Doing business spiritually vs Doing spirituality as business

Majority of my work today is as a personal strategic advisor to mission-driven founders. Many of them operate in the creator economy, and a subset have leaned into spirituality. Sometimes from genuine personal conviction, sometimes as a differentiator in their field.

That’s led me to reflect on an important distinction.

Doing business spiritually means letting your values shape how you work: your ethics, boundaries, and responsibility toward people. The aim is to help others become clearer, more grounded, and more capable over time.

Doing spirituality as business is when spiritual experience itself becomes the product. Personal revelations, “transmissions,” or belief systems and practices are packaged and sold.

The issue isn’t intention. It’s that spirituality is deeply personal and doesn’t translate cleanly between individuals. As guidance, it often creates confusion rather than clarity. And as a business model, it tends to be fragile, hard to sustain, hard to scale, and rarely built for long-term value.

My current conviction is simple: Let spirituality be the operating system, not the product. Build things that are grounded, verifiable, and genuinely useful, while carrying the sacred with humility, not commercialization.

Curious how others in this community, where spirituality is a frequent theme, see this distinction.

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