Building Successful Businesses with Kindness and Respect - Irum Jones

Irum Jones is a powerhouse, a secret weapon for the underdog, and the new voice of Main Street entrepreneurship, where the focus is on people, community, profits, and business with intention. She helps start-up companies and individual women entrepreneurs develop their businesses by providing a full-scale range of services. Irum is one of the many inspiring speakers at the upcoming inaugural Inspire Her Nexx Chapter Conference to be held at the Hilton Anatole, Dallas, Texas, on August 29-30, 2025.

Juggling multiple roles with ease and success, Irum discusses her journey into entrepreneurship, how she finds balance, and what she hopes to accomplish.

While majoring in telecommunications during her early college years, her then lab partner and now husband discussed starting a business to help people with electrical repairs, powering up generators, and future-proofing not only the facilities, but their careers too—because everything required power to charge. This was before Google took over lives, YouTube was new, and AI didn’t exist. They decided to start their electrical contracting business. Initially, Irum struggled to get the right resources and receive support from vendors and other people. Despite not having the right environment for being a business owner and coming close to quitting at times, she forged ahead, intending to help others one day, showing them what worked and what didn’t, what costly mistakes to avoid, questions to ask, and how to evaluate the right way.

Today, Irum is the one to call when businesses are ready to stop playing small. She does not like using the word failing. Businesses face multiple and sometimes crippling challenges when people do not understand the vital elements of building a business. Her experiences have enabled her to develop frameworks, processes, and systems that she knows will work, and she trains the teams to navigate through possible future situations. Sometimes, people assume her work is a one-time activity and end up in the same challenging situations again. It’s like a house being cleaned only once in a lifetime. It will start piling up dust and clutter. Irum is the one to put people’s lives and their businesses back into motion.

A caring coach who focuses on helping business owners gain a holistic work-life balance, Irum wants to see people win in life holistically. She loves working with small business owners and start-ups in stage 3. For these people, the business becomes a big part of their lives, given the amount of resources, care, and effort they put into it. She brings in time management, a way to find and keep the balance between work and personal life and pushes the status quo.

From her experience helping businesses scale, Irum notes that the key to turning around a business is for entrepreneurs to get out of their own way. An ego will kill a business, relationships, and momentum, and isolate people. When running a business, people don’t understand that it’s more strategic thinking than the technical experience and educational qualification.

The other important factor is to be a person of action. Do things scared, even without all the details to move forward. Talking about a ziplining experience in Costa Rica, Irum mentions that she was the first in line among her group of friends, despite never being one for doing high-risk activities. She went first, not just once, but 10 zip lines, and her confidence encouraged all of her friends. The jungle was teaching an important lesson that applies to business. If no one else is in front of you to lead, it is your call to lead others, be it customers, employees, or even the industry at large. Others will be motivated by the first person’s experience.

With how busy life gets, Irum makes time for herself every day. She is proud to have set an example for her daughter, who is a passionate self-care advocate. Irum starts her day with grounding, waking up early if required to spend 10 minutes as the sun is coming out. She releases all things that don’t serve her God-given purpose, washing away yesterday’s mud that could slow her down from moving forward. She sets her intentions and actions for the day. She ends her day with gratitude. She is unapologetic about refusing to take on any work that doesn’t get her closer to her goal. Irum believes the world is rigged in your favor if you have the mental stability to believe you’ll make it.

Being goal-driven and trying her best, even if it doesn’t get the result she wants, gives her true satisfaction. As long as she tries her hardest, she knows she will reach the top by reaching a different level of her best. It’s important for people not to give up on themselves.

Irum leads by example in everything that she does, leading with kindness, dignity, and respect, given how transitory life can become. One day, you feel like you're at the bottom, and then you're just one idea, one action step, away from something big. That’s what she likes to do: bring hope into the room that she walks into. Hope dealer is another nickname she is known by.

Irum wishes to be known for her kindness among other entrepreneurs. Having grown up in a dysfunctional family amid life’s toughest challenges, she had every reason to be bitter and hateful. She chose to see the good in people and believes situations are bad, not people. If we all learn to work together for a common cause, such as love, acceptance, being seen and heard, and reaching a level of abundance, the world will be more optimistic and united. She wishes that people would serve each other with dignity to help reach the next step. If this were taught everywhere, it would save the community.

Irum advises aspiring entrepreneurs not to give up, to avoid building excuses, and to remember that entrepreneurship is about problem-solving. She emphasizes the importance of thinking and processing and not skipping steps in business planning. Irum encourages women to set aside time to think and detach from daily responsibilities. She highlights the importance of leading with kindness and being kind to oneself and others.

Her Nexx Chapter (HNC) was one of the first collaborations Dallas Professional Women (DPW) formed, of which Irum is the Chief Empowerment Officer. DPW is one of Texas’s trusted business resource networks, where she and her team give away $15K+ annually to help incubate startup businesses. DPW believed in the vision of HNC’s Founder, Lady Chap.

Irum is excited about speaking at the Inspire Her Nexx Chapter Conference and encourages women to attend, be present in learning, and participate in as many of the diverse sessions as possible. The conference has been curated to present women with a variety of tools and options to fill their toolbox for life. She looks forward to attending sessions from other speakers and picking up any valuable nuggets of information and resources to make our lives better.

Join Irum and other powerful women in Dallas, Texas August 29-30 for Inspire Her Nexx Chapter, a transformative women’s conference. We intend to speak to women’s spirits, cultivate their souls and pamper their hearts in a space where diversity and differences are seen as strengths and where women can actively participate.

The Future of Connection for Women

Lakshmi Iyer

 I am creative and I thrive on the energy I get from making words and images speak a cohesive message. I love building new and meaningful relationships while going the extra mile to maintain old and precious ones. Every new person I meet, I look for something to learn and imbibe into my life. A postgraduate in Public Relations (PR), I have worked in PR agencies, in a marketing communications role with a mid-sized Indian company, and as an internal communications and change management consultant in a multinational organization. A mother to a caring and amiable girl, I love baking, alone time during the day, writing, and admiring nature’s beauty.