Designing Strategy With Soul: The Leadership Vision of Jackie B. Grice
- Apr 8
- 3 min read
By She Rises Studios Editorial Team
For more than two decades, Jackie B. Grice has built businesses, mentored leaders, and shaped organizations across multiple sectors while quietly redefining what sustainable success looks like for women entrepreneurs. As the founder of a multimillion dollar transportation company and a coach to purpose driven leaders navigating burnout and growth, her work reflects a powerful integration of strategy, wellness, faith, and operational excellence. Rather than treating business performance and personal well being as competing priorities, she has made them inseparable pillars of modern leadership.
Jackie’s defining turning point emerged during a period when her business appeared to be thriving from the outside. Behind the scenes, however, she was experiencing sleeplessness, distance from her faith and family, and the strain of watching top team members struggle under pressure. That moment forced her to confront a critical question about the cost of achievement. It was not simply about scaling operations. It was about preserving the life that success was meant to support.
This realization shaped the direction of her leadership philosophy. Instead of continuing to rely on traditional models that placed unsustainable pressure on founders and executives, she began intentionally designing wellness into the structure of her organization. She introduced deputy leadership roles to distribute responsibility more effectively and implemented restorative rituals as part of the leadership process. She also launched Soul Sabbatical, a program created to help high performing women take meaningful time to rest without guilt. These changes strengthened retention, sharpened decision making, and supported leaders in scaling their impact without sacrificing their well being.
Her belief that wellness is a competitive advantage rather than a luxury continues to shape her coaching practice today. Jackie works with entrepreneurs and organizations to shift their perspective on burnout, reframing it not as a personal weakness but as a predictable outcome of systems that reward constant activity over meaningful outcomes. She encourages leaders to treat restorative time as essential infrastructure and to adopt outcomes based approaches to performance rather than measuring value through hours worked. By introducing asynchronous communication strategies, mandatory sabbaticals, and restorative retreats, she helps organizations create environments where leadership can flourish over the long term.
Jackie’s understanding of value creation was influenced early in life by her upbringing in a family of builders and visionaries. Watching her father transform ordinary materials into meaningful results taught her that creativity and resourcefulness can turn scarcity into opportunity. That lesson became especially relevant during the pandemic, when uncertainty challenged even established businesses. Rather than retreating from those realities, she returned to faith and reflection, strengthening her conviction that resilience and worth are not defined by circumstances but by purpose and intention.
Her career across government contracting, higher education partnerships, nonprofit leadership, and private enterprise further deepened her perspective on what it means to define success independently. Each sector demanded different strengths. Government work required compliance and clarity. Higher education required credibility and research driven collaboration. Nonprofit leadership called for mission centered commitment. Private enterprise demanded speed and accountability.
By translating lessons across these environments, Jackie developed a versatile leadership style grounded in systems thinking and strong partnerships.
Through these experiences, she learned that success is rarely achieved in isolation. Networks, mentorship, and institutional knowledge play essential roles in building sustainable organizations. She now teaches leaders to design businesses that reflect their values while drawing on community resources and collaborative support structures. In her approach, autonomy and well being are not separate from profitability. They are part of the same equation.
Today, through Launching Deeper Enterprises and J Diamond Inc., Jackie continues to shape a vision of leadership that challenges outdated assumptions about hustle and endurance. She is committed to helping women entrepreneurs build companies that do not depend on constant founder involvement but instead rely on thoughtful systems, confident delegation, and emotionally intelligent leadership. Her work emphasizes that boundaries and rest belong alongside revenue growth as core competencies of effective executives.
She also hopes to normalize values based leadership that prioritizes mentorship and community rather than competition.
By integrating faith, financial insight, and restorative practices into her programs and Soul Sabbatical retreats, she is helping redefine what ambitious leadership can look like for the next generation. In her vision, women entrepreneurs are not forced to choose between purpose and profit or between growth and personal sustainability.
Instead, they are invited to lead fully and confidently, building organizations that reflect both strategic excellence and human capacity. Through her example and her mentorship, Jackie B. Jackie is contributing to a leadership movement that measures success not only by scale but by impact, resilience, and the legacy leaders leave for those who follow.
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