About
About
Our Mission & Values
Our Mission
At Fifth Compass, our mission is to help entrepreneurs move from survival to thriving by building profitable, aligned, and sustainable businesses.
We believe business ownership is more than operational; it is transformational. Entrepreneurship has the power to expand leadership, self-trust, financial empowerment, freedom, and the ability to create a meaningful impact in the world. Through strategy, leadership development, financial education, conscious growth, and human-first support, we help business owners become the confident CEOs their businesses require.
Our work is rooted in the belief that entrepreneurs were never meant to carry the weight of business ownership alone. We are committed to creating spaces where business owners feel supported, challenged, understood, empowered, and connected while building businesses that reflect their vision and values.
At its core, Fifth Compass exists to help people create aligned businesses so their lives can feel purposeful, abundant, and deeply authentic.
Our Vision
We envision a world where business is built consciously, authentically, and sustainably. A world where entrepreneurs no longer believe burnout, overworking, disconnection, or sacrificing themselves is the price of success. A world where leadership is rooted not only in profitability and growth, but in humanity, integrity, self-awareness, opportunity, and meaningful impact.
We believe businesses have the power to transform not only the lives of their owners, but also the communities, people, and futures they touch.
That is why the culture of Fifth Compass is deeply rooted in human dignity, equity, opportunity, and conscious leadership. We believe none of us are truly free until the most marginalized among us are free, having access to opportunity, support, safety, and the ability to create sustainable change in their own lives.
We stand for:
- people over profit
- sustainable success over burnout
- collaboration over isolation
- conscious leadership over fear-based growth
- and businesses that create lasting impact beyond profit alone
At Fifth Compass, we are not simply building businesses. We are helping build conscious leaders, sustainable futures, and a human-centered way of growing and succeeding together.
Our Founder's Story
I Was Afraid of Getting Everything I Ever Wanted
Even though I’ve been a business owner since 2017, I still experience moments of uncertainty and fear. Every stage of entrepreneurship has felt like peeling back another layer of limiting beliefs, questions of worthiness, fear of visibility, shame, guilt, and self-doubt.
When I first started my business, I’d say I only wanted to be a bookkeeper, doing all the work myself, that I didn’t want a large company, employees, or visibility. “I just want a small boutique firm,” I would say, almost like staying small made me safer or somehow more honorable. But deep down, I felt like I was meant for something big. Looking back now, I was hiding, afraid of failing, afraid of being seen, and afraid of the responsibility that came with growth.
As the years passed, I became bolder. I expanded into HR, CFO advisory, leadership guidance, coaching, and deeper strategic work. But underneath that growth was a persistent feeling that I was meant for something larger still, that my purpose was to serve and support entrepreneurs on a much broader scale. I could feel it pulling at me.
Surprisingly, the obstacle wasn’t the fear of failing. It was having everything I’ve ever wanted. It was the fear of fully stepping into visibility and becoming everything I secretly knew I was capable of becoming. I worried that if people truly knew my mistakes, fears, struggles, or the parts of myself I had judged, they would question my ability to help them, even though I was helping people every day with success.
Entrepreneurship has taught me that each new level of growth requires a new level of internal expansion. It reminds me a lot of parenting. You think the hardest stage is infancy, until your child is sixteen and suddenly there is a completely different level of emotional weight, fear, responsibility, and growth being asked of you. Business is the same way. Every level asks something new of you.
Often, entrepreneurship can feel incredibly lonely. Not because there aren’t people around us, but because many entrepreneurs spend years trying to maintain the appearance that everything is working. We learn how to perform while privately carrying exhaustion, uncertainty, comparison, pressure, and fear. Social media only amplifies this. You see someone standing next to a luxury car talking about their $100K month or celebrating a $1M deal, and it becomes easy to quietly wonder, “What’s wrong with me?” I’ve asked myself that more times than I can count.
So much of what we consume online is curated to project success. Much of it is marketing, positioning, performance, or carefully manufactured perception designed to build authority and attract business. It was similar to the moment I realized many online reviews are not even written by real people. That realization changed me.
It made me stop chasing the appearance of success and start focusing on building something real and aligned. That journey became the foundation of Fifth Compass and The Fifth Compass Collective. I knew I needed to build a space where entrepreneurs no longer have to pretend they have it all together in order to belong, grow, or be worthy of success.
Poverty Was My Superpower
At 10 years old, we lived in a one-room cabin, mattresses on the floor, a hot plate for cooking, a college dorm fridge anchored our kitchen, and no inside bathroom, meaning we had an outhouse with only a toilet, without a door. I took a “bath” in a drink cooler into which we poured a little hot water from a kettle warmed on the hot plate, in which I could only fit one foot at a time.
As I grew up from this child living on food stamps, and still went hungry, there was an allure that money created safety, freedom, happiness, and relief from pain. I thought that if I could just become successful enough, earn enough, achieve enough, then life would finally feel happy, sane, accepted, and normal.
Imagine my surprise and great disappointment, as my paycheck clicked into six figures, that an angel didn’t descend from the sky and welcome me into an alternate dimension of happiness, joy, and wholeness. My problems didn’t disappear. The big house, 2 cars, expensive trips didn’t magically make life perfect. What had I worked so hard for, exactly? To make someone else rich? All while a company was telling ME when I could rest, eat, and even pee. When I could live my life and how. And I found myself wondering, what does it mean to truly live? I realized true abundance is deeper than dollars. It is freedom. Alignment. Purpose. Health. Presence. Peace. Self-trust. Time ownership. Meaningful relationships. The ability to live your life on your own terms instead of constantly self-sacrificing and performing to meet someone else’s metrics.
The polarity of my life, “from rags to riches” allowed me to see both sides of the illusion. Money can solve financial problems, but possessing it alone cannot heal emotional wounds, create self-worth, give purpose, or teach someone how to truly live. The realization that I had to do the inner work, no matter how much money I did or didn’t have, became one of my greatest superpowers.
Multiple Sclerosis Was My Transformation
In 2013, I woke up with numbness in my right leg. Do you think I stayed home? Called a doctor? Nope… I went to work at a job that felt like it was extinguishing the light of my very soul. By the afternoon I was numb to my shoulder blades and left to see a doctor. I had a 7.55mm multiple sclerosis lesion at C6 on my spine. I saw my whole life vanish in an instant. I mean, it was like a cartoon where the thought bubble of dreams just vanished. I was faced with the possibility of life without driving and maybe not even working, which was most of my identity then. I couldn’t bathe myself, walk normally, or even walk distances through a grocery store. I felt screwed because I was too sick to leave the job, but I knew staying was making me sick.
It was then, that moment right there, that’s the reason I am here with you right now. I decided then that I was going to heal that lesion, get myself well, and find out what it means to really live. This progression took years, but that lesion healed so well that they couldn’t find it years later with an MRI, and so did the next lesion.
Once I was finally well enough to leave that job, and I decided to start my own buisness, it was because if I was ever going to believe in myself, use my skills and talents to benefit me and my family, it was going to be now. If not now, then when? So, in 2017, I started my bookkeeping business. In 2018, after downsizing our lifestyle into.a shoebox of an apartment, I left that soul-sucking company without a single client. I was so afraid to think big. I didn’t have the capacity to think big. I was afraid of everything. My confidence was shaken. I was burnt out. I was sick. I needed to rest my soul. I had so much to heal. I spent the next 3 years going through the Dark Night of the Soul. I could finally heal what that company and my parents had broken. I burnt down my indoctrinated, fearful, performing persona and birthed an authentic, compassionate, and driven embodied warrior that continues to emerge today.
Since then, I’ve healed my body as a daily practice. I prioritize my relationships. I traveled over 1,000 consecutive days as a digital nomad with my husband and our two cats, spending one year traveling Greece. I’ve let go of decades worth of shame and guilt. I’m practicing being seen in a deeper way, shedding the masks I built safety around.
Over time, so many powerful insights and growth came out of that process. I realized that building a business isn’t just about making money. Success isn’t defined by the number on your pay stub. It’s about aligning to your purpose so you can become the person capable of leading the life you want. It’s about dreaming big and having clarity about what’s important.
This realization is exactly why I created Fifth Compass. Because so many entrepreneurs are navigating their businesses without a clear direction, without the knowledge I’ve gained through hard-fought seats at boardroom tables. Whether it was a revenue plan that repaid an investment portfolio years earlier than the deadline, creating a proforma on a new hotel deal, coaching an employee, handling legal notices, or rebranding, I feel like my expansive experience in my career and business life has led me to this point to help others but also create a space where we can all learn from each other. Share our stories. Support each other through the hard parts. Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can discover isn’t another tactic or strategy. Sometimes it’s realizing that your compass was within you the whole time.
How We Help You Grow Into the Leader Your Business Needs
Empowering Entrepreneurs Worldwide
At Fifth Compass, freedom isn’t just something we create for our clients, it’s a value we extend around the world.
As part of our mission, Fifth Compass proudly supports Kiva, helping provide business loans and economic opportunities to entrepreneurs around the world who may not otherwise have access to traditional funding. Through this partnership, we believe even small acts of support can help create generational change, economic empowerment, and greater freedom for individuals, families, and communities globally.
Since 2021, our partnership with Kiva has provided more than 45 micro-loans across 18 countries, multiple continents including the United States, Africa, the Solomon Islands, Moldova, and Turkey.
We have statistically touched 100 lives, but since many of these loans support single mothers who are building businesses, women who, with just a little support, are able to change the course of their lives and their children’s lives, we think it’s much more. By investing in their dreams, we’re helping create choice, opportunity, and freedom for families who might not otherwise have it.
This work is part of our culture and mission: to align business with purpose and to ensure that success creates ripple effects beyond profit. Every loan is more than a financial transaction, it’s an act of empowerment, building businesses that sustain families, communities, and futures.
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