I first began thinking seriously about impact early in my career, long before I ever launched my own business.
At the time, I had the opportunity to work alongside Anna (Anne) Eleanor Roosevelt, who was leading Boeing’s global corporate citizenship efforts. She believed that companies have both the responsibility and the capacity to play a meaningful role in addressing social, economic, and environmental challenges.
As I watched, I noticed that the work she and her team were doing wasn’t performative or peripheral. It was being embedded into Boeing’s culture, into how employees engaged as volunteers, and how partnerships with nonprofits and local organizations were formed and sustained.
I asked Anne to be my mentor in an elevator at The Boeing Leadership Center.
We had two floors to go. My heart was pounding as I delivered my entire pitch in about thirty seconds. With a warm smile, she said yes on one condition: that it would be a two-way mentorship. That moment stayed with me, not just because she agreed, but because it reflected something I would come to believe deeply.
Impact is not hierarchical; it’s collaborative, and it works best when it’s rooted in mutual responsibility.
Watching Anne’s work shaped how I understood the role of business in the world. Global corporate citizenship, at its best, is not about writing checks or bolting philanthropy onto the side of for-profit businesses. It’s about embedding responsible, human-centered practices throughout core operations. It’s about balancing profitability with positive impact on employees, communities, and the environment. It’s strategic, ethical, and a critical business differentiator.
Businesses are uniquely equipped to meet big moments.
Institutions play distinct and necessary roles in our society.
As a political science major, I learned early that government is designed to serve the masses. It establishes laws, provides protection and security, and ensures that basic needs are met. Nonprofit organizations step in where governments cannot or will not, addressing gaps in care, promoting causes, and advocating for communities that are often marginalized or overlooked.
Business, by contrast, is built for wealth creation and innovation.
At its best, business is agile. It can move quickly, allocate resources decisively, and experiment in ways other institutions cannot. It attracts talent, mobilizes capital, and turns ideas into action. When aligned with clear values and strong leadership, business has a unique ability to respond to complex challenges with both scale and speed.
This is where our opportunity and responsibility lie as business owners and leaders.
Businesses can invest, partner, and commit for the long term, and when they collaborate effectively with government entities, nonprofits, NGOs, and community organizations, their impact multiplies.
That lesson in college stayed with me.
Years later, in 2022, I found myself at a crossroads–a moment many business owners recognize–when the push to do more collides with deeper questions about what they’re building and why. I had just relaunched my solo consulting practice at the same moment the online business space was being flooded with “hustle harder” narratives. Everything on social media was about working harder, doing more, scaling faster, and optimizing everything for more, more, more. It was profit at all costs, and something about it all felt deeply misaligned.
I didn’t - and don’t - reject the importance of profitability in business. I strongly believe that businesses must be profitable to be sustainable and make a difference. But the extractive, dehumanizing edge of the profit-at-all-costs model didn’t sit right with me. It felt disconnected from everything I had learned about leadership, systems, and long-term value creation. I found myself thinking back to my time with Anne and the role businesses can, and should, play in the world.
I decided to go all in on a different path.
I shifted my business model to be explicitly impact-oriented, grounded in the belief that business can be a force for good when it is led with clarity, values, and conviction. I believe that when leaders are clear on what they stand for and on the impact they want to create in the world, their businesses gain power, not lose it. They move with greater focus, make better decisions, and more easily build trust. The cumulative effect of that means we have the ability to move mountains and create ripples of change.
Impact, in this sense, is not charity. It’s differentiation.
In a crowded market, conviction is one of the most powerful strategic assets a business can have. Values-led companies don’t need to chase every opportunity. They know what they’re building toward. They understand the tension between purpose and profit and are willing to navigate it thoughtfully, rather than throw one out for the other.
This is the essence of the triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit. When businesses steward resources well, support human dignity, and generate revenue in alignment with their values, they fundamentally change the systems they operate within.
My perspective on this has been shaped not just by my corporate experience but by the years I spent living in Egypt, a place rich in community, relationships, and collective responsibility, and by working throughout the world. In cultures where connection and mutual care are central, the idea that profit should come at the expense of people feels foreign and unsustainable.
And quite frankly, that’s not a world I’m interested in helping to build.
As I leaned more fully into this conviction, I began looking for other small and solo business owners who were navigating impact in real, imperfect ways. While there is a large and inspiring global community of B Corporations, at the time I struggled to find spaces that felt relatable, places where women running businesses like mine could openly discuss the tensions, questions, and tradeoffs inherent in doing meaningful work.
In November 2023, I created the Social Impact Roundtable.
It was designed as a safe, thoughtful space for female business owners to come together to talk honestly about impact, leadership development, and the realities of balancing purpose and profit. The community has evolved over the past two years, but at its core are women doing deeply intentional, beautiful work in the world.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned through this work is that impact doesn’t have to look like any one thing.
How we define impact is deeply personal. It’s shaped by our convictions, our values, and the experiences that have formed us as leaders and business owners. What feels essential to one person may not be the same for another, and that’s not a flaw in the system; it’s the whole point.
For me, two areas of focus are particularly close to my heart.
The first is menstrual equity. I believe every menstruator deserves to menstruate with dignity. Access to supplies, education, sanitation, and support should not be a luxury; it is foundational to participation in education, professional life, and public spaces. When menstruators are pulled out of school or work due to shame, stigma, or lack of resources, the long-term economic and social costs are exponential. Addressing menstrual equity is not simply about health; it’s about removing a systemic barrier to education, economic participation, and gender equality.
Closely connected to this is my work around women’s empowerment. I believe in a world where women are free to use their unique skills, expertise, and voices to create opportunities for themselves and others. We know that women reinvest up to 90 percent of their income back into their families and communities. When women are equipped and supported in entrepreneurship, the ripple effects extend far beyond individual success. They strengthen entire communities and create generational impact.
In my own business, I’ve worked to operationalize impact on a daily basis.
I am in the process of becoming a certified Benefit Corporation For Good and have integrated impact through philanthropy, volunteerism, and partnerships. This includes menstrual supply drives and kit-packing initiatives, as well as collaborations with organizations like HeartProfit, where I serve as President of the Executive Board, and B1G1, embedding giving and social contribution directly into everyday business operations.
Social impact is not just an add-on to my business; it’s something I have specifically designed for.
I don’t believe the businesses that last will be the loudest or the most optimized. I believe they will be the ones built with conviction and led by people willing to take responsibility not just for growth, but for helping create a kinder, more just, more equitable world.
When business leads with goodwill and deep conviction, aligned action follows. And that, to me, is where real impact begins.
