January 20, 2026

I have been doing a lot of reflection on the power of community and connection for the next phase of my business. In a time when corporations are, indeed, running the world with a questionable moral compass, I feel that how we do business is an important consideration.

Back when my service was running a yoga studio, we only called ourselves “owners” for the sake of language the taxman understood. To everyone else, we referred to ourselves as stewards of the space and the community.

That distinction mattered to us.

We didn’t own what happened there. It belonged to all of us. As stewards of what happened, we had a clear mission. We returned to it again and again to make decisions. And we were surrounded by humans (contractors) who were in business with a servant’s heart. We led with our values as a compass.

There is a tension many values-driven business people eventually run into:

Businesses rooted in service often underperform not because the work lacks value, but because care gets confused with self-erasure. We start to believe that if our work is humane, it should be free. That counting ourselves into the equation is somehow a betrayal of the mission.