#139: Starting a Mission-Driven Business After 40
If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...” the answer’s NO—and The Uplifters is about to show you why. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives. I’m your host, Aransas Savas, and I’ve spent the last 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching.
Last week, we heard from Rachel Giordano and her journey from 30 years in entertainment to writing children’s books. This week, we’re exploring what it takes to build a mission-driven business with midlife founder Tara Miko Ballentine. Next week, you’ll hear from Kimberle Lau, who turned her midlife food intolerances into a thriving allergen-friendly baking company. Welcome to the Uplifters!
Listen to This If...
You find it difficult to have big conversations with the kids you love
You’re building something that matters while everyone around you questions whether it’s worth it
You’ve been told your mission is “too controversial” but you can’t imagine watering it down
You’re four years into something without breaking even and need to know you’re not alone
It’s scary to think about all of the bad stuff that could happen to kids we love out in the world, but sometimes it’s just as scary to answer their big questions or to come up with the “right” thing to say about nuanced or sensitive topics. Not because we don’t have opinions, but because we’ve never had to articulate them, or maybe because nobody ever had those conversations with us.
That’s where Tara Miko Ballentine found herself during the pandemic. Isolated with her young daughter, watching the world shift in real time, she had this realization: she’d been protected growing up, which left her unprepared for the world. She wanted to prepare her daughter.
So Tara went looking for resources to help her have these conversations early. The hard ones about consent and boundaries. The important ones about diversity and belonging. The necessary ones about safety online and in the world. What she found were products designed for after the bullying, after the incident, after the damage was done. Nothing existed to prepare kids for these moments.
Tara shares in the episode that 100% of kids will face bullying at some point and that 95% of childhood sexual abuse is preventable with early conversations about awareness and education.
Kids are sponges. If we wait to fill them with our values and our wisdom, someone else—the internet, their peers, random adults—will fill that space first.
Tara’s company, Bright Littles, is on a mission to equip us to have these conversations.
This mission means the world to Tara, but passion alone doesn’t pay the bills or navigate tariffs or convince investors to fund a female founder with a fully-developed product over a man with just an idea. So in this episode, we talk about what it takes to keep pivoting when the ground constantly shifts, how she’s learned to side-hustle while building, how she moved from physical products to digital in three months when tariffs threatened to shut her down, and how she maintains her North Star when everyone questions whether a mission-driven business can actually work.
Her Courage Practice
Tara’s practice is choosing joy and connection, even when (especially when) the world feels heavy. She makes a point of looking people in the eye when she walks her dog, greeting strangers with genuine warmth. She asks herself with every setback: “Where’s the good in this? How can this make the product better?” When tariffs threatened to shut down her physical product line, she pivoted entirely to digital in three months, learning tech she’d never touched before because the mission mattered more than her comfort zone.
She’s also teaching her daughter this practice: that getting up and choosing joy is a choice we make. That we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we show up in the world.
Ways Tara Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:
Start before you feel ready — Tara couldn’t find the tools she needed, so she created them, even though she’d never published books or built subscription tech before. She learned as she went, failing forward, pivoting fifty-five million times (her words). The product looks nothing like it did when she started, and that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.
Hold your North Star when the world questions your path — As a female founder in social justice, Tara’s been in countless rooms where men with ideas get funded while women with products and traction get passed over. She’s been doing this for four years without breaking even, side hustling the entire time, and she keeps going because the mission matters more than the metrics.
Choose joy as an active practice — When everything feels hard, Tara doesn’t bypass the difficulty, but she refuses to let it steal her ability to create joy. She greets strangers. She looks for silver linings. She remembers that happy people in love don’t wish harm on others—so maybe if we took better care of ourselves and each other, we’d all be a little braver.
Lift Her Up
Visit brightlittles.com to explore Bright Little’s Conversation Club (currently 75% off—less than $5/month) or access free resources to start important conversations with your kids.
If you loved this story...
Start with Christina Testut’s episode about transforming body image struggles into children’s literature, then explore our conversations with women turning personal pain into purpose: Amy Cohen’s episode (co-founder of Families for Safe Streets after losing her son), Janelle Hill’s episode (founder of Refuge Mental Health Services and sexual abuse survivor), and Rebecca Soffer’s episode (founder of Modern Loss after losing both parents).