Impact investor Kelly Ann Winget is a believer in investing for impact, yet she’s going about it in a different way.
By Real Leaders
As founder and CEO of Alternative Wealth Partners, Winget has built a successful career pursuing her unique, contrarian approach to driving positive change.
While others focus on checklists, Winget emphasized leveraging one’s lived experiences to make a difference on any scale. There are global leaders, but impact also happens locally within communities.
When asked about her philosophy, Winget dove into opportunities she sees differently. Where some concentrate on funding diverse founders, she stressed the need to develop the investor pipeline itself. Currently, most investment committees lack diversity, hindering their ability to properly evaluate all opportunities.
She continued by saying that by educating more women and minority investors, these groups gain knowledge and confidence to become impact investors supporting their own communities. Winget’s book “Pitch the Bitch” aims to bring more women into investing through financial literacy.
In her portfolio, Winge looks outside norms to drive change. She actively invests in traditionally male-dominated industries like manufacturing, energy infrastructure, and oil/gas extraction. One example was acquiring an ammunition component manufacturer, now the only woman-owned business in that field.
Winget believes diverse leadership provides a fresh perspective that can spot new problems and innovative solutions others may miss.
For too long, industries like oil/gas have narrowly focused on extraction costs rather than broader stakeholder impacts. Her approach weighs safety, environmental stewardship, and community impacts equally with returns.
Statistics show women reinvest profits more into local communities compared to men. For Winget, impact means redistributing wealth tangibly for the world, not just short-term profits. By empowering underrepresented groups as both investors and entrepreneurs, real, sustainable change can happen from within industries over time.
Winget’s experience-based philosophy challenges conventional wisdom.
Rather than checklists, she focuses on developing a more diverse ecosystem where underserved markets may finally gain needed attention and funding to drive progress.
In a deeper dive into her investment process, Winget looks for founders who truly believe in their vision for the long-haul, remaining calm under pressure with a sense of responsibility to investors. As an entrepreneur herself, Winget understands the dedication required and only partners with others equally committed.
When discussing ESG metrics, Winget noted challenges in industries like oil/gas but aims to operate sustainably within regulations.
For stakeholders, she emphasized building relationships with suppliers to overcome obstacles together through open communication and mutual understanding of challenges.
By empowering underrepresented groups from the inside-out, Winget believes her contrarian approach can make the greatest impact where it’s needed most. Through financial education and diverse leadership, industries may finally address problems previously overlooked, benefiting communities and the planet.
Winget’s experience-driven philosophy challenges norms to drive progress through an expanded definition of impact investing. By developing inclusive ecosystems, underserved markets may gain long- overdue support for positive change.
