A Social Business is a Business After All

“The question is not how do you grow organizations but how do you scale impact”. This statement from the Harvard Business Review article “It’s not all about Growth for Social Enterprises” perfectly summarizes the essential difference in scaling up a normal company and scaling up a social business. However, many business fundamentals remain valid for social ventures provided they adjust them to the social context and the impact objective. The article “How to take a social venture to scale” lists the most important best practices that a social entrepreneur should keep in mind to successfully take his or her concept to the next level. To add on that, drawing from my own experience working in a service start-up, I would like to emphasize the importance of the following elements as well:

•             Position yourself: What you are doing, where you are doing it and why you are doing it should be crystal clear for you and your stakeholders. When it’s the case, it is much easier to make the right strategic choices and better scan and filter all the possibilities and opportunities that the start-up has. It is also much easier to target the right stakeholders and communicate efficiently towards them. A blurry positioning can quickly lead to a loss of value as the stakeholders may be confused by what it is that you’re trying to do or that you’re trying to help them with, which could lead them to discard your offering. Positioning can be a very difficult thing to do when the activity is complex or when the opportunities are so abundant that you’re afraid on missing out but it is important to have the courage to do so especially at the critical phase of scaling-up.

•        Don’t lose focus: when you start developing a venture, you also start seeing how opportunities can be endless. It is important to keep an eye on them but it’s as important if not more important to keep your focus on your main objectives at least in the first phases of scaling-up. Diversification – in the markets you’re servicing or in your offerings - is a very important step in your company’s growth but you want to build it on solid ground in order to avoid wasting valuable time and resources. However, you can already start developing business ideas and business plans for the future and mature them over time until it’s the right moment to start implementing them. The key is not rushing on anything unless the impact is undeniably worth it or the cost of waiting is too high.

•        Invest in your human resources: your collaborators develop knowledge and expertise that you want to build on. You can think about it as an increasing returns to scale type of investment. Also, you will probably hire smart people, so treat them as so in being transparent and straight-forward regarding the company’s strategy, future plans, performance and everything else that is of interest to them. They will feel more included, more important and more engaged in the company’s growth. It is also important to listen to their ideas and concerns and encourage them to provide as much positive or negative feedback as possible. Your collaborators are in the front with all your stakeholders so they are a goldmine of useful information that can help you grow in a more efficient way.

•       Listen to your stakeholders: sometimes, start-up managers and founders can be so focused on their ideas and their roadmap that they forget to monitor the outside response to their output until it’s too late. Getting early feedback from all the stakeholders should be done on a continuous and thorough basis. Negative feedback shouldn’t be discarded because we think that a client is being difficult or that an investor doesn’t really know what the real market conditions are. It should be embraced and cherished because, at the end, what matters most is not what you’re trying to do but how it is perceived by the rest of your environment. It helps get a fresh and outside perspective on the actions you’re launching which will help you better adapt them to the actual needs and preferences of your stakeholders.

It seems obvious, in theory, that social ventures can benefit for conventional business techniques and should leverage them to maximize value. But how easy and feasible is it when value is about social impact not revenues?