Shifting Your Business Into Social Enterprise

An enterprise will be called a success if it can generate money, money, and money.

But now that the world moving so fast into a different level, an enterprise cannot only doing business as its core value. A social movement can be done by an enterprise to be more responsive to society. An enterprise who take care of their inner society will be more respected by its stakeholder because they have a sense of belonging to its surrounding environment.

But now how do they shift the company’s direction into more social? A social enterprise is an enterprise where at least 50% of the profits are invested back into a charitable cause. The aim is to have a social mission and creates social impact [1].

Before we continue to talk about the technical of how to shift your business model, we need to know first what is your values and social mission transforming your conventional business into a social enterprise. Social mission is a big driven to social enterprise’s activity. The founder of social enterprise often have social issues to solve. Forming strategic social issues can take several times using design thinking, which we can discuss in another article. But I will give you several hacks to form your social vision is by knowing about Social Development Goals (SDGs)

SDGs are the blueprint of UN goals to make a better and more sustainable future for all. It addresses the global challenges including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental, peace, and justice which have to achieve in 2030. By knowing SDGs you can shift your goal, in general, align with the SDGs. These 17 problems happen in every country in the world and now it’s your enterprise duty help to solve these social problems.

After you know your social mission in general, you can continue to search who will have an impact on your enterprise’s social activity. After you know who is the subject of your social mission, you need to know what kind of impact you want to give to them. There are several impacts on a social enterprise that affect people (social), planet (environment), and economic (financial). Let’s talk about it more later on in another article.

Why these are important? Because when you know the subject and impact of your social activities, it will be easier for your company to shift your business model from conventional to social business. It may look easy above but knowing that business isn’t built by one person only, sometimes it will make a contradiction between founders.

Better have an early argument about your future company than having a late argument where you already include your stakeholders in your execution.

Reference:

[1] Agarwal, P. 2018. How To Create A Business That Does Good With A Social Enterprise. Forbes Online Article.