TLDR
Our skills in design and our creative prowess captures the essence of your brand.
Our skills in design and our creative prowess captures the essence of your brand.
You're an ambitious founder with a brilliant idea that could make someone’s world better. You've got the passion, the purpose, and maybe even some startup capital. But then comes the existential crisis that hits every impact-driven entrepreneur: "Can I actually make money and make a difference?"
If you've ever felt torn between your bank account and your values, you're definitely not alone.
The business world loves to serve up false choices like they're the only thing on the menu.
"You can make money OR make impact."
"You can scale OR stay true to your values."
"You can be profitable OR purpose-driven."
I'm here to tell you it's all absolute nonsense.
The real problem isn't that these goals are fundamentally opposed—it's that we're trying to retrofit purpose into business models that were literally never designed to accommodate it in the first place.
It's like trying to turn a tank into an ambulance. Sure, you can paint a red cross on it and call it a day, but it's still fundamentally built to destroy things, not save them. And that's exactly what happens when we try to force traditional business models to serve purpose-driven missions.
Enter business design: the approach that changes how founders balance profit and purpose—not as opposing forces, but as perfect partners.
When most people hear "business design," they think logos, websites, maybe product packaging.
When introducing myself as a business designer, I’m not talking about any of the above.
Business design is the intentional architecture of your entire business system — how you create value, deliver it, capture it, and regenerate it.
Think of business designers as architects for your venture. An architect doesn't just make a building pretty; they ensure it's structurally sound, functionally efficient, and designed for its specific purpose. They consider the entire system: foundation, support beams, circulation, energy flow, and yes, aesthetics too.
That's what business design does for your company.
Instead of giving you a generic list of tips, let me break down the actual framework I use with founders. Think of it as your business design blueprint:
This isn't just your mission statement on your website. Purpose Architecture is how your "why" becomes the actual blueprint for your business decisions.
In traditional business, purpose is the decoration added after you've built the house. In business design, purpose is the foundation and structural beams that determine what the house can become. ( We are called OPENHOUSE for many reasons, this is one of them)
You can look at Patagonia's purpose of environmental preservation. It doesn't just inspire their marketing—it determines which materials they use, which suppliers they work with, and even tells them when NOT to make a product.
Key question: How can your purpose become the decision-making filter for everything in your business
"Value" in business design goes beyond money. It includes knowledge, well-being, resources, relationships, and environmental health. Value flows are how these different types of value move through your business ecosystem, benefiting all stakeholders—not just extracting profit for shareholders.
Think of value like water in a garden. Traditional business funnels all the water to one plant (profit). Business design creates irrigation systems where water nourishes the entire ecosystem while still keeping the garden productive.
Key question: How can you design your business so value circulates and regenerates rather than being extracted?
Growth systems are the mechanisms that allow you to scale your impact without diluting your purpose or burning out. They're the levers you can pull that create exponential rather than linear results.
Traditional business grows by doing more of the same, often sacrificing purpose along the way. Business design identifies points of leverage where small inputs create large outputs while staying true to your mission.
I love seeing how Khan Academy designed their growth system around open educational content that serves millions without requiring proportionally more resources or compromising their educational mission.
Key question: What are the leverage points in your business that can amplify both purpose and profit simultaneously?
The typical founder journey looks like this:
So currently you start with a conventional business model and try to bolt purpose onto it. While business design flips that around. Purpose isn't the decoration; it's the foundation. Profit isn't the goal; it's the fuel that powers you.
Most businesses design for customer needs. Business designers design for entire ecosystems — understanding the needs of communities, the planet, future generations, and yes, customers too.
Business designers build minimum viable models, test them quickly, and iterate based on real feedback. Our "quickly" is a little different from other design agencies as the core proactice of build at the speed of trust can influence the overall speed.
Most businesses optimize departments in isolation. Marketing tries to maximize leads, operations minimizes costs, finance maximizes margins.
Business designers optimize the connections between these elements, not just the elements themselves.
So every time you change one part of your business, map the ripple effects through the entire system.
Business models are complex adaptive systems. You can't understand them through spreadsheets alone.I have seen how much more approachable business design is for neurodivergent founders.
Business designers visualize their models to identify patterns, gaps, and opportunities invisible in traditional planning tools.
Most businesses we see were designed for a different world — one with seemingly unlimited resources, stable climate systems, and uncomplicated stakeholder demands.
That world no longer exists.
The founder who will thrive in the next decade isn't the one with the perfect pitch deck or the biggest funding round. It's the one who can design business models that generate profit by solving real problems, not by creating new ones.
If you're an impact-driven founder struggling to reconcile your mission with your margin, you don't need a better execution strategy.
You need a better-designed business.
Business design isn't about finding the perfect balance between profit and purpose—it's about designing systems where they fuel each other. Where purpose drives profit, and profit powers purpose.
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