Purpose Led Business: How to Make Money and Create Impact

What you do with your money is powerful.
For Carmen Hawker, money isn’t the end goal. It’s a tool for redistributing wealth, creating opportunity and building the kind of world she wants to see.

In this episode of **Money Secrets**, Fi is joined by **Carmen Hawker**, impact communicator, brand strategist and founder of certified B Corp **Carmen Get It**, a personality-driven copy and campaigns studio for purpose-led businesses. Carmen is also the co-founder of not-for-profit **The Global Women’s Project** and financial education platform **Ladies Talk Money.**

Listen to Episode 83

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Purpose-led business is more than a mission statement. Your impact goals should shape how you make decisions.
Your values need to show up in action. Measure, demonstrate and communicate what they actually look like in your business.
Small businesses can create meaningful impact. You don’t need to be a huge organisation to track and share your contribution.
Impact reporting can take many forms. Focus on what matters to your audience and share the wins and non-shiny bits.
Feast and famine isn't inevitable as a freelancer. Sustainable, ongoing marketing helps keep leads coming in, even when you’re busy.
Productising your services creates predictability. Clear offers help customers feel confident while making your capacity easier to manage.
Your money stories shape your business. Unchallenged beliefs about money can become self-fulfilling patterns.
Money and impact can work together. Earning more money creates more capacity to redistribute wealth and opportunity.
Risk doesn’t happen on a level playing field. Women and marginalised people face greater consequences when taking risks.
We can make risk safer for other women. Sharing knowledge, capital, encouragement and support gives others a safer place to land.
It’s not your job to be affordable; it’s your job to be valuable. Don’t make assumptions about what your customers are willing to pay.
If you want a village, show up as a villager. Community and reciprocity are about what we contribute, not just what we receive.

Don't Pull the Ladder Up: Carmen Hawker on Purpose-Led Business and Backing Women (EP#83)

Introduction

We've made a lot of progress as a society in many areas, but one thing that hasn’t changed enough is our relationship with money. If we want to tip the scales in favour of marginalised people, we need to understand the secrets to making money in small business.

The more we talk about money — especially the secrets that usually stay behind closed doors or on the golf course — the more empowered we become. My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically business owners like you.

Because I believe small business can change the world. And to do that, we need to be making more money.

Acknowledgement of Country

This episode was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. I’d like to acknowledge them as the Traditional Owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work and play on.

I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.

The Feminist Money Laundry: Making Money, Creating Impact and Showing Up as a Villager

What if making more money wasn't at odds with doing good?

What if your income could actually be part of your impact?

And what if building a purpose led business wasn't about sticking a nice values statement on your website, but about making decisions that genuinely reflect what you believe in?

In this episode of Money Secrets, Fi Johnston sits down with Carmen Hawker, impact communicator, brand strategist and founder of certified B Corp Carmen Get It.

Carmen's career has taken her through gender equity, women's health, family violence, human rights and social justice before bringing her into the worlds of business, branding and money. She's also the co-founder of not-for-profit The Global Women's Project and financial education platform Ladies Talk Money.

Together, Fi and Carmen explore what it actually means to be a purpose led business, why impact needs to go deeper than a mission statement, the money stories that keep women playing small, and Carmen's brilliant concept of the feminist money laundry.

Because making money and making a difference don't have to be two separate goals.

Sometimes, they're part of exactly the same thing.

What Does Purpose Led Actually Mean?

Purpose led business has become a popular phrase.

But what does it actually mean?

For Carmen, it's about being accountable to more than profit.

That means considering the communities you're part of, taking responsibility for where and how you make your money, tracking your impact and being transparent about it.

It's not enough to have a mission and vision.

The real question is:

How does your purpose change the decisions you make?

Sometimes, choosing the option most aligned with your values will cost more.

Sometimes, it might mean saying no to money.

Sometimes, it means asking who benefits from the way your business operates, and who doesn't.

That's where purpose stops being a marketing statement and starts becoming part of the business model.

Values Need to Be Lived, Not Laminated

One of Carmen's best lines from the conversation?

"Values need to be lived, not laminated."

Your values aren't something you decide once, put on the wall and forget about.

They need to show up in what you actually do.

Who do you work with?

Who do you pay?

Where does your money go?

What opportunities do you create?

What happens when living your values becomes inconvenient?

Fi and Carmen talk about purpose as something that evolves. You keep interrogating it, measuring it and asking what those values look like in practice.

Because when you know better, you can do better.

And then you can tell the story of how your business has changed along the way.

Your Business Can Have an Impact Even If It's Just You

You don't need a huge company, corporate sustainability department or 80 page impact report to start measuring the difference your business makes.

Fi is a solo business owner and has been sharing her own impact reporting for years.

She measures things that matter to her, like how much money she spends with other small businesses, donations, advocacy, the clients she works with and the people reached through her emails and podcast.

Carmen makes an important point:

Even a tiny business can have a positive impact.

The important thing is to decide what matters, track it and share it.

And your impact report doesn't need to become a giant downloadable PDF that nobody ever opens.

Fi's has been as simple as an Instagram carousel and an email.

The goal is to make your impact visible, both for accountability and because seeing what another small business is doing can encourage someone else to think differently about their own.

Share the Non-Shiny Stuff Too

Impact reporting shouldn't only be a highlight reel.

Carmen believes some of the most useful things businesses can share are the parts that didn't go according to plan.

The commitments you didn't meet.

The goal you missed.

The thing you tried that didn't work.

The cash flow challenge you still haven't solved.

That honesty gives people something to learn from, and it makes impact reporting much more meaningful than a long list of impressive numbers.

Progress over perfection applies here too.

You don't have to be a perfect purpose led business to talk about impact.

You need to be willing to measure it, learn from it and be accountable when things don't go the way you hoped.

Good Money Club

If this conversation resonated, you don’t have to figure it out alone.

Good Money Club is open right now.

Inside Good Money Club, women business owners:

Learn to understand and manage their own money
Build financial roadmaps
Develop sustainable pricing strategies
Get accountability and support
Increase revenue and take-home pay
Make bold, ethical money decisions

If you’re ready to:

Earn more
Pay yourself properly
Build a sustainable business
Reduce money stress
Close your own revenue gap

You can learn more about Good Money Club while doors are open.

Feast and Famine Doesn't Have to Be Your Business Model

One of Carmen's non-shiny realities is something many service based business owners know very well:

Feast and famine.

You're either drowning in work or wondering where the next project is coming from.

Fi challenges the idea that this has to be an inevitable part of running a service business.

One of the biggest ways to interrupt the cycle is to never completely stop marketing.

Because the classic pattern looks like this:

You market.

You get clients.

You become incredibly busy.

You stop marketing because you couldn't possibly take on another client.

The projects finish.

And suddenly... crickets.

Then you panic and start marketing again.

A more sustainable approach is finding marketing activities you can continue even when you're busy, so there is always something happening in your pipeline.

Don't Give Up on the Sale Too Early

You have the discovery call.

You send the proposal.

And then...

Nothing.

It's incredibly easy to fill that silence with a story.

My price was too high.

They didn't like me.

The proposal wasn't good enough.

I've been ghosted.

But none of those things are necessarily true.

Your potential client might simply be busy.

Something might have happened personally.

The proposal might have fallen down their inbox.

And the longer they leave it, the more awkward they might feel about coming back.

Fi's advice?

Follow up.

Following up doesn't have to be pushy. It can actually make things easier for the potential client by reopening the conversation and removing the awkwardness.

Create a Sustainable Money, Visibility and Pipeline Rhythm

Carmen has been deliberately working on creating more consistency in her business with a simple weekly practice she calls MVP:

Money. Visibility. Pipeline.

Every Monday, she completes a small activity connected to each area and tracks what she did, the impact and any follow-up required.

It's not about suddenly becoming a perfect business owner who has every system figured out.

It's about rhythm.

Doing small, important things consistently instead of only paying attention to sales when revenue drops or marketing when the pipeline dries up.

For Carmen, that sustainable rhythm has already contributed to a much stronger year in business.

Who Benefits From You Believing You're Bad With Money?

Carmen didn't always love talking about money.

In fact, she once felt deeply uncomfortable with it.

Working in highly feminised and often underpaid sectors, combined with the messages she'd absorbed about women, work and money, contributed to a story that she was "bad with money" and "bad with numbers."

Eventually she started asking:

Who does that belief actually serve?

It certainly wasn't serving her.

So instead of continuing to avoid money, Carmen decided to run towards it.

She learned.

She sat with spreadsheets.

She worked with accountants, financial advisers and other finance professionals.

And through writing about finance for clients, she became increasingly fascinated by money herself.

The thing she had once avoided became something she wanted to understand.

Start With Your Money Stories

It's tempting to jump straight to the practical money stuff.

Investing.

Tax.

Super.

Pricing.

Budgeting.

But Carmen and Fi come back to something deeper:

Start with your identity and your money stories.

What did you learn about money growing up?

What do you believe people like you are allowed to earn?

What have you been taught about being wealthy?

What stories have you repeated so often that they've started feeling like facts?

Even something like "service businesses always go through feast and famine" can become a story that shapes your behaviour.

Once you recognise it, you have an opportunity to create a different pattern.

Welcome to the Feminist Money Laundry

And then we arrive at Carmen's very excellent concept:

The feminist money laundry.

The idea is to gather money, wash it through your values and send it back out into the world.

Instead of seeing making money and creating impact as competing goals, Carmen sees her ability to earn more as increasing her ability to redistribute wealth and opportunity.

Her income can fund other small businesses.

It can support causes.

It can create work.

It can pay people.

It can move through her community.

As Carmen puts it:

"My own income is impact."

That's a very different way of thinking about wanting more money.

It's not necessarily about accumulation for accumulation's sake.

It's about asking:

What becomes possible when more money moves through the hands of people who care about what happens to it?

It's Not Your Job to Be Affordable

When Fi asks Carmen about some of the best money advice she's received, a few gems come up.

One is Fi's:

It's not your job to be affordable. It's your job to be valuable.

Another comes from Carmen's accountant:

Get out of your customers' pockets.

In other words, stop deciding on behalf of your customers what they can and can't afford.

And another lesson from Jas, The Pricing Queen:

We price ourselves as if we're the ones paying the bill.

These ideas all point to the same habit.

Small business owners often set prices according to what they personally feel comfortable spending rather than the value of what they're providing or what their actual customers are willing to pay.

Taking Risks Is Easier When You Have Somewhere Safe to Land

Fi and Carmen also unpack why conversations about financial risk need nuance.

Not everyone has equal access to risk.

Structural inequality, intergenerational disadvantage and access to capital all influence how easily someone can take a big financial swing and recover if it doesn't work.

So encouraging women to take bigger risks can't simply mean pretending everybody is starting from the same position.

Instead, Fi and Carmen ask another question:

How can we help each other take risks more safely?

That might mean investing in another woman's business.

Sharing knowledge.

Making an introduction.

Helping someone access capital.

Or simply being the person they can call while they're doing something terrifying.

And risk isn't always financial.

For one business owner, recording a video and putting their face on Instagram might feel enormous.

The size of the risk is personal.

What matters is having somewhere safe to land.

If You Want a Village, Show Up as a Villager

This might be one of the most important ideas in the entire conversation.

Carmen shares something her sister once said:

"Everyone talks about the village and wants the village, but they don't want to show up as villagers."

We all want community.

Support.

Referrals.

Introductions.

People buying from us.

People sharing our work.

People showing up when things get difficult.

But community isn't a one-way transaction.

If you want the village, you have to contribute to it too.

That applies to families, friendships and business communities.

Instead of walking into a network and asking:

"How can I leverage this?"

Carmen suggests asking:

"What can I give to this space to make it better for everyone?"

Because if you want a village, you've got to be somebody else's villager too.

Final Thoughts

This conversation starts with purpose and impact, but underneath it all is something bigger.

Money is a tool.

Business is a tool.

Community is a tool.

And what matters is what we choose to do with them.

You can make more money and care deeply about the world.

You can charge properly for your work and be generous.

You can build a profitable business and redistribute money through your community.

You can take risks while acknowledging that not everybody has the same safety net.

You can measure your impact without pretending everything went perfectly.

And you can want a supportive business community while also asking what you're contributing to it.

Perhaps that's the feminist money laundry in action.

Make money.

Wash it through your values.

Send it back into the world.

And while you're doing it, don't forget to show up as a villager.

Outro

Thank you for listening to Money Secrets. If you loved this episode, please subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a review. Your support helps us get these conversations into the hands of more good people who deserve to thrive in business.

We’ve come so far as a society in many ways, but money is one of the areas where progress hasn’t been enough. If we want to tip the scales in favour of marginalised people, it starts with understanding the secret: money in small business.

In this podcast, Money Secrets, host Fiona (Fi) Johnston—Chartered Accountant, small business advocate, and impact enthusiast—dives into the conversations we need to have about money. The secrets that once stayed behind closed doors (or on the golf course) are finally out in the open.

Fi’s mission? To get more money into the hands of good people, like you. She believes small businesses have the power to change the world, and the key to making a bigger impact is to make—and manage—more money.

________________________________________________________________________

Thank you to everyone involved for bringing this podcast together. We are excited to hear from you with any questions, feedback or suggestions for future episodes that you might have. Send a Direct Message to @peach.business

If you are excited for what’s to come, please like this episode, follow the podcast and share it with your friends. We are thrilled you're here.

Want to find out more about Good Money Club? It's for female and non-binary business owners ready to make more money and impact. Join us?

Check out my FREE Pricing Training you need to set your prices for profitability.