Nada Matti-Leighton and Emily Monsell-Holden worked together almost 15 years ago, both in-house marketers at purpose-driven businesses before anyone used that phrase. 

Nada's frustration is that we're still asking whether purpose and profit can coexist at all. She borrows a useful term for the answer: bothism. Not profit or purpose, brand or performance, short term or long term, but and. And she’s honest by the cost. She won't tell clients that being purposeful will make them more money, because she doesn't think the evidence supports it, and then she gets specific about what it does cost: the workload of B Corp certification, the price of a better supplier, and once, turning down a partnership that would have reached thirty million people. 

Nada is ex-Head of Marketing at Canopy & Stars and an Bristol-based independent consultant. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

This one is a big, meaty topic. Emily Monsell-Holden and Ed Ferris try to break it down. Emily’s view is that we treat profit as the business and purpose as a thing bolted on, when the businesses doing it well have the two feeding each other. Drawing on years working with social enterprises and purpose-driven brands, she looks at why the structures matter: family businesses and employee-owned businesses can take a short-term hit because someone is thinking about the next generation of custodians. 

Ed Ferris argues that purpose is an investment like any other, and that the slower building blocks tend to produce the loyalty that lasts. They also examine why taking a long-term view has become quietly radical, and what that says about how we currently define success. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Sarah David had the challenging role of restructuring an organisation after the 2008 collapse, closing offices and making people redundant. Yet it remains one of the things she's proudest of in her career, because of how they did it. 

She joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to explain what person-led restructuring actually looked like in practice, what she means by getting out of your own way, and the shift she works on with founders: becoming the CEO first and the founder second. 

On leading through uncertainty, her advice is to build an options culture, to watch for anyone saying there's no choice, and to judge yourself on the quality of your decision-making rather than on outcomes you couldn't have predicted. 

Sarah is a board chair, executive coach and management consultant to leadership teams.

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

The most personal conversation on this podcast so far. Ed Ferris took over his father's business at 23 after his dad had to step away for his health. Two weekends in, at one in the morning, his most important team member rang him in pieces. He talks here about how unequipped he felt, about the mistakes he made, and about redundancies that he says destroyed him for a year. 

EmilyMonsell-Holden, who led teams through the COVID transition and throughout rounds of redundancies, adds the part leadership teams miss: for everyone who stays after a restructure, that's the beginning rather than the end, and the tremors last for years if nobody keeps talking. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Rebecca Oliver-Mooney (aka ROM) walked into drinks industry meeting rooms with a serious career in FMCG behind her and was routinely assumed to be the most junior person there. Raising the Glass came out of that, and is now a network of over 2,300 women and allies. 

She joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to explain what makes a community real: that it takes a community to build a community, that she started with five people she respected asking whether it needed to exist, and that the best communities end up bigger than their founder's original vision. 

Her warning to brands is direct: if you set out to construct a community from a brand strategy, people will scratch the surface, find it's fabricated, and switch off faster than almost anything else. 

ROM is founder of Raising the Glass and previously set up the Apiary, Co-op's incubator for underrepresented founders. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Every brand seems to have a community now. Emily Monsell-Holden wants to ask them a question: do your customers know they're in one, and would they use that word? 

Drawing on two decades in brand and marketing, she argues that a lot of what gets called community is customer segmentation with better branding, and that the softer version already exists in any strong brand. 

Ed Ferris has the cautionary tale. He tried to bring watch collectors together in his own business and found the brands didn't want to sit alongside each other and the customers only turned up for their own. 

They talk about when community is genuinely powerful, when it's forced, and why some industries are simply better suited to it than others. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Jannine Barron is anti-jargon – thank goodness. Sustainability means to sustain. Regenerative means to begin again. She joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to give the plain English version, tracing the argument back to Donella Meadows in 1972 and forward to doughnut economics, and using farming as the example that makes it real: soil degrading fast enough that farmers had to change or stop being in business. 

She's equally clear about what not to do, and would not recommend putting nature on the board to any business under about ten people, because the legal obligations are real. 

Her simplest starting point costs nothing: take people outside. She reckons a day in nature does the work of a six-week Zoom workshop. Jannine is a regenerative business mentor, and has been Emily's own mentor. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Regenerative business, nature capital, nature on the board. Emily Monsell-Holden has spent years in this world and still finds it hard to articulate. 

She traces how she got here, from years of walking meetings and outdoor sessions long before that was a normal suggestion, to the argument that a business isn't separate from the world it operates in and never was. 

Ed Ferris brings the harder perspective. He came from jewellery, an industry that pulls things out of the ground, and is honest about how difficult it was to find precious metals and stones extracted responsibly, what they changed, and what still troubled him. 

If this topic has always sounded slightly abstract to you, this is the episode where two people try to make it a bit more concrete. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Zee Ahmed's third business is the one that worked. 

He quit his job for a travel company that COVID destroyed, opened a coffee shop in South Manchester that didn't work either, and found himself in his late twenties wondering whether the people around him still believed in him. 

He joins Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden to talk about what changed the third time round, the six-monthly ritual he uses to hold himself honestly to account, and how he decides which advice to take and which to leave. 

He's also building a collective to connect food and drink founders across the north, because he thinks the south has become the default hub and that shouldn't be the case. Zee is founder of Raju Sauces, now stocked in around a hundred independents and on Ocado. 

Part two of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.

Going it alone sounds like freedom. Everyone told Emily Monsell-Holden how brave she was for starting up by herself. At first it felt like praise, but then she started hearing it as a warning.

In this episode she talks honestly about what four or five years of running her own business has actually felt like, including the part nobody warns you about: losing count of the advice you've been given, most of it conflicting, and having no idea who to trust with money you can't spare. 

Ed Ferris, who took over his father's business at 23 and has since worked with many solo founders, offers a practical answer: treat choosing an adviser like an investment rather than a purchase. Find ten people who've built what you're building, ask each for a coffee, and watch whether they turn up with a proposal. 

Part one of two.

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Impact Curious is hosted by Ed Ferris and Emily Monsell-Holden of The Impact Apothecary, the anti-consultancy for purpose-led leaders, based in Winchester. Every topic runs across two episodes: one where Ed and Emily work out what they know and what they don't, and one where they bring in an expert to fill in the blanks.  

Get in touch at [email protected] or find Ed and Emily on LinkedIn, where you can vote on the questions we ask our next guest.