Can Tiny be Mighty for Social Enterprises?

For my blog post, I want to explore the ideas presented in the article, “It’s Not All About Growth for Social Enterprises”. As its title suggests, the success of a social enterprise is not necessarily correlated with its size. While there are a many large-scale social enterprises that are dazzlingly successful at meeting the needs they have set out to meet, it’s worth examining those who have grown tremendously, but have not been nearly as successful. Many of these large, unsuccessful organizations still manage to attract astoundingly high popular support and funds.

One notable example of a widely popular and highly financially successful social enterprise is TOMS Shoes. As we discussed in class, TOMS does a relatively poor job of creating a sustainable solution to the problem they have set out to solve. While they have been making important steps to produce their Giving Shoes in the countries where they’re distributed, they still have a long way to go truly sustainable social enterprise.

On the other hand, there are large number of social enterprises that have remained tiny, but are highly effective at solving the problem they have set out to solve. Often times, aspects of their success can be attributed to their small size. I would categorize this aspects of success into 2 categories: specialization and lean operations.

We can further divide specialization into 2 categories: impact specialization and geographic specialization. Impact specialization could be thought of as having a very limited scope of impact, such enriching the lives of people with a particular rare disease. The other, more prevalent area of specialization is geographic specialization. This involves tailoring a solution directly for a particular geographic area. In the past, I worked with a non-profit organization in Meadville, Pennsylvania called Creating Landscapes that, while not a social enterprise, provides a good example of geographic specialization. Creating Landscapes ran a wide variety of programs in Meadville, including a preschool, public school outreach, community garden, and afterschool program. They had a deep impact in the community. However, Creating Landscapes was not scalable. It had been uniquely grown to fit the opportunities Meadville could provide it.

The other advantage of staying tiny is the ability to have lean operations. It only takes a handful of people to start small, successful social venture. It takes many more to scale it. This growth takes time, energy, and resources. While it may be worthwhile in the end, a small team may be more efficient for many social enterprises.