Nada Matti-Leighton and Emily Monsell-Holden worked together almost 15 years ago, both in-house marketers at purpose-driven businesses before anyone used that phrase.

Nada's frustration is that we're still asking whether purpose and profit can coexist at all. She borrows a useful term for the answer: bothism. Not profit or purpose, brand or performance, short term or long term, but and. And she’s honest by the cost. She won't tell clients that being purposeful will make them more money, because she doesn't think the evidence supports it, and then she gets specific about what it does cost: the workload of B Corp certification, the price of a better supplier, and once, turning down a partnership that would have reached thirty million people.

Nada is ex-Head of Marketing at Canopy & Stars and an Bristol-based independent consultant.

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.

Get in touch at hello@theimpactapothecary.com or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

This one is a big, meaty topic. Emily Monsell-Holden and Ed Ferris try to break it down. Emily’s view is that we treat profit as the business and purpose as a thing bolted on, when the businesses doing it well have the two feeding each other. Drawing on years working with social enterprises and purpose-driven brands, she looks at why the structures matter: family businesses and employee-owned businesses can take a short-term hit because someone is thinking about the next generation of custodians.

Ed Ferris argues that purpose is an investment like any other, and that the slower building blocks tend to produce the loyalty that lasts. They also examine why taking a long-term view has become quietly radical, and what that says about how we currently define success.

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.

Get in touch at hello@theimpactapothecary.com or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Sarah David had the challenging role of restructuring an organisation after the 2008 collapse, closing offices and making people redundant. Yet it remains one of the things she's proudest of in her career, because of how they did it.

She joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to explain what person-led restructuring actually looked like in practice, what she means by getting out of your own way, and the shift she works on with founders: becoming the CEO first and the founder second.

On leading through uncertainty, her advice is to build an options culture, to watch for anyone saying there's no choice, and to judge yourself on the quality of your decision-making rather than on outcomes you couldn't have predicted.

Sarah is a board chair, executive coach and management consultant to leadership teams.

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.

Get in touch at hello@theimpactapothecary.com or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.