That makes no sense (unless perhaps they've already achieved their primary goal). If your primary goal is to improve the world in some way, you'd put all of your surplus revenue towards that goal (and by that I of course include accumulating capital in the organization for later use). There'd be nothing left for profits.
If you were interested in the greatest profit you'd put all your surplus revenue towards producing greater profits in the future and just draw a subsistence wage rather than living in a big house or what have you.
But people don't, so I assume that goals don't work like that.
I might want to make the world a better place while still living in a nice house. Maybe that's not logical, but it seems to be the case that advancing your primary goal a short way with your money may not be as satisfying as advancing your secondary goal a long way with the same money.
I suppose a more formal way of expressing that idea would be to say that your goals are weighted as multiples of how interested you are in the results of those goals. If I value a world-changing company twice as much as I value a nice house, then all that needs to happen is that a given sum of money is twice as likely to get me a nice house as it is to get me a really nice company.
Which lines up with the idea that when your company is small and you don't have a lot of money it's probably not a good idea to be buying huge houses, but later on a few hundred k here and there probably won't make a lot of difference to the health of the company.
You do have a point, especially in your first paragraph, but I think it's important to separate the goals of the business from the goals of it's founders, management and employees. The latter probably have goals of at least making a decent living, and that of course impacts the profit-making goal of the business.
However, I also think you're confusing profits with wages. Non-profit organization employees can have quite high wages, but that doesn't impact whether the goal of the organization is to turn a profit.
