried to capture in “polyscopic” (a term which friends told me reminded them of, um, medical “scopes”). I deeply value making ideas and systems work in the real world. But more deeply than that: I want to build a business where the actual work of it delights me. And to get that kind of business, I’m centering on common thriving.

Open horizons

I’m running Common Thriving, the LLC, as a coaching/consulting business to help small-business owners gain clarity about their most-effective next actions, and to support them in increasing profits and decreasing stress. The consultancy is intended to help individual business owners thrive–and it’s intended to make a profit. But I’m also dreaming. What if we had a whole network of people building businesses that, from the ground up, leaned into “common thriving”? What would the individual businesses look like? What would the network look like? And what would the communities around those businesses look like?

The next step for me is to support good small-business owners in personally thriving as they build their businesses: helping give them the space to breathe and reflect, looking at next steps along the path, and supporting them as they build. Beyond that, the idea of the Common Thriving Network keeps on simmering. I’d love to hear your ideas of how such a network could make life better for its participants and for the world!