I was naively hopeful that the paint on my new year intentions would have a chance to dry over January before the earth shifted under our feet again. 

The news of the January 3rd strike and the enforcement-driven devastation people are describing in Minnesota landed on top of a relentless pulse of pressure, instability, and a news cycle built for panic. It’s not just the “big” headlines. It’s the slow-drip stressors like health costs rising, budgets tightening, and benefits disappearing.

I’ve heard from hundreds of clients who share the cognitive dissonance I feel about marketing my business in this environment and I'm not immune to the urge to burn it all down and go put my body in direct action at protests. Then I look at my calendar, my team, my client commitments, and remember why I need to continue to show up for my business, too.

Now, I find myself in a familiar place as a purpose-driven entrepreneur who’s been at it since before 2020: looking for meaning in my work that doesn’t collapse under the weight of what I’m witnessing.

If you’re a founder who started your business to make a difference; to expand your life and create for and with others; to leave your industry or your community or your family better than you inherited it; then I’m sure you recognize this mental dance.

So here’s what I’m practicing, as someone who committed to unlearning extractive leadership patterns many years ago, and is also ten years into building a business with payroll due every two weeks. A few practices I’m using to reduce harm at work and a live look at my attempt to use the power I have here responsibly.

1) A daily practice to lead on purpose

Here’s what I remind myself of every time I need to: I don’t need a perfect identity. I need an everyday form of activism I can play from where I actually stand. It doesn’t matter that I’m a small business without a big budget for impact campaigns because this isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about building impact into the thread of how I operate from day one, so as we grow, our values scale with us, and we never have to choose between alignment and hitting our goals.

“Purpose-driven” isn’t a brand statement, it’s a governance choice:

→ More capacity to redistribute time and financial resources.
→ More ability to fund real care.
→ More power to set norms.
→ More chances to build a workplace where people can breathe.

New practice for 2026: a five-minute morning reset to remember the community I’m working with, and to lead like we belong to each other.

Who am I responsible to today?
Who is counting on me to be clear, steady, and human?
Where can I materially reduce pressure for someone else?
What decision could I make today that increases agency (not just output)?

Then I pick one concrete move that reduces pressure for someone else today.

This practice is grounding. It reminds me I’m not just running a business, I’m shaping a small ecosystem. And when I remember that, I stop spiraling and start leading.

2) Operationalizing our values

An equity-and-agency lens on business forces a simple and practical realization: Values aren’t values until they show up in budgets, policies, and project plans. “We’re a great place to work” is not enough to shape a new organizational culture. I know that because it’s where I started and it wasn’t good enough.

Now we get specific. Below are actions we’ve taken that are easy for you to try. 

Set a shorter workweek target (even if you don’t hit it perfectly)
We target a 36-hour work week, and we hope to continuously reduce as years go on. Often we hit it cleanly. Infrequently, we don’t. But the target itself changes what people feel permitted to do when rest is a part of the design.

Build flexibility into the calendar, not as a perk
We do Flex Fridays every other Friday, and we keep work schedules flexible because life doesn’t fit neatly into “business hours.” The point isn’t just convenience—it’s trust, autonomy, and fewer people having to choose between being a whole human and being “professional.”

Normalize renegotiating timelines
We constantly allow for renegotiating due dates and deliverables because we do respect bandwidth and capacity. And interestingly? This “softness” has made us a better business due to our need to be relentlessly focused on the biggest needle movers. When you stop relying on pressure and panic to get things done, you’re forced to choose what matters.

We treat renegotiation as a pressure-release valve, not the plan. The longer-term work is getting better at setting clear goals, prioritizing the highest-leverage projects, and scoping work accurately enough that we don’t need to renegotiate as often. That’s a leadership skill we’re actively refining, because preventing burnout and grind culture starts upstream in how we plan, prioritize, and operate day to day.

Use AI explicitly for quality-of-life, not replacement
If we’re using AI it’s not to replace people, it’s to improve the lives of the people working with us. Less busywork or repetitive labor and more time for thinking, craft, relationship, strategy (the parts that are uniquely human and also uniquely exhausting when squeezed into the margins). 

These workplace policies reflect a simple reality that the most immediate sphere a small business can impact is its workforce, and I don’t want to overlook that on my way to anything else.

3) My business distributes resources (so govern it on purpose)

My company distributes time, money, opportunity, and power. Most small businesses do, and even a business founded with the best intentions can still reproduce the same extractive dynamics we claim to disown. Building a culture of harm reduction, equity, and agency at work isn’t about being the “good founder.” It’s about building structures that don’t require founder goodness to function.

Below are actions we’ve taken that are easy for you to try.

Redistribute surplus on purpose
We redistributed a portion of our profits last year to team members, female-founded businesses committed to sustainable business models, and Techworker Community Africa, an organization committed to protecting human rights and psychological wellbeing of techworkers worldwide. A question I want to spend more time on as my company grows is around how we share surplus in a way that systematically and measurably advances equity and sustainability. 

Make “how are you really doing?” a repeatable system
We distribute a weekly happiness survey to check in on employees’ mental health, stress level, workload, and where leadership can provide support. It makes it harder for me to pretend I “didn’t know.” It gives early warning signals before burnout becomes a crisis. It’s not surveillance, it’s accountability with consent and care. 

It’s imperfect, but it’s care in action – and it’s also a resource-allocation tool! It helps us redistribute workload week to week, spot friction before it becomes failure, and adjust support in real time. Over the long term, the patterns help us refine roles, capacity planning, and resourcing, so people can excel in the opportunities they’re given and actually progress in their work instead of just surviving it.

4) When it feels pointless, I get specific

When the news is loud with violence and instability, my brain does the predictable thing: None of this matters. I should be doing more. I should be somewhere else. But I’ve learned to treat demoralization like a signal: It’s telling me there’s a mismatch between my values and my operating model.

So I ask the same question every time I’m in this loop:

What would it look like to run this company in a way that reduces harm and increases collective power? What does more agency and dignity for the people doing the work look like today – in how we work. 

EXAMPLE: 

On Jan 13, I hosted a training on Zoom (roughly 1,000 live participants). That morning, I watched clip after clip of Minnesotans being bullied, kidnapped, and shoved outside Targets, daycares, and gas stations just a few days after the death of Renee Nicole Good. After months preparing the material (based on 15 years of career experience), suddenly it felt so trite and pointless, and business as usual felt wrong.

So I opened with a statement acknowledging what so many of us were bringing into the session: a deeply disturbing rage and grief over what is happening in the United States. I stated, "with all due respect to everyone's own lived experience, I need this room to know where we stand, which is in solidarity with immigrant families and communities under attack and in active resistance to the authoritarian direction this country is taking… Every small business here has an opportunity to provide service, to provide care, to provide impact, to provide for their family, to build community, to raise the resources we're gonna need to create a future we want to live in and do business in. And that is what today is about and that is the spirit in which we're gonna attack the next 90 minutes."

No virtue signaling — it’s in the name of solidarity and clarity for attendees about what kind of room we’re building and who I feel responsible to. It was that day’s answer to asking what it would look like to reduce harm, increase collective power, and remind us of our agency.

Regardless of how many people tell you to “stick to [insert whatever your business sells here],”  this is the most beautiful thing about business in 2026:

The conflict that we’re told exists between standing for what we believe and keeping our customers isn’t real. The majority of people don’t support what’s happening, and I don’t have to do business with people who don’t prioritize collective safety and don’t share our values. Most importantly, I won’t ask my team members to sweat for people who vote to revoke our rights as women, Queer, or Black folks. We could become a $100M company without doing that and it will be a lot more fun and fulfilling. Now is not the time for silence. 

5) Your business is part of the work

If it’s feeling pointless, I don’t think it’s because you don’t care enough. I think it’s because we’ve been trained to treat profit as the only scoreboard and to treat values like a “nice-to-have,” or strictly personal and separate from business.

But money has never been the point. The only reason it matters is because of what it can resource: dignity, care, stability, and a future we actually want to live in. Values are what make it matter and what tell us what “winning” actually is.

The choice isn’t activism or business. It’s between unconscious reproduction of domination and deliberate practice of harm reduction, equity, and agency.

If you can create one workplace where people are less disposable, more resourced, and more valued, your ripple effect is not theoretical. It’s the active shaping of a new organizational culture where productivity and quality of life are equal measures of success. When the news makes you feel helpless—and also when it doesn’t—that kind of practice is critical work.

Go ahead and pick one policy, one boundary, or one ritual you can implement this month, and let that be how you start building the future you want inside the work you already do.

In your corner,

Katie

PS If you are looking for an update about what is happening in Minnesota and ways to help, please review this short resource list and update from one of our clients who lives in the Twin City area.

PPS For the founders reading this who are practicing along with me: if you want to build a purpose-driven workplace without accidentally reproducing the harm you're trying to reduce, you need support. I've been working with Nikki Blak since 2024. Her program, Interrupting White Womanhood, is not another DEI training or anti-racism book, it's the deeper work of actually changing how white women like me see and operate. It's where I go when I inevitably make a mistake, where I think out loud about the decisions I'm not sure about, and where I've found someone in my corner when this work gets hard. 10/10 recommend working with Nikki.

 

Updated April 2026.

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