TheCEOVerse • Digital Edition
“The Most Inspiring Woman Leader Building a Legacy of Purpose and Impact 2026”
Cover story
Cindy Kay Waddle
Featured Profile - Cindy Kay Waddle
How Cindy Waddle Turned Four Decades of Service Into a Legacy of Encouragement
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a hospice room. It is not the silence of nothing happening, it is the silence of everything happening at once, of a family holding its breath, of words that need to be said and somehow never quite make it out loud. Cindy Waddle knows that silence intimately. She sat inside it as a volunteer, long before she ever imagined starting a company, and it changed the shape of the rest of her life.
Today, Cindy is the Founder and CEO of Dezire to Inspire, LLC (D2I), a Colorado based company that has quietly become something far bigger than a greeting card business. It is, in her words, a company built around a single conviction, that a few sincere words, offered at the right moment, can become a lifeline. Her products travel into hospital rooms and hospice houses, onto office desks and inside lunchboxes, into the hands of grieving pet owners and the rucksacks of veterans. They arrive where celebration cards never go, into PTSD, depression, anxiety, grief, and trauma, and they stay there, doing quiet work long after the moment has passed.
It is an unlikely third act for a woman who spent 38 years climbing the ranks of federal human resources. But listen to Cindy tell it, and it does not sound unlikely at all. It sounds inevitable.
Where It All Began: A Career Built on People, A Company Born From Presence
Long before Dezire to Inspire had a name, Cindy Waddle was building something else entirely. For nearly four decades she worked in federal service, much of it within the Department of Defense, later managing an HR branch at the Department of the Interior before landing at the United States Mint in Denver, where she served as HR Manager, at times overseeing three Mint HR offices simultaneously. She rose through those ranks without a college degree, a detail she does not hide but rather treats as proof of a simpler truth that leadership is earned through determination and people first instinct, not conferred by credentials.
Across those decades in senior HR leadership, Cindy worked alongside people at every stage of life and career, through promotions and layoffs, through difficult conversations and organizational upheaval. And somewhere in the accumulation of thousands of those interactions, one lesson lodged itself permanently in her thinking that people may forget almost everything else, but they rarely forget how you made them feel.
That lesson might have stayed a private philosophy of good management, quietly practiced and never spoken of, if not for an experience that reached her on a different level entirely, which was her work as a hospice volunteer. Sitting with families in the middle of loss, Cindy began to notice how often the right words, offered simply and without pretense, did more good than any grand gesture ever could. Sometimes, she realized, people do not need a long conversation or a complicated solution. They need to hear four or five words, plainly spoken, “I believe in you. You matter. Keep going. You are not alone.”
That realization became the seed of everything that followed. Cindy wanted to create something a person could actually hold, words that would remain after a conversation ended, tangible enough to sit on a nightstand or slip into a coat pocket, there long after anyone had left the room. She came to believe that inspiration should not be rationed out for birthdays and holidays, that encouragement belonged in the fabric of ordinary days. That belief eventually crystallized into the philosophy that now anchors the entire company, “Say it Every Day.”
Founded in April 2021, Dezire to Inspire grew out of that conviction into a full catalog, more than 30 themed card sets addressing everything from encouragement and empowerment to grief, perseverance, mental wellness, youth character building, and tribute to veterans and active duty service members. What started as an idea, Cindy says, became a mission. To leave lasting imprints on people’s hearts precisely when they need it most. Her federal career had taught her how to lead organizations. Life, and hospice rooms, and hard conversations, and 38 years of watching what people actually remember, had taught her why people matter. Dezire to Inspire is what happens when those two educations meet.
From Struggle to Strength: Learning That the Heart Needs a Spine
Every founder’s story has its harder chapters, and Cindy is candid about hers. The biggest lesson, she says, was discovering that passion and purpose, as powerful as they are, are not sufficient on their own to build something that lasts.
In the earliest days of D2I, Cindy led almost entirely from the heart. She wanted to help everyone. She saw possibility in every direction, and if an idea might conceivably make a difference in someone’s life, she wanted to chase it. It is an instinct any mission driven founder will recognize, and as the company grew, Cindy discovered its limits. Being purpose driven, she came to understand, also demands discipline, structure, strategy, and sometimes the harder discipline of saying no.
The internal shift was subtle but significant. She had to move from asking simply, “Can this help someone?” to asking a second, harder question, “ Does this support our mission? Is it sustainable? Can we scale it? Is this the right opportunity at the right time?” That reframing , from impulse to strategy, marked one of the more important transformations of her entrepreneurial life.
There was also the more mundane challenge every founder eventually meets which is the sheer range of hats a small company demands. One moment she was deep in product development, the next she was untangling marketing, partnerships, sales, operations, finance, and customer relationships, often within the same afternoon. Rather than wearing her down, Cindy says those pressures forged a different kind of leader in her, one who understands that protecting a mission sometimes requires making unsentimental business decisions, and that strategy does not dilute compassion. Done well, strategy is what allows compassion to reach more people. As she puts it, the goal was never simply to build something meaningful. The goal was to build something meaningful that could endure.
The Innovation Edge: Making Encouragement a Habit, Not an Occasion
Ask Cindy what sets Dezire to Inspire apart, and she does not talk about paper stock or packaging. She starts with a question “ How can inspiration become something people actually use in everyday life?”
D2I was never interested in products meant to be glanced at once and forgotten. Cindy wanted encouragement to be interactive, shareable, personal, habitual in the way a morning coffee or a bedtime routine is habitual. Her card sets are designed to say the things people often struggle to say themselves. A single card might sit propped on a desk for weeks, get tucked beside a bathroom mirror, slide into a child’s lunchbox, get handed to a grieving coworker, or land, quite literally, in the hands of a stranger who needed it more than anyone realized.
That, Cindy says, creates a ripple effect. One person receives a message. It changes their day, even slightly. They pass something forward to someone else. What starts small compounds into something much larger than the original card ever could have been on its own.
The company’s ambitions extend well past individual card sets, too. D2I has been developing curricula, workplace wellness applications, youth character building programs, community initiatives, B2B partnerships, and charitable campaigns, all built around the same underlying insight, one that the company’s “Say it Every Day” philosophy captures in four words that is inspiration works best as a practice, not an occasional gesture.
Central to that philosophy is the idea that encouragement is never “one size fits all”. A grieving person needs different words than a young person still learning to believe in themselves. A veteran connects with a different register of language than someone navigating a bruising week at the office. D2I’s entire product architecture, dozens of themed sets addressing distinct life circumstances, exists because Cindy insists on meeting people exactly where they are, not where a generic greeting card assumes them to be. In her view, the real innovation was never the cards themselves. It is what happens between people because of them.
Among the collections closest to her own heart is Grace While Grieving, born directly out of her hospice volunteering, alongside other wellness centered and faith forward sets built to support mental and emotional well being, proof, if any were needed, that Cindy builds from lived experience rather than market research alone.
Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Opportunity Is Not the Same as Alignment
If there is one lesson Cindy repeats like a mantra, it is this, “ do not confuse opportunity with alignment.”
Entrepreneurs, she notes, are perpetually offered ideas, introductions, and potential partnerships, and in the beginning it is tempting to believe every open door is one you are meant to walk through. Cindy has learned, sometimes expensively, that this isn’t true. Some opportunities consume enormous time and energy while moving a company only inches closer to its real destination. And no founder, however energetic, can build everything at once. Creativity generates a constant stream of ideas, a gift, Cindy says, but one that becomes a liability without ruthless prioritization. Leadership, in her framing, is the discipline of sorting ideas into three piles that are “what belongs to today, what belongs to tomorrow, and what may never belong at all.”
These days, she interrogates opportunities far more carefully, weighing scalability, sustainability, return on investment, and mission alignment before saying yes to anything. It distills, for her, into a single guiding line, purpose needs a plan. Dream boldly, she says, but build deliberately.
Voices That Shaped Her
No meaningful journey happens in isolation, and Cindy is quick to name the people who shaped hers. Her family has been a foundation of strength throughout, she has been married to her husband, Randy, for over four decades, a marriage that included 24 years of military life and the kind of relocation heavy, sacrifice heavy partnership that only military families truly understand. Their son has been, in her words, a blessing beyond measure. Entrepreneurship demands sacrifice, and Cindy is candid that the people closest to a founder live that sacrifice alongside her.
Her decades in federal human resources also exposed her to a wide spectrum of leadership styles, some that modeled exactly the kind of leader she wanted to become, others that taught her, by negative example, exactly the kind of leader she refused to be. Both lessons, she says, were equally valuable.
But one relationship gets singled out with particular warmth, Carl, her business partner and co owner of Dezire to Inspire. Carl, Cindy says, has played an essential role in moving the company’s vision forward, believing not only in what D2I is today but in what it can still become. Perhaps his most valuable gift to her has been perspective, the reminder, offered at exactly the right moments, that entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. It is an easy truth to know intellectually and a hard one to live, especially for a founder who feels the pull to accomplish everything at once. Carl, she says, has taught her to slow down, take a breath, and trust the pace of meaningful growth. The right people in a founder’s life, Cindy reflects, do more than applaud the wins, they challenge your thinking, surface your blind spots, and gently insist you look at situations from angles you would have missed alone. Her gratitude toward Carl runs through nearly every reflection she offers on the company’s growth.
Stronger Together: Building a Team Big Enough for a Mission This Size
Partnership, Cindy insists, is not optional for Dezire to Inspire, it is existential. The mission is bigger than any single person, and building a culture where encouragement becomes part of everyday life will require businesses, schools, nonprofits, healthcare organizations, veteran communities, corporations, and educators all carrying the message forward together.
She wants organizations to see D2I’s products not as novelty cards or gift shop impulse buys, but as genuine tools, for connection, recognition, employee well being, community engagement, and human kindness at scale. That same philosophy governs how she runs her internal team. Great teams, she says, need clarity, people must understand not just what they are responsible for, but why it matters. One of her ongoing growth areas as a CEO has been learning to step back from personally carrying every task, and instead building clearer roles, stronger systems, and shared ownership across her organization.
A founder, Cindy notes, can begin with a vision, but it takes a team to give that vision scale. Her ambition is for Dezire to Inspire to eventually become something far greater than its founders, built by people who believe in the mission and are empowered to help carry it forward.
A Word for the Next Generation: Start Before You Feel Ready
Ask Cindy what she would tell someone just starting out, and her answer arrives without hesitation that is to not wait until you feel completely ready, because you probably never will. There is always another reason to delay, more money, more knowledge, more connections, a better economy, a better moment. Her advice is blunt, “start anyway”.
But she is equally quick to temper that urgency with humility. Starting does not mean moving recklessly. Be courageous enough to begin, she says, and humble enough to keep learning once you have. Ask questions. Listen to people who know more than you do. Understand your numbers. Know your customer. Protect your reputation fiercely. Choose your partners with care. Learn from mistakes quickly rather than letting them fester.
Above everything else, she stresses knowing your why. There will be days without applause, slow sales weeks, opportunities that evaporate, and moments of real doubt about whether the dream is worth the effort it demands. Purpose, in those moments, is what keeps a founder standing. Success, Cindy has come to believe, is rarely one dramatic breakthrough, it is hundreds of small decisions, made consistently, to keep moving forward. Her closing counsel is characteristically direct, believe in yourself but stay teachable, dream big but build wisely, and never underestimate what two determined people with a meaningful purpose can begin together.
Beyond This Milestone: Scaling a Mission Without Losing Its Soul
Recognition, for Cindy, is not simply a celebration of what has already been accomplished, it is a responsibility for what comes next. Being featured by TheCEOVerse, she says, offers Dezire to Inspire another platform to introduce more people to the power of intentional encouragement.
Professionally, her sights are set on scaling the company through strategic partnerships, corporate and wholesale relationships, educational collaborations, community initiatives, and new ways of weaving inspiration into people’s daily routines. She envisions D2I’s products reaching further into workplaces, schools, hospitals, veteran organizations, grief support communities, nonprofits, and homes, anywhere encouragement can genuinely change the texture of someone’s day.
Personally, this moment is also an invitation to pause. Entrepreneurs, Cindy admits, spend so much energy looking toward the next milestone that they often forget to acknowledge how far they have already traveled. She is proud of what has been built, and remains, by her own account, even more excited by what still lies ahead. She wants the company’s next chapter to be defined less by units sold and more by impact created, how many conversations were started, how many people felt seen, how many small acts of kindness were set into motion because someone chose to say it every day.
The Power Sitting in Your Own Words
Pressed for the single message she would want readers to carry away, Cindy does not hesitate, to never underestimate the power of your words.
We live, she points out, in a world where the people around us are often carrying burdens we cannot see. The person beside you may be grieving quietly. A coworker may be questioning their own worth. A young person nearby may be struggling to believe in themselves at all. A friend may simply need reassurance that someone still remembers them, still cares. A few sincere words, offered without waiting for the perfect occasion, can become a lifeline for any one of them. Encourage people now, she urges. Thank them now. Celebrate them now. Tell them you believe in them now. That immediacy is the entire heart of Dezire to Inspire, and the plain meaning behind Say it Every Day. Kindness, she reminds us, does not need to be complicated to be powerful, sometimes changing the world begins with changing one person’s day.
The Legacy Behind the Cards
If there is a thread that ties Cindy Waddle’s whole story together, it is not entrepreneurship in the conventional sense. It is legacy. At some point, she believes, every leader must confront a deeper question, “what will remain because I was here?” Titles change. Careers end. Awards gather dust on a shelf. Businesses evolve or dissolve entirely. But the way we affect other people, Cindy argues, can outlast every one of those things.
Her hope for Dezire to Inspire is nothing less than the normalization of encouragement, making appreciation, hope, compassion, gratitude, and love things people express freely and often, not just on birthdays and anniversaries. She imagines workplaces where recognition is woven into daily culture rather than confined to an annual awards banquet. She imagines young people hearing, regularly, the words that build genuine confidence and character. She imagines someone in the depths of grief receiving exactly the message they needed on the day the silence felt unbearable. She imagines veterans and active duty service members being reminded, in tangible form, that their service is remembered. She imagines families leaving small notes of encouragement for one another simply because they can.
Her leadership journey, Cindy reflects, has taught her that success is not ultimately about what you personally accomplish, it is about what you awaken in the people around you. If Dezire to Inspire’s products inspire even one person to keep going, reconnect with someone they love, believe in themselves again, express gratitude, extend kindness, or simply feel a little less alone on a hard day, then the company has already done something that matters.
There is, by her own admission, still a great deal of work ahead, building, learning, refining, partnering, dreaming bigger than the company currently is. But the vision underneath all of it remains, in her words, beautifully simple: use words intentionally, create connection, leave an imprint. Say it every day.
That, in the end, is the purpose behind Dezire to Inspire, and it is the legacy Cindy Waddle hopes to leave behind, one message, one heart, and one life at a time.