If Your Biggest Revenue Stream Disappeared Tomorrow, What Would Be Your Reason for Existing?

It’s a confronting question. But the most valuable ones usually are.

If the thing that keeps your lights on, your “cash cow”, vanished overnight, would your organisation still have a reason to exist? Would your people still come to work with a sense of purpose? Would your brand still stand for something that matters?

This is the tension between product and purpose. Between what you sell and why you exist.

Think about Google. If regulators banned all advertising tomorrow, Search and YouTube ads gone, would Google still have a future? Their mission is to organise the world’s information. So theoretically, yes. Their other ventures AI, Cloud, Health, and Mobility, should carry that mission forward. But it would be the ultimate stress test: is that mission real, or simply a justification for the business model?

Every company faces this question in some form. If you’re a bank, are you in the business of loans or in the business of enabling lives? If you’re a manufacturer, do you make things or make progress? If you’re a school, are you teaching or transforming?

This question does more than provoke reflection; it exposes structural dependence. It reveals how many of our business models are built around what works now, not what will endure next. And it reminds leaders that a true organisation is built around a purpose resilient to disruption. Because purpose doesn’t vanish when a product does. Purpose is what makes reinvention possible.

So ask yourself and your leadership team this question honestly:

“If our biggest revenue stream disappeared tomorrow, what would be our reason for existing?”

If the answer is silence, that’s not failure. That’s the beginning of clarity.