Why You Should Never Create a Business or Strategic Plan Again

It’s an all too familiar situation. A retreat or intensive discussion with your team, board, advisors and more evolves to a 20+ page deck or document. Ideally, it’s a roadmap for the next three to five or so years of your organization. 

In reality though? 

Within months, it more often than not becomes obsolete. 

Both strategic and business plans are often built on more on aspiration and inspiration than information.

While it’s amazing to think big and think creatively as a social entrepreneur, creative thinking isn’t strategic without . . .a strategy. 

The strategy needs to be responsive. It needs to be agile. So for a long term plan to fulfill your organizational goals (which I suspect involve some combination of increased revenue and increased impact – because that’s the case with each of my clients) there needs to be less of “here’s what we’re going to do” and a lot more “here’s where we think we want to be and why, here’s how we think we can get there, and here’s how we’re going to know if we’re on or off track.” 

I break down each of these components for you below.

Here’s where you think you want to be and why.

Whenever any of my clients mention planning, I always start by asking them if they have fully mapped out their business model. Usually, the answer is no! 

They do things, but they haven’t fully put on paper the relationships and why behind the things they do. So we always start there. I have two main tools I use with clients to do this: the first is the business model canvas, and the second is the logic model template I outline in my freebie you can get here. Or, ideally, do both!

Next, when planning, we create the exact same template for a given point in the future – usually not more than a few years out – and add on a strong why to both anything that changes and anything that stays the same. Without the why it’s just planning for planning’s sake. For those that operate on some sort of very set annual cycle – usually in education – three to five years makes sense. For those that are just continuously operating, I always recommend a shorter time span. It’s really about how many cycles you have to iterate and learn. 

My Strategy Instead

I recently did this with my own consulting business. I’ve had a strong model of engaging in strategy consulting, but a few months ago I realized something was missing – and that something was impacting. The impact is 100% my why; this probably resonates with almost all social entrepreneurs. I was serving larger and larger clients in multi-month projects, but that meant that I wasn’t able to see my clients’ impact increase, and if it did, it was hard to pinpoint it back to any aspect of our work together, which didn’t provide very helpful data for me to figure out if what I was doing was working or not.

While I wasn’t going to shift my model overnight, I created a future model on paper in which I’m working with a larger quantity of smaller super impact-focused clients on a much shorter-term basis and making money. 

As consumers, we see this future modeling happen all the time, like with Netflix’s shift from mailing DVDs to digital content creation or car companies’ commitment to increased MPG in their fleet. 

And just as strategists at these companies did (or are doing), I needed to figure out how to get that future model. 

Which brings me to . . . 

Here’s how I think you can get there!

Next, I have clients literally list this out. How do you think you’re going to get to this ideal state in X amount of years? This is where creativity gets to live. But it’s also where this caveat is crucial: Each step you write down here is – unless already tested – an assumption. What does this mean? Let’s say for example that within a couple of years you want to double the number of people served; this is clear when you make your ideal state business plan. 

To do so, let’s say you want to enter another market. Unless you have any information that proves that entering this new market is going to double your numbers, you’re assuming that entering this new market is going to double your numbers. You may also assume that doubling down on marketing, or hiring new staff, or a myriad of other things are going to double your numbers. 

In creating your “here’s how we think we can get there” plan, choose one of those assumptions to start off with and a plan to start implementing it –  but keep a holding pen of the others.

We’ve been able to see this evolution with Netflix. First, the phased-out DVDs and started distributing content online. Then, they introduced the original content. 

In my own business model, I hypothesized that leaning into my Impact Tuneup – my introductory product designed for my new target customers – as well as investing in marketing would help me shift my model to eventually (and hopefully) create and launch a digital course for social entrepreneurs next year.

And then, it’s time to test.

brainstorming

Here’s how you’re going to know if you’re on or off track.

Finally, once my clients have all the above figured out, we work on metrics tools and systems to figure out if the untested ideas they initially implement are leading them in the right direction or not. 

This is a good place to remember that informative data is always better than perfect data. Simple measurement tools that get done are far more useful than intricate measurement tools that don’t get fully implemented. 

Adapting Your Business to the Pace of Change

If the data is coming back saying that this idea is actually not leading to the ideal state, then one of two things need to change: either the idea or the ideal state. This is where the constrictions of traditional business and strategic plans get super frustrating because everything in the plan assumes both the steps and ideal state are constant; more often than not, both end up changing a little based on new information and data. 

You can bet Netflix took incremental steps in its move from DVD mailing to content creation to generate customer data and inform its strategy along the way. In my own business, I’m using one-on-one Impact Tuneups and feedback from clients and the market to help inform what may work for my future digital course, and am testing all sorts of marketing and PR strategies before I gung ho invest in them in 2020. 

The organizations I witness that deploy an agile, responsive planning process and put all the above on paper excel at increasing both their impact and revenue. And I can’t wait to see how this process goes for you.

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Start Manifesting More Money For Your Impact Business with Cassie Parks

Interview with author and entrepreneur, Cassie Parks

Subscribe to this show on Spotify  |  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

What if you could manifest another $10k in your life over the next 90 days?

Sounds compelling right?

That’s exactly what Cassie Parks helps people do.

Cassie Parks is an entrepreneur, author, business coach, and leadership expert who runs the successful course, “Manifest $10k.” After spending her professional career navigating corporate culture, Cassie realized her dream of pursuing her own aspirations and becoming financially independent.

Having created enough passive income in real estate, Cassie “retired” at 32 and launched her own coaching service. Served over 1500+ people in 23 different countries, “Manifest $10k” is designed to help people write new powerful money stories while also manifesting $10,000 in 90 days.

She helps participants change their thoughts so they approach money differently and are open to creating more wealth and achieving their dreams.

She’s the author of 7 non-fiction books, on the topics of money mindset, business and lifestyle design.

Listen close to this interview and start thinking about the money blocks you might have so you can break through them!

Should I Incorporate my New Org as a Nonprofit or For Profit?

I get asked this all the time by early-stage social entrepreneurs: “I have this prototype or start of a business or idea that could help drive social impact and I’m not sure how to incorporate it.”

Cleaning up a few common misconceptions.

For-profits can receive donations; nonprofits can earn income.

There are some business models – such as purely philanthropic organizations or political entities – that need to incorporate as a nonprofit in the US and many other geographies. This isn’t about them. This is about delivering a product or service that benefits individuals. And while there are many tax and legal and accounting implications, I know strategy best and my advice is rooted there. 

Surprisingly to some, I always encourage early-stage social entrepreneurs to start off by developing an earned income, a for-profit organization in their initial business and financial models. Because here’s the thing with nonprofits without earned income: you’re always, always going to be fundraising. When you can earn revenue, you get the freedom of saying “for each unit of whatever we do, we’re going to generate this much revenue. Our costs to make that unit are somewhat known, so here’s our estimated margin.” 

You still need to market and sell the thing you do, but it’s a somewhat predictable financial ratio, and one that you can start testing pretty much immediately – just start selling. 

Proti or non profit organizayion?

How do non-profits work?

In a strictly donor-driven revenue model, that shifts. Now, while the unit of whatever you do may be known and the costs may be known, you have to go out and fundraise for that cost from an additional source. All of a sudden, you have two very, very distinct customer bases: those you serve and your donors or funders. 

Sometimes, especially when directly serving low-income populations, a pure and straightforward earned income model isn’t going to cut it. I was talking to a woman recently who was developing a new breast pump for a developing region; many customers there just won’t be able to pay for the pump’s cost. 

Some other business models to consider in this case.

Some iteration of one-for-one, for example, can work if done thoughtfully. For-profit companies, especially those that make technical products or are solving large scale problems, can also 100% get grants to cover things like R&D and startup costs, and ongoing sponsorship can often cover revenue gaps in for-profit social enterprises that can’t quite cut it solely with earned income. 

However, if it just doesn’t seem sustainable to charge for whatever you’re doing and have that cover a majority of costs, nonprofit incorporation makes sense. Remember, nonprofits can still earn income, and I see many daily that are doing so to diversify their revenue streams and mitigate risk. I used to work at an organization that was incorporated as a nonprofit but sold its services to schools. The payments from schools covered around 10% of our annual revenue needs; donations subsidized the rest. 

Be wary of the obvious choice.

I see social entrepreneurs often default to nonprofit incorporation because they’re afraid of sales. They don’t usually word it like this to me, but they say something to the extent of “it’s easier” or “we’re not sure anybody will actually pay for this.”

In a nonprofit, you’re still selling – just to funders. It’s not just like you need a good writer who can fill out grant applications. You have to market to funders and dig into articulating value propositions for them and sell to them to be successful.

And here’s another thing about sales: it’s feedback from the market. Consumers buy things they like and want and need. Now, in a nonprofit, you’re “selling” something that’s meant for Group A (the communities you’re serving or helping) to Group B (donors and funders). There’s a slippery slope that happens all too often of nonprofits giving in to feedback from funders about how to best serve communities, but it might not be something communities like and want and need; it’s something funders like and want and need. 

Planning strategy

This is where I always see nonprofits become really, really tricky to manage from a strategic and growth standpoint – and where many board issues arise as well. With two customer bases, business and financial modeling and strategic planning just get harder. Which is why I always recommend trying to figure out how to start off and sustain as a for-profit first, or at least have some semblance of earned income to not always be beholden to funders – as fantastic as many of them are. 

Obviously, there are many legal and tax implications as well, but from a strategic perspective, remember this bottom line:

Try to have a bottom line and make money first. You can always evolve from there!

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How to Find YOUR Story: With Real-Life Examples

If you’ve read anything about storytelling on the internet in recent years, you’re likely to have come across this:

“Customers don’t generally care about your story; they care about their own.” (Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen)

A bold statement.

Also, a statement often taken out of context. (Donald Miller is talking about branding here, not about storytelling.)

As Anna Bradshaw’s article about storytelling in e-commerce shows, “if you’re producing a high-quality product, using provenance in your marketing copy could allow you to charge twice as much” — suggesting that customers do indeed care about your story. And academic research has your back.

But how do you get started when you’re new to storytelling? If you’re (figuratively) dying to tell the world how you started your company, read on.

Step 1: Find Your What If…?

Still worried about the Donald Miller quote above — that people don’t care about your story?

Well, here’s the thing:

It doesn’t really matter whether “customers generally don’t care about your story”. That’s to be expected. After all, they don’t even know you, or why they should care.

Your job is to make them care.

And that’s the true power of a good story, even if it’s about yourself.

Here’s how storytelling expert Marsha Shandur explains how to make them care: 

“Whether it’s your business, passionate hobby or worthy cause, tell the story of it in a way that shows us why it’s important to you. … Show some vulnerability. This doesn’t have to mean pouring out your innermost turmoiled diary thoughts (you can totally save those for your therapist). Just give us enough to know that you’re human.”

Jody Aberdeen’s article here on Change Creator explains why that approach will hit a nerve with your audience:

“In an age of outrage culture and sensational news media, we are inundated in everything that we don’t want the world to be and have. What people are craving more than anything in 2019 is something, maybe someone, to root for, not rail against. Make sure to show your audiences, through your storytelling, the world that you want to create and invite them to create it with you.”

That’s the power of the humble “What if…”: the power to “invite the imagination into a story we want to explore.” Which is why the What If is usually the first thing the Pixar team come up with when they create a new story:

 

To give you some What-If examples:

  • This podcast with SheEO founder & entrepreneur Vicky Saunders quite literally begins with her What-if statement.

  • Ethical Brand Marketing focus on visionary leaders working to save animals and the planet. Founder Jessica Lohmann’s What-If is simple: “What if we lived in a world of healthy choices and opportunities for all animals, humans included?”

  • Here’s how the fully transparent apparel brand Where Does It Come From? describe their What If: “What if we lived in a world where nurture after our planet and the life on it, producing just what we need and ensuring that it is created with kindness to people and planet and as part of a circular economy?”

What’s great about these examples is how closely tied they are to the daily work of the change creators. In the next step, we’ll form the same kind of bond between what you do and your vision.

Step 2: Take Us On the Road Towards Your What If

Now it’s time to list all the things you do in order to make your What If a reality.

This is a great exercise for a team brainstorming session. Mindmapping, journaling or recording voice memos whenever you can think of something new can also be useful.

However you decide to tackle this step, Anna Bradshaw’s list of questions is a great place to start:

  • “What’s the unique personal story that led you to develop this product?

  • How is this product manufactured?

  • Is it made with special equipment, in a special place, or stored in a certain way?

  • Where do the materials come from? Are they all from the same area? Are the ingredients organic?

  • Have you or your suppliers implemented more sustainable practices that set you apart in your industry?

  • Where do you get your inspiration and ideas for small design details and color palette?

  • Who actually manufactures your goods? Do you have a special group of product testers?”

Answering questions like these will make sure there’s a perfect fit between your vision, the way you run your business and the offer you make to your audience.

Swimwear brand Deakin and Blue‘s story is a particularly effective example of this.

It starts with the founder’s personal experiences, takes us on the road to her realizing her What If (What if there was swimwear with both style and substance?) and invites us to get involved at the end:

“Join our Revolution.

Over 500 women have already told us that our swimsuits have changed the way they feel about their bodies.

And we’re just getting started.”

Step 3: Plot a Story Arc onto Your Roadmap

At this point, you’ve got all the data to talk about your vision, how you’ll reach it and the impact you’re making.

The important thing now is to continue working on your story.

One of the most common mistakes I see impact businesses make is to stop here and declare a collection of facts their “story”. But until you’ve got that story arc in place, it’s really just a bunch of claims and numbers.

A clear beginning, middle, and end let the audience perk up, take notice and get involved emotionally.

In his seminal book Into the Woods, John Yorke (who’s behind UK drama favorites such as Shameless, Casualty, and Life on Mars) suggests a five-act story structure. It “creates gripping turning points that increase narrative tension and in turn eliminates one of the most common problems” less experienced storytellers struggle with: “the ‘sagging’, disjointed, confused and often hard-to-follow” middle of the story.

Importantly, when you develop your story, be brave and talk about some of the challenges you faced. What went wrong? How did you overcome the (inevitable) bumps in the road? Too few companies do this, although it makes your story so much more compelling. If you’re concerned about greenwashing or “social-washing”, then working your challenges into your story can be an effective way to stay real.

Example time! Let’s look at the structure of Cuddle & Kind‘s brand story:

Act 1: Call to adventure:

What If… we could help feed children in need? (Inspired by watching a documentary on childhood hunger)

Act 2: Response to the call: 

Son Ethan suggests doing something about it — idea is to create sustainably hand-knit dolls and provide 10 free meals for each doll sold

Act 3: Midpoint: things get even more exciting, as they’re now in the thick of it. Going back is just as hard as carrying on: 

Crowdfunding campaign

Act 4: Challenges — perhaps even a crisis point: 

This is the weakest point in the video. Potential challenges that could make this story even more engaging could be the anxious first hours of their crowdfunding campaign, hearing about new areas where children need their support, or perhaps even the question of whether they’ll be able to attract enough revenue to be able to reach their vision

Act 5: Winning the (internal) battle: 

Being able to give 4.2 million meals in just 3 years!

Step 4: Bring Your Story Arc to Life

Journalists, screenwriters and novelists have always known that an “honest story of someone going through the struggles of starting a business can be a great way to connect with your audience” (source).

One of the best ways to foster that connection is by using action scenes.

Choose at least one moment in your story that you can tell as if it were a film: show what the characters in your story are doing, describe what the place looks like and share how that situation feels.

The BBC’s take on the launch story of Bristol Cloth is a nice example. We get to see the place where Bristol Cloth is made, we can observe the production process. The imagery is so rich that we can almost smell the landscape and feel the texture of the cloth:

https://vimeo.com/334944136

From the music to the imagery and the interview, it feels thoroughly authentic. According to the Ultimate Change Creator Guide to Creating a Brand Story, those are the precise ingredients that “help customers develop a sense of loyalty … that lasts for a long time”.

It’s perhaps easiest to do this in a video, but comic strips, news features and novels are all great sources for inspiration if you’re looking to work mainly with words and static images.

Step 5: Practice Telling Your Story 

Congratulations! Your story is ready to be shared with the world.

If you don’t yet feel confident about it, don’t worry: that’s completely normal. Just go ahead and tell your story as often as you can, and in as many different ways as possible:

  • Face to face when you meet someone new

  • In a Facebook post

  • In an Instagram story

  • In a tweet

  • In a blog post

  • In a pitch desk to wholesalers, clients or investors

  • On your LinkedIn profile

  • On TV, on podcasts, on the radio or in magazines…

Over time, you’ll grow into your story, and your story will develop a life of its own. And remember, there’s a whole Change Creator Community waiting to dive into your story, too!

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5 Powerful Ways To Use The Hero’s Journey To Easily Grow Your Impact Business

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

That’s the short version of the storytelling pattern known as the Hero’s Journey, as described in Joseph Campbell’s 1949 work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

While a fascinating book for sure, it was not intended as a guide to writing better stories. Campbell simply wanted to show that many myths around the world have a similar structure.

That’s why you’ll probably find yourself using this pattern, even if you’ve never heard of it. To quote master copywriter John Simmons:

Quest, love, conflict. The grand themes of storytelling are powerful simply because they are embedded in all our lives, including our business lives.

(John Simmons, The Invisible Grail: How Brands Can Tell Better Stories. Chatham, Kent: Urbane Publications, 2016 pp. 13f.)

5 powerful ways you can use it in your impact business! (And only 2 of them are about marketing.)

  1. Improve the way you run your business

  2. Shape the UX of your digital product or website

  3. Speed up your storytelling efforts

  4. Make your marketing more effective

  5. Model the change we need to see in the world

Let’s dive in!

1. Improve How You Run Your Business

Business success is impossible without empathy — especially if you work for a triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. 

Enter the Hero’s Journey: the most fun and effective customer empathy tool you’ll find. Here’s how it works:

  • Cast your customer as the hero on a quest, and you’ll automatically follow the Hero’s Journey pattern.

  • Write down the story and then work with it to achieve good outcomes for your hero and your company. For example, you can tweak scenes showing your customer interacting with your company to change the atmosphere. Or you can find ways of turning a dramatic mid-point crisis (oh no! they sent me the wrong size!) into a happy ending.

  • Let the whole team take part so everyone understands

    • your customers’ needs,

    • how your product can help them, and

    • what gaps in the market your company can address.

As an added bonus, this methodology will also unify your team around a “company campfire” as you all work together towards a shared vision.

I first learned about the approach from startup mentor Andrew Harrison.

If you are looking for more help and want to know how story can be used in your business, Change Creator has a Facebook Group dedicated to helping social impact entrepreneurs harness the power of storytelling for your business (you can find me there too!). 

 

company culture change creator

2. Shape the User Experience (UX)

Let’s stay with the empathy theme. As Adam G. Force explains in this Change Creator article,

“Storytelling is a deep understanding of human pain, human behavior, and then the most, most ideal format for communicating that”.

Our world is increasingly shaped by behavior in virtual spaces. If we want those spaces to be safe, enjoyable and nurturing, then we need a deep understanding that storytelling brings. This is what “narrative UX” is all about — a concept I first discovered and applied in 2014 when I was still working in-house at LEGO Group.

Sounds complicated? It’s really simple and fun:

Start by thinking of your users as heroes on a quest through your app or website. Then, take responsibility for guiding them through their choose-your-own-adventure tales.

If you’re in charge of a website or you make a digital product, Jessica Collier’s brilliant Medium article about narrative UX is a must-read.

3. Speed Up Your Storytelling Efforts

Remember how I said that Joseph Campbell didn’t intend his book as a storytelling guide?

And still, it’s turned into a popular source of storytelling templates.

And that’s OK…

… as long as we bear in mind that the Hero’s Journey is just one way to tell a story…

… and as long as the complexity of Campbell’s 17-stage model doesn’t cause writers’ block and anxiety.

If you’re after a Hero’s Journey template that’s simple enough to use and realistic enough to produce a great “story skeleton”, the French playwright Eugène Scribe (1791-1861) is a better guide than Campbell. As John Yorke, creator of the BBC Writers’ Academy, explains in his fascinating book, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (pp.42f.):

Scribe’s prolific output (he ‘wrote’ over 400 works collected in no less than seventy-six volumes) is largely explained by his employment of a team of juniors who followed a formula he honed to perfection — much as an author like James Patterson does today. …

Though the topicality of his plays means his work has dated, Scribe is… arguably the first to articulate a template for mass production… his works were incredibly well structured, full of dashing rhetorical devices and — in their time — great fun. …

Without Scribe, then, there would have been no Ibsen or Shaw (at least not quite in the same form).

Not only is a 5-act template much easier to use than Campbell’s 17 stages. The resulting structure also makes for more powerful marketing. 

To find out what makes an ad successful, Keith A. Quesenberry and Michael K. Coolsen analyzed 108 Super Bowl commercials over the course of 2 years: “Results demonstrated that average consumer ratings were higher for commercials that followed a five-act dramatic form.”

I’ve adapted Scribe’s 5-act template into a 5-step worksheet to help you plot your stories. You can download it here.

4. Make Your Marketing Messages More Effective

Marketing is the world in which the Hero’s Journey is the most talked about. But how do you use it in real life?

Here are 3 ways you can play with the Hero’s Journey in your marketing:

1. For your Brand Story

Brand Stories are easy to understand and remember, so they will help the entire team integrate all your communications. Essentially, you’re using your favorite story from the Story Model described above — and turn it into the foundation of your marketing.

2. To get more testimonials and make them relatable

Many brand owners struggle to get testimonials and reviews. One major reason for this is that customers can feel overwhelmed with having to write such a piece.

Here’s an easy way to help them — and your business:

Ask your customer some questions.

Following the Hero’s Journey, you could, for example, ask:

  1. What was going on in your life that made you want to try [our product]?

  2. Tell me what it was like to order and receive your product.

  3. Did you have any concerns or issues using it?

  4. How did you overcome those issues?

  5. How have things improved for you since you got the product? What’s the biggest benefit you’ve seen?

As this in-depth article from Help Scout explains, the answers will also help you to “set up the ‘before, after, bridge’ that is so effective in persuasion — start with a vivid description of the pain, end with an enviable, headache-free outcome, and make it obvious how the tool was able to bridge the gap.”

Plus, the questions prompt honest answers that will help you improve your product and customer experience.

3. Storytelling in Advertising.

Not all transformation stories have to be strictly true. If you’re creating an ad, it’s enough to make the story believable.

The following 1927 ad by John Caples has been called “quite possibly the most swiped advertisement ever“. The hero of this story is a man on a quest to prove the snickering people wrong and embarrass them by how well he can play the piano. We’re thrown right into the thick of it:

Note how the story transforms into a sales pitch when the hero explains how he learned to play. We may find this example a bit dated today — but it’s still one of the most effective ways you can tell a story that effortlessly supports your offer.

5. Model the Change We Need to See in the World

One reason why John Caples’ ad seems quaint is that we’re fighting much bigger battles today. Yes, there’s a huge market for personal improvement, and it’s important. But the real power of story in the 21st century is in inspiring social change.

Which is why (contrary to what the critics say) we need a lot more superhero movies.

We need to see more flying, costumed creatures in capes protecting the earth.

And more undercover superheroes quietly doing their thing to save species — thus ultimately saving humanity from extinction.

Good stories have the power to inspire us to take action.

But only if they allow us to identify with the hero who’s changing the world. That experience (Aristotle called it “catharsis”) lets us experience and practice the change before we’re getting our hands dirty.

The thing is, different kinds of people have different kinds of self-images. And at the moment, there’s still a huge gap between people denying climate change and climate change believers. 

Summer Harrison’s research found that lack of identification with the cultural community of believers is to blame:

“Attempts to educate the public through the use of scientific facts fails to acknowledge something fundamental about human understanding. Despite its importance, especially given the recent rise of so-called “alternative facts,” access to this knowledge does not account for the role of emotion and identity in the creation of our beliefs.”

Even amongst climate change believers, the attitude-behavior gap is still huge. For example, Renée Shaw Hughner found that 67% of consumers showed a positive attitude towards buying organic food, but only 4% actually bought it.

If “people like us do things like this” — one of Seth Godin’s oft-quoted mantras — then we urgently need to harness stories of diverse eco-warrior heroes.

Only storytelling can fuel the fire of passion inside as many different people as possible. And build their confidence that they can drive the change we need to see before 2030. 

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Why Every Social Entrepreneur Needs a Business Model – And How to Get One

A clearly articulated business model is imperative to the success of any social enterprise and nonprofit. Period. Yet a lot of us – perhaps most of us – don’t have them. 

How I started my business.

As a social entrepreneur myself, I realized this pretty damn quickly in starting my business. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, especially those of us who are service-based, I started my business as a bit of an accident. I had quit a job where I’d been burned with nothing else lined up and wanted to be super deliberate about my next job search. 

I reached out to my network for contract-based projects to pay my bills during the job hunt by saying “you know me – I’ll do whatever for whatever rate you think is fair.” 

My network was primarily in the social impact and education spaces, so folks who responded to my outreach generally fell in that universe. But their asks were all over the place . . . as were their rates.

It didn’t know I was starting a business, but I was. I got a lot of initial traction and a few months in decided I really liked consulting and turned down a couple of job offers. I quickly realized that while I was in the somewhat narrow niche of “social impact strategy consultant,” being everything to everyone at whatever rate was making both me and my potential clients enormously confused.

“Surely,” we all thought, “no one human can be an expert and completely badass at everything under the umbrella of social impact strategy!”

We all were right. 

The antidote is a business model.

A lot of people talk about the curse of mission creep in social impact or the general entrepreneurial curse of being everything to everyone (at every price point too), but they don’t really discuss the best antidote. 

A part of it is saying no and staying in our lanes, but even then things can be blurry. Our lanes need to be super defined, as do the structures that support them. This, altogether, is our business model. 

That’s the antidote – a business model. A defined model is that much more vital in social enterprises and nonprofits that not only need to generate revenue (earned income and/or donations) but also need to drive pressing social change. And a defined model, more than logos or colors or taglines, informs a very attractive brand.

In my business, I knew my core competency or expertise (strategic consulting and advising in social impact) and core assets (my brain, my experience, my network) but not much else. And this is the point at which I meet a lot of my clients. 

Business plan

Here are the first things I did and the first things we do to start articulating business models:

  1. Theory of Change

First, we think through our Theory of Change or Logic Model. Those are jargony terms for articulating why our businesses or orgs exist and how we think our competencies and assets map to that why. The very, very simplified flow I use is mapping resources (including competencies and assets) to activities (or how we spend our and our team’s time) to quantifiable outcomes to the big outcome or transformational change in the world we hope to seek.

  1. Business Model Canvas

A lot of us in the social impact strategy space have our own approach to the business model canvas, but the general headers and categories are universally applicable. Defining our work onto this canvas helps us understand not only how our core operations work (or should work) but the roles and value creation for and from our customers and partners (big tip in social impact: treat your funders and end-users, even if they don’t pay, as customers).

In taking the first stab at these two tools, you’ll probably realize that things are a bit of a mess or confusing. That’s totally normal and partially is the point. 

No successful business or nonprofit on the planet has anything figured out, nor are any of them stagnant. These models are always a little messy and constantly evolving, but clarity in what isn’t a mess and what needs to evolve is what separates the successful enterprises from the confused.

I’ll discuss how we tackle this constant push and pull between clarity and evolution in business models in a later column, but for now, I’ll say this: Articulating what I knew and needed to grow in my own business model allowed me to build a magnetic brand where my rates and prices are nearly 8 times what I was being offered originally and also where I deliver consistent, replicable services and results. I’m a lot saner . . . and more impactful.

And that, my friends, is why a business model is crazy important in social impact. 

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Nasreen Sheikh: From Child Slave to Powerful Social Entrepreneur Helping Women Escape Poverty

Nasreen Sheikh was born silent. With no documents to acknowledge her birth or death, and with poverty stuck in her throat like smoke, she was the perfect victim of the sweatshop industry. You can’t report a crime if you don’t exist, and Nasreen learned from an early age that the more she stifled her voice, the safer she would be.

Freedom has a way of scraping through, and for Nasreen, it came in the form of a stranger who offered her a mere $5 but ultimately gave much more. With his mentorship, she escaped the rag trade empire at 11. She set up an empowerment center called Local Women’s Handicrafts across the sweatshop that stole two years of her childhood. Today, she profits from the very skills it had once exploited as a grand “go to hell” flourish.

She’d not even turned 16 yet. 

Today, she’s training and employing sweated labor survivors and travelling through the USA, giving them a voice. She’s freed over a hundred people thus far.

If fashion brands were the only predators in Nasreen’s story, that would be all of her achievements, but she was born in a country that’s divided into 3,000 castes. To achieve her highest social goals, she would have to create entire economies in forgotten places by empowering forgotten faces. Impossible? No. She’s achieving it one piece of silence at a time.

She appeared in the pages of Forbes magazine before she even knew what Forbes was and became the face of a movement before she had the documents to legitimize her existence. She opened her own NGO before she became an adult, and her business model is one of the most sustainable ways out of poverty around the world. Even so, Nasreen never meant to achieve such impossible things. She just wanted to help one woman, then two, then three.

The Arts and Crafts Movement 

An estimated 250 million children are forced to work in sweatshops for less than $2 a day. Everyone has heard the statistics, but the predation isn’t defined by simple slavery. Just as sweat is intertwined into every sweatshop garment, India’s patriarchal caste system is intertwined into every undocumented slave’s livelihood.

The issue is a complex one. To unravel it, you must travel to the landlocked republic of Nepal, where 37% of children are trapped in forced marriages before they turn 18. You must walk through the mud of Salia Sahi, where rape isn’t raping if you’re married. You must visit Kathua and Dharavi, which imprison children before they learn to write by never issuing the birth certificates they need to obtain passports and access healthcare.

To undo the injustices that victimized Nasreen Sheikh, you must unpick a figurative garment that’s taken thousands of years to weave. It’s an impossible task, but Nasreen eats “impossible” for lunch. She’s created a five-stage system for undocumented sweatshop survivors because you don’t become the face of a global movement by shying away from the opposition.

Unlike lesser NGOs, Nasreen tailors her assistance to the goals and skills of the women she helps. She gives them a safe place to live, then offers them six four months to four-six years of sponsored training. Then, each survivor can work for Nasreen’s Social Business (Local Women’s Handicraft profit crafts store) or get a loan to start a business. If she remains under the Local Women’s Handicrafts banner, she will train other survivors while earning a living salary. The combined NGO/for-profit model is practical and inherently sustainable. No matter how many women it helps, its ability to support increasing numbers is ingrained in its strategy.

 

Nasreen’s Store Growth System

Most NGOs rely on funding to support their growth, and that requires an endless search for new donors. The traditional NGO model has generated hundreds of funding strategies, and none of them begin to address the fact that donations are a finite and time-heavy resource. Nonprofit is a tax status, not a funding strategy, so Local Women’s Handicrafts and the NGO that feeds it are elastic enough to grow indefinitely.

The enterprise receives requests for support every single day, and while it has a waiting list, it’s growth is automatically provided for. Nasreen’s store supports her nonprofit’s growth to encourage further elasticity. She turns the skills she teaches into viable products that can develop further under her brand.

>To breathe life into her NGO, Nasreen had to apply for a loan before she’d turned 14. The loan covered only the barest of bones: a sewing machine and four walls to house it. She built her NGO one brick, one voice, one woman at a time. With that skeleton in place, she gained an education and built a social impact model with incredible scope. She’d never heard the term “iterative development,” and Chang’s Lean Impact strategy had yet to be written, but the approach came naturally to her anyway. With such complex issues to solve, it was the only way forward, but then came to Nepal.

A Flood of Silence

In 2017, Nasreen traveled to the border of India and Nepal after almost 200 of its residents were killed in a flood. The area was undocumented, but most of its men had left to find work in neighboring regions. Women remained behind, unable to escape because they were not allowed to work. Most NGOs were too intimidated to confront this complex society, but Nasreen isn’t most people. Confronting the crisis required her to obtain support from castes who refused to share a room with survivors, let alone donate their resources to them. Her approach required women to confront ingrained patriarchy by daring to become employed. In short, Nasreen had to overcome four core challenges: slavery, India’s patriarchy, the cast system, and the lack of birth certificates.

Craftsmanship has become a key escape from poverty and abuse.

From the dusty streets of Southern Africa to the cluttered slums of Lebanon. Nasreen is only too aware of the gifts it offers. The intimacy and power of her workshop leaked beyond its walls and into the hearts of higher castes and patricentric husbands. The model broke down all four walls it was designed to overcome, so she took it to the flooded Nepalese village. The spouses who’d once been horrified at the idea of their wives working now welcome the support. The higher castes who’d once refused to involve themselves in the under-class have felt the power of Local Women’s Handicrafts and come to support it.

Sheikh attributes the change to the authenticity of her center. “When you put so much love [into something],” she says, “people can feel it because we’re all human. We feel the love. That’s the power of humanity.” It’s not the kind of tactic you’ll find on Wall Street, but when you’re trying to fix humanity, you must work with the stuff of humanity. Even so, today’s consumers are adept at detecting phony branding and greenwashing, so sincerity creates the very bricks and mortar of a successful social impact brand. That’s why Sheikh’s model rose well beyond her expectations.

The good leaders train others to be a leader as well.

She still wasn’t satisfied with her numbers. She trained her workers to fulfill her leadership role, freeing herself up to travel the United States to draw attention to her cause. Her TedX audience gave her the kind of ovation Fortune 200 speakers can only hope for. She spoke at the 360° Fair Trade Conference and the Buy Good, Feel Good Expo. She’s been interviewed by Jay Shetty and The Chicago Tribune. Her tour of America has resonated with audiences because she speaks with sincerity. It has also inspired a new goal: to connect western mentors with under-served women in her community to fuel even more growth.

When she’s working in Nepal, she no longer takes care of the nuts and bolts of daily management. Her role is now a visionary one because you can’t manifest a global success story by focusing on rent payments. Sheikh admits that vision requires courage, but she has more than enough of that to spare. 

“You need a solid pillar and passion in your heart to do this type of work.”

Sheikh is working to clear the air of a polluted industry by bringing the voices of under-served communities to millions of Westerners. She’s achieving it because she’s only too aware of her resources. Has she educated herself? Certainly, but at her core, she’s a resounding example of the change she’s bringing to the world. Most successful change-makers are.

She’s confronting the fact that 35% of all births go undocumented because she, too, was once undocumented. She confronts the fact that over 150 million children are child laborers because she, too, was a part of that statistic. She also confronts the fact that there’s a forced marriage every two seconds because that almost became her fate. And most of all, she confronts these issues because she understands them intimately. You don’t have to build a cause out of your past, but you need to become intimately acquainted with the ones you serve.

“Know yourself. Go deeper. Find out who you truly are. When you find yourself, you will automatically be of service to everyone.”

Nasreen Sheikh was once silent. She wove that silence into every garment she produced in the ten by ten cell she ate, worked, and slept in. Today, she weaves a voice into every garment her fair trade employees create. Then she carries thousands of voices onto a global stage. Millions of people are listening. 

 

8 Key Takeaways We Learn from Nasreen

1) Build sustainability into your social impact model so that you’re not reliant on funding. You can achieve this through a pay-it-forward model, a for-profit support structure, or through permanent stakeholders. 

2) If you’re dealing with complex societal issues, build a minimal viable service, allowing your learning to inform later growth. 

3) Visit the communities you serve and learn all you can about the people your cause hopes to support. 

4) Use business activities to strengthen the capacity of your NGO. Don’t ignore macro issues like economic development in high-poverty regions. 

5) Digital marketing is a core part of any campaign, but don’t ignore traditional approaches to branding. PR isn’t dead. 

6) Know yourself. Build your social impact business around your unique concepts instead of copying others’ and being inauthentic with your causes. 

7) Treat the people you help as individuals. Dictating their freedom isn’t freedom at all. 

8) You can’t save the world until you help one person, so don’t let grand goals intimidate you. Start small. 

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Sustainable Development Goals Provide a Framework: Here’s How You Can Use Them

Many impact entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed when it comes to communicating the positive impact they’re making.

Either they’re unsure exactly what metrics they should be recording, or they don’t feel confident that they’re delivering enough value to avoid accusations of greenwashing.

Without a standard framework for impact measurement, it’s difficult to know what to include and how to share the difference you’re making with your customers, stakeholders, investors and other agencies that may be interested.

That’s why having an impact story can be a powerful tool. You can pull together a compelling picture of why your business exists, what difference you’re making, and what you plan to do going forward to build a business that matters even more.

Thankfully, the UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a framework to make preparing and communicating that story even easier.

Communicating your impact is an essential part of your marketing strategy.

Inc. reports on an international 2017 survey in which more than one in five consumers said they’d “actively choose brands if they made their sustainability credentials clearer on their packaging and in their marketing.”

And according to Trendwatching, “it’s now simply assumed your organization is working to reduce its impact. For example, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation announced in October 2018 that over 250 organizations, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever and H&M, had signed its pledge to eliminate single-use non-recycled plastics by 2025.”

So with consumers actively seeking out evidence of your impact, and 93% of the world’s largest 250 companies now publishing annual CSR reports, there’s never been a more important time to tell your impact story.

Your impact story brings your vision to life.

As a changemaker, you started your business to have a positive impact in the world. To change a social or environmental issue you feel strongly about. 

You’ve got a big vision, and your impact story is a chance to share it.

When it comes to measuring your impact, your vision is your guiding star. You’re not going to create that change overnight, so how will you know if you’re making progress? 

What indicators can you look for, and measure, to be confident that you’re creating a better world?

For example, if your big vision is to create a world where women have equal opportunities to men (in line with achieving Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality), you might be bringing that to life by providing training to the women in your supply chain.

You can measure the impact of this by capturing data about how many women you’ve trained, how many jobs you’ve created, how much more money they can earn as a result of being trained – and collect personal stories from the women themselves about how the training has helped them.

As part of your impact story or annual report, you should include targets for how many women you will train next year, and what impact that will have for them, their families and their communities.

The Sustainable Development Goals are a roadmap for change.

Unless you’re part of a wider movement like Fairtrade or Bcorp, there’s no industry standard or set framework for recording, measuring and communicating your impact. 

There are probably a wide range of credentials you could include – for example, if your products are vegan, your suppliers are paid a living wage, or your supply chain is plastic-free, but it’s essential that you provide evidence to support any claims. Vagueness is one of the warning signs of greenwashing, so the more specific you can be about your impact, the better.

You should also aim to balance out your facts and figures with testimonials, case studies and stories about beneficiaries you’ve helped. This will make your impact feel more real and will help build an emotional connection with customers and stakeholders.

This is where many impact entrepreneurs get overwhelmed – without a guiding template or the budget to hire an impact measurement expert, many struggle to fully convey the power of their impact story.

Thankfully, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are here to help.

In 2015, a global agenda was developed to create a better, more sustainable future for us all, where major global challenges (like inequality, lack of education and climate change) can become a thing of the past. 

The UN Sustainable Development Goals that were agreed cover 17 areas, with 169 targets to be achieved by 2030 – providing an actionable plan for business, governments, communities and even individuals to play a part in creating a better world.

The Global Goals showcase your positive impact on a larger scale.

These goals give us a common language to communicate how we’re going to tackle global problems. The targets set out in this agenda provide a practical roadmap for exactly how the goals will be achieved, and by aligning your impact to the relevant Sustainable Development Goal(s), you can explain the difference you’re making in a global context, in ways that everyone will understand.

When you communicate your impact through the lens of the SDGs, you can show the wider impact you have on a range of different issues.

All the goals are connected, and progress towards one area also helps others too. For example, if we achieve Goal 4: Quality Education, it will help to achieve Goal 1: Zero Poverty, Goal 5: Gender Equality, Goal 8 : Decent Work & Economic Growth and Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities too.

Often impact entrepreneurs who have embedded ethics and sustainability throughout their supply chain and business practices find it difficult to communicate their impact without overwhelming their customers. You have to choose which bits of your story to tell carefully, and plan when to tell these within your customer journey.

By picking one or two SDGs as your core focus, you can showcase the impact you’re having and demonstrate how it’s helping to achieve the other goals too – which gives your impact story more depth without making it too complex.

Impact reporting doesn’t have to be an annual exercise.

Larger corporations often produce an annual CSR report, but as a smaller ethical and sustainable business, you’re in the fortunate position that positive impact is embedded in your DNA. It guides every decision you make, and it’s constantly evolving.

You can use this to your advantage by making your impact story a living, breathing part of your marketing strategy.

There are many different ways you might choose to make an impact, and these will influence how you communicate your impact story. For example, if you operate a ‘buy one give one’ model – made famous by TOMS Shoes – you may wish to update customers after their purchase about who received the item you gave on their behalf and how it helped.

If you make a monthly donation to charity, you might choose to share monthly updates about how much you’ve given so far, how much you’re aiming to give by the end of the year and how the money is being used.

You could include your impact on your website, in your regular newsletter, on your social media, and in your customer service processes. Don’t forget to thank customers for the part they’ve played in helping bring your impact to life!

Customers impressed by your impact will sell your story for you.

Humans love to share stories. Telling your impact story to existing customers will show them you appreciate their support, and will encourage them to spread the word about your business too.

Measuring and communicating your impact isn’t always about data and reports – sometimes it’s simply telling a story in a social media post, or emailing your customers to let them know how they’ve helped you make a difference.

You might feel like you’re not doing “enough” or you’re too small to create the global change needed, but by connecting your impact to the Sustainable Development agenda, you can show the world why your business matters and what you’re doing to “be the change you wish to see”.

Here are some more resources to amplify your impact marketing:

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How to Cut Through The Overwhelm And Start to Enjoy Storytelling

If you’re a living, breathing human being, you know how to tell a story.

That’s because our brains are built to run on stories the way your phone runs on Android or iOS.

Still, a lot of impact entrepreneurs feel out of their depth even just thinking about telling their stories.

And if you’ve ever searched for “storytelling” online, it’s not all that surprising. At the time of writing, Google spits out 137 million search results — many of which contradict one another.

Spend 30 minutes reading blogs online, and you’ll come across information such as this…

When you want to use storytelling in your copywriting you need to pick a genre you’re going to steal from. You want to center your work around a certain mood, a specific emotional response. Are you writing a horror story? A romantic comedy? Or something else? 

… which seems to give completely different advice from this article by Jody Aberdeen:

What people are craving more than anything in 2019 is something, maybe someone, to root for, not rail against. Make sure to show your audiences, through your storytelling, the world that you want to create and invite them to create it with you.

Faced with the decision between picking a genre and painting a positive vision of the future, many social entrepreneurs simply give up.

If that’s you, I want to encourage you to enjoy the power of story. Check out our extensive Brand Story Guide and learn more about how you can use story to build your brand today. 

Read on to find out about the benefits of storytelling — and how to overcome the overwhelm that’s holding you back.

Stories Help Us to Become Better Humans

Not only are stories a source of great joy, they also build deep connections, switch on our empathy and allow us to learn by impacting our brains and our hormones directly.

It’s that authentic connection that makes storytelling so important, “especially in times of widespread crisis of trust in advertising”.

Whether you’re writing blog posts or producing video ads, stories can work wonders for your business and your cause. They will engage people more than factual content, and your audience will think more highly of your work.

Here are 3 areas where you’ll benefit most from the power of stories:

1. Storytelling Will Make Your Blog More Engaging

Did you know that stories can keep your visitors reading for longer? Carolina Stubb from the Stockholm School of Economics found that

using a storytelling message format compared to an informational message format when a blogger reviews a sponsored product increases the blog readers’ viewing time of the sponsored blog post. This has important implications for advertising attention, since increased attention towards an advertisement can result in enhanced brand recall and purchase intentions.

2. Storytelling Will Make Your Facebook Ads More Profitable

Tara West found that 55% of people would consider buying from a new brand in the future if they really loved a story told via Facebook ads:

 

According to her research, the most effective way to advertise on Facebook is by “sequencing ads together in a way that tells a brand story”, rather than “a sustained message focused solely on driving an action”.

It’s worth playing with ads that break up the customer journey into smaller steps based on your story, rather than “going all in” with a single ad that asks the viewer to make a purchase straight away. This approach establishes you in the minds of your audience, and you’re more likely to ask for the sale at the right time in their relationship with you.

3. Storytelling on Your Packaging Will Make People Love Your Product More

Beata Zatwarnicka-Madura and Robert Nowacki summarised the research on the effectiveness of storytelling in advertising. They found that “even a short brand story included on FMCG [Fast-Moving Consumer Goods] packaging had a positive impact on consumers’ affective, attitudinal, product value, and behavioral intention responses to the brand.”

This means you can build stronger customer relationships, long-term loyalty and spontaneous advocacy just by printing your story on the box or wrapper! Plus, you’ll get away with charging a higher price — which is so important for any brand with a fair and sustainable supply chain.

Right, so we know that storytelling is the holy grail of marketing. But how do you get started if you’re feeling stuck?

What’s holding you back from telling your story?

In my work as a copy coach and trainer, I’ve found that most storytelling overwhelm comes from 3 mindsets holding us back:

  1. The search for “the one” story

  2. Reading too many business books

  3. Worrying that storytelling for business is inherently unethical 

In the final part of my article, I want to shed some light on each one to help you free yourself from those unhelpful mindsets.

1. Are You Searching For The One Story That Will Change Everything?

You may be searching in vain.

The thing is, all that content about “telling your story” — in the singular — suggests that there is this ONE magical story that you need to tell, and your business success is basically guaranteed.

Sounds great!

But then you sit down at your desk and you start to take notes, and you discover…

There’s no single story beckoning to be told.

Instead, you’re faced with a multitude of story snippets, glittering like fairy dust. All of them seem worth telling.

The best thing you can do is this:

Catch the one that appeals to you the most right now and start telling that story. Then move on to the next one.

You’re in this for the long haul. There’s always time to tell more stories later; the important thing is to get started.

2. Are You Reading Too Many Business Books?

In recent years, we’ve been inundated with “storytelling-for-business” books.

At first, this seemed like a genius idea — but as more and more books got published, many have gone too far in their search for an easily repeatable recipe.

As a result, many readers start out enthusiastically until they start working on their story and hit a prescriptive wall.

One of my favorite love-hate example of this is Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand. The book is a huge commercial success and a huge commercial enterprise, with associated consulting, online platforms, events, and webinars attached.

However, it’s also one of the most misunderstood books of the last decade. Building a Story Brand is often recommended as a book about storytelling, creativity or even copywriting. Thing is, it’s none of the above. Really, it’s a book about branding, and that’s where it’s strongest. Donald Miller uses stories as metaphors that help businesses understand how branding works. When he ventures into storytelling or copywriting territory, he makes claims that are so absolute that they’re no longer true. (After all, one of the only rules of copywriting that all copywriters can agree on is “always be testing”.)

Storytelling is a courageous creative process. So, read books that help you build your confidence and your creativity muscle — for example, books by artists, novels, short stories, and autobiographies.

And if you decide to use a framework, remember it exists to serve you, not the other way around. Use it as a springboard for your imagination and to bring order to the chaos of too many ideas.

Are You Secretly Worried That Storytelling is a Sneaky Sales Technique? 

There’s a myth that’s causing much trouble in the purpose-driven business world…

The belief that all stories must be used for marketing a product or service:

If you want to advance your social enterprise, you’ll need to transform the stories that mass numbers of people around the planet have about the causes and issues that matter to your business. You’ll need to inspire them on a deeply emotional level to do what’s right, which should also look like buying your products and services.

Why is this a problem?

Most people don’t like stories with ulterior motives. They feel dishonest and smell of snake oil.  Listening to a story like that is almost like ‘sponsored content’ or clumsy product placement.

But what’s even worse, I’ve seen the pressure to sell via story lead to writing blocks in some of the most creative people I know.

And a strong focus on selling a product or service pushes the far more important offer in the background: the idea that’s being sold.

If you’re stuck telling your story, forget about your products and services and focus on the ideas and mindsets you want to foster in people. The best movies, novels and long-form news articles “sell” an idea to us: they create meaning and help us to make sense of the world. Just think of E.T. (friendship is also about letting go), The Lord of the Rings (a fellowship can overcome anything to fight evil) or even Pretty Woman (love crosses social boundaries and class is a function of looks and behaviour).

Whether you’re telling your founder’s story, your impact story or the story of your happiest customers: each is driven by a strong sense of purpose. Make your story about that, and your story has the power to change the world.

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Learn This Proven Leadership Style to Grow Your Startup Impact and Profits

One of the most commonly held assumptions in the world of business is that it is only the most ruthless competitors who will flourish and succeed. During the past century, the models of successful businessmen and businesswomen that we are taught are those who put the bottom line of profit ahead of all other considerations.

Art Barter, the owner and cultural architect of Datron World Communications, offers a living case study of an extremely successful business that has thrived while following values and principles that seemingly contradict the guiding tenets of the globalized economy we live in today.
Who is Art Barter?

Art began his career at Disney where he worked for over eight years while he put himself through school. After working his way up from janitorial duties, he spent time in their finance department. However, Disney Corporation didn’t offer a wealth of opportunities to get ahead, so he moved on to the world of manufacturing.

In the manufacturing business, he discovered his passion for building things and for the world of international business. Datron World Communications, a radio manufacturing company that he worked for and eventually purchased, had 90 percent of their revenue sold in the international marketplace. “They were selling in countries I´ve never heard of,” Art mentions, “and I ended up in 2004 with the opportunity to buy the company.”

At the time Art purchased Datron, he was in what he calls the “power world” where the most important element of the business was trying to increase quarterly profit and keep his shareholders happy. “I spent a lot of my career sacrificing family time,” Art remembers. “I got burned so many times by companies that I said…I´m tired…of having to sacrifice my life for the companies I work for.”

At the same time, during the first six years that Art owned Datron World Communications, he turned a $10 million company into a $200 million dollar company. This obvious success, however, didn’t stem from spending 14 hours a day in the office in an attempt to squeeze every penny of profit from his company. Rather, the success of Datron was born out of his desire to transform a traditional system of leadership into a servant-led organization.

The Servant Leadership Model

When Art originally purchased Datron, it was a doing 10 million dollar of revenue annually and actually losing money. “I told my wife that I wanted to run this company different, not just like any corporation,” Art says, and in 2005 he began the process of changing the culture, mission and purpose of the company.

He began in 2005 by asking his team how much they wanted the company to grow, but Art put a twist on traditional business planning. He told his leadership team: “I´m tired of putting plans together based on a 10% increase in revenue…If we are all about serving customers, let´s make serving customers our number one priority.” In essence, Datron decided that they were going to let the customers decide how fast the company would grow depending on how their customers responded to the service that was offered. “The customers will see our heart and they decide how fast we´re going to grow,” Art explains.

Through different contacts and readings, Art came across the idea of servant leadership. He knew that his job as the head of the company was to inspire his employees and focus on serving those employees over simply increasing profit margins.

In the power model of the business world, leaders are in love with power and profit. In the servant leadership model, however, Art encourages an ethic where “we care about our employees, and what they want to accomplish in life. The big difference for us is that our families come first. We don’t want people to look Datron and say that´s the company that took the people I love most away from us because they demanded them to work 12 hours a day.”

The Process of Defining a Servant Leadership Model

At the beginning, most of the leadership team at Datron thought that their new owner had simply come across a new fad in the world of business leadership and they were failing to understand the deep-reaching changes that Art wanted to implement in the company culture.

The main question that Art had to deal with was: “How do I get people to own this?” Of the 35 leaders in the company, he asked each of them to come out with what they considered to be ten characteristics of a good servant leader. As a team, they then narrowed down those characteristics to a final ten. “We started with their definition,” Art clarifies, “and when I look back this was the moment I transferred ownership to my leadership team. It was their definition, and this empowered them to take ownership of this process.”

Art understood that the people in his company had to take ownership for cultural change to truly occur within the company. The main purpose of the company was to positively transform the lives of others, and the people within the company needed to be able to live out this purpose see it put into action.

Living Out the Servant Leadership Model

It is worth recognizing that Datron World Communications is an extremely successful and profitable company that doesn’t believe in debt. They raise all of their funds organically and are still able to set apart ten per cent of operating profit each quarter destined for a charitable fund decided by the company.

Instead of simply writing a check to some huge non-profit organization, the employees at Datron are the ones who decide where that money goes. “This charitable fund is managed by employees and the employees decide which non-profit gets money,” Art explains. “My employees get to give back to some of the organizations that have helped them….I have the best job in the world because the heart of the employees comes out through this process…and it gives them an opportunity to give back.”

Art believes that since “the employees helped to create the profit, they have every right to say where that money goes.”

At the same time, this unique aspect of the servant leadership model acts as an incentive for people within the company. If the employees work harder to create more profit for the company, the more the company will be able to donate to NGOs. Instead of a selfish incentive, this heart-centred, altruistic motivation has been central to the company´s model of success.

To date, Datron has given away over 15 million dollars of funds to non-profits around the world.

Show Your Heart to Your Customers and Your Employees

Another essential aspect of the servant leadership model is to not be afraid to show your heart to your customers. Art tells the story of a military client in the Middle East who wanted to buy their radios. They needed something easy to use that could be deployed quickly to the servicemen and women. Art asked for a year to develop a product, and when the first one rolled off the production line, he travelled overseas and hand-delivered that first radio to the general on the front line. Today, the company has sold over 40,000 radios in that Middle Eastern country.

“When you serve your customers from your heart, it shows financially as well,” Art believes, “especially if you care about (your customers” from your heart and not your pocketbook.”

Art and the Datron leadership also worked hard to help their employees determine the gifts they have and find ways to put those gifts to work for the company. While many people were put in a job position straight of college that didn’t correspond to their interests, Datron is determined to help their employees discover what they like to do and find a niche for them within the company where they will be happy and productive.

Finally, Datron is also very focused on finding ideal employees that can identify with the mission and purpose that is behind the servant leadership model. “If you are clear on your values and know who you want to serve, you need to hire people for character first and competency second,” Art believes. He advises young entrepreneurs who are looking for employees to look firstly at character, and only secondly at their resume. “If you get the person with the right heart, then you can take their skill level and teach them and help them learn, but it is very difficult to change character,” Art advises.

Business Insights and Strategies to be Learned from Datron World Communications, Inc.

Any business that can grow from 10 million in revenue to 200 million in only six years certainly has a recipe for success that young entrepreneurs would do well to follow and learn from. In the case of Art Barter and Datron World Communications, however, the lessons that can be learned aren’t the typical business “values” of competition and fidelity to the bottom line of profit. The three main lessons from Datron World Communications can be summed up as:

  • Find and follow your own values and principles and be strictly faithful to them,
  • Empower your employees to live out the mission and goals that you have defined for your business, and
  • Don’t be afraid to show your heart to both your employees and your customers.

For young entrepreneurs, Art shares the following important advice: “If you are an entrepreneur just starting your company…know what your purpose is, make sure you have values and the most important thing is, and don’t compromise on your mission, purpose and values. Don´t compromise to get business. Stick to your values and do it the right way.”