Earlier in my career, I defined my purpose-driven impact by leading teams to deliver on important project goals. Over time, it evolved into building successful and engaged operational teams, solving complex business problems, and developing employees for their next best step. Since we spend most of our time working, it was important that we built an environment for collaboration, trust, and fun. I wanted them to like their work. As my career progressed, my definition of impact evolved. As burnout was common with the increasing demand for productivity, I found myself motivated to remove barriers for my teams. My impact was now to ensure my teams were caring for themselves, minimizing unnecessary work while achieving aggressive business goals. They were all highly motivated people, even during the remote working environment of the pandemic. If their well-being wasn't considered, our team would not succeed. Individually, their health would be impacted. As their leader, I also needed to embody this practice. I, too, needed to delegate. I needed to rest and delegate. It was also my responsibility to check in with my employees to ensure I could assess their well-being and needs. I aimed to create an environment of psychological safety to share concerns, wins, and build trust with one another. Trust over competition. My purpose was to help guide my team and employees to be productive AND efficient. To find new ways to leverage their strengths and to delegate tasks. This delegation allowed others to grow. They could begin to reframe delegation as a generative process. As a leadership coach to women leaders, I work with clients to set boundaries, including letting go of perfectionism, and rethinking work that no longer adds value. It's a common theme across industries and professions. Most of my clients feel compelled to carry the emotional and performance loads of their teams. They want to ensure their well-being while trying to maintain their own. Many, like their employees, are the primary caregivers for family members. Without self-care and boundaries, these women will burn out. It's important to take a whole-life view of ourselves, our employees. We need to offer ourselves "permission" to build in time for rest, nourishment, and joy. We need to make time for mindfulness practices so that we can care for those who are important to us, so that we may address the issues of our important professional and personal commitments.
Impact, for me, is choosing one thing I want to be known for in the next year. I ask, “If I could only be known for one thing a year from now, what would I want people to say I helped them do?” This pulls me out of shiny opportunities, back to identity, and leads to simpler decisions, a cleaner calendar, and lighter work that helps me lead without losing myself.
I view influence as a responsibility to spotlight others. In a male-dominated industry, I strategically presented our company to a major philanthropic organization and encouraged potential customers to connect directly with team members based on their expertise, using collaborative leadership to showcase a women-led business. The measure of influence is how well you create space for your team to be seen and trusted.
My view of impact changed when we shifted from broad traffic growth to bottom-of-funnel keywords that served people ready to start a business; visits fell, yet revenue per visitor and total sales rose. Influence, to me, means guiding the right audience toward decisions that match their readiness rather than chasing vanity metrics. Women can lead without losing themselves by defining success with outcomes that align with their values and staying steady when the numbers that matter look smaller.
My definition of impact has evolved from "how many kids learn to swim" to "how many families leave with safer habits around water," because most tragedy is preventable and often comes down to everyday lapses in active supervision. Drowning remains a major risk for young children globally, and it is strongly linked to supervision and basic water safety skills, so real impact is building a suburb-level safety net through parents, not just teaching children in a lane. With influence comes responsibility to stay calm, accurate, and practical. It is tempting to lean on fear to get attention, but fear does not teach capability, so I focus on community engagement that makes safety normal: partnering with schools and local groups, repeating simple supervision cues, and reinforcing everyday protections like pool barriers and routines that families can actually stick to. Women can lead without losing themselves by treating purpose like a long game, not an emergency. I protect my steadiness by staying anchored to what I can control, the quality of care, the clarity of our messaging, and the way we support anxious parents, and by building partnerships so the work is shared across the community rather than carried alone.
I used to think impact was about completing the most projects or generating the biggest invoices. Twenty years in remodeling taught me it's actually about the veteran who can finally shower independently after we made his bathroom ADA-compliant through Guns To Hammers. That shift--from volume to individual lives changed--completely rewired how I run H-Towne & Around Remodelers. The heaviest part of influence is that homeowners hand you their life savings and trust you won't disappear like the last three contractors who quoted their kitchen. I've watched owners promise the world during sales pitches then vanish once the check clears. We return estimates in 48 hours and I'm on-site until the final walkthrough because someone's financial security is riding on my word--that's not something I can delegate. I stay grounded by keeping the same crew of second- and third-generation tradesmen instead of cycling through cheap subcontractors. When I'm tempted to scale faster or cut corners to win a bid, I ask whether I'd accept that work in my own home. The answer is always no, and that simple filter has kept me from becoming the type of business owner I started this company to prove wrong.
I used to think impact meant publishing papers that got cited thousands of times. Then I watched governments struggle to analyze genomic data during COVID while holding datasets that could save lives--but couldn't share them because of data sovereignty laws. That's when I realized real impact isn't about being the smartest person in the room; it's about making the smartest people in every room actually able to work together. The weight of influence hit me when a pharmaceutical partner told us our federated platform helped them identify a drug target in 6 months that would've taken 3 years the traditional way. We're talking about cancer patients who might get treatments years earlier. That timeline compression keeps me up at night when we're debugging code or negotiating contracts--every delay is measured in human cost, not just revenue. I almost burned out trying to prove I could code as well as my engineers and understand genomics as deeply as our PhD scientists. The shift happened when I stopped trying to be the technical expert and started being the translator--the person who could sit with a health ministry in one meeting and a pharma C-suite in the next, making both understand why federated data access matters. Turns out my "limitation" of not being purely technical was actually my superpower for building bridges. The women I mentor always ask how to be taken seriously without performing someone else's version of leadership. I tell them about the time I walked into a room of computational biologists and said "I don't know what that algorithm does, but I know which hospitals need it and how to get it deployed compliantly across 12 countries." Owning what you don't know--while being crystal clear about what you do bring--is how you lead without losing yourself.
I used to think impact meant staying sober long enough to keep my accounting business afloat and not embarrass myself in front of clients. I'd schedule meetings in pubs so no one would question my drinking, and I convinced myself that paying bills through direct debit meant I was "functioning." Nine years sober now, I realize impact isn't about appearing functional--it's about the 12% of men and 4% of women binge drinking weekly in Australia who think they're holding it together like I did. The responsibility that comes with influence terrifies me more than my worst drinking days. When someone reaches out to The Freedom Room after reading about me pouring wine into juice bottles to drink at the park with my kids, I can't offer them half-measures. I borrowed significant money for rehab because accessible recovery didn't exist for me--now I've built what I desperately needed but couldn't find. Every person I turn away due to capacity is someone who might not ask for help again. I lead without losing myself by refusing to pretend I'm anything other than a recovering alcoholic who got lucky. I don't have a psychology degree that makes me credible--I have a youngest daughter who used to tip my alcohol down the sink and cause scenes in shops. The Freedom Room works because I stopped trying to be the polished counselor people expect and started being the messy truth they actually need. My team are all in recovery ourselves, which traditional wellness centers would see as a liability but is actually our entire value proposition.
I spent 11 years in luxury cosmetics before joining EMRG Media in 2008, and my definition of impact completely flipped. At Estee Lauder and Chanel, impact meant hitting quarterly sales targets and managing distribution networks. Now? Impact is watching a nervous first-time event planner from Google walk into our Expo feeling completely lost, then seeing them confidently execute a 500-person conference six months later because of something they learned on our show floor. The responsibility piece smacked me hard when we grew The Event Planner Expo to 2,500 attendees. I'm now programming content that directly affects how companies like JP Morgan and Blackrock spend their event budgets--we're talking millions of dollars riding on whether our speakers actually know what they're talking about. When I share a stage with people like Gary Vaynerchuk or Mel Robbins, I'm acutely aware that 2,500 planners are taking notes and will implement what we say at their own companies. One bad recommendation about event technology or vendor selection, and I've just caused problems for potentially thousands of events downstream. I lead without losing myself by staying involved in the logistics nobody sees. Even as VP of Marketing & Sales, I still personally walk our venue spaces to check sightlines and negotiate hotel blocks. My team knows I'm not asking them to do anything I wouldn't do myself--I've handled my share of last-minute speaker cancellations and broken A/V equipment at 6 AM. That hands-on approach from my sales administration days keeps me honest and reminds me why we do this work in the first place.
I'm coming at this from construction and outdoor living--not exactly the audience you asked for, but I've learned that leadership principles don't change much across industries. Running two South Florida design firms for decades taught me that impact shifts from "how much we built" to "what we left behind for families." Early on I measured success in square footage of outdoor kitchens installed and contract values. Now I think about the grandfather who can finally host his whole extended family in his new outdoor space, or the couple who stopped arguing about their cramped kitchen after we redesigned it. We had one client in Dania Beach who told us three years later that our backyard renovation saved their marriage because they finally had a space where they actually wanted to spend time together. That's when I realized we're not in the outdoor kitchen business--we're in the "give people their lives back" business. The responsibility that comes with influence in my world is pretty straightforward: when a homeowner trusts you with $40K-$80K and access to their home for weeks, you can't cut corners even when they'd never notice. We use 304 stainless steel and fiber-rich rock panels because I know what South Florida salt air does to cheap materials--and I'm not willing to rebuild someone's outdoor kitchen in five years just because we saved $2K on materials today. Every installation decision either builds trust or destroys it for the next contractor who comes after us. I almost burned out trying to be the designer, the installer, the salesperson, and the accountant all at once because I thought delegating meant losing control. The shift happened when I hired specialists who were better than me at specific things and focused on what I'm actually good at--understanding what clients really want (not what they say they want) and making sure every team member delivers on that vision. Now I spend more time in findy meetings and quality checks than swinging hammers, and both companies are stronger for it.
I used to think impact meant winning the custody case or getting the best property split. Twenty years in, I've learned real impact is whether a seven-year-old still feels safe with both parents after the divorce is final. One client called me three years after we settled her case--not because something broke, but because her ex-husband just walked her down the aisle at her wedding. That's when I knew we'd done it right. The biggest responsibility that comes with influence showed up when I started handling surrogacy cases for LGBTQ+ families in 2008. North Carolina didn't have clear law on this, and every agreement I drafted became precedent for the next family. I couldn't afford to get sloppy with a comma, because that comma might determine whether a child has legal parents when they're born. I've handled maybe forty of these cases, and each one carries the weight of the families who'll come after. I stay grounded by doing my own intake calls instead of handing them to staff. After three decades I could delegate that, but sitting across from someone whose spouse just emptied the bank account reminds me why I skip the scorched-earth litigation. My MBA taught me to run the numbers on high-asset cases, but those intake calls taught me that most people just want their kids to be okay and enough money to start over. Every collaborative case I settle instead of taking to trial is one less family spending their kids' college fund on attorneys.
I've spent 40+ years watching my wife Betty and our team at Candlewic serve candle makers, and here's what I've learned about impact: it stopped being about shipping the most wax and started being about the single mom who emailed us at midnight because she needed help troubleshooting her first batch before a Saturday market. We now answer technical questions within hours because someone's rent money depends on those candles setting properly. The responsibility that keeps me up at night is knowing hundreds of small makers price their products based on advice we publish on our blog. When we wrote about avoiding "margin drain," one reader commented she was suddenly facing a $1,500 wholesale order during COVID and our article helped her think through whether to accept it. If we're wrong about costing or give lazy advice about scaling, real families lose income--so every business tip we share gets tested against our own 40 years of mistakes first. I've stayed myself by refusing to automate the parts that matter most. We still offer custom wax granulation and personalized consultations instead of just Drop-shipping generic supplies for higher margins. When a customer leaves a review--good or bad--I make sure someone from our team responds personally, which most suppliers our size abandoned years ago. The moment I stop answering "dumb" beginner questions is the moment I've lost what actually built this company: caring more about their success than our efficiency.
I came from fifteen years in finance where "impact" meant basis points and portfolio performance, then spent four years in the Navy where it meant mission completion. Now as CEO of a roofing company, impact is watching a single mom in Houston open her insurance check letter after a hail storm and actually understanding what it says because we walked her through every line item. That shift from abstract metrics to direct human outcomes changed how I measure everything. The influence weight hit different when we started doing Tesla Solar Roof installations and IBHS Fortified systems across Texas. A homeowner in McKinney chose our Fortified system based on my explanation of UL 2218 Class 4 impact ratings, then her roof was the only one on her block that didn't need replacing after the 2024 hail season--she sent me photos of her neighbors' damage. I'm now acutely aware that when I explain technical specs, families are betting their financial security on whether I actually know what performs in 95degF heat and hurricane-force winds versus what just sounds good in a sales pitch. I stay grounded by still doing roof inspections myself and responding to 2 AM emergency leak calls. My Harvard MBA matters way less than the fact that I can physically show my crew the right flashing detail on a valley transition. When your leadership includes crawling through 140-degree attics in July, you don't lose yourself--the work keeps you honest about what actually matters versus what looks good on a capability deck.
I'm coming at this from a tech industry perspective, so maybe unexpected--but I've watched hundreds of business owners paralyzed by IT decisions because they felt they'd look stupid asking questions. Early on I measured impact by systems uptime and tickets closed. Now I measure it by whether a CEO can actually sleep through the night without wondering if their network's been breached. The responsibility that surprised me most is that clients will copy whatever communication style you model. When I started Cyber Command, I noticed if I responded to problems with jargon and deflection, their entire team would start doing the same--blaming vendors, hiding issues until they exploded. When I switched to "here's what broke, here's why, here's what we're doing," suddenly their internal teams started owning problems too. Your transparency ceiling becomes everyone else's transparency ceiling. The trap I see constantly is expertise becoming identity. I came out of IBM Internet Security Systems where being the smartest person in the room was the whole game. Running my own company forced me to realize that "winning" a technical argument with a client just means they'll avoid calling you next time. I stay grounded by keeping one rule: if I can't explain a security decision to my least-technical client in under 30 seconds, I don't understand it well enough yet. That constraint makes me better at the actual job, not just better at sounding impressive. The 24/7 operations side taught me something unexpected about leadership--you can't run on adrenaline forever without becoming the bottleneck. I had to build systems where my team could make calls without me, which meant documenting not just *what* we do but *why*. That's when I actually became replaceable in the day-to-day, which counterintuitively made the company stronger and let me focus on the decisions that genuinely need my input.
I used to think impact meant growing revenue and collecting five-star reviews--we've got over 800 now. That mattered when I was scaling from one truck in 2005 to a full team, but after getting my MBA in 2014 I realized the real measure was whether customers actually wanted to be outside again. A dad who texts me a photo of his kids playing on grass we brought back from dead? That's impact. The responsibility that comes with influence hit me hardest when we broke a customer's sprinkler head during mowing. My crew could've stayed quiet--it was a $40 part buried in the lawn. But we have 20-30 homes trusting us with keys and gate codes every single day, so I told the homeowner immediately and replaced it same-day. That decision cost us maybe an hour of labor but it's why people let us into their yards when they're not home. I stay grounded by sharpening mower blades every single day. Sounds small, but the average homeowner mows 20 times per season and our crews do 20-30 homes daily--if we let blade maintenance slip, we'd shred 600 lawns a month instead of cutting them clean. My civil engineering degree taught me systems thinking, but daily blade sharpening taught me that leadership is just showing up to do the boring essential work when nobody's watching.
I started Uniform Connection 27+ years ago thinking impact meant building a profitable scrub shop. Now I realize impact is the surgical nurse who came in crying because her hospital changed uniform policies overnight and she had no idea where to start--we fit her entire wardrobe in under an hour and she left confident. That single interaction matters more than any quarterly sales number ever did. The responsibility that terrifies me most is when hospital systems trust us to outfit 200+ employees through our group programs. These facilities are making dress code decisions based on my team's recommendations about fabric durability and pocket placement. If I push a brand that pills after 10 washes just to hit margins, I've wasted the budget of an already-stressed healthcare system and made nurses uncomfortable for months. We rejected three major scrub brands last year specifically because they didn't meet our quality standards--even though they offered better wholesale pricing. I protect myself by still working the sales floor every week, fitting customers one-on-one. My staff knows I'm not the owner who disappeared into an office--I'm still on my knees hemming pants and helping a 4'10" nursing student find petite scrubs that actually fit. When I interview new "Scrubologists" (our internal title), I tell them about the time I personally delivered emergency scrubs to a new nurse at 8 PM because her first shift started at 5 AM and she was panicking. That's the standard I set because that's who I actually am--not some version I perform for employees.
I used to think impact meant approving as many course categories as possible--1,500+ felt like proof we were serving the radiology community. Then a technologist emailed saying our $39 fluoroscopy safety course let her keep her license when her hospital cut training budgets during COVID. She'd have lost her job otherwise. That's when I realized impact isn't about catalog size--it's whether a single mom can afford to stay certified when her employer won't pay. The influence piece got real when I saw CE providers selling "ARRT-approved" courses that technically met requirements but taught outdated positioning techniques. We had radiologists reaching out saying their new hires were using dangerous protocols they'd learned from expired content. I pulled six of our own profitable courses that hadn't been updated in 18 months, which cost us revenue but meant we weren't putting patients at risk through lazy education. The responsibility isn't just regulatory compliance--it's knowing techs will position real humans based on what we teach them. I almost burned out trying to be the "education expert" who knew every imaging modality inside-out, which was impossible and made me freeze on content decisions. Then I realized my actual skill is translating what regulators require into something a night-shift tech can finish at 2am without confusion. I stopped hiring PhDs to write courses and started hiring working techs who remember what it's like to panic about state licensure deadlines. Our course completion rate jumped from 71% to 94% when I let go of sounding impressive and focused on being useful.
I measure impact now by how many plumbers I can keep home for dinner instead of on emergency calls at 2am. When I left the Department of Justice to join my husband's plumbing business during COVID, I thought success meant revenue growth. Three years in, I realized our real impact was creating jobs where technicians earn $125K+ without sacrificing their families--no on-call, no weekends, PTO plus your birthday off. That shift happened when one of our guys told me he'd never been to his kid's soccer games at his last company. The responsibility that hit me hardest was finding Arlington's county water contains more chlorine than a swimming pool, yet homeowners have no idea they're bathing in it. I have both sighted and blind children, and watching my blind daughter steer a world that wasn't built for her made me obsessive about stress-free service delivery. When you have influence in people's homes, you're responsible for what you don't tell them, not just what you fix. I can't unsee the water quality data, so now every service call includes education about filtration--even when customers didn't ask. I almost burned out trying to be the "technical expert" because I came from IT project management, not the trades. My background screening DOJ employees felt irrelevant until I realized the plumbing industry has zero consistent standards for background checks or safety vetting. I stopped apologizing for not holding a wrench and started building the systems that made our technicians better--ITIL frameworks applied to service calls, mentorship programs, accessible customer experiences. Turns out my "wrong" background was exactly what differentiated us in a sea of trucks with phone numbers painted on the side.
I used to measure impact by how many customers walked through our showroom doors--more traffic meant more success. That shifted completely when a retired teacher came in seven times over three weeks, paralyzed by flooring choices for her first home purchase. She finally admitted she was terrified of making an expensive mistake on a fixed income. I stopped trying to sell her our premium European laminate and walked her through what would actually hold up in her space for her budget. She sent me a photo two years later of her grandkids playing on that floor, saying she smiled every time she looked at it. Impact became about whether someone felt confident in their home, not our sales numbers. The responsibility piece hit different when we started sourcing containers directly from factories overseas. I could inflate prices 40% and customers wouldn't know--most shops do exactly that with imported goods. But I'm the one reading emails from young families stretching to afford their first renovation or landlords trying to keep rentals decent without bankrupting themselves. When I price flooring, I'm deciding whether a single mom can afford to replace water-damaged vinyl or has to live with a health hazard. That's not dramatic--that's Tuesday at King of Floors. I almost lost myself trying to become a flooring encyclopedia who could rattle off every technical spec for our 10,000+ SKUs. Burned out hard until I realized my real value isn't memorizing moisture ratings--it's translating factory jargon into "this works for your basement" or "skip this for high traffic." I stopped pretending to know everything and started saying "let me check with our supplier" when I wasn't sure. Customers trust us more now because I'm useful, not impressive.
I spent five years converting inquiries into long-term tenants at ViewPointe, and my definition of impact flipped completely around year two. I used to measure success by how many virtual office clients I signed per month--now I count how many attorneys felt safe enough to trust us with their confidential mail and how many startups actually survived past year one because we gave them a professional Vegas address they could afford. The shift happened when a solo practitioner told me our mail handling let her focus on winning a custody case instead of worrying about missing court documents. The responsibility that keeps me up at night is knowing that 60+ virtual clients depend on me to handle their business licensing compliance and mail delivery without a single mistake. One missed forwarded check or late compliance notice could sink someone's practice, and in Las Vegas with our heavy attorney clientele, confidentiality breaches aren't just embarrassing--they're career-ending. I borrowed a filter from my HR days: before I delegate any task, I ask whether I'd trust someone else with my own business license renewal or legal correspondence, and most of the time the answer is no. I stay myself by refusing to automate the parts that actually matter. Follow Up Boss and Satellite Deskworks handle our scheduling and CRM, but I personally walk every new lead through their first tour because software can't read when someone's nervous about spending their last $500 on a virtual office. My old HR manager used to say "systemize the paperwork, humanize the people"--I still put that on every meeting room booking and mail pickup because the second I optimize away the human check-ins is the second I become just another coworking space.