At UnLtd we work with some pretty amazing social entrepreneurs. Our work in the Ventures team is to help them grow incredible social businesses to deliver impact at real scale.
The challenges for an ambitious entrepreneur on this journey are manifold: how to be an inspirational leader, how to recruit and retain wonderful people, how to plot a credible growth strategy, how to successfully market and sell your products, how to make accurate financial projections. It’s not an easy path to take.
Some of the best support received by our Big Venture Challenge winners has come from successful commercial entrepreneurs who have already travelled the path and successfully scaled one or more businesses themselves. Many have come via our partnership with the Supper Club who are promoting our work to their members (all founders of high-growth businesses turning over at least £1m, frequently much more), and helping create relevant matches by sector experience and expertise.
Working with these individuals has helped our winners – all chosen for their ambition and potential to scale – because they can pass on valuable lessons from their own journeys, sharing their successes and failures and thereby (hopefully) reduce the risk of our social entrepreneurs making the same mistakes they did. They also help our cohort think in a more commercial manner, get inside the mind of investors and plot short-cuts to rapid growth.
But there’s a lot more that can be done. These individual entrepreneurs are (in the most part) supporting our winners in their spare time, in an individual capacity and out of the goodness of their heart. I’d like to see a scenario in which not only are our social entrepreneurs working with their commercial counterparts, but also in which different members of each of their respective teams are working together: Financial Director with Financial Director, HR Manager with HR Manager, Head of Sales with Head of Sales. This is ‘Organisational Mentoring’ provided by family-owned or entrepreneur-led, private companies that have successfully scaled.
The challenges of scaling social ventures are not limited to helping the entrepreneur diagnose the challenges and opportunities – but in offering practical support and industry expertise to successfully implement the chosen strategies. For a social entrepreneur, this would involve your team having regular contact with a larger commercial business from a similar sector and sharing a range of resources: not just knowledge … this could be office space, contacts, template documents and suppliers.
So why should the mentoring company engage in this? The numerous corporates that currently offer mentoring programmes with social entrepreneurs do so for three main reasons: to aid in staff development; to boost their CSR programmes; and to get exposure to an innovative new growth sector. All three equally apply for medium-sized businesses too.
- Professional development of staff. Privately-owned SMEs have their own growth agendas. They want to grow their teams and must therefore develop their managers. One-on-one mentoring programmes have proven efficacy in developing the leadership, communication and interpersonal skills of the mentor.
- CSR Outcomes: Small private businesses traditionally don’t have CSR programmes – it is somehow reserved for large companies that can afford the ‘luxury’ of CSR departments. But as CSR is increasingly being augmented by the notion of Shared Value – whereby the organisation actually creates commercial value out of the social value they create (and vice versa) – the opportunities for all companies, large and small open up. Some forward thinking corporates are even considering dissolving their CSR departments and instead encouraging ‘Shared Value’ strategies in each department of their business. For SMEs (with less ingrained thinking and no shareholders to convince), it is easier to build this culture early, than it is for corporates to dismantle it.
- Better innovation: Crucial to any SME’s growth strategy is building a culture of innovation. To my mind, the single most compelling feature of the social ventures we work with – above and beyond the social value they create – is their ability to approach a long-standing problem with an entirely novel perspective, challenging pre-conceptions and delivering a disruptive solution. Indeed the mere process of bringing different worlds together creates innovation: research from Stanford Business School shows that diverse, horizontal social networks are three times more innovative than uniform vertical networks.
Over time, informal mentoring and co-innovation may lead to more formal partnering, co-production, joint-ventures… all of which opens new markets and new revenue streams to both organisations. The barriers that may prevent social ventures from working with major corporates – differences in culture and scale for instance – are greatly reduced when working with smaller privately-owned businesses.
Shared Value Supply Chains 
Leave a comment