[00:00:00] Fiona Johnston
Can we please stop being so vague? It really bothers me how many founders and businesses call themselves purpose or impact led, and how few of them explain what that means, let alone measure it. It's just as important to measure your impact as it is to measure metrics like revenue, growth, profitability, and cash flow. And yes, measuring impact is harder than those metrics, but it's still possible and a worthy pursuit.
Money Secrets Intro
Are you a small business owner who'd love to be making more money while making positive change in the world? You're in the right place, friend. Hi, I'm Fi Johnston, a chartered accountant and money coach obsessed with small business. In The Money Secrets podcast, I share strategies that you can use to make more money without working harder. You'll hear successful small business owners share what they've learned about money and business, and I'll help you to think differently and shift your [00:01:00] perspectives about money so you can grow your business and your impact. My mission is to get more money into the hands of good business owners like you.
Acknowledgement of Country
This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present, and note that sovereignty has never been ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
Fi
In today's episode of The Money Secrets Podcast, I am going to tell you about my impact report. So in case we haven't met, I'm Fi Johnston. I'm the host of The Money Secrets Podcast. I'm a chartered accountant, and I have been helping purpose-led businesses to grow profitably for [00:02:00] 25 years. So my business, which is called Peach Business, has always been about impact.
It's been about creating it, supporting it, and helping others to grow their own. And I'm now at nearly 16 years of business ownership, which means 16 years of impact creation. So when I started my business, Peach, back in 2010, I decided I'd only work with founders who were using their businesses as a force for good.
They needed to be taking a balanced approach to people, planet, and profit. Now, back in 2010, this was a fairly radical concept, especially for an accountant. But since then, the world has shifted and moved, and being purpose-led has almost become the status quo. So this is the impact that I'm trying to create.
I wanna get more money into the hands of good business owners. Now, before I deliver my impact report to you, I want to tell you about something that [00:03:00] really grinds my gears. Can we please stop being so vague? It really bothers me how many founders and businesses call themselves purpose or impact-led, and how few of them explain what that means, let alone measure it.
So articulating, measuring, and monitoring our impact is something I love doing with my Good Money Club members. It's just as important to measure your impact as it is to measure metrics like revenue, growth, profitability, and cash flow. And yes, measuring impact is harder than those metrics, which tend to pop straight out of zero, but it's still possible and a worthy pursuit.
I think this is something that small business owners can learn so much from the social enterprise and not-for-profit world. So great social enterprises publish their impact report or their impact statistics on their websites. Often it goes out as part of their annual reporting process. [00:04:00] And something that I'm seeing more and more out in the world is small businesses delivering their impact report, and I think it's awesome.
I've been doing it for about three or four years in my business. I talk about it with my Good Money Club members every month, and it's also something that we did as part of Ripple Festival. Now, when we released the impact report for Ripple Festival, I'm gonna tell you that we did actually get a bit of blowback, which is quite interesting.
And this was for our first festival. We haven't released our second impact report yet. But after our first festival, we delivered this impact report on stage actually, and we did it on Instagram and in our EDM. Now, we talked about things like how much money was invested into small businesses. We talked about how many people we put on stage.
We talked about things like how many businesses were involved in putting the festival together. We talked about how many people were at the event, how many people we were able to sponsor or [00:05:00] give scholarships to for tickets, and these were the things that were really important to us. Now, we had somebody provide some feedback that they did not think that those things were impact.
They believe that impact is things like planting trees or giving money to a homeless shelter or, you know, providing meals to the homeless or hours spent mentoring, things like this. And I really challenge that idea Because your impact is whatever you decide you want to create. The impact that we wanted to create for Ripple Festival was exactly that.
We wanted to look at how much money can we invest in other small businesses through this process? How many people can we get on that stage that we are paying? How many people can we get at the event that we are able to sponsor or subsidize their ticket? Those were the things that mattered to us. So this [00:06:00] other person, who actually operates in the purpose-led space themselves, really found it difficult to get their head around the fact that our impact was different from what a social enterprise or a not-for-profit might deem to be their impact report.
So I just wanted to put that out there. The impact that you decide you want to create is what you want to create. It doesn't have to have a philanthropic feel to it. I mean, I would suggest that it probably will if you are truly a purpose-led business owner. You are looking to have a positive impact on the world.
But for you, that might look like environmental causes, whereas for another person it might look like working with, uh, survivors of domestic violence. So everybody has different areas that they are trying to make a positive impact in, and you can really only measure the impact that you are trying to create.
[00:07:00] So that's my little backstory or my thoughts that if you are calling yourself a purpose-led business owner or an impact-led business owner, please consider whether you are actually explaining what that means, what your purpose or your impact actually is, and even better, can you measure it? Are you a purpose-led business owner who'd love to make more money to deliver your mission?
Come and join me on the 30th of July for a free masterclass called More Money, More Mission. I'm gonna teach you how to make more revenue and impact through your business by talking to you about pricing strategy and revenue generation, choosing the right clients, money management, and impact creation.
The masterclass is for small and medium business owners ready for more. It's on the 30th of July at 10:00 AM Australian Eastern Time. It's 60 minutes on Zoom, and all are welcome. I promise you, it will be jam-packed with value [00:08:00] and worth your time. So I'm now going to deliver my 2026 financial year Peach Business Impact Report.
So in collating my impact report, I'm trying to measure how I've directly impacted my clients and suppliers, because investing my money into Australian small businesses and not-for-profits is very important to me, so I measure it. I'm also including the free education I provide in my podcast, on Instagram, and in my weekly email, because sharing my skills is an important part of my career and my impact goals.
So I have eight impact statistics that I have measured that I'm now going to share with you. Number one, I worked with 59 clients, and 50 of them were Good Money Club members. So this is in the 2026 financial year. Now, I'm gonna share with you that this was a drop on the number of [00:09:00] clients I worked with the previous financial year.
And in hindsight, I dropped my one-to-one clients too much. Ripple Festival, which is, uh, my side project, my second business, part of my impact delivery, it took a huge investment of time and energy, and I needed to drop something in order to be able to make that happen What I dropped was my one-to-one workload to accommodate that, and in hindsight, that actually wasn't a very good idea for me personally.
Uh, so I'm just sharing that, um, not all of these numbers have a 100% positive spin on them. The next impact statistic I wanna share is that through my business, $65,000 was invested into 19 Australian small businesses. So this included admin and podcast support, training, studio rent, website development, graphic design, and more.
And [00:10:00] by the way, this isn't all of my expenses. Some of my money does go to businesses that are not small businesses. It's quite hard to avoid. A very important part of this $65,000 investment is into my podcast editor and community manager, Kira, who will be editing this podcast episode. So Kira keeps me organized and my members taken care of.
I am so glad that I have made that investment in Kira and in my business, because my business and I am better because of Kira. So thank you, Kira. The next statistic I wanna share is that I donated $1,800 to charities, including Children's Ground and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. I went to many peaceful protests in that financial year about the occupation of Palestine, and I walked alongside people from all walks of life, faith, age, and ability at those protests.
So that's my f- the [00:11:00] philanthropic part of my impact, is the donations that I was able to make and the time that I was able to invest in peaceful protest and activism. Now, that was a lower dollar amount than my donations have been in previous years, and it's because of what I said before, that I dropped my client load in order to accommodate producing Ripple Festival twice in one financial year Now, talking about Ripple Festival, this is the fourth impact statistic that I wanna share with you.
So through Ripple Festival, which included producing two festivals, one was in November 2025, and one was in May 2026. So in those two events, we put more than 40 small business owners on stage, and we invested more than $250,000 into small businesses. We also sponsored many marginalized people to attend the [00:12:00] events, which we are very proud of.
So Ripple Festival was a big part of my impact creation in the last 12 months. It's something that we went into wanting to really shine a spotlight on the amazingness of small business. We wanted to do something ethical. We wanted to be inclusive. We wanted to live up to the values that we had in that festival, and I really think we did manage to do that.
On the flip side, it was damn hard. My co-founder, Mia, and I have found that our, our own businesses and our health has actually really suffered because of all of the effort that we put into Ripple Festival. Both of us are kinda taking a little beat trying to work out what comes next. But both of us are extremely proud of the 250,000 we invested into small businesses and the two events that we put on, and the 40 people that we put on those stages across [00:13:00] those two events.
The next statistic I wanna share with you is that I delivered training to the members of Mums & Co. for the City of Sydney, the City of Maribyrnong, and Global Sisters. So this training reached thousands of business owners, and a lot of it was pro bono. So I love training and educating small business owners in how to make more money, how to make more impact, how to create businesses that are sustainable, and I do that through masterclasses.
If that's something you would like for your organization, please feel free to reach out. I am also running a free masterclass at the end of July called More Money, More Mission. You can find a link in the show notes to sign up for that free masterclass. So that masterclass will become part of my impact report in the 2027 financial year period because those free [00:14:00] masterclasses are part of how I share my skills and experience with small business owners The next statistic I wanna share is that I shared my financial skills in 42 emails via the Peach Weekly.
Are you a subscriber? So every week, or 52 weeks of the year in that financial year, I write a, a newsletter, an email, an EDM, whatever you wanna call it, where I share my thoughts about different things happening around the world in business and money. I talk about my thoughts and skills around business strategy, business models, pricing.
I share what's happening behind the scenes in my business and in the businesses of my clients. That's also where I let people know about upcoming events. I share some vulnerable personal stories in there as well when I think it's gonna be useful for the readers. And I get [00:15:00] a lot of amazing feedback about the Peach Weekly.
So if you are not a subscriber, please head to the show notes and become a subscriber, because I will probably send about 42 emails this financial year too. My next statistic is that I created 43 podcast episodes in the 2026 financial year, which were downloaded 5,092 times by people all over the world.
This blows my mind. If you are listening to this podcast from Australia, hello. G'day. If you are listening to this podcast from America, that just absolutely blows my mind. I don't know how that happens, but hello to everybody in the United States, which is about a third of my audience, it appears. And if you're listening to this podcast from another part of the world, hello.
Hola. Bonjour. Uh, bonsoir. Uh, I can't think of any other ways of saying [00:16:00] hello. Wominjeka. Um, hello, and, uh, it absolutely blows my mind that you are listening to this podcast, and I hope that you find it useful, especially in this pursuit of you making more money through your business And the last statistic I wanna share about my impact for this year was that I created 163 Instagram posts.
Those posts received 4,000 likes and 812 comments. Strangely enough, that was way down on the previous year, so I think that either my content is getting worse or the algorithm is getting harder. Maybe it's a little bit of both. I wanna also highlight that lucky me now has a social media manager. Elise Campbell from Rita Social Media is my social media manager, and I'm absolutely thrilled that I now have support to help me get my social media out the door each day and also to me making it [00:17:00] better.
As you can hear in my voice, I get really excited about thinking about how I can share my financial skills, how I can help other small business owners out there to create more impact through their businesses. And in order to be able to create impact in our businesses, we need to be making money. So the first thing that we need to think about is, am I actually making enough money to support this business, to support myself, and to support my impact goals?
I implore you to really think about if you consider yourself to be a purpose-led business owner, what purpose are you trying to create? What impact are you trying to generate? Do you have a theory of change or any kind of sentence that might explain what you are trying to do? So for example, my theory of change would be that I believe that if I create [00:18:00] education, training, and support about money, business, and business strategy, and I share that with small business owners, that that helps small business owners to make more money and use it to do good in the world.
That is my theory of change, and I'm testing that every day. And this is why I create this impact report, is because I wanna understand what is going on in my business, what impact am I creating, how is my work, how is my, you know, knowledge, how are my opinions moving through the world, and am I actually creating something good here?
My goal is, has always been getting more money into the hands of good business owners. This podcast is part of how I do this. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Don't worry, I'm not finishing the podcast. Um, I'll be back next week, but I really wanted to take this moment to say thank [00:19:00] you for listening to this podcast.
There are so many podcasts you could be choosing to listen to, and you are listening to this one. I hope it has felt like it was worth your time. I love hearing from you, so if you have any thoughts about the podcast, please get in contact with us via the show notes. And if you are a small or medium business owner who would like to make more money and impact, you need to go and register for the More Money, More Mission masterclass happening on the 30th of July, 2026 at 10:00 AM Australian Eastern Time.
It's completely free, it's jam-packed, and I promise it will be worth your time. Will I see you there?
Money Secrets Outro
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you'd subscribe to the podcast, but [00:20:00] leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends. I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective, and I really hope you enjoyed the listening experience
