Hard truths for Social Entrepreneurs...
I can't believe it's been two weeks since I last wrote a blog, although I can, as it's been pretty hectic over here at Share Impact HQ.
Life has changed dramatically over the past two years since I set up this business and I've been trying to get back in to a rhythm, out of my maternity leave and into a new balance between motherhood / looking after Rosie and working just 2 days a week.
It's not easy but we're slowly figuring out what works and what doesn't. (There’ll be another blog on this topic soon).
...The reality is I can't do everything I would like to be doing in my business now with just two days a week, so I have to focus on the essential priorities. Which means sometimes my blog posts don’t happen.
But I wanted to share with you something I learnt recently from delivering a workshop with 15 social entrepreneurs in Manchester.
Last month I was invited to speak to Flourish CIC's Lunch and Learn event in Manchester. It was a fantastic learning event helping social entrepreneurs understand how to measure and communicate their social impact and social value, with insights from myself and two other expert consultants. (If you live or work in the Greater Manchester area you should definitely check out Flourish CIC and their events).
I was asked to share my insights and ideas on how they (the social entrepreneurs attending) could best communicate their social impact and of course I interpreted this in my own unique way to "How to attract customers by communicating your social impact story".
My session went really well and I think it's because I unapologetically shared my unique story and beliefs about the social enterprise sector and what we really need to be doing as social entrepreneurs if we want to be truly 'successful & sustainable'.
They were hard truths for some to hear but all acknowledged them as necessary once we talked through the fear and objections.
My hard truths for social entrepreneurs included:
Social Enterprises should be for-profit and not grant-dependent. What are you doing to make this shift from grant funded to trading income?
As a CEO, Founder or sole person in your social enterprise you need to be spending 80% of your time on securing income, sales and connecting with potential customers / investors until your in a stable and sustainable financial position. Why are you doing work which you’re not getting paid for?
You need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable things in your business (such as sales, marketing and measuring your impact) or delegate them to someone else so you can focus on the things that set you alight. What’s the best option for you right now?
If you’re not in a stable financial position you should be prioritising speaking to your target customers everyday for the next 3 months, so you can learn more about them, build relationships, discover opportunities and share what you have to sell.
If you want to be successful and ride the storms, you need to be thinking bigger in terms of who is out there to buy from or invest in you. (By this I don’t mean you necessarily need to scale up or become a big organisation, but the best people to speak to might not be in your direct network or knowledge base).
Like I said hard truths for most of this audience (and no doubt yourself) to hear but truths non-the-less that I have had to face up to when establishing and growing two social enterprises myself.
Why am I sharing these truths? Because I’m super passionate about the social enterprise sector to grow and become the normal way we do business in the future, however this won’t be possible if we don’t get the business side of organisations in order, alongside the impact piece.
We won’t succeed by waiting for hand-outs, grants and constantly expecting others to pay for what we do. If you’re a social enterprise you’re a business and you need to be generating your own income and yes profit in order to protect the incredible work that you. Read more about that here.
If this gets you thinking (or ruffles some feathers) I’d love to jump on a call with you and help you see how you could start transforming your organisation from grant dependent, desperately seeking the next funding application to complete to generating a trading income that gives you unrestricted funds to do the things you truly want to be doing in this world.
