The Gas Station Problem

By: Tyler Dewey | August 12, 2026

A mentor of mine recently told me that Strong Road should buy a gas station, and my first reaction was that they were completely crazy.

We are a strategy firm that works with organizations trying to do good in the world. A gas station was not exactly the obvious next step in the strategic plan, and there was a moral reaction in there too: if we care about climate change, public health, and healthier communities, what exactly are we doing owning something whose economics still depend in part on selling gasoline?

The question stopped feeling theoretical when I looked around Washington, D.C. Over the last year, we have watched enormous humanitarian and international-development organizations suddenly become frighteningly fragile when U.S. foreign-assistance funding froze or disappeared. The need did not disappear, the people doing the work did not become less capable, and hunger, disease, displacement, and poverty certainly did not go away. The money changed. In 2025, Save the Children U.S. CEO Janti Soeripto told Harvard Business Review that U.S. government funding had represented about 30 percent of the organization's global spending. Even one of the world's great humanitarian institutions can become exposed when a major part of the economic foundation underneath the mission moves.

That is what made my mentor's question harder to dismiss. His argument was simple: don't you drive? Annoyingly, yes. Someone is already selling the gas, someone already owns the station, and someone is already making the profit. What if we owned an everyday business, ran it responsibly, and used some of the profit to make the mission less dependent on one funder, one political environment, or one economic system?

I think impact organizations often count revenue streams when they should be counting underlying risks. Ten government contracts may look diversified, but if one political decision can hurt all ten, they may really be one economic bet wearing ten contract numbers. Five foundations may look diversified, but if the same recession or philanthropic shift affects all five, their logos may be doing more diversification than their economics are. An everyday business serving local customers may fail for very different reasons than a federal contract or foundation grant, which does not make it safe, but may make the institution around it more resilient.

And then the morality gets harder, because "someone else is already making the money" is not enough. There is a difference between buying gasoline because I live inside a transportation system I did not create and owning an asset that benefits when more gasoline is sold. If I believe that system contributes to climate harm, weak public transportation, and burdens that fall hardest on people with the fewest resources, I cannot simply wave those concerns away because I intend to do something noble with the profit.

But imagine that some of that profit funds poverty reduction, vaccine distribution, cancer research, or serious work on AI safety. Imagine that we treat employees exceptionally well, reduce environmental risks, add EV charging, and slowly make the business itself better. Does that change the moral equation? Maybe. If someone else would buy the station and operate it less responsibly, that matters too. But counterfactual reasoning can become a very elegant way to give ourselves permission to do whatever we already wanted to do, so I do not think it gets the final word.

That is why I have started calling this the Gas Station Problem. It is not really about gasoline. It is the problem impact-oriented leaders face when resilience and moral clarity do not line up neatly: how do we build an economic foundation strong enough to protect the mission without quietly betraying the world the mission is trying to create?

Maybe we buy the gas station and maybe we do not. I no longer think the idea is crazy, but I also do not think the cash flow gets the final vote. The nobler goal is not simply to make an impact organization harder to kill. It is to make it durable enough to keep serving people, while remaining worthy of the people and the future it hopes to serve.

The Gas Station Problem is not simply whether an imperfect business can make money. It is whether we can build resilience without compromising the reason we wanted resilience in the first place.