A Business Built on Purpose

Five years after receiving the inaugural goBeyondProfit Champion Award, Gas South continues to demonstrate how generosity in business strengthens organizations during times of significant growth and change.

Recently, goBeyondProfit interviewed Gas South CEO, Kevin Greiner, to explore the company’s ongoing commitment to its purpose, Be a Fuel for Good.  The conversation highlighted how this guiding principle has evolved into a fully integrated strategy, fostering loyalty among employees and customers while informing critical business decisions. 

By staying true to its purpose, Gas South has discovered that generosity is not just good corporate citizenship – it’s a powerful strategic advantage.

Be a Fuel for Good

Kevin Greiner: Gas South really has built our business around purpose. When you get purpose working, you take an approach of thinking about who are all the stakeholders in my business. How do I holistically really make a difference with all of these different constituencies? It all started with a pledge that we had made in 2016, which was to give back 5% of our profits to youth in need. It was really to support our purpose of being a fuel for good, in caring for our customers and our employees, and in elevating our industry and our communities, and as we looked at how do you bring purpose to life, a core part of that community commitment was really about that 5% of profits going to children in need.

We sat down with Carley Stephens, Manager of Community Affairs at Gas South, to gain additional insights:

Carley Stephens: Be a Fuel for Good is really a call to action. So it not only invites you as an individual to be a fuel for good in your work, in your everyday life inside and outside of Gas South, it invites our employees to join with us in doing that, to think about how they can be a part of that, and it invites our customers to think about how they can participate in it as well, and that it’s an understanding and a commitment between all of us, among all us, to be a fuel for good together.

Another way that we do it is through how we serve our customers. Our customer care team is completely in-house. Everybody is a full-time employee, so anybody that you talk to when you call Gas South or when you chat with us or when you do an email, you’re interacting with the Gas South team member. Having our team members be the ones that serve as the voice and the ears of the company is super, super important for us, and I think our customers see that that really makes a difference in how they experience us.

Carley Stephens: I think because we are a purpose-driven company and we are very outspoken about the good we are trying to do and inviting people in to do it with us, we attract employees and customers who have that same value. There’s a few ways that we’ve started to engage our customers more in our purpose and in our giving back. We have a application process for funding for nonprofits where employees and customers vote for the nonprofit that they feel that they connect with the most to receive funding. We invite our customers to vote on where our profits are going because we also know that we’re not profitable without our customers.

Kevin Greiner: We talk about our mission being the energy provider of choice by providing exceptional value, service and simplicity and our purpose around caring for customers really encompasses all of those principles.

Purpose as the X Factor for Gas South’s Growth

Kevin Greiner: I think that purpose matters so much when you acquire or merge with another company. Through all of the acquisitions that we have made it has made such a difference. Those employees who came over from acquisitions, all the great team members that we’ve been able to bring into this great company, have mentioned that time and time again that they could see that this was a purpose-driven organization. They wanted to be part of that.

I think it is difficult if you don’t have that foundation, because this is a time when people are really watching and thinking about, is this really where I want to go? Is this where I want to continue my career? Without it, you’re going to lose a lot of folks. So having that purpose really creates the foundation for bringing new people into your company and really getting the best of a new, more powerful organization when you make that acquisition.

Translating Purpose into Values

Kevin Greiner: I think in these times it’s as important as ever to define your purpose as a company. It’s important to take that purpose and translate it into the values that you really want to live by in your organization. For us at Gas South, we’ve been through that process.

We recently undertook really a reframing of our mission and our values because we had changed as a company, we’ve gotten a lot larger and brought so many new people into our organization. We really wanted to invite them to be part of that process. Our value statements, I think, really define who we are as an organization, what we expect of ourselves, what we expect of each other, and how we want to drive our business forward.

Carley Stephens: Our articulated values are Do What’s Right, Own It, Serve Others, Be Better Together and Keep Growing. Those things really encompass how we expect our employees to conduct themselves each and every day. It helps to really outline and define what the North Star of our purpose is and how to Be a Fuel for Good. It still leaves room for employees to interpret what that means to them, but it gives some really good guardrails in terms of making sure that you do the right thing inside and outside of work.

Kevin Greiner: For any CEO, you really need to define your purpose, define your values, define your mission, and then ensure that you live by them each and every day.

Practical Ways Purpose Influences Employee Care

Kevin Greiner: Caring for our employees at Gas South is extremely important. We’ve increased our minimum wage over a multi-year period. We’re proud, not only of the wage level, which allows our team members to really take care of themselves and their families, but also providing a benefits package that provides them with healthcare, retirement, and a sabbatical.

The other thing that has been really important to us is paying well for a job well done. The way that we do that is with a company-wide bonus. We call it our Performance Incentive for Employees. The acronym we use is PIE. As we have success at Gas South and as we continue to generate good financial returns, every team member here at Gas South gets a piece of that PIE.

We’ve also gone all in on hybrid work and our “Work for Your Day” philosophy really epitomizes and embodies that. The way that we think about “Work for Your Day”, is all about conscientious autonomy. We want you to make the decisions about whether you should be in the office with a customer or at home on a given day, but be conscientious about it. Think about what impact it is going to have. It’s very high on flexibility. It’s very high on autonomy. It really puts the decision making in the hands of the team member and their leader at Gas South, and I think it’s worked out really well for us.

One of the other things with “Work for Your Day” that may make it a little bit different from other companies is that it’s not one size fits all. And what I mean by that is we recognize that there are a lot of different functions here at Gas South. People do a lot of different work. People have a lot of different preferences and so we decided not to go in the direction of having a one size fits all where everybody’s expected to be in the office on certain days. We decided instead to really take advantage of the differences of the work that people do and recognize that there is a different optimum for different individuals in terms of how often they should be in the office versus how often they should be able to work from home.

I think our team members really like it. They see that we trust them to make good decisions on how often they come into the office and how often they work from home. They want to have more autonomy in how they work and where they work. And we’ve embraced that at Gas South and really tried to turn that into a strength for our company.

Narrowing the Focus Deepens the Impact in the Community

Kevin Greiner: We have made a shift in our philanthropy. What we’ve done is we have concentrated our giving with a fewer number of larger partners and I think that’s really helped us to move the needle with those organizations. We’re able to fund specific initiatives and specific programs and to be a more meaningful partner for those organizations.

Carley Stephens: Our philanthropic commitment has grown well over 300% in the past five years. It started as under a half a million dollars when I first came, and now we’re giving more than $4.5 million back to the community, which is incredible. As we’ve grown, our philanthropic investments have grown, the amount of money has grown, but so were the number of nonprofits we were engaging with. And although it may sound counterintuitive at first, it wasn’t allowing us to be good partners.

We were simply writing checks to nonprofits and those checks were for smaller amounts and they didn’t come with any relationship or partnership with us because that’s all we could manage. So by going deeper and focusing on fewer nonprofit partnerships we have become a better community partner.

My favorite thing to hear from our nonprofit partners or other nonprofits is how they’ve heard that we are a great company to work with and how we do it right. We’re not just stroking a check, they feel that we actually really care about the issues in our community, and we really care about how we can solve those issues and have an understanding of what role we play as a company.

Kevin Greiner: The way that we look at the 5% is as the pie increases, there’s more good that we can do. We felt like the 5% of profits going to children need continues to be as salient as ever and makes sense as much as ever for Gas South.

The Greatest Benefits of Business Generosity

Kevin Greiner: I think being generous as a company, being a great corporate citizen, is really a benefit that is truly multifaceted. Our employees love it because they feel like they have a sense of purpose coming to Gas South. They can be part of something that is really special. I hear from our team members all the time that one of the key reasons that they were attracted to Gas South in the first place is because of the level of community engagement that they see from us.

Carley Stephens: When I am here. It’s not just about our overall corporate purpose, but it’s about the people who make up this place. That’s the greatest benefit for me personally, because it has attracted employees who are incredible individuals, incredible leaders, and when you enjoy working with people, you can be creative and collaborative and innovative.

Kevin Greiner: A lot of our customers see us as a company that really leans into the community, that wants to be part of the community, that wants to give back, and that leads to a level of loyalty among our customers. I think that when you look at our industry as well, we are seen as a leader in our industry, in part because of how we lean into community engagement and support.

Carley Stephens: I love that our purpose has been a North Star and it’s been unwavering. It hasn’t changed. I think it’s grounded us as a company to make the decisions we’ve needed to make, to change, to grow, to adapt for our customers, for our employees, and for our community. It’s evergreen in the underlying commitment to do what’s right and to continue to be committed to do the good things and be a good force.

Kevin Greiner: I hope five years from now, we’ll be double the size that we are today, but more than just size is really, are we a better organization? Are we a better company? Are we better people? I think those are the things that we always strive for at Gas South, and we want to continue to make that difference, continue to give back to the community, continue to be seen as one of the best corporate citizens in Atlanta and Gainesville, and really challenge ourselves to reach new heights.