Make An Impact, Not Just Money With Mary Ann Kristiansen (392)

Life Skills That Matter | Create Work That Works For You

Do you have an idea to make the world or even just your local community a better place?

Mary Ann Kristiansen wants to inspire you to start a business to make an impact, not just money.

She's the founder of the Hannah Grimes Marketplace, a main street store celebrating the local producers of Keene, NH, as well as running an incubator to help businesses start and grow.

She's also the co-founder of Radically Rural Summit, an annual conference to exchange success stories about what's working in rural America from land development to renewable energy to entrepreneurship.

Lot of great lessons in our conversation including:

1. Why community is her core source of motivation.
2. The concept of being idea friendly from SaveYour.Town.
3. How she challenged her limiting beliefs about what it means to be a leader.
4. How idea demons help her overcome big challenges.
5. Why her business incubator has such a high success rate.

Life Skills That Matter In This Episode

• Build community.
• Curiosity.
• Tell your story.

How Mary Ann Works and Thinks

• Wake up time: 5:30 – 6:30 am
• Core work activities + habits: 1) Keeping the community tight, starting with supporting her team. 2) Listening to the community and keeping an eye on the news for a sense of what’s happening. 3) Staying attached to why it’s important and loving the place she lives.
• Ideal work environment: Having lots of open time before she gets into working. For some types of work, it’s in a busy environment, with lots of people, and ideas popping around. For other work, like writing or thinking, it means taking a few days off to approach it really fresh.
• Superpower: Seeing things as easy and attainable, even if they sometimes turn out not to be.

Inspirational Quotes

“For me, a lot of forward motion comes from working with lots of different things and then sort of seeing the connections between them and sometimes seeing a new path forward.”

“If business were consistently a force for good, so many of the, what we consider, complex, intractable problems would go away.”

“What we’ve found is really having a wide variety of things, help feed each other.”

“I really believe ideas are things, I’ve more and more come to believe it’s some dimension that we have yet to learn.”

“We give people what they need at the time that they need it.”

Coaching Advice

Got a big, burning idea that you’re having trouble starting on? Mary Ann recommends this as a first action to get going:

1) Get clear on your idea in order to be able to articulate it, and your excitement about it, to others.

2) Do that by sitting down and writing out what your idea is, how you would market it, what does it look like, and get really detailed.

Resources + Bonus Materials

The Keene Sentinel

Hannah Grimes Business Incubator Program

Deb and Becky – Save Your Town

Mary Ann’s TED Talk: Radically Rural Idea Demons

Hannah Grimes PitchFork Guide

Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold

The Impact Filter

Related Episodes

How To Do Your Best Work with Amber De La Garza (366)

Design Your Lifestyle Around Your Work With Craig Chavis (164)

Connect With Mary Ann

Hannah Grimes Center

Hannah Grimes Marketplace

Radically Rural

LinkedIn

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