Flying the Coop

#17 Jessica Lackey: You can't move faster than the speed of your own growth

Janel Torkington — Thu, 07 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

"If they teach you how to build a business, you stop buying their stuff. That's not what they want." — Jessica Lackey

A lot of business advice is a slot machine dressed up as a strategy.

Jessica Lackey's book Leaving the Casino lays it out cold: the entrepreneurial industrial complex isn't, in fact, designed to help you build a sustainable business. It's designed to keep you spending money on the PROMISE of one.

She and Anna get into:

Why and how the casino targets the most vulnerable entrepreneurs, MLM-style
The zone of enoughness: how to define your minimum and maximum across money, time, schedule flexibility, and creative autonomy
Why "just raise your prices" might be the most misplaced advice in the industry, and what to actually do instead
The difference between slowing down your activity and slowing down your expectations
Why if your marketing isn't working, it's probably your market, not your mindset

Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op.

When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

#16 Nilou Khonsari: Collectivism isn't radical, we just forgot how to do it

Janel Torkington — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:05:00 +0000

"Collective care feels like an exhale — like finally being able to breathe at work." – Nilou Khonsari

Most organizations that say they value collective care don't actually build for it. They write values statements, flatten a few org chart lines, and hope the culture follows. (spoiler: it doesn't.)

Nilou Khonsari spent ten years co-building Pangaea Legal Services, a nationally recognized immigrant justice nonprofit, into a model of what collective governance actually looks like in practice. Through her book The Future Is Collective, she helps organizations build structures that truly reflect their values.

Anna and I did a full winter book club around this one.
(We ate it up. I read every word of the appendices.)

This conversation gets into hardcore collective scaffolding:

The difference between advice process, modified consensus, and consent-based decision making
What Nilou learned from almost paying her co-founder $1,000 less than herself
How equal pay worked beautifully at Pangaea for years, until it didn't
How to redesign a nonprofit board so the people closest to the work are the ones driving it
Boundaries as a collective practice, not a personal one

And woven throughout: Strange Birds' own messy, ongoing, in-progress attempt to enact a lot of this fun stuff ourselves.

Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op.

When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

# 15 Meg Rye is redesigning recruitment from the inside

Janel Torkington — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:00:00 +0000

"If you want to take the time to really understand every human being you're working with — that takes more time. And time is money. And that's inherently anti-capitalistic." — Meg Rye

Hiring is a power system. Most people on both sides of it (candidates and companies alike) have just accepted that as a fact of life.

Meg Rye hasn't.

Meg is the founder of Good Maven, a design recruitment and career coaching business built on a pretty radical premise: that recruiters can function as guardians rather than brokers. That the job isn't to scoot humans through a pipeline as efficiently as possible; it's to understand what each person actually needs, and make connections that honor that.

In this conversation, we get into the mechanics of what that looks like in practice: how Good Maven approaches underrepresented talent, why diverse pipelines don't happen by accident, and what it actually takes to redesign hiring around care rather than conversion.

We also go deep on the structural side — B Corp certification, Employee Ownership Trusts, EMI shares — because Meg is building the values into the bones of the business itself, not just the pitch deck. (Janel will be the first to admit this part of the conversation made her head spin a little. Anna loved every second of it.)

We explore:

Why "there just aren't enough qualified candidates" is a load of hooey... and what actually widens the funnel
What consent-based recruiting looks like in practice, from the first conversation to the final offer
How to balance meaning and mortgage in a job market that's genuinely tough right now
The structural scaffolding Meg is building at Good Maven: B Corp, EOTs, and why she's thinking about exit strategy before she's anywhere near exit
Why the next generation of recruiters needs real mentorship, not just AI shortcuts

Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op.

When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

# 14 Tarzan Kay has the antidote to hustle culture (and it’s not simply "slowing down")

Janel Torkington — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:09:00 +0000

“We’ve been sold such a narrow idea of what a business can be — like you either coach or sell a course. But there are so many ways to build something rich and beautiful, something that’s actually yours. A business can give you so much more than just money — it can give you community, relationships, growth, and experiences.” - Tarzan Kay

What would work look like if designed it around real humans, real relationships, and real choice?

In this episode of Flying the Coop, we’re joined by Tarzan Kay, a leader in consent-based business design and marketing. Tarzan shares how her thinking has evolved from traditional online marketing into a much deeper exploration of power, persuasion, autonomy, and responsibility.

This episode was extra special to me as I've been following Tarzan for the last decade, watching her evolve from self-dubbed "email marketing diva" into something much more expansive and inspiring (who still tells a mean story or three 'round the fire). What a total honor to have her on the show to explore:

How classic business models limit creativity and possibility
Why urgency and persuasion shut down critical thinking
What consent looks like on a practical level in marketing, leadership, and community spaces
Why businesses hold real power, and how to wield it responsibly

This convo smashes to smithereens the prefab version of success we’ve all been handed, replacing it with hope: expansive, relational, creative, and alive.

Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a messaging co-op that gives a flying duck. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long-term strategy: if you want your brand, offers, and experience to tell the same story, we can help.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

#13 Sara Otto: Supply chains that center the people within them

Janel Torkington — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:01:00 +0000

“Supply chains are made of people, not just products or paperwork.” – Sara Otto

Supply chains touch almost everything we buy — clothes, home goods, gifts, art — yet most of us never really see how they work, or who they rely on.

In this episode of Flying the Coop, we’re joined by Sara Otto, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Nest, a nonprofit working globally to make artisan supply chains more equitable, transparent, and sustainable, especially for home-based and small-workshop makers who are often invisible to traditional oversight.

Sara shares how Nest operates at the intersection of ethics, compliance, logistics, and real-world commerce, translating “we want to do business better” into systems that actually protect workers’ rights and dignity. Drawing on years of experience living and working alongside artisan communities, she offers a look at what real-deal ethical sourcing looks like.

Together, we explore:

How "social compliance" rests on relationships
How Nest bridges the gap between global brands and small-scale artisans
How transparency begins with simply knowing who is in a supply chain
What equity looks like beyond paternalism or "white savior" models

This conversation is a grounded, compassionate look at how complex global systems can be redesigned to respect humanity at every level.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

#12 Chloe Poynton: Human rights as a business responsibility

Janel Torkington — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:01:00 +0000

“Human rights aren’t things that happen over there. They show up in everyday business decisions.” – Chloe Poynton

Chloe Poynton is the co-founder of Article One Advisors, a global consultancy that works with companies to put people and human rights at the center of business, from supply chains and product design to emerging technology and AI governance. They have partnered with organizations ranging from major consumer brands to tech platforms and manufacturers, helping them move beyond surface-level compliance towards real change.

Chloe shares her path from humanitarian work in refugee camps with the UN and why she shifted to working with businesses. We talk about what actually changes when businesses stop treating human rights as a compliance exercise and start treating them as a lived responsibility.

What we talk about:

The difference between preventing harm vs repairing harm — might sound simple, but it isn’t!
Why every company has a responsibility to human rights, whether they acknowledge it or not
How incentives, governance, and KPIs directly shape ethical outcomes
Real stories of uncovering and remediating harm inside complex global companies
What it means that the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is a process document
How AI changes the scale of risk, but NOT the underlying responsibility
What gives Chloe hope, even in a turbulent moment for values-led work

Join us to talk about how care, accountability, and dignity can be implemented inside large, messy systems, and why centering people in business is often about designing better structures to hold them and their work.

This interview covers a lot of ground with a lot of heart.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

#11 Lauren Edwards: Building businesses that do good from day one

Janel Torkington — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:01:00 +0000

"Every business could be a social enterprise if they wanted it badly enough." – Lauren Edwards

Lauren Edwards has spent her career helping businesses stop treating "doing good" as an afterthought, and start building it into the core of how they operate.

As Executive Director of SeaChange and owner of NextStep Business Consulting, Lauren works with entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and corporations to prove that profit and purpose don’t have to be in tension.

In this conversation, we dig into what social enterprise actually means (and why the label matters less than the intention), why nonprofits and for-profits are both constrained by broken systems, and how trust (and the lack of it) shapes everything from wage gaps to public policy.

We also cover:

What defines a social enterprise (and what doesn’t)
How profit and impact collide, and how to navigate those moments honestly
Practical models for values-led businesses (B Corps, benefit corporations, worker ownership, revenue sharing, and more)
Why "shop social" can matter as much as shop local
What it looks like to show up ethically when no one is watching

This episode was a beautiful reminder to us that how we structure our business is one of the loudest ways we can show up in the world.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Flying The Coop: Lauren Edwards
(00:01:03) - What's a Social Enterprise?
(00:03:25) - Double-Bottom Line
(00:05:26) - Social Entrepreneurs: Profit and Purpose
(00:08:13) - The Case for Social Enterprise
(00:11:47) - The Fight for Higher Taxes
(00:17:35) - Shop Social: How to Support Social Enterprise Companies
(00:20:18) - The Importance of Choosing Your Own Money
(00:23:08) - The role of individuals in fighting climate change
(00:26:31) - Give More to Nonprofits: We Need a Business Model
(00:30:30) - Five Ways to Do Good While Starting a Business
(00:36:44) - Local Businesses to Support
(00:37:19) - The role of trust in our society
(00:42:15) - The Value of Communication
(00:44:43) - SeaChange: Celebrating Social Enterprise's 10th Anniversary
(00:46:25) - Flipping The Coop

#10 An honest year-in-review of (almost) building a co-op

Janel Torkington — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 23:01:00 +0000

“Capitalism is all about squeezing every last bit of value you can… and what we are trying to do is explore a model that allows us to exist within a capitalist hellscape, but takes care of us as a fundamental driving mechanism instead.” - Janel Torkington

In this end-of-year episode of Flying the Coop, we’re looking back on what it’s actually been like building Strange Birds (and the podcast!) in 2025.

We talk about:

What it really means to move toward becoming a worker-owned co-op
How open books and shared decision-making have reshaped our relationship to business
Why we define full-time work as 25 hours
The systems and “containers” we’ve built to handle big feelings, hard conversations, and real life
Our “Bird Brain Summit,” where we mapped how our very different brains, speeds, and working styles actually complement each other (curious? here are the question prompts we used for this)
Why showing up consistently sometimes means showing up for ourselves before the business

This episode is part retrospective, part behind-the-scenes, and part planting our flag for building a business that’s for-real human first... especially in a year that basically tried to eat us alive.

---

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Flipping the Coop: Year One
(00:03:17) - Janel on Going Co-op
(00:05:04) - Taking a Step Back: Becoming a Co-op
(00:06:37) - Dear Strange Birds: When Will I Be an Employee?
(00:08:15) - Drinking Vermouth
(00:09:01) - What Makes a Coop So Fun?
(00:12:45) - Show Up Consistently For Your Job
(00:17:00) - The Bird Brain Summit
(00:22:46) - The Way We Approach Time
(00:27:22) - A Year in the Life of the Podcast
(00:28:29) - What Have You Learned From The Co-op Podcast?
(00:30:09) - What Are You Hoping For In 2019?
(00:32:12) - Flying the Coop: Brand Marketing

#09 Noah Scalin: The ROI of creativity in the age of AI

Janel Torkington — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:19:00 +0000

“What’s the ROI of creativity? That's like asking, what’s the ROI of electricity?” - Noah Scalin

Noah Scalin is a multidisciplinary artist, author, and co-founder of Another Limited Rebellion, where he helps individuals and organizations unlock their creative capacity through practice, play, and a wildly approachable philosophy: that creativity is a universal human skill you can train.

We talk about why creativity is a muscle, how limitations can actually expand what’s possible (get back in the box!), and what happens to organizations when they treat creativity as infrastructure instead of decoration. We also get into the age of AI, the difference between human expression and machine output, and why doing creative work for yourself might be the secret to showing up better everywhere else.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:13) - Flying the Coop: Noah Scalin
(00:01:23) - How Do You Define Creativity?
(00:02:47) - How Creativity Affects Your Work
(00:04:37) - In the Elevator: Creativity and Innovation
(00:06:54) - On the Future of Creativity
(00:12:01) - The ROI of Creativity
(00:15:16) - Is AI Bad for Creativity?
(00:19:03) - AI and the Question of Creativity
(00:24:07) - Unlock the Creative Capacity of Your Employees
(00:29:42) - Honorizing the Hustle
(00:29:59) - Skull A Day
(00:30:37) - How to Get Out of the Box
(00:35:57) - Oh, We Need Some Skulls
(00:36:48) - Leagues of Space Pirates Are Back
(00:41:06) - Strategic Messaging

#08 Elijah Zimmerman: Compassion as resistance in a culture of optimization

Janel Torkington — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:21:00 +0000

“If you’re forgetting the basic fundamentals of how we can be here together, that’s not optimization — it’s an illusion.” - Elijah Zimmerman

Elijah Zimmerman is an interfaith minister, nonprofit leader, and PhD in communication whose work lives right at the intersection of compassion, transformation, and leadership. As executive director of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, he helps people and organizations use compassion as a real, practical tool for meeting change, whether that means leading through uncertainty, making space for discomfort, or calling a pause when things get tense.

We talk about why compassion is more than a feeling, how it can act as a quiet form of resistance to the culture of optimization, and what it looks like to bring a little more breath, pause, and presence into how we work together.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:06) - Flying the Coop: Exploring Compassion
(00:01:12) - What is the Difference Between Compassion and Empathy?
(00:08:09) - Blue Jays' Captain on the World Series
(00:09:29) - The Need for Self-Compassion in Work
(00:13:00) - Ideas for a More Just World
(00:18:00) - Self-Compassion and Its Myths
(00:18:47) - Self-Compassion and Common Humanity
(00:20:50) - Compassion as a Catalyst
(00:24:03) - What Does Compassion Look Like in a Team?
(00:30:00) - Non-Binary Business Structures
(00:35:13) - Queer perspectives on the business
(00:38:57) - Flying The Coop: The Need for Compassion in Work

#07 Brandon Reid & Andrew Jacob: Co-ownership is the future of work

Janel Torkington — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 23:08:00 +0000

“Collaborative ownership and collaborative governance is a vessel to make our mission happen.” - Brandon Reid

Brandon Reid and Andrew Jacob are longtime friends turned co-founders of Heirloom, a platform for collaborative ownership that helps builders find their team, share equity, and actually get passion projects off the ground. We talk about why the future of work should feel more like weaving than hustling, what it takes to create something worth passing down, and their best mushroom foraging hauls.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Flying The Coop
(00:01:24) - Heirloom: Best Friends Foraging Together
(00:04:09) - The Secret to Collaboration
(00:04:26) - Co-op: Explained on The Podcast
(00:05:52) - Collaborative Ownership at Heirloom
(00:06:58) - Heirloom's Collaborative Loom
(00:09:41) - Heirloom: A Place for Personal Growth
(00:13:18) - When You Pitch the Collaborative Organization
(00:14:32) - What's an Elevator Success Story?
(00:16:35) - In the Elevator: The Small Business Model
(00:19:18) - Heirloom: The Startup Where Talent Can Find Work
(00:21:44) - What kind of people would join the Heirloom team?
(00:24:32) - Heirloom's Commitment to a Community
(00:25:07) - Ideas on Heirloom: Open to the World

Announcement: Why Flying the Coop is saying bye-bye to Spotify

Janel Torkington — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:57:34 +0000

In two weeks, on 26 November, we’re going to delist our podcast Flying the Coop from Spotify.

It'll still be available on just about every other podcast platform, plus streaming on our own website.

If you’re one of the 20% of Flying the Coop listeners who prefer to listen on Spotify, we are truly sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll continue distributing the podcast everywhere else: Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Pandora – basically everywhere our publishing platform Castos connects us to, plus video versions on YouTube as well. We encourage you to give one of these a go.

BUT.

We also understand if that won’t fly with you.

We’re in a place where we feel we have privilege of choice; not everyone is in such a place.

We choose to hold these powerful corporations responsible for their choices.

With you, we choose to share what’s on our minds and open a conversation.

---

CORRECTION: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek actually has donated $700 million to AI defense company Helsing (not $60 million as we say in this recording).

#06 Nancy Disbrow: Rethinking work for different kinds of brains

Janel Torkington — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 23:05:00 +0000

“The way that my brain didn’t fit was also the reason for my success.” - Nancy Disbrow

Nancy Disbrow is the sharp and deeply empathetic brain behind Neuro-osity, where she helps high-achieving professionals (especially those with ADHD or dyslexia) stop forcing themselves into broken systems and instead build ones that actually work for their minds. We talk about what it means to put the right brain in the right seat, how teams can support neurodivergent folks without falling back on stereotypes, and why curiosity might be the most powerful workplace tool of all.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:06) - Flying the Coop: Neuro-osity Coach Nancy Disbrow
(00:01:54) - Nancy on Not Fitting The Mould
(00:03:18) - How Dyslexics Changed the Way You See the World
(00:06:38) - The Feelings of Not Fitting Into a Corporate Structure
(00:07:02) - Dyslexic leaders on the workplace
(00:12:58) - How to Talk to a "Lazy" Employee
(00:17:50) - Challenging Dress Codes
(00:21:59) - What Does Your Work Get Done?
(00:25:37) - How to advocate for yourself with ADHD

#05 How we make difficult decisions: A business framework

Janel Torkington — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 22:23:00 +0000

“The goal is to reach mutual understanding and agreement, not to win.” - Janel Torkington

Oh hey, a mini-episode on how we do business differently at Strange Birds!

This decision-making framework works magic because:

It invites you to rep the viewpoint of the other person
It transforms the conflict from you vs me to us vs the problem
It clarifies the difference between a principled objection and a preference
It kicks things off and wraps things up with [brief] feelings

It's inspired by the Quaker model of consensus. We met at a Quaker uni (Earlham College) way back in the day. Despite neither of us being Quaker, the way we structure our co-op is heavily influenced by the (very smart) way they make group decisions.

Get yerself a ready-to-roll version of this decision-making framework here: https://strangebirds.kit.com/decision-making-framework

If you take it for a spin, please please please let us know how it goes!! We're super curious if it helps you make your way through tricky biz conversations.

Chapters

(00:00:06) - How We Decided to Publish Our Podcast on Spotify
(00:05:05) - A Real Talk About Feelings
(00:09:58) - How to Have a Difficult Conversation About a Business Decision

#04 Jacqueline Radebaugh: The legal side of doing business differently

Janel Torkington — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 22:05:00 +0000

“The cooperative model is healing the way we interact and relate to each other… and it allows us to practice law in a healing way.” – Jacqueline Radebaugh

From corporate tax law to co-ops, Jacqueline has been on quite a journey as a lawyer.

Now she’s the best dang coop lawyer around (spoiler alert: she’s ours).

Jacqueline is a managing partner at Jason Weiner, a firm that provides legal and business consulting for mission-driven companies, social impact, and environmental enterprises. Jacqueline assists mission-based, values-forward entrepreneurs and businesses in identifying and addressing their legal needs, from start-up phase through financing rounds, to conversion and exit strategies.

On top of the three things everyone should kind of already be doing before they begin discussions in creating their coop (open books, decision-making practices, and sharing profit), we also cover:

What makes a coop successful?
What do extractive practices mean?
What paperwork do you need to be a coop?
What is sociocracy?
Where are the common places people struggle when building their coop?

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:05) - Flying the Coop: The Best Co-op Lawyer Around
(00:01:13) - Jacqueline on Co-OP Law
(00:03:57) - What is a Co-Op?
(00:06:40) - What are the things a company needs to have to operate as a
(00:10:25) - Co-op Governance and Decision Making
(00:16:28) - The Case for the Co-op
(00:19:33) - Why a Co-op Is a Good Decision
(00:22:52) - Flying the Coop

#03 Alfred García: Business should care for the people within it

Janel Torkington — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 22:05:00 +0000

“People work better when they believe in what they are working for.” - Alfred Garcia

Alfred is a member of Jamgo, a developer co-op based in Barcelona that has been around for nearly 15 years. On top of that, he lives in a housing co-op. We spoke with him about how a co-op’s structure should be just enough to flex around the complexity of the people within it.

In a co-op, you are an active decision maker. You don’t get to externalize decisions to a boss. You are all the boss, sharing the load together.

It’s like a bunch of entrepreneurs got together, put their hands in, and created Captain Planet (when will they make a Marvel Universe around him? Please bring Captain Planet back).

This interview goes deep.

We get philosophical.

We ask deep questions like:

Why is it so hard to ask for help and how can we change that?
If profit isn’t just about money, what else can it mean?
What does it look like for a business to honor the whole person, not just honor their productivity?
What does ‘transparency’ look like in practice?
How does equitable compensation work at Jamgo?
How does the concept of ‘speed’ change when you look at co-ops? What is slower, what is faster?
What is the difference between community-based support and support based in capitalism?

We also answer fun questions like “Why is Barcelona so full of co-ops? Is it… the anarchists???”

Oh yeah, this is a good one.

Action items from this conversation:

What does profit mean to your organization?
What does ‘transparency’ look like in practice in your organization?
How do you celebrate the messiness of life?

Listen anywhere podcasts roost.

Watch on YouTube.

See Alfred’s web for more about him.

Learn more about Jamgo.

See all episodes.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Flying the Coop: What It's Really Like to Work at a Co-op
(00:01:30) - What inspired the creation of Jamgo? Co-ops
(00:08:41) - Jamgo's personality as a co-op
(00:10:06) - Jamgo Coop's Core Values
(00:13:28) - Assemblies! Assemblies! Assemblies!
(00:22:13) - What Startup Founders Need to Know About Coops
(00:30:10) - What Do We Do About Paying It Forward?

#01 Janel and Anna: Why we’re doing business differently

Janel Torkington — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 07:38:00 +0000

“Truth is multifaceted and always shifting. So let’s talk to lots of people and find out lots of stories.” - Janel Torkington

It made sense to kick off our podcast in conversation with each other.

What the heck are we doing?

Why should anyone listen?

Who are we?????

In this episode, we share our origin story, fail at Avril Lavigne lyrics, and dig into why we care so dang much about cooperatives.

Make sure you stay until the end to hear random animal facts!

Action items from this conversation:

What does growth mean to you?
What is your business structure (hierarchical, horizontal, cooperative) and why did you pick it? Does it align with your values?
Have you ever considered building a bat house?

Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a messaging co-op that gives a flying duck. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long-term strategy: if you want your brand, offers, and experience to tell the same story, we can help.

Chapters

(00:00:06) - Flying the Coop: Episode 1
(00:00:47) - Janel and I Made a Podcast
(00:01:12) - Anna Hoatzin on Strange Birds
(00:07:34) - What Creatives Need to Know
(00:09:58) - Janel on Co-ops
(00:11:59) - What Does a Sustainable Business Mean to You?
(00:14:09) - Janel on Starting a Business as a Partner
(00:19:32) - What Has Being a Business Owner Teaches You About Power
(00:22:25) - Responsibility and Power in Business
(00:23:57) - Flying the Coop: A Human First
(00:26:16) - What Animal Do You Think We're Turning Into?
(00:28:57) - Fact Checking Anna

#02 Haley Boehning: The relationship between purpose and profit

Janel Torkington — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 07:38:00 +0000

“Purpose without profit is a dream. Profit without purpose is meaningless.” - Haley Boehning

Every time we have a call with Haley, we always think “wow, we should have recorded that.”

Well, lucky you!

We finally recorded a conversation.

Haley was the perfect first interview for Flying the Coop.

She is an expert at purpose.

In this episode, we cover juicy questions like:

What even is purpose, beyond the buzz-word definition of it?
And how does that purpose help make every single decision easier and more efficient?
How do you know if your purpose is muddled… even if it’s written down super clearly?

And our personal favorite question: How do you make the business case for ‘purpose’ without sounding too ‘woo woo?’

We loved this conversation.

In fact, after this convo we had a full hour session to rework Strange Birds’ purpose, which then turned into a 6-email series in our newsletter of how we unclucked our messaging.

Action items from this conversation:

What is your purpose?
What is one way you could better embed your purpose in your work days?
If you have a team: have an open discussion about your purpose in your next stand up. What does it mean to them?

Here's where to find more from Haley:

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

Chapters

(00:00:06) - Flying The Coop: Haley Boehning
(00:01:40) - What Does It Mean to Be a Purpose Driven Company?
(00:07:10) - Why Purpose Drives Businesses
(00:10:33) - What Was the Biggest No You Ever Said That Reconfirmed Your
(00:17:24) - Incentive Programs: Where Things Go Wrong
(00:18:56) - Internal Systems: The Impact of Decisions
(00:24:44) - The Stakeholders of Business
(00:26:52) - The 5 Questions for a Purposeful Business
(00:29:34) - The Joy of Working With Strange Birds

Flying the Coop debuts on 4 September 2025!

Janel Torkington — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 09:09:03 +0000

Flying the Coop will debut on 4 September, 2025!

We share great convos with with founders, co-op creators, legal advocates, and the best kind of business geeks about evolving business models, shared ownership, long-term trust, and the tradeoffs that come with building something more honest, longer-lasting, and real-deal human.

If this sounds like your jam, sign up for our podcast newsletter to be the first to know when it hits the feeds:

https://strangebirds.kit.com/podcast

Chapters

(00:00:00) - A placeholder episode for Flying the Coop