Impact, Trust, & Ownership: A Founder’s Bold Succession Strategy with Miren Oca
Release Date: 02/24/2026
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Founder transitions are often framed as financial or structural events. But long before a succession plan, ownership evolution, or exit is announced, founders carry a hidden layer of pressure that few people see. In this solo episode of Connecting With Purpose, I continue the conversation from last week’s episode, Founder Transition: Identity Before the Deal. While that episode explored the identity shift from operator → owner → steward, this episode focuses on another critical dimension of founder transition: The weight founders carry while navigating the future of their business. Even...
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Founder Transition: Identity Before the Deal
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Ownership transition isn’t just a financial event. It’s an identity shift. In this episode, I explore the part of founder transition that rarely gets discussed — the internal evolution required before structure changes. Whether you’re considering succession, employee ownership, partial liquidity, or long-term exit planning, the most important work doesn’t begin with valuation models or legal structures. It begins with identity. In this episode, we cover: - Why ownership transition is primarily an identity event - The evolution from operator → owner → steward - How unexamined...
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Impact, Trust, & Ownership: A Founder’s Bold Succession Strategy with Miren Oca
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In this episode of Connecting with Purpose, Mark Griffin sits down with Miren Oca, founder of Ocaquatics Swim School and founder of Ripples of Impact — a nonprofit expanding access to life-saving swim education in Miami-Dade County. Since 1994, Miren has grown Ocaquatics into a multi-location swim school built on culture, ownership, and purpose. In 2024, she made a bold move: transitioning 100% of the company to an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), protecting its mission while creating long-term wealth-building opportunities for her team. But this conversation goes...
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Regenerative Finance Explained: How Purpose-Driven Leaders Change Business with Jasper van Brakel
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Welcome back to Season 4 of Connecting with Purpose — where we put founders first and share the stories of the humans behind the business. In this episode, Mark sits down with Jasper Van Brakel, President & CEO of RSF Social Finance (Regenerative Social Finance), to explore what happens when purpose, capital, and systemic change come together. If you’re an impact-driven founder or leader navigating growth, funding, culture, and the messy middle of leadership, this conversation will resonate deeply. Jasper shares three defining “magic moments” that shaped his journey — from an...
info_outlineIn this episode of Connecting with Purpose, Mark Griffin sits down with Miren Oca, founder of Ocaquatics Swim School and founder of Ripples of Impact — a nonprofit expanding access to life-saving swim education in Miami-Dade County. Since 1994, Miren has grown Ocaquatics into a multi-location swim school built on culture, ownership, and purpose.
In 2024, she made a bold move: transitioning 100% of the company to an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), protecting its mission while creating long-term wealth-building opportunities for her team. But this conversation goes deeper than ownership structure.
Miren shares three defining leadership chapters — Different, Survival, and Evolve — and how each shaped her approach to growth, culture, and impact. We also explore Ripples of Impact, which provides swim scholarships that remove financial barriers so children in underserved communities can learn to swim, build confidence, and stay safer around water. In Miami-Dade, where drowning remains a leading cause of accidental death for children, access to swim education is life-saving.
In this conversation, we discuss:
• Why Miren chose an Employee Ownership Trust over private equity
• How to protect purpose during succession
• The difference between traditional ROI and Ripples of Impact
• What it takes to build a true ownership culture
• Why every leadership decision is a “pebble” that creates long-term ripples
This episode is for founders and growth-stage leaders who want to scale responsibly — proving that profit and impact are not opposing forces, but aligned drivers of long-term success.
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