Success Grounded in Faith
How do high-performing Catholic leaders stay true to their faith? They stick together. Groups like Legatus provide a way for business leaders to connect with each other while nurturing their faith lives. As a charter member of the New Hampshire Legatus Chapter, Jessica Steele knows the pressures of entrepreneurship and executive strategies that maximize profitability. Jessica shared her professional story and tips for staying grounded in a recent conversation with Catholic Women in Business.
Tell us about your background. How did you get started in business and what professional accomplishment are you most proud of?
I was recruited out of college for a corporate leadership program that immediately sent me back to school to learn nuclear field engineering. I spent my early career working internationally, managing complex modifications and refueling outages — tasks I absolutely loved. By 22, I had already earned Platinum Elite status with American Airlines, but the constant international travel and months-long outings meant missing too many family events and friends' weddings.
Seeking a better balance, I pivoted to a role on the East Coast to be closer to family, working as a Six Sigma Black Belt on a mergers and acquisitions team. I worked with incredible people until a shift in management changed everything. I took a role at a recently acquired site but found myself reporting to an incredibly indecisive leader. When I identified a few critical compliance issues and presented them alongside data-backed, capital-requiring solutions, the response wasn't a resolution — it was a demotion, and I was replaced by a "yes man."
I was five months pregnant at the time, furious and deeply hurt that doing the right thing had resulted in a professional punishment. That night, I went home, channeled my frustration into action, and listed all of my old nuclear engineering textbooks on a relatively new platform that had just opened up to third-party sellers: Amazon.
I made $1,000 that weekend. From that point on, I was looking for anything with a barcode to see if I could resell it for a profit on Amazon. This was long before YouTube courses, specialized software, or scaling tools existed.
Soon, I was sourcing closeout truckloads with pallets of shoes and household goods from Macy’s and Bloomingdale's to ship to Amazon's warehouses. I quickly felt confident enough to quit my corporate job, working late into the night after my children went to bed. As the business grew, I built a reliable support team of Catholic women in the Philippines to handle listing optimization, copywriting, and customer service. Eventually, I invested in learning how to manufacture and launch my own brands rather than just reselling existing products.
Through that transition, I quickly realized how vital strong networks are for sharing what does and doesn’t work in the ever-changing e-commerce space. While attending an industry mastermind session, I noticed that while the other attendees had technical questions for the speakers, the speakers themselves were often single-threaded in their expertise from a newly launched marketing course. I had been navigating the platform's backend longer than most, and I started answering the technical questions from the crowd. Before the event was over, someone asked if they could hire me to fix their account issues. Just like that, I landed the very first client for my Amazon agency.
What I’m Most Proud Of: In an industry often dominated by hotheads and high-stakes stress, the professional accomplishment I am most proud of is my ability to maintain an inner calm. I hold close the words, "My peace I give to you." While I certainly experience frustration, time, perspective, and experience have taught me how to lead with steady composure when everything else is in flux.
What has been the key to your professional success?
David picked up five smooth stones when he took out Goliath. My five are daily family Rosary, monthly confession, daily(ish) Mass, an annual spiritual retreat, and pilgrimages.
How has your Catholic faith influenced your decisions for yourself as well as your employers and/or clients?
The business and e-commerce worlds can be deeply cutthroat. The sheer volume of underhanded tactics, black-hat strategies, and unscrupulous behavior from people running multi-million-dollar brands is a harsh reality. We have entered into new territory since dot-com businesses are often hidden and faceless marketplace vendors. The reality that we are living in a post Christian world really hits when you innovate and bring a new product or service to market only to have someone cheat, copy, or steal it. Over the course of my career, I have been sued, lied about, and had tens of thousands of dollars in inventory stolen.
Yet, rather than hardening me or driving me to adopt those same tactics, every one of those trials has only drawn me closer to Christ. I anchor my business ethics in Micah 6:8: “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
A few years into building my last agency — the one I recently sold — I reached a spiritual turning point. I felt I wasn't growing at my local parish, and at the same time, I was dealing with some exceptionally draining, high-conflict clients. I began attending the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), which completely transformed my approach to my professional and personal life. I sat in the back of the church, and after about the fifth TLM that I attended, I went out to my car and wept some ugly tears. The confessors at the TLM didn’t let me off the hook because I was a busy executive, mother, or wife; instead, they challenged me to confront my own baggage, pick up my cross joyfully, and truly follow Jesus.
This shift directly influences how I protect my clients and advise my employers. Operating with absolute integrity means I refuse to cut corners, but it also means I approach high-stakes crises with a sense of detachment from worldly chaos. I have taken the approach that how I live my life might be the ONLY Bible someone will ever read. With that said, I have always maintained Sunday as a holy day with no work. I have also deliberately recruited people in parts of the world with Marian sites I wanted to visit. We hosted one of our business meetings in Mexico City (CDMX), and I got to see the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Another person I hired lived near Ephesus in Turkey, and I flew out to have a business review and took him to the house St. John lived in with the Blessed Mother before her Assumption into Heaven.
When and how did you discover Legatus? How has the organization helped you grow both personally and professionally?
I first discovered Legatus through a simple notice in my parish bulletin. The New Hampshire chapter had recently formed, and they were actively gathering enough members to officially charter. I reached out to the chapter coordinator, Nevi Toth, who invited me to attend an upcoming monthly event featuring Mass, a dinner, and a guest speaker (one of the mothers from the Sandy Hook school shooting).
However, the morning of that scheduled meeting, I received news that my mother’s kidneys were failing and she was in immediate need of a transplant. This came just 18 months after she had suffered liver failure, during which my younger sister had selflessly served as a living liver donor. Compounding that family crisis, I was also in the middle of navigating a difficult professional separation from my business partner. I was dealing with so many fires simultaneously.
Completely overwhelmed, I called Nevi to request a rain check, explaining that I was on life overload. Her reply was the most profoundly Catholic response I could have received. Instead of asking about business or rescheduling, she simply asked, "What is your mother's name? I want to add her to my prayer intentions immediately."
In that moment, before I had even attended a single meeting, I knew Legatus was different. Personally and professionally, it has provided an anchor. It is a rare space where fellow leaders don't just understand the high-stakes pressure of running a company but automatically filter those challenges through a lens of faith, charity, and prayer.
What advice would you give other women who are trying to integrate – or at least stay true to – their faith with their work?
I believe in practicing radical accountability. At the end of all this, when we die, we all have to stand naked before God and own it all. There are no corporate excuses, hidden agendas, or justifications that will hold up. Nothing goes unnoticed by the Almighty.
That reality shouldn't terrify us — it should inspire us. God designed us with unique talents, but He also allowed us to have defects. Our purpose on this earth is to spend our lives perfecting those defects, however slow and hard-headed we might be. He gave us confession to keep chipping away.
Divine Mercy gets a lot of hype today, but the other attributes of God — His Divine Omnipotence, Divine Omnipresence, and Divine Justice — demand just as much reflection. When you remember that God is entirely sovereign, that He is present in every difficult business decision, and that His justice is absolute, it completely shifts your perspective. You stop managing for the approval of your peers or your board and start managing for an audience of one.
I also think that life has seasons; how my business looked when my children were younger was radically different than how it looks now that they are older. If God made you a wife and a mother, those vocations come before any corporate title or business building.
In what ways do you give back to your Catholic community? How do you find the time?
Right now I am on the finance and building council at my parish. There was a vacancy and some of my fellow Legatus members recommended me to our parish priest. The parish is undergoing a multi-year, multimillion-dollar renovation, and I can use my project management and business skills to help the parish. My children attend school on the monastery of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and attend the traditional Latin Mass daily as part of their curriculum. I have gotten to know the brothers and sisters there very well and have helped them with organizing their big fall fundraiser. How do I find the time? I took a week-long silent retreat that really forced me to evaluate how many digital connections I had. Owning and managing an e-commerce agency was fun and exciting, but it rewires you to get those dopamine hits, refreshing the screen to see how a product launch is going. Putting faith and family first is how God has wired us. If those items get out of whack, we need to scale back and reevaluate boundaries, keeping work and life in harmony.
How can Catholic Women in Business ensure they are creating both short-term impact and long-term value?
Christ calls us to be faithful in all that He has entrusted to us. Our impact as Catholic businesswomen is in all that we do.
Short-term impact: Be present. Take the time to get to know people beyond the screen and find out how you can incorporate them into your prayer requests.
Long-term value: We are all trying to get to heaven and recruit as many people that we know to go there with us. Often, people avoid hard conversations about things in their lives that are not aligned with the faith. Have the courage to have those conversations for love of the other’s soul.
What other advice do you have for our community?
Consecrate yourself and all that you do to the Blessed Mother; she will make what you have even better for Christ. Lean into your patron saint. God didn’t make their lives a cakewalk and neither is yours. Each day we have is a gift from God, and we can and should use that to build His kingdom here on earth.
With over two decades of entrepreneurial and executive leadership experience, Jessica Steele has built a career on driving transformative growth and innovation across e-commerce, digital marketing, and strategic operations. As the founder of successful ventures and a trusted advisor to global brands, her expertise lies in crafting visionary strategies that optimize performance, maximize profitability, and align with evolving consumer landscapes. From leading high-performing teams to mentoring budding entrepreneurs, Jessica fosters environments that prioritize collaboration, ingenuity, and resilience. Her contributions have enabled over $500 million in e-commerce sales, elevated countless brands to industry leadership, and inspired a new generation of leaders and innovators. As a speaker, educator, and lifelong learner, Jessica is passionate about empowering others to succeed. She has shared her insights on international stages, authored best-selling courses, and served on advisory boards where strategic vision and execution meet. Her dedication to sustainability, Six Sigma methodologies, integrity, and continuous improvement have been a hallmark of her leadership style.
Jessica is a charter member of the New Hampshire Legatus Chapter. She is on the Finance Council at St. Stanislaus in Nashua, and she also coordinates the activities at their summer FSSP family camp at Camp Fatima. She volunteers for the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Harvard, Massachusetts, and for their fall yard sale and as a classroom volunteer.
Sharon Bengel is a cradle Catholic with more than 30 years of experience in writing, communications and publication design. A recovering newspaper reporter with a crush on the prophet Jeremiah, Sharon loves discovering new things about the scriptures. She runs an LLC out of her home office in southwest Ohio where she keeps a stash of chocolate for her grandkids.