Three things I wish I’d known
New Start Magazine this month asked me to talk about three things I know now that I wish I'd known then. Here they are – I'd be interested in your thoughts, and what your three things would be. Just be aware, you probably won't manage a better comment than my three-year old son, who, on seeing a picture of his dad in the magazine, said "Ha ha ha ha ha! I don't believe it!"
Sometimes the most entrepreneurial thing you can do is to stop doing something.
A couple of years ago I read about Drucker's theory of Organised Abandonment – which encourages organisations to consider whether they can stop doing certain things which no longer contribute to their social mission.
I've worked with organisations where the long list of activities in the Annual Report was a great source of pride. The fact that a third of these activities no longer contributed in a meaningful way to achieving their mission was neither here nor there.
Change matters more than structure.
I used to be a bit of a structural fetishist, believing in the inherent superiority of a not-for-profit structure. How could you really be serious about social change if you were making money out of social change?
Used well, in the right circumstances, a certain structure can help to magnify the change you wish to create. But in many cases, a not-for-profit structure is used as shorthand for "we're a decent organisation", when it actually offers no guarantee at all.
And let's face it, most of us work in markets where excessive profits are the least of our worries – so I’m now starting to work with people who are serious about social change, regardless of their ownership structure.
Marketing isn't just about flyers, websites and adverts.
I remember believing that the key to success at the fair trade shop where I worked was an increased marketing budget. With a few thousand Pounds, we could get a flash website, some swanky flyers and an ad campaign in the local paper. The lack of budget offered a convenient excuse for not hitting sales targets.
A few years later I read Marketing Judo – a book about how to market your business on a shoestring. I realised that marketing didn't have to cost a fortune – and the best marketing – good customer service which encouraged word-of-mouth recommendations – didn't cost anything at all.
1. There’s no point having a nice idea if you’re not going to pay for it and no one else is either.
2. Writing a business plan is not the same thing as having a plan for your business.
3. Just because something is received wisdom, doesn’t mean that it’s actually wisdom.
Thanks David – very good – wise words from an entrepreneur who’s knows what it’s really like to run a social business. The first one is a key one – and a real challenge for a lot of people as the idealism that I think you need to maintain is challenged by the pragmatism and realism that you need as well.
I can’t help thinking that what lies at the heart of this debate is ethics. But that’s only part of it; you can have all the ethics you like but you’ve still got to get on and do it. Equally, just being excellent at what you do doesn’t necessarily make it good; think of, say, a successful pick-pocket. In combination then you get what Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalhi and William Damon describe as ‘Good Work’ (in their excellent – or is it good? – book of the same name: Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet).