How do we support social entrepreneurs to succeed? ... So often business support and investment readiness work has been
THE BIG VENTURE CHALLENGE: A PEOPLE-CENTRED APPROACH TO SCALING SOCIAL VENTURES Introduction
The Big Venture Challenge’s approach to scaling social ventures is not a scientific process that can be boiled down to deliverables or blue prints and carried out in exactly the same way everywhere. It is a learning journey involving complex networks of relationships, trust, confidence and commitment; it can be a battle against the odds, a psychological challenge and much, much more. At UnLtd, we have been supporting social entrepreneurs for ten years to create social change and have a positive impact on the world around them. We have learned that helping social entrepreneurs to succeed is an equally human, messy and unpredictable process. We put people at the heart of everything we do because we believe that despite their individual idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, people are the single most important source of genuine change. How do we support social entrepreneurs to succeed? Social entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. They carry with them a whole range of different personalities, backgrounds and relationships, skills, fears and blind spots. There is no one-size-fits-all support programme on earth that can possibly suit them. So often business support and investment readiness work has been done by formula. Has the business start-up got the right legal structures? Is their revenue model robust? Is their business plan scalable? It isn’t that these questions are unimportant – they are - but the reality is different from the tick-box process that the traditional business support tends to set out. UnLtd takes a distinctive and very flexible, ‘people centred’ approach to support by employing individuals who we put on the frontline. We give our frontline staff the freedom and autonomy to find exceptional social entrepreneurs and figure out the best way to support them. UnLtd’s ‘People-‐Centred’ Principles of Support Wherever possible we encourage our frontline staff to show very similar characteristics to those we look for in entrepreneurs – flexibility, honesty, ambition, reliability, the ability to listen and the ability to build relationships. We don’t necessarily look for our staff to be experts in any given field. Their role is to prompt, to probe, to ask the stupid questions – and to be curious. 1.
Listening – we believe that to really understand someone else’s perspective you need empathy, and the only way to get there is by listening, being genuinely curious and keeping quiet. We try not to position ourselves as ‘business advisors’ who prescribe solutions because this would restrict us to the limits of own knowledge. Instead, we operate as highly skilled listeners, using our experience to understand, ask questions and give social entrepreneurs the time and space to think.
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Building trust – trust is absolutely vital when it comes to supporting social entrepreneurs and it can often lead to breakthrough moments. It takes time, patience, honesty, resilience and openness on the part of our staff. When it works, it can lead to significant shifts in progress for the entrepreneur. If we can get to a point where our clients tell us what is really going on, what they are really worried about or what they are really stuck with, then we can focus in on helping them to decide the right action to take which often results in a step change. Once we get to this level of trust and rapport we find that progress tends to happen more quickly.
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Acting as connectors – we don’t fix problems; we help social entrepreneurs to develop their own solutions by connecting them to a much wider world of contacts. We help them tap into our network of specialists, mentors, partners and other entrepreneurs who can provide experience and inspiration. We don’t want them to be dependent on us. We help them build and sustain their own networks so they have relationships with the right contacts to help them for each stage of their journey.
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Keeping pace - social entrepreneurs are constantly moving, learning, testing, progressing and our staff need to keep up with them by providing support in a flexible, human, entrepreneurial way. This might mean taking a call in the evening to let an entrepreneur offload. It might mean taking them out for a drink to get under the skin of a problem, or going along to an early morning breakfast meeting with an investor. UnLtd staff are not governed by targets or output numbers. We go at the speed of the entrepreneur. It means we try as much as possible to not let administrative processes get in the way. Our staff know that working imaginatively with people who can make a difference is exciting in a way that watching over processes is not. This also means keeping pace with the scale of ambition of the entrepreneur. We want to match the entrepreneur’s ambition, every step of the journey. We believe there is no limit to what these people can achieve, if that’s what they want.
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Shared learning – our staff are learning all the time, every day. We make plenty of mistakes, but that is inevitable and provides the richest source of learning. Supporting social entrepreneurs effectively is an unpredictable human experience – not one that can be done by formula or through standard one-size-fits-all training workshops. So we have to build our practice through experience and reflection, by admitting mistakes and pinpointing what works. This is how we developed our basic principles of support and we will continue to build on these in the future to strengthen our practice.
Taken together, the people-centred approach amounts to something that goes beyond simple flexibility. The objective is very specific – it is to give the social entrepreneurs we are supporting the confidence, commitment and contacts to make things happen. If they have all those three, then they can take on the world. Above all, we aim to treat everybody as an individual, with separate and different issues and challenges.
