Why a regenerative perspective?
I didn't set out to build a regenerative business. I set out to survive.
After being laid off for the second time, I found myself in a weird space. Somewhere between grieving, embarrassment, disillusionment, and a deep sense that my body wasn’t meant for the traditional 9-5. Returning to a conventional workplace felt impossible: the structures, the pace, the environment, even the lights had become unbearable. Yet starting my own business seemed like its own trap, misaligned with my values and beliefs, especially with my awareness of colonialism and capitalism's flaws. Building a business felt counterintuitive.
That changed with a post from Vivianne Castillo that stopped my scroll, where she drew a distinction I hadn't considered before: that commerce and capitalism are not the same thing.
Commerce, being the exchange of goods, skills, and value between people, has existed across human history in countless forms.
Capitalism is just one way to organize commerce, and a relatively recent one built on scarcity economics. The extraction, relentless growth, and people-as-output mentality aren’t inherent to commerce; they're a specific set of pervasive rules layered on top, now seen as the norm.
That reframe shifted me.
The real problem isn’t business itself. It’s the capitalist operating system that defines how most businesses run.
So how can I do business differently? How can I shift the narrative?
Most of us run businesses within an operating system we never chose, one that defaults to extraction over nourishment, efficiency over humanity, and scale over sustainability. Profit becomes the north star, often at any cost. There is never a sense of enoughness, only a drive for more.
And the tragedy is that many of us know something is off. We feel it in our bones, the burnout, in the team tensions, in the gap between the business we imagined and the one we're actually running. We feel it when growth starts to feel heavy instead of expansive. We followed the plan and did all the things, but somehow these aren’t the results we imagined.
What can we do instead of accepting the system as-is and trying to do a little good around the edges? Regenerative thinking offers the possibility of creating something new and potentially shifting the system.
What Regenerative Actually Means
I am not sure why the word regenerative landed so differently for me than sustainable, conscious, or ethical ever did. I feel it carries something older in it. A remembering, maybe, of how things can work when we are part of something larger than ourselves.
Some traditional definitions of regeneration:
“the act of improving a place or system, especially by making it more active or successful”
Cambridge dictionarythe process of being “restored to a better, higher, or more worthy state”
Merriam-Webster
I have always aimed to make whatever space I enter better, so this immediately aligned with that. What if this was the perspective I was missing for my business? And how could I help others prioritize their businesses differently?
Regeneration or Regenerative isn't a softer word for sustainable. Sustainability asks: how do we cause less harm? Regenerative boldly asks: how do we actively restore, reimagine, and repair?
It's a framework borrowed from ecology, the understanding that healthy systems don't just maintain themselves, they renew themselves. Soil that is regeneratively farmed becomes richer over time. Ecosystems that are well tended grow more biodiverse, more resilient, and more alive.
The same logic applies to organizations, teams, and the humans inside them.
A regenerative business isn't just one that avoids burning people out. It's one whose operations, systems, and culture are designed to leave people more energized, more capable, more creative and more connected to their purpose than before. Where the work itself becomes a source of renewal, not just for the founder, but for the team, the clients, and the wider community it touches.
This isn't idealism. It's systems design.
Where Operations Come In
Here's what most operations conversations miss: none of this happens by values alone.
You can hold the most beautiful intentions, care for people, and still run a business that exhausts everyone in it. Because if the underlying systems, the workflows, the decision-making structures, the ways tasks are tracked and capacity is held, are still built on extractive logic, the values don't stand a chance.
Operations are the architecture of how a business actually lives in the world. They're not the boring backend you deal with after the visionary work is done. They are what allow the work to happen. They determine whether your values stay on the wall or get built into how things actually run.
Regenerative operations means designing systems that treat the people inside a business as the living, breathing heart of the business and not resources to be optimized. This is the intersection I work in. Not operations just as a technical fix, but also as an act of care.
An Invitation
I want to be honest with you from the start: I haven't resolved the tension between building a business and living inside a capitalist society.
What I've realized is that regeneration is not a destination, but a practice. An ongoing negotiation between values, reality, and systems, and the best way I know to reconcile doing business within a capitalist model.
If you've been holding a tension between wanting to build something and not knowing how to do it without reproducing the systems you're trying to move away from, this space is for you.
I'm not here to offer a perfect anti-capitalist blueprint. I don’t believe there is one. I'm here to explore, honestly and practically, what it looks like to build a business differently. One that serves people. One that restores rather than depletes. One where the way you work is as intentional as the work itself.
I'm not here to offer a perfect anti-capitalist blueprint. Instead, I’m sharing practical ways to build a business differently from a regenerative perspective. A business that makes the way you work as intentional as the work itself and makes this world a better place.
That's what regenerative means to me.
Here’s to imagining what’s possible...
Have a thought, a question, or a moment of recognition while reading this? I'd love to hear from you — connect with me.
