Before I tell you about The Purpose Company, I want to tell you where it comes from. Because the values that shape how I work with founders and leaders didn't start with a business plan - they started in Kenya. This shapes everything. And I think you'll see why.

In the autumn of 1984, the BBC broadcast Michael Buerk’s report on the famine in Ethiopia. I was at university. Like most of the country, I watched it transfixed — children standing on legs as thin as matchsticks, mothers unable to feed their newborns, images that went around the world and shook British consciousness in a way that very little else has before or since.

I had a close friend, Linda, who was teaching in Kenya with VSO, and her letters had told me about drought and poor harvests and the fragility of things I’d taken for granted. But nothing she’d written prepared me for what Buerk showed us.

Live Aid followed, and a month after Live Aid, I got on a plane to Nairobi. I’d saved the money working night shifts in a teabag factory on the East India Docks, and I flew SudanAir because that’s what I could afford. I was twenty-one. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to find. I knew I had to go.

What I found was more than I’d expected.

I spent time in Linda’s school, talking with her students about their hopes and their lives. I visited villages, ate lunch with families, learned what it means to be welcomed by people who give generously anyway. After one lunch, my hosts presented me with a kiondo — a handwoven sisal basket, filled with fruit and vegetables and eggs — because I was an honoured guest. I knew they could ill afford the gift, and I knew I had to receive it with grace. That moment has stayed with me ever since.

And alongside the human world, the natural one — equally vivid, equally alive. At the great Rift Valley lakes of Naivasha and Nakuru were the flamingos I’d seen in Out of Africa — majestic in reality, massed in their thousands, their pink colouration vivid against the water. I drove through the Masai Mara and watched lions, cheetahs and leopards moving through the savannah. I travelled to Garissa, a semi-desert town in the north, where I saw the early beginnings of what would eventually become the Green Wall of Africa — communities planting trees to hold back the desert, restoring land through what we’d now call permaculture.

I came home knowing what I believed. I didn’t know yet how I would make it happen.

What followed was a career that lived that purpose in different ways — always the same thread running through it, even when it wasn’t visible from the outside.

A Masters in Development Studies, where I started to understand why gender equality is the central issue, not a side one. Years working across the voluntary sector, public services and private enterprise — leading teams, building organisations, navigating the full complexity of what it takes to run something well. Eight years as a CEO, where I led a mission-driven enterprise and learned that holding your values under pressure is what protects team morale, builds deep trust, and transforms external chaos into measured, forward progress.

And through all of it — the belief that building something excellent and building something good are the same ambition.

When the time came, I made a decision: to build the future I wanted, on my own terms.

That decision has become The Purpose Company — a strategic advisory practice for founders and leaders who are building businesses with ambition and purpose, at a moment when that matters more than it ever has. I work with people who care deeply about what they’re building and who they’re building it for. The approach I bring is what I call hope-centred strategy: the practical discipline of knowing where you want to go, seeing the pathways to get there, and building the agency to act on them.

Alongside the advisory work, I write. A Global Hinge Moment is my Substack on the international order in transition — shining a light on hope-centred leadership and purposeful strategy at a moment when most of what we read points in the other direction. Where the news cycle can leave you feeling that despair is the only rational response, A Global Hinge Moment finds the leaders and organisations building something better, and asks how they’re doing it. We Are Mimosa is its companion — a publication that tells the stories of women who are building the future, because those stories are rarely told. Both are produced through Purpose Media, the media organisation I’ve built to sit alongside the advisory work.

The founders I work with are building in different ways. Some are well into their growth and ready to go further. Some are laying the foundations and need to get them right from the start. Some are women who have lost sight of what they want to build, or are finding it for the first time, and need clarity before they need strategy.

If you’d like to see what that looks like in practice, their stories are here.

What they share is an orientation: toward the future, toward their values, toward the sense that building something that lasts and building something that means something are the same ambition.

If that sounds like you — if something here resonates with the way you think about what you’re building — I’d love to talk.

And if you’d like to know more about my career and experience, you can read more here.

With warmth and strategic hope,

Denyse