The Business Plan Of Love

There have been many turning points in my life, but one moment stands out as truly fundamental. It happened four or five years ago, during an event I co-founded: the Festival of Consciousness. It was the first time I invested in something without expecting any economic return.

At the time, I was running a very successful company — recognized as one of the best places to work in Spain. The reason for that success was our culture. Our higher purpose in business was never running the business itself, but using the profits it generated to create happy workplaces. That had become the whole reason we were in business, and it made running the company genuinely fun. We had a great work atmosphere.

One of the things we did as part of that purpose was create the Festival of Consciousness — obviously a not-for-profit event. I knew we'd need to put money into it, and I hoped ticket sales would make it sustainable. I thought I might have to put in some money — just not that much. It ended up not being sustainable at all. I ended up spending five or six times more than I'd originally had in mind. For me, that was frustrating.

We closed the two-day event with ecstatic dance. We were about 2,000 people. The atmosphere was incredible. The event had been designed to be diverse, so we'd kept ticket prices very low — which, honestly, is part of why it wasn't sustainable. But it meant we had a wonderfully diverse crowd, and the energy was phenomenal. It was really beautiful. That ecstatic dance was literally ecstatic — 2,000 people dancing in awe, after an event that had lasted two full days.

I stood there with a mixed feeling, aware of how much money I'd spent to make it happen. But at some point I was so overwhelmed by the sense of happiness — seeing all those people smiling around me, and feeling that I played a role in it — that I was in awe myself. I remember thinking: wow, it was so cheap to make all these people so happy. The whole story I'd been telling myself about how expensive this had been turned completely around. Two thousand people, happy, for almost nothing.

It was a kind of joy I'd never experienced before. I already knew happiness through professional success — building a company where people were thriving had always been deeply satisfying. But this was different, because I wasn't making any money from it.

What I felt was excitement too, but even more than that, a sense of plenitude: a sense of being home, a sense that this is what happiness is actually about.

That was the first edition. At the second, something magical happened too — one I still find strange to explain. One of my most senior employees had come as a volunteer, and she thanked me simply for letting her be part of it — specifically, for letting her clean the festival floors. She would never have taken on that kind of work for money. Never. But she'd done it for free, and she was genuinely grateful for the chance. I remember thinking: what is going on here? This is really weird.

By the third edition, I realized my passion was drifting toward doing more things like the Festival of Consciousness. My company — as successful as it was — had become too small a vehicle for what I was up to; I felt I was meant for something much bigger. That's when I decided to sell it. That experience is, quite literally, what moved me to sell my company, which I did last year, in order to move forward in this direction.

What strikes me now, looking back, is that I didn't talk myself into it. There was no way anyone could have convinced me to sell my company before that moment — no argument would have worked. It was only after this new sense of happiness took hold that it suddenly made sense. And that's what changed my behavior.

So transformation is not a change in behavior. It was a change in my belief system that drove a change in behavior, with no effort at all. Whenever you find yourself forcing a change in behavior through sheer effort, it's usually because there's something else — a belief underneath that behavior — that actually needs to change first.

Understanding that was fundamental for me. And then I thought: if this is true at an individual level, it has to be true at a collective level too. That's when we developed the idea of transformational philanthropy — that if we want to transform the world, we have to begin by transforming ourselves. And transforming ourselves means transforming our belief system.

Xavi Ginesta founded Voxel in 1998, a Barcelona-based company that became a global leader in electronic payments for the travel industry and was twice named one of Spain's best places to work. He sold it in 2024 for over $100 million to found the Humanitas Foundation, which supports transformational philanthropy — funding shifts in belief and mindset as a catalyst for systemic change. Along the way, he also served as CEO of the Spanish chapter of Conscious Capitalism and co-authored the book Humanitas with Sergi Torres.