But to actually deliver genuine social and financial growth, we need social entrepreneurs and big businesses to actually work TOGETHER. This means social entrepreneur actively seeking out private sector contracts, doing everything they can to make themselves as competitive as possible in this marketplace (including proving they are a sustainable organisation themselves) and zeroing in on the one piece of social value they are set up to deliver in the process. Beyond that, their focus should be on creating financial value for big business – like all other supply chain partners would. Unless they do, they won’t ever be a real part of the business world, they will remain an act of charity. As a genuine part of the supply chain, social entrepreneurs aren’t relying on hand-outs (of time or money). They’re doing what they should be doing: creating social value whilst building a sustainable organisation. Crucially this is achieved through regular contracts with clients that aren’t grant-funders or a broke public sector.
Recent research commissioned by UnLtd identified “finding a ‘good’ customer” as the key tipping point in the journey of a social entrepreneur and also the one thing they most requested from us as a support organisation. So why not look to the private sector? It seems to me that social entrepreneurs spend far too long worrying about whom to have in their own supply chain and much less trying to get into other organisations’.
As someone who’s worked for two huge global businesses and now with dozens of tiny social enterprises, I can say the idea that they operate in entirely different, incompatable worlds is crazy. There are far more similarities than differences in the kinds of people that work in each, and though maybe the language is different, the only real problem I can identify is the age-old ‘fear of the unknown’.
For big business, there is value too. They get to create genuine social value that we know engages staff and customers, just by picking the right partners: a simple decision between two partners in their supply chain that offer equal financial value to them…. Only then can these businesses test the hitherto-unexplored-by-most-businesses-but-seemingly-obvious-to-the-rest-of-us hypothesis that building social value in the places you work actually creates, not hampers, longterm financial value.
This is particularly important for those private companies looking to deliver public services – and this is where this process has already begun, for instance in the forthcoming Work Programme. There are many advantages to big businesses delivering public services: scale and efficiency to name but two. But such is the social cost big businesses often create that the public (and sometimes government) are, rightlyconcerned. Having private sector firms with social entrepreneurs at every stage of the supply chain should go some way to easing these concerns.
Shared Value Supply Chains 