Jeff Church explores whether products can solve social problems, examining how social enterprises balance business success with social causes. He discusses different models for creating impact through commerce rather than charity alone.
Can these products actually help save the world? Can something as basic as a bottle of Newman's Own salad dressing actually bring joy to a child with a life threatening disease? Can a bottle of water sold here in the United States actually help bring clean water to someone in the developing world? Can a pair of TOMS shoes purchased at Nordstrom's actually put shoes on someone else's feet in South America? And can something as basic as a ream of office paper, not much more basic than that, right? Can that actually provide a meal for a family of five for a week? And the answer is yes, they can. And they're doing it through a really interesting model called social entrepreneurship. And I want to talk a little bit about what this model is. There's tremendous overlap between commercial entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. They're very difficult to pull apart. I do feel like that you can pull them a little bit apart by the mission of the business. Is the mission of the business to really fulfill a society, challenge a societal solution, or is the mission of the business to create value and economic return and that kind of stuff for shareholders? And just as I say that, there's a bunch of counters that I would say against it, but they're very similar in terms of the implementation of them. And I feel like oftentimes social entrepreneurs screw up because they look at their business as nine parts cause, one part business, when in fact in the beginning it's got to be nine parts business, one part cause, because if the business doesn't stay around long enough because it can't make it, you can't do anything about the cause. So in the early days of a social entrepreneurship, a social enterprise, it's all about making the business successful so that you can deliver whatever kind of give back model you've got. But on the left, we've got the traditional for profit businesses and they give back tremendous amounts. I'm a large, significant free market, pro capitalism believer and I believe these businesses give back tremendous amounts of money. But in the end, ideally and in the end legally, they're really focused on creating economic return for their shareholders and they can't be entirely focused on this other model. On the right side, you've got the nonprofits, and to be honest, they focus most of their time on fundraising and the other portion of their time they spend on development. So they don't really have the time to create true businesses. And oftentimes the NGOs aren't necessarily the best business people in the world. So in the middle here in the bottom, you've got this hybrid model of social entrepreneurship, social enterprises. And the beauty of this is they can be anything. They can be for profit businesses that are donating, in our case, 100% of its profits, or they can be for profit businesses that are donating 2%, or they can be donating a pair of shoes for every pair of shoes they sell. They can be very different models. There's no right or wrong in that, in my mind anyway. And on the other hand, you can have non profits that create sister companies, and those sister companies are for profit entities that maybe are helping lower their admin rate so they can attract more dollars. And I think it's a really exciting model because of. The.
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