Let's Get to Know Grace Nelson
What inspired you to start your business, and what keeps you going?
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spark. As a teenager, I thrived in team settings and group projects, driven by a desire to bring people together and maximize their unique strengths to solve problems. The complexities of unsolved problems inspire a deep sense of curiosity in me, and I’m fascinated by what happens when the right team comes together to untangle them.
Launching Magenta positioned me to fully embrace those values. Setting my own pricing and schedule is a huge perk—but the real reward is collaborating with clients doing meaningful work who can use my unique strengths to level up. At Magenta, we combine our clients’ mission-driven work with my ability to clarify and communicate outcomes, creating real impact together.
As a social entrepreneur, how does your business positively impact your community?
Magenta partners with nonprofits and mission-driven organizations to clarify their outcomes and communicate their impact. We help them scope their mission, measure progress, and tell the story of the good they’re doing—ultimately illuminating the relationship between invested dollars and mission success. When organizations can clearly articulate their impact, they’re better equipped to attract funding, increase efficiency, and solve the societal challenges they exist to address.
Can you share a time when you took a significant risk in your business? What did you learn from that experience?
I launched Magenta just three months before COVID. With the world shutting down, I said yes to everything—grant writing, strategic planning, social media management, etc, etc, etc…! Magenta ended up with 20 different offerings, without the processes to support that variety.
Eventually, I burned out from juggling so many roles, and my business lost its spark. With input from my mentors and community of fellow entrepreneurs, I realized I needed to refocus. I honed Magenta’s offerings to projects at the intersection of my greatest passions and highest value-adds. As a result, we clarified our core mission, streamlined our services, and began referring out work that didn’t align.
Letting go of misaligned projects was nerve-wracking, but it empowered Magenta to grow as a thought leader in our niche instead of getting lost in mixed messaging. Today, I feel energized rather than drained by our work. We’re growing up instead of sideways!
How do you define success, both personally and in your business?
For our clients, success means clarity, credibility, and results—communications that lead to more funding and greater mission impact.
For Magenta, we adhere to our core values: Positive, Proactive, Resourceful, Clear, and Effective. We commit to clear deliverables, deliver results on time and with excellence, and meet challenges with a can-do mindset. We view client feedback as a gift that helps us refine and elevate our work.
For me personally, success means building a business that serves my life—not the other way around. It means doing the work I love, with clients I believe in, with the capacity to be present in my relationships and activities outside of work. To achieve that vision for my life, I design my business around meaningful work, flexible time, and energizing relationships.
What’s the "why" behind your business? What motivates you to keep pushing forward despite challenges?
I believe the nonprofit sector can—and should—be a model of efficiency and impact. But unlike the business world, where profit serves as a clear accountability metric, nonprofits often struggle to measure performance and demonstrate progress. When profit isn’t the benchmark, we need alternative tools to track outcomes and maintain accountability.
My “why” is impact: helping organizations define it, measure it, and communicate it. When we align every philanthropic dollar with the outcome it makes possible, we establish trust in nonprofit work, raise more money, and solve problems other sectors can’t.
Clear impact reporting is more than a communications tool: it’s a catalyst for change. By leveraging impact reporting, nonprofits can become the gold standard for operational effectiveness.
How do you see your business evolving over the next few years?
Today, most of Magenta’s work supports nonprofits. But increasingly, I see a need on the funder side too. Foundations and social impact investors also need to understand how effectively their invested dollars are advancing the causes they support.
So Magenta is expanding our work to include philanthropic foundations, helping them define success, measure impact, and communicate it to their stakeholders. We envision applying the same tools upstream for broader, systemic change.
What advice would you give to someone considering starting their own business, especially in your field?
Entrepreneurs providing a service are selling time. So, protect yours! This is especially relevant in a nebulous field like consulting, which can require a lot of scoping to align with clients on deliverables.
Service providers, I encourage you to turn your expertise into a set of clear deliverables with defined outcomes, timelines, and prices. Develop a consistent process for scoping and project management, and make those guardrails into habits. Build the time it takes to scope and manage projects into your schedule and your price to ensure you can deliver on your commitments.
How do you maintain balance between your business life and personal life?
For me, balance isn’t about doing less…it’s about doing the right things. Looking at work and life holistically, I consider the activities that bring me the most personal fulfillment. It’s important to me to be present at work and among my family and friends, so I also reflect on where I can make the most difference to my clients or community.
Running my own business means I can choose to pursue the activities that intersect both areas. Achieving that alignment requires some thoughtful structure: I scope every project with intention and price it to reflect the real time it takes, including administrative hours. By planning well and compensating myself appropriately, I give my best to my clients and deliver a quality product. By being accurate in scheduling, I can effectively carve out the time needed for work, fun, household obligations, and rest.
I’ve also “created” time by implementing four magic words: Automate, Delegate, Eliminate, and Refer. I use software to automate workflows, outsource tasks I don’t need to do myself, and say no to work that doesn’t align with Magenta’s mission. Applying the same mindset at home, I outsource cleaning, “automate” workouts by signing up for classes with a coach, and skip volunteer gigs that aren’t uniquely suited to my talents.
Ultimately, achieving balance means investing my energy where it does the most good—for both me and my community.
We shine brighter together. What we are looking for:
- Location:
The entrepreneur must be based in the State of Georgia. - Business Stage:
Businesses that are less than 3 years old. - Impact:
The business should have a positive impact on the local community, either through its mission, community involvement, or other contributions. - Innovation:
The entrepreneur should demonstrate creativity and innovation in their business model, products, or services. - Resilience:
Consideration of the challenges the entrepreneur has overcome in building their business. - Ethics and Integrity:
The entrepreneur and their
business should operate with a high standard of ethics and integrity. - Nomination and Support: Self-nominations are allowed, but be sure to include supporting stories or testimonials.