Purpose + Profit Podcast

Business at a Crossroads: When It’s Time to Release Jess Sato closes the Business at a Crossroads series by exploring the “release” crossroad and why letting go can be the right move. She shares how she ended a business partnership in 2021 and closed a version of a business she loved when she and her partner had diverging thoughts on their audiences, values, and direction. She explains two common release scenarios, offers diagnostic questions for both scenarios, and outlines thre...

Business at a Crossroads (Part 4): Expand Without Burning Out Jess Sato continues the Business at a Crossroads series with a focus on the “expand” phase, when business is going well, demand is high, but capacity is strained. Using her half-marathon training mistake and resulting plantar fasciitis as an analogy for unsustainable pace, she outlines four areas to assess when demand outpaces delivery. She encourages founders to “engineer your actions” by revisiting whether current pl...

Reinvent: Don’t Under-React to the Hum in Your Business Jess Sato opens the third Business at a Crossroads episode by urging listeners to take the five-question Crossroads Diagnostic, then uses her refrigerator failing after months of ignored warning signs as a metaphor for low-grade business issues that escalate when unattended. She emphasizes that in the “reinvent” phase founders shouldn’t under-react, and she acknowledges the guilt, shame, and external factors that can accelerate pro...

Business at a Crossroads: Refine vs. Reinvent and finding the real friction points in your business Jess Sato continues the Business at a Crossroads series by clarifying how established founders can identify when they need to refine rather than reinvent their business. Using stories from her family’s auto repair work and a recent car diagnostic that missed faulty spark plugs, she explains that many business slowdowns come from subtle, fixable pain points—not full-system overhauls—and w...

What to Do When Your Business Feels Broken? Jess Sato introduces a series on what to do when your business feels “broken,” inspired by networking conversations with owners facing revenue declines, payroll stress, or rapid growth that systems can’t support. Conventional advice and “spaghetti throwing” creates confusion. Progress comes from getting under the hood, using data, and isolating the dominant factor driving results. Jess outlines four crossroads every business reaches:&nbs...

An AI Detox, Travel Pivots, and Doing the Foundational Work Before a Crisis Jess Sato returns after a gap to share why her content felt “flat” and why she kept thinking, “I have nothing to say,” realizing that relying on ChatGPT and Claude for ideation and drafting reduced the deep thinking she normally does through writing. After hearing Brene Brown and Adam Grant discuss how writing helps people know what they think, she began an AI detox, paused her subscriptions, and recommitted to...