Scaling a business and staying true to a mission can pull leaders of mission-driven organizations in different directions. As companies grow, that tension intensifies, especially for founders trying to balance operational demands with the values that motivated them to build in the first place. For Rachel Bernier-Green, founder of EJ Consortium, framing the challenge as a simple either-or oversimplifies what actually makes these companies durable.
Known as “The Impact CFO” for her work helping companies translate complex financial systems into practical tools that support both profitability and measurable social outcomes, Bernier-Green advises organizations whose missions are explicitly rooted in justice. A social entrepreneur herself, Bernier-Green has built and operated a social enterprise connected to the regenerative food movement and the hiring of reentering citizens. For her, finance, when designed intentionally, can be a lever for equity.
“It’s a false trade-off,” Bernier-Green says. “A lot of the things that actually contribute to running a mission-driven business, taking care of your people holistically, for example, actually contribute positively to the bottom line.” Her work centers on organizations that move beyond mission alone and anchor their operations in justice. At that stage, financial rigor becomes inseparable from impact. The organizations that change communities for the long haul are the ones that treat financial strategy and operational discipline as part of their justice work, not a distraction from it.
Profit and Purpose Miscast as Opposites
The tension between profit and mission often surfaces when companies pursue impact without the financial structure to support it. In those cases, mission and margin appear to be in conflict not because they are incompatible, but because the business lacks systems capable of holding both. Bernier-Green is direct about the operational realities behind that dynamic. “It’s important to know what it means to have people relying on you for payroll and health insurance,” she says. From her perspective, the question is not whether values belong in a financial model, but whether the model is designed well enough to support them. Practices often associated with justice-driven organizations, such as sustainable workloads and sustained investment in people, tend to reduce operational strain. Over time, lower turnover and more consistent performance influence cash flow and capacity in practical, measurable ways.
Start With Values That Can Be Measured
Scaling without compromise begins with specificity. “People should be very clear on what their values are and what it looks like to live them out in practice and how they actually measure that,” Bernier-Green says. Value statements are easy. Operational definitions are harder: What does “care for our people” mean in schedules, benefits, and management? What does “community wealth” mean in hiring, procurement, and ownership?
From there, Bernier-Green focuses on establishing measurement systems that track both the financial engine and the mission outcomes. “It’s very difficult to improve things that you aren’t measuring.” If a company is clear on what it will not compromise, leaders can decide where efficiency is nonnegotiable. They can also see where the organization is underinvesting in infrastructure that would actually protect the mission. At EJ Consortium, her consulting firm, the work in striking the right balance between impact and profit begins by translating a company’s stated values and growth goals into financial and operational dashboards that make performance visible, showing how the business is executing financially alongside its stated mission.
What surprises many leaders is how far upstream the work must go. “Most companies not only don’t have those dashboards in place, but they don’t even have the underlying data collection systems to gather the right information,” she says. On the finance side, that can mean restructuring the chart of accounts, the “skeleton or the backbone of the financial system,” so leaders can make informed decisions. On the impact side, Bernier-Green sees a recurring gap between intention and execution. “There are good intentions, and that’s typically where it stops,” she said. If a company cannot quantify progress, it cannot manage performance or defend its priorities when growth pressures arrive. One client, after a decade in business, told Bernier-Green that working with EJC was the “first time they felt genuine financial clarity and could clearly see a viable path to profitability,” she shares.
Run Finance as a Whole-Business System
The most durable justice-driven companies treat finance as a design problem. “We don’t ever address finance in a silo,” she says. “We always address finance in a holistic perspective.” This helps to expand the definition of sustainability. In addition to business metrics, EJ Consortium evaluates whether the company is harming the entrepreneur, recognizing that in mission-driven organizations, purpose can be deeply motivating, but can also make the work intensely personal when it is tied to a cause. “On a quarterly basis, we’re actually assessing our clients to see how much stress they are under, how well they are sleeping,” she says.
It also treats wealth creation as an impact metric. Bernier-Green tracks clients’ net worth across her portfolio, and some clients also choose to track employee net worth. The aim is to determine whether the business is prioritizing security for the people doing the work, not just revenue. For early-stage companies, this approach challenges a common assumption that grinding through financial uncertainty is simply the price of building. If the work is meant to repair systems, leaders need systems inside the business that do not rely on personal burnout.
The Higher Stakes Demand Fiscal Excellence
Justice work does not excuse financial mediocrity. It has to raise the bar. “You have to follow the same principles that your everyday company is following,” she says. “But the stakes are higher when you’re running a mission-driven or justice-driven company; your impact is only as sustainable as your financial bottom line.” That is why she pushes leaders to build what she calls a “fiscally elite” operating model, not the fragile version many small businesses accept. The mission cannot outpace the infrastructure forever. Profitability creates the runway to hire well, pay fairly, invest in measurement, and stay accountable to the communities the company exists to serve.
Follow Rachel Bernier-Green on LinkedIn for more insights.
