Purpose Before Profit: Michelle Risinger Of Rising Solutions On The Benefits Of Running A Purpose-Driven Business

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

Protect your culture at all costs — this means being brave enough to call out bad behavior. I am a huge fan of Brene Brown and her work on vulnerability. One of my biggest takeaways from her is to have the courage to have tough conversations, especially when it means discussing bad behavior. This moment bad behavior shows up, address it immediately with empathy and curiosity.

In today’s competitive business landscape, the race for profits often takes center stage. However, there are some leaders who also prioritize a mission-driven purpose. They use their business to make a positive social impact and recognize that success isn’t only about making money. In this interview series, we are talking with some of these distinct leaders and I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle Risinger.

Michelle Risinger is an award-winning innovation strategist, design thinker, public speaker, and professional facilitator who creates enabling environments to catalyze transformative ideas that accelerate impact. Her research focuses on innovation culture and psychological safety in the workplace, addressing invisible barriers to innovation (workplace design, status quo bias, creativity bias, burnout, and anxiety), and bringing more creativity neuroscience, and chronobiology to workplaces.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

Growing up in Chicago, my father was an academic and my mother worked in the Cardiac Cath lab, so my family was instilled with incredibly strong values around learning, justice, and service. When I was a child, I loved movies about travel and adventure. I wasn’t quite sure what my career would look like, but in my head, I was basically Indiana Jones.

As an undergrad, I double majored in International Studies and History, again trying to figure out how to be Indiana Jones. The more courses I took, the more I realized that complex humanitarian emergencies were really where I wanted to be. After graduating, I took a job at the American Red Cross trying to get close to that work, but ultimately, I landed a position in their historical resources department, far from the work I wanted to be doing.

It wasn’t until two years later that I switched departments and joined teams who were leaving for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to engage in humanitarian assistance. I remember vividly that the same week I found out I was given an assignment in Baghdad, Iraq I also found out I had been awarded a full scholarship to the University of St Andrews in Scotland to study Medieval History. So in a strange coincidence, my lifelong dream to be Indiana Jones came together in a very different way in the span of a week!

After working in Iraq for a year, I re-applied to the University of St Andrews, this time for a (much more relevant) degree in International Peace and Conflict Studies. This laid the groundwork for a career inherently committed to purpose. I would stay in the humanitarian aid space for another 5 years, before having a bit of an existential crisis around why we were designing interventions as top-down, linear, and prescriptive programs. I became immersed in design thinking, prototyping, and agile approaches, and thus formally began my career in the innovation space. I went on to become the founding member of the innovation team at a large international NGO and soon became its global director. After seven years of social innovation within an NGO, I opened Rising Solutions as an independent firm specializing in innovation strategy, design thinking, and facilitation for social impact projects. We work with any client — but the project must have a social return. The rest is history (pun intended).

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?

In 2022, Rising Solutions was awarded the opportunity to be the lead facilitator and host of a 150-person global forum in Malaysia for a large international development NGO. Additionally, we were also allowed to present a keynote session at the 2022 Inventures Innovation Conference in Canada on an exciting new curriculum we had developed. We were planning to formally launch the curriculum at the conference. This required me to facilitate the five-day in-person leadership meeting in Malaysia and then fly directly to Canada for the conference presentation.

After a grueling, but fulfilling facilitation, I was preparing to fly to Canada when I began having the symptoms everyone dreaded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sure enough, the morning of my flight, I conducted my pre-departure COVID-19 test and received the feared result. Not only would I be isolated for my first encounter with COVID-19 in a foreign country, but our session in Canada no longer had a presenter.

As I rapidly descended into what would become a very serious case of COVID, my foggy, fevered brain was trying to find a new presenter and a way to continue with the curriculum launch as planned. Even though my addled brain was struggling to comprehend emails, my incredible team and I came up with a plan across eight different time zones.

In what was a tremendous display of our purpose-driven culture and company values, another member of the team based in Arizona with limited knowledge of the content agreed to rearrange his schedule, fly from the US to Canada, study the curriculum, and give the presentation in 48 hours. The entire time, through incredible grace and resilience, the team kept telling me to not worry about a thing. They would handle it.

The presentation ended up being a complete success — validating our work and research. It was then I knew that together we had built the team and company I had always dreamed of. One in which its members feel supported, challenged, rewarded, and truly valued as humans while we accomplish great work.

We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one that you made that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?

We have been extremely fortunate to have experienced significant success in our early years. After launching Rising Enterprises LLC in January 2021, we have proceeded to double our revenue year upon year, leading to expansion of our client portfolio, as well as an expansion of our internal team.

However, in January of 2023, that growth finally caught up with us. My CFO and I found ourselves in a bit of a perfect storm. 1) Although the team had grown, we had not adjusted our prices quickly enough or significantly enough to handle the new cost burden. 2) We unexpectedly (and amazingly) won a very large contract that forced us to bring on more contractors to handle the workload. This threw off our projected expenses for contractors. . And 3) in the spring of 2023 the news was forecasting an impending recession come the fall. Our pipeline dried up which we desperately needed not just to hit our revenue targets, but to onboard new clients to the new price point.

In May of 2023, we made some tough decisions. We slashed my salary by 50K, we slashed my $401K distribution, we froze our travel and our marketing budgets, and we adjusted contracts for some of our internal consultants — all very painful and disappointing.

However, this is where being a purpose-driven business truly shines. My CFO and I chose to be completely transparent with the team and shared our profit/loss numbers with them. If we didn’t make these changes, we would finish the year $150K in the red. We openly answered the team’s questions and gave an update on the situation every week. We shared how we were going to revamp BD and what our plan was to finish out the year.

The result was a gracious, motivated, and focused team re-centered around our new lean budget and business goals. Other leaders might have become defensive or attempted to hide the situation. Leading with honesty, trusting the team with our financials, and working with them were all essential for learning from our mistakes and successfully overcoming the challenges we faced.

This experience was also tremendous learning from a risk management standpoint. I personally have a very high tolerance for risk (somewhat critical if you’re working in innovation), but this was our first experience with risk when it meant the livelihoods of our team. It was a powerful and humbling experience, which served to reinforce that protecting the team and their employment was our bottom line and it never once occurred to us to cut positions. Freeze them, amend them, but not cut them. People first.

As a successful leader, it’s clear that you uphold strong core values. I’m curious what are the most important principles you firmly stand by and refuse to compromise on. Can you share a few of them and explain why they hold such significance for you in your work and life?

Before opening Rising Solutions, I spent seven years as the founding member, and eventually Director, of an in-house innovation/R&D and human-centered design team within a large international nonprofit. For seven years, I built an incredible team whose role was to create enabling environments for innovation within the global nonprofit. I confess this was the most challenging job of my entire professional career. We were a team devoted to agile, lean iterative problem-solving methodologies tasked to launch new products and services for social impact, embedded in a conversely linear, risk-averse, incrementally focused organization.

Over the years in that role, I began honing in on three values that I felt were the absolute secret sauce for running an innovation team. Today I know them to be empathy, humility, and curiosity and I firmly believe they are pivotal in shaping any successful innovation team. These principles have become the guiding force in our collaborative and inventive endeavors.

Empathy is what binds us together as people. Our care and compassion for people and their problems — whether a client or a member of the team — roots us in human connection. Staying true to this value means that we prioritize the pain and needs of others over deadlines, profits, and business. Humility is critical not just for great innovation, but for great leadership because it refers to the ability to acknowledge your mistakes — to stay gracious and forgiving, to foster truth and psychological safety. It’s admitting you don’t have all the answers, but you’re committed to working through the questions. And finally, curiosity signals a desire to learn without judgment or bias. It’s seeking “the why” behind challenges and behaviors with a pure heart.

Can you help articulate a few of the benefits of leading a purpose-driven business rather than a standard “plain vanilla” business?

It honestly hadn’t ever crossed my mind to have a “plain vanilla” business. In part, I believe this is a result of the value of service I experienced growing up — which was then solidified by the work I did early in my career overseas, but I also think it comes from how I identify “value”. Value for me has never been financial success. Certainly I want to earn a living that provides me with a comfortable lifestyle, but I’ve always believed the only thing I can ever truly own is my own behavior. How I treat people, how I make them feel, and the legacy of good I leave behind are what matters most. It has always been so clear to me that the purpose of our time on earth should be devoted to making the world a kinder, more equitable place.

This belief was solidified during my first assignment in Baghdad in 2008 with the American Red Cross. We worked seven days a week, on call 24 hours a day. And I can recall even to this day saying to friends and family that the gratitude and fulfillment I experienced in that job was better than a paycheck. When someone thanked me, that gratitude was the purest, most sincere form of human validation. I learned what it truly meant to be fulfilled. I genuinely believe once you have that type of experience you can never go back to being satisfied with just a paycheck.

How has your company’s mission or purpose affected its overall success? Can you explain the methods or metrics you use to evaluate the impact of this purpose-driven strategy on your organization?

In truth, our mission-driven focus makes us incredibly niche. While innovation strategy firms and certainly management consulting are a dime a dozen, innovation strategy for social impact is far more specialized. I come from nearly 20 years in the social sector, seven of those years running an in-house innovation team within a nonprofit. So Rising Solutions is incredibly unique in our understanding of the very complex dynamics of social innovation.

For example, with social innovation, you cannot rely on the usual market drivers for successful product or service development. In other words, those who may be using your product or service, are often not the purchasers of the service. Those paying for the service on behalf of the users are often governments or large donors who can influence the design and outcome of the solution because they control the purse strings. This lack of agency on the part of the user creates a very unusual dynamic when it comes to competition.

As a social innovation strategy firm, we are somewhat unique in that every project we take must have an articulated social impact. We are currently working on climate change with the Rainforest Alliance, and on women’s reproductive health with the UN for example. However, what we are really interested in is if, throughout our engagement with a client, we got them to think differently about problem-solving and innovation.

Our true theory of change at Rising Solutions is not about the purchase of our services. Rather, we measure our impact on the theory of change that if social sector organizations use more agile, iterative, empathetic, creativity neuroscience and psychological safety tools, processes, systems, mindsets, and cultures THEN we will see faster, better quality solutions that create impact in the world.

As we are young in our journey, we are still collecting data on our value proposition, but let’s check in again in five years and see how we have done :)

Can you share a pivotal moment when you realized that leading your purpose-driven company was actually making a significant impact? Can you share a specific example or story that deeply resonated with you personally?

We worked with a client over two years to help revamp their value proposition. They were originally a donor-funded project run by an international NGO and they wanted the project to become a self-sustaining entity. We spent our first year of work running a large-scale discovery process to revamp their value proposition. We did extensive market research, current user interviews, and focus group discussions, we did extensive co-creation looking at new ways of adding value and then we did nearly six months worth of prototyping until we landed on the new value proposition. That new proposition ended up being so compelling that we were able to secure a million dollars in new funding to build it. What’s even more powerful is that this new value proposition focuses on building a local market for design thinking services in Africa and Asia, creating a digital platform that connects employable, local design talent with global health projects needing designers. This both increases the workforce development of the African economy and guarantees that design work is locally led and representative of African communities and contexts.

But the true impact here was in the changing mindsets of the members of the project team, most of whom had never done business transformation and innovation. It was a team heavily dependent on linear, analytical thinking and very uncomfortable with iterative thinking and prototyping. At the end of the exercise, it was incredible to see the impact the methodology had on the team’s mindsets. It was clear that through the ambiguity and unpredictability of an innovation process, there emerged a value proposition we never could have come up with had we not used an agile, iterative process.

Have you ever faced a situation where your commitment to your purpose and creating a positive social impact clashed with the profitability in your business? Have you ever been challenged by anyone on your team or have to make a tough decision that had a significant impact on finances? If so, how did you address and reconcile this conflict?

Absolutely, yes. We’ve seen this manifest in a few different ways. We will work with any client, but the project must have a quantifiable social return. Oftentimes when presenting at or attending conferences, we make connections with interested parties that we ultimately have to turn down.

Additionally, we acknowledge that we may have to end our work with a client if our values don’t align. We use our values to screen our clients, and oftentimes we lead with them when presenting a proposal. We find that when we put them out there from the beginning the right clients are thrilled and those who are not a fit don’t understand why we are opening with them. It actually makes for an easy decision on our part. This may also mean walking away from a current client when there is a frequent disconnect from our values.

What I have learned is to always cultivate an abundance mindset. I’m speaking from experience now so you’ll just have to believe me when I say this, but in my experience, when you are serving the greater good, the universe will always provide. Saying no to one client means making room for another. Or in a different scenario, during that spring of 2023 when we were feeling the ramifications of our growth and desperately needed new contracts to come in, we had a potential client approach us five times with different scopes of work and each time the opportunity fell through. I had to hold true to my belief that if this was the right client they wouldn’t be treating us this way. I had to release my anxiety about securing them as a client and lean into my belief in abundance. Clearly, this wasn’t the right time for this client and I needed to not let my anxiety around finances cause me to break with our values. They never ended up signing. Then, a wonderful client we had already been working with added two new large scopes to their existing contract.

What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs who wish to start a purpose-driven business? What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Purpose-Driven Business.”

1. Start with your values and build everything around them. Hire your team around them, select your clients and partners around them, and turn to them when business gets hard — because it will. I would say we talk about our values on a weekly basis. I regularly open team meetings by asking people how they lived our values that week. And I’m constantly referencing our values when it comes to decision-making. It’s critical to make it clear to people that values don’t exist on paper…they exist in our actions.
2. Hire for culture first, you can always teach skills. My number one rule when hiring is to value culture fit over technical skills. In my entire career, when it comes down to the top two individuals, I’ve always hired the person who was the better fit for the culture, even if it meant sacrificing slightly on technical skills. In my experience, you can always teach skills…but you cannot teach people empathy, humility, and curiosity. I need my team to show up with those traits inherently, and everything else I can teach. I have never once regretted this approach.
3. Protect your culture at all costs — this means being brave enough to call out bad behavior. I am a huge fan of Brene Brown and her work on vulnerability. One of my biggest takeaways from her is to have the courage to have tough conversations, especially when it means discussing bad behavior. This moment bad behavior shows up, address it immediately with empathy and curiosity.
4. Always give people the benefit of the doubt. When you hire good people, trust that they want to do well and they believe in your company. So when someone makes a mistake, which is inevitable, always approach the mistake with the benefit of the doubt. Did you create confusion or give incomplete instructions? Is this person having a personal bad day? What factors are at play that you aren’t aware of? Always leading with grace and the benefit of the doubt reinforces trust, psychological safety, and appreciation within a team.
5. If you are running a mission-driven business, lean into a belief in an abundance mindset. Doing the right thing, however hard it may be, always pays off in the end — even if it’s not in the way you had expected. I have learned through many years of business that when you seek to do good in the world, the universe conspires in your favor. I see this time and time again, but you need to hold fast to this in the hard times. My most powerful example to date, as I mentioned in an earlier question, was when we were looking at finishing FY23 $150K in the red. We ended up finishing the year $117K OVER our revised budget.

I’m interested in how you instill a strong sense of connection with your team. How do you nurture a culture where everyone feels connected to your mission? Could you share an example or story that showcases how your purpose has positively influenced or motivated people on your team to contribute?

Here is my number one rule of thumb for building a strong culture — always ask the intern what they think. The greatest mark of psychological safety within a team is if the intern’s voice is valued and heard equal to the most senior member in the room. The intern is the canary in the coal mine of team culture. When the intern is respected, heard, and trusted as a valued member of the team, everyone knows their own opinion and work matters.

The second piece I would say here is to always give people public credit for their work. Always use “we” statements when referring to your team, and when someone does something notable, acknowledge and praise them in front of others, especially in front of clients.

Finally, leading with our empathy value, we are always people first, with work second. We send birthday cards and small gifts for each team member’s birthday. We recognize and celebrate our personal wins including graduations, weddings, housewarmings, and more with flowers, books, or dinners. I routinely Venmo members of my team from my personal account little gifts of funds to buy a coffee or a snack when they are going above and beyond on a project, working nights or weekends. When someone is sick, the team insists that person rests, rather than allowing them to keep pushing through. And every year we take an annual team retreat to a beautiful location where we rent an Airbnb and live together for the week, working, spending time together, and building connections.

The result is a team of joyful, loyal, creative, and passionate people who stand together when things get tough like they did with our financial situation in 2023 or the COVID-19 debacle at Inventures in 2022.

Imagine we’re sitting down together two years from now, looking back at your company’s last 24 months. What specific accomplishments would have to happen for you to be happy with your progress?

Every year, we select a word that represents our business strategy for the year (we also design our strategy in Miro rather than Word or PowerPoint — I highly recommend it), and for 2024 that word is Calibrate. Coming off a year of tremendous growth in 2023 we need to spend 2024 fine-tuning our systems and processes, tightening our organizational structure, and streamlining our business development. We need to stabilize our pricing structure as well as our overhead costs.

Then in 2025, I predict we focus on a year of “rewards”, where the calibration of 2024 pays off. This looks like a steady increase in profits, onboarding more values-driven clients, and having a strong articulation of the impact we’ve had on clients. Specifically, changing how they approach innovation and creativity in highly prescriptive, linear environments.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I am incredibly passionate about forever eradicating the 9–5 work day. The idea of an 8-hour workday is a vestige from the Industrial Revolution and the Ford Motor Company, which was focused on the maximum amount of physical human labor you could extract from a worker without diminishing returns.

We have integrated this thinking into our work with clients and internally are developing proprietary technology and research related to how we structure our work day. We’ve conducted research for over a year, understanding the market, barriers, and opportunities in performance, along with the biological and psychological drivers of creativity in the workplace. We’ve spoken to over 60 individuals including managers, business leaders, knowledge workers, medical professionals, and sleep specialists.

As an expert in creativity neuroscience and innovation, I believe the 9–5 is one of our greatest obstacles to unlocking creativity and solving the world’s most complex problems. Study after study has shown that the 9–5 day does not produce 8 hours of work (in fact, according to the Economic Research Council, it only produces 2 hours and 53 minutes on average), and continuing to force people to work an 8-hour day is insane.

Instead, I advocate for working according to your chronobiology. Do focused or flow-state work during your highest-performing psychological hours and do other tasks during your lowest-performing cognitive hours, according to your circadian rhythm.

How can our readers further follow your work or your company online?

Follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our #RiseUp newsletter on our website!

Photo credit to JeremyHouchens.com.

This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!

A
bout the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com