Your Fun & Profitable Online Business · Episode 58
Giving Back: Profit with Purpose
Profit can create capacity for more than your own business. It can create options, support the causes you care about, and send meaningful ripple effects far beyond your revenue.
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Profit can travel farther than you think
How profit creates a ripple effect
A profitable business gives you more than a healthier number on a spreadsheet. It creates room to choose what matters, contribute resources, and support people and causes beyond your own business.
Profit
Create resources
Profit gives your business breathing room. It creates resources you can use instead of requiring every dollar, hour, and ounce of energy just to keep going.
Capacity
Create options
With more capacity, you can choose to donate money, volunteer expertise, sponsor something meaningful, or simply have more room to show up.
Choice
Support what matters
Your business can become a vehicle for causes that are personal to you – from grief support to animals, education, the environment, youth, or your community.
Impact
Create the ripple
You do not have to wait until your business is huge. Small contributions, repeated over time, can become meaningful change far beyond you.
And capacity creates possibilities – for your life, your business, and the people and causes you want to support.
This special Podcasthon episode starts with the work of Grief Cycles, a nonprofit that supports people navigating grief through cycling and community. But the conversation reaches into business too, because one of the most meaningful things a profitable business can create is the capacity to contribute beyond itself.
When your future looks different than expected
Grief is often connected with losing someone we love, but it can also appear whenever the future we pictured suddenly looks different. Divorce, health changes, job loss, changing dreams, and unexpected turns can all create their own kind of grief.
That idea can show up in entrepreneurship too. Businesses evolve. Priorities shift. Paths change. Sometimes you have to let go of the version of the business you thought you were building in order to make space for the version that fits now.
Why Grief Cycles combines movement, outdoors, and community
Grief Cycles creates space for people to process grief through three powerful ingredients: movement, time outdoors, and connection with other people. Movement can help us process heavy emotions. Nature can help our bodies settle. Community can remind us that we are not alone.
The organization is especially meaningful to Wendy because it was created by her husband as a response to his own grief – an example of turning pain into something that can support other people.
What profit makes possible
The business lesson in this episode is simple: profit creates capacity. Without profit, you may care deeply about a cause and still feel limited in what you can contribute. Profit creates options.
Those options might look like donating part of a launch, sponsoring a nonprofit event, volunteering your expertise, highlighting an organization in your content, or someday creating a program of your own. None of those require waiting until you are huge.
Sometimes the most powerful motivation for building a profitable business isn’t what it can give you. It’s what it allows you to give to others.
Your five-minute action step
Ask yourself one question:
- If your business became wildly profitable overnight, what cause would you want to support?
- Write it down somewhere you can see it.
- Then identify one small way you could begin creating that ripple now.
Questions you might be wondering
What does profit with purpose mean?
Profit with purpose means viewing profit as more than a personal financial outcome. A profitable business can create capacity, choice, and resources that allow you to support people and causes that matter to you.
Do I need a large business before I can give back?
No. The episode shares examples of small businesses donating a percentage of a launch, sponsoring events, volunteering expertise, and using their platforms to highlight nonprofit work.
What is Grief Cycles?
Grief Cycles is a nonprofit that supports people navigating grief through cycling and community, with an emphasis on movement, time outdoors, and connection.
How can giving back fit into my business?
Start by naming a cause that matters to you. Then choose a contribution that fits your current capacity, whether that is money, time, expertise, visibility, or another form of support.
Featured nonprofit
Learn more about Grief Cycles
Explore the organization Wendy featured in this Podcasthon episode and learn how Grief Cycles supports people navigating grief through cycling and community.
Read the full episode transcript
Episode 58 transcript: Giving Back: Profit with Purpose
Hey there, and welcome to episode 58 of your fun and profitable online business. This is the podcast that helps you build a business that feels as good as it looks, with simple systems, fresh ideas, and plenty of confetti along the way. I’m Wendy Muzzy, a certified money coach and online business strategist, and I help women entrepreneurs create fun and profitable online businesses built with systems and designed for joy. Today’s episode is a little bit different than normal. It’s part of Podcast Thon, which is a global podcast movement where hosts around the world highlight nonprofit organizations doing meaningful work in their communities. And the organization I’m highlighting is Grief Cycles.
Grief Cycles is a nonprofit that supports people navigating grief through cycling and community. And today I want to talk about two things. First, the incredible mission of Grief Cycles. And second, something that connects directly to business. Because when you build a profitable business, you create the ability to support causes that matter to you. And often those causes are deeply personal.
Grief, movement, and community
Grief Cycles supports people navigating grief through cycling and community. Now, I think the founder describes grief in an incredibly powerful way. While grief is often the result of losing someone we love, it’s not the only place it shows up. He says it can happen anytime your future looks different than you expected.
That definition opens the door to so many experiences that people carry with them. It could be after divorce or relationship change, or health challenges, or job loss, or even dreams that didn’t unfold the way you thought they would. Sometimes grief is obvious, but just as often, it’s incredibly quiet.
No matter how it shows up, Grief Cycles creates a space for people to heal through movement and connection. There are three main reasons for that. First, movement can be incredibly powerful when we’re processing emotions. Sometimes it’s easier to work through those heavy feelings when our body is moving. Second, being outdoors helps regulate our nervous system. Fresh air, open space, and nature have a way of helping our bodies settle. And third, community reminds us that we’re not alone.
When we’re grieving, that sense of connection can make all the difference. When you think about these three things together – movement, being outdoors, and community – it creates a really powerful environment for healing. I think it’s incredibly beautiful that the idea of healing doesn’t come from just sitting still. Sometimes healing happens while moving forward, quite literally.
When grief changes the path
This is where the story gets a little more personal for me. I’ve experienced grief. Deep grief from losing someone incredibly important to me. My future was unmistakably different, and it happened in a flash. I often describe it as my snow globe moment – that feeling when everything you thought you knew, everything that felt solid and secure, gets shaken up so suddenly that you can’t tell which way is up.
Our grief moments can be disorienting, and they can feel so heavy. But sometimes those moments can also be turning points. For me, that season of grief created a space for some big changes in my life, and I’m incredibly grateful for the path that came from it.
Another reason this nonprofit is so meaningful to me is that my husband created it. It was his response to his grief. Watching someone take their pain and turn it into something that helps other people is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever witnessed. I could not be more proud of him.
Many of us are carrying some form of grief because it’s not always the deep loss that I’ve described. Sometimes it’s something that’s lighter or just not as obvious. One thing I’ve noticed in my conversations with business owners is that many of them experience their own form of grief somewhere along their entrepreneur journey.
When you’re building a business, there are moments where you let go of beliefs you once held. Sometimes you change the path you thought you were going to take. Sometimes your business evolves. Sometimes your priorities shift. And sometimes life just happens. It’s in those places that your future can start to look different than you expected.
Profit creates capacity
So how does this all connect to business? Here’s the core idea I want to share with you today. Profit creates capacity. Without profit, you might want to help, but you may feel limited. You might want to donate, but your budget feels tight and restrictive. Profit changes that. Profit creates options.
When a business becomes profitable, the owner gains the ability to donate to causes they care about, to volunteer their time and expertise, and sometimes even create programs that help others directly. A profitable business isn’t just about revenue. It’s about options. And one of the most meaningful options profit creates is the ability to support something bigger than ourselves.
What causes matter most to you? Maybe it’s grief support like I described, but it could also be an animal rescue or educational programs or environmental work or youth programs or community development. Whatever it is, your business can become a vehicle for supporting the thing or things that matter most to you.
You don’t have to wait until you’re huge to start. I watch small businesses create real impact every single day. I’ve seen business owners donate a percentage of their launch to an organization that was important to them. I’ve seen them sponsor a nonprofit event. I’ve seen them volunteer their experience to an organization that was in need. And I’ve seen them highlight a nonprofit organization in their content.
Every small step contributes to a larger ripple. And that ripple can create meaningful change and is filled with beautiful possibility.
Your action step
I want you to take five minutes and ask yourself, if your business became wildly profitable overnight, what cause would you want to support? Write it down, put it where you can see it. Naming it gives your work another layer of meaning because sometimes the most powerful motivation for building a profitable business isn’t what it can give you, it’s what it allows you to give to others.
When you start thinking about your business this way, profit stops feeling like a number on a spreadsheet and starts to feel like possibility. A way to support the things that matter to you, a way to show up for your community, and maybe even a way to create impact in ways you can’t even fully imagine yet.
This is one of the reasons I believe so deeply in helping people build profitable businesses. Because when they have resources, they tend to create ripple effects everywhere around them, in their families, in their neighborhoods, in the causes they care most about. And that’s the heart of what this episode is about.
If you’d like to learn more about Grief Cycles or support their work, you can visit griefcycles.org. I’ll also include the links in the show notes so you can explore their mission and see how they’re helping people navigate grief through cycling and community.