Herschend Enterprises and their CEO, Andrew Wexler, were recently nominated and selected as the first 2022 goBeyondProfit Champion. We sat down with Andrew and learned how he views the long-term return on investment of love as a business strategy. 

Long-term Sustainability of Love as a Business Strategy 

Our founders instilled a way of doing business that was different. It was about caring for everybody involved, the community, the employees, and definitely the guests, and the consumer.

If you want to be successful over the long term, you’ve got to be sustainable. And sustainability is all about this balance: customers, shareholders, and employees, and other stakeholders like community, vendors. And you’ve got to think of that in balance. And if you put that in balance, then you’re going to be able to survive the long-term.

This idea of love in action, the concept of treating people with respect, dignity, taking care of each other — that’s timeless.

When you lead with love, there are going to be times when you have to make decisions that may be a little counter to how you’ve always done it in a pure return on investment defined only by dollars. The reason we use dollars to define return on investment is because it’s easy to be counted. But if you think more of economics and utility, you realize there are other benefits to consider. You’ve got to start broadening how you think about benefit. It’s hard to quantify, but if you can get everybody aligned with the right language and everybody believing in the mission, then you can start to see people make the decisions and to do the right things that will pay off in the long run. You may not see this in terms of dollars next quarter or next year, but this is coming from seventy years of experience. We’re as strong as we’ve ever been, record profits, record growth. And the reason is we think about things in terms of love as a long-term sustainability strategy.