28 Days to Save the World: Crafting Your Culture to Be Ready for Anything

In 2020, engineering firm Velentium faced an unprecedented ask: partner with a small medical device company and a very large vehicle manufacturer to increase emergency ventilator production from hundreds per month to thousands per week—in just 28 days.

Serving on the frontlines of pandemic response is enough pressure to cause any size business to buckle, but the small firm thrived and even doubled in size to complete their manufacturing scale-up known as Project V: seven months of work in six weeks.

 

Velentium’s cofounder Dan Purvis attributes their extraordinary success to their decade-in-the-making company culture, which buoyed them in the face of an unforeseeable crisis. In 28 Days to Save the World, he lays out how to harness the power of organizational culture to prepare your small business to weather any challenges ahead.

 

Every quarter, more than 30 million small-business entrepreneurs face innumerable familiar crises—of management, strategic direction, cashflow and credit, staff, and customers—that can spell their doom.

Drawing from his twenty-five years of experience as a small-business leader, and with gripping stories from Project V, Purvis reveals crisis-tested methods for turning challenges into opportunities.

 

He shows how a well-crafted culture:

Reveals the right path in a crisis

Taps into team members’ inner motivation

Unites leaders and followers

Compels action in “made for you” moments

Enables you to step up to global challenges

Catalyzes deep connections between people inside and outside your organization

 

When a defining moment arrives for your organization, will your team be ready? 28 Days to Save the World is an essential resource for ensuring that you are.

A serial entrepreneur and the founder of six companies, Dan Purvis has deep experience with small business. An engineering graduate of Texas A&M with an MBA from Rice University, Dan brings 25 years of practical know-how in creating corporate environments that people want to work in and clients want to engage. Dan realized that if you seek revenue first, relegate “culture” to a poster slogan, and shoehorn in customer care, you’ll reap dysfunction. But if you make promises you keep, put client success ahead of your own, protect your people and keep operations human—then loyalty, referrals, growth, and profit will follow. And the way you do that is through culture. Velentium, Dan’s current firm, began as a two-person operation in 2012. It now ranks #32 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing engineering companies nationwide, and has averaged 50% annual growth for nearly a decade. Dan’s purpose in writing 28 Days to Save the World is to share his insights, mistakes, and experience in building successful cultures with other leaders, so that together, we can make the world a better place to be human.

Jason Smith founded his first company, a residential landscape design and installation service, thanks to mentoring from other entrepreneurs in his community. By the time he graduated from college, his company had helped pay tuition for a dozen staff, each recruited away from passion-crushing employment in big-box stores or fast-food restaurants. Fueled by polymathic curiosity, Jason subsequently worked in a variety of industries: real estate, property management, nonprofits, trade associations, higher education, and now, medical device development. Jason’s wide-ranging experience enabled him to recognize something rare at Velentium: Most organizations lack the combination of insight, empathy, and investment guts required to do right by their staff, clients, and investors alike. He believes that 28 Days to Save the World will show leaders how to harmonize these “competing” interests to build more effective, resilient, and positive organizations. 28 Days to Save the World is the tenth published book Jason has helped author.