FOUNDER · AUTHOR · WRITER ·
Marisa Guthrie
I've spent thirty years proving profit and principle aren't opposites.
The question is no longer whether you can make money. The question is whether the way you are making money still reflects who you are, what you believe, and the impact you want your work to create.
For more than thirty years, I have been exploring the same questions:
“How do you build a business that feels fully aligned with the person you are becoming?”
How do you increase your income without compromising the values that matter to you?
How do we build businesses that are both profitable and ethical?
Not businesses that make money at any cost, or that sacrifice profitability to stay true to their values, but businesses where profit and purpose strengthen one another.
My interest in these questions is not academic. It comes from more than thirty years spent building businesses, supporting founders, and navigating the realities of entrepreneurship myself. Again and again, I encountered the same tension: the belief that making more money requires some form of compromise. My work has emerged from a desire to challenge that assumption and explore a different possibility.
I believe the future belongs to business owners who are no longer willing to separate how they make money from what they believe.
The Ethical Entrepreneurship Ecosystem is the culmination of more than thirty years spent building businesses, working with founders, testing ideas, making mistakes, and returning to that question again and again.
It is the methodology I developed for women who are no longer willing to separate how they make money from what they believe. It offers a way to build meaningful profit, create real impact, and redesign your business so that it feels fully aligned with the values, standards, and philosophy that guide your work.
My book, The Reluctant Capitalist, explores the same question from a wider perspective: how we navigate the realities of making money while remaining aligned with our values, our ethics, and our vision for change.
Three expressions of the same work.
COACH
The methodology I developed for women who are no longer willing to separate how they make money from what they believe.
Ethical Entrepreneurship Ecosystem™
AUTHOR
Out now! A book for anyone who has felt torn between making money and staying true to what they believe.
The Reluctant Capitalist
WRITER
The ongoing practice: weekly essays working out these questions in public, one issue at a time.
Ethical Entrepreneurship, on Substack.
Recent Conversations
OWN YOUR TIME, HOSTED BY SARAH STEWART
“Building a Business Without Selling Your Soul”
On ethical pricing, marketing without manipulation, and building a business that protects your time instead of extracting from it.
On redesigning a business around self-trust instead of fear, and what changed when Marisa stopped pushing through and started listening to her own limits.
“How Self-Trust Creates a Sustainable, Ethical Business Model”
THE SELF TRUST SOLUTION, HOSTED BY DAWN LEDET
Stay close to the work
Weekly essays on money, values, and building a business you believe in.

