In the world of creative writing, there's a saying, show, don't tell. Well, something similar is happening in the impact space. It's no longer enough to just tell everybody how amazing you are, the incredible sustainability or impact outcomes that your business is having. Now, you need to show the receipts. The good news is we're fairly early in this trend, and it's not that hard to get started. But businesses who really are able to have data to tell the story of how your business is moving the needle in positive impact ways are way ahead of the curve and are gonna do better than businesses that don't. Our guest this week is Angel Lance, and she's gonna tell you how to get started, couple of tips, and she's just a real trendsetter in the world of impact accounting. So take a listen and share it with your friends.

Hi. This is Paul Dollitzer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. I'm an indie podcaster, and it makes a huge difference if you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps more people learn how to have a positive impact through a values based business. Thanks so much.

Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Angel Lam, and our topic is the practical applications of impact accounting. Angel is a visionary founder and CEO with an impressive track record of creating and leading successful companies that solve big problems. In over 2 decades of serial entrepreneurship, she has launched and scaled 4 self funded profitable enterprises from the ground up, demonstrating an unparalleled business acumen and commitment to living her passion for environmental stewardship. Angel, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Excited to be.

And we didn't even talk about your new book and being an author and all sorts of things. We're gonna get into that in the show. But before we get into all the incredible things that you've done, Angel, if somebody didn't know who you are and wanted a little bit of sense of your backstory, what's a 3 minute version of your journey as an entrepreneur?

3 minute journey. I would say if someone didn't know me and they wanted to get a sense of where I came from, they would define me in a couple of simple words, which would be straightforward, honest, scrappy, get it done. That would be it.

That sounds pretty good. And, like your career, like, where did it start? You know, now we're talking about impact accounting today. Like, did you start as an accountant? Have you always been an entrepreneur? Like, give us like, a little bit of, like, what's what were the formative years of your career? What did they look like?

Oh, so I am not for the record, I am not a scientist. I am also not an accountant. What I am though is a business lady, and where I got into the business lady world is I used to work for big corporations. And in those big corporations, we would hire a lot of consultants as big corporations do. And those big consultants, big companies, and their consultants that they employed, I felt did not really deliver a lot of value to the big companies that I worked for. And I thought it could be done differently and better and more more tangibly and more maybe honestly. So I started a company, a consulting company where I could do exactly that, where I could deliver tangible value of day 1. I could do the things I said I was gonna do, and I could have a group work with a group of people who check their ego at the door and actually roll up their sleeves to to get a job done.

Check their ego at the door and work to get things done. I like that. Sometimes that doesn't happen in business.

Sometimes. So this

concept, Angel, of impact accounting, we're gonna dive into this. I was super excited when I got this pitch, because it's something I've been hearing about. And, and I wanna say in the impact world, sometimes people use big concepts, but don't always have any sort of granular information to back it up. And and one of the things that was exciting to me about this topic is a good accountant can really help you, like, what's going on in this business and to bring that into the impact space with something that I'm super excited about. So impact accounting, what is it? Where does it start?