Dr. O - Businesses for Social Change: Recent Episodes
Omer Casher
Conversations with mission-driven entrepreneurs building businesses for social change. I am sure they will inspire you as they have inspired me. If you have been impacted by the recent terrible global events and have a burning desire to make a positive social change, you've come to the right place. My own Telehealth project aims to keep patients with chronic conditions out of the hospitals and in their homes.
In this episode, Paul Diamond and I share our experiences in jumping from a corporate career into entrepreneurship. Like myself, people who do this often read many motivational books and write a business plan before they jump.
Without a doubt the biggest mistake that I made was not identifying a big social mission and therefore omitting in the business plan the tasks needed to act on the mission in addition to delivering a product and service. Not surprisingly I pivoted several times which is another way of saying I had to overcome multiple failures.
The goal of this episode is for the early-stage entrepreneurs to learn from my mistakes. To this end, I have drafted a short generic bucket list that has helped me survey the landscape of Dr. O's social mission and organise the tasks in my business plan accordingly:
- Social mission: What is the social change that you want and the biggest single measure of success? This is the "think big" mission that should resonate not only with you but with all your stakeholders.
- Motivation: Is your true motivation aligned to your social mission? This should determine your resiliency and the obstacles you must overcome.
- Value creation: What are the professional skills that you have applied (preferably repeatedly) to create big business value? You will need them to succeed in your social mission.
- Communication: How do you convince all the stakeholders (team, customer cheerleaders, investors) of the value that you will create for society? Your communication skills can be assessed by the stakeholder feedback and buy-in.
- Community: How will you build an engaging online and offline customer-centric community? This should establish the feedback loop for your customers.
- Planning: Once the above questions are answered, what is the business plan? This should include the community building tasks.
- Education: What education is required to deliver the plan? Your education needs to be optimised for risk mitigation as well as business credibility.
- The Black book: What network is needed to help you realise your social mission? Identify your existing relationships and how you will build all the new relationships needed.
Paul and I expand on these during our conversation. To be frank, I had felt that building a community was the top priority at the early stages but I left this discussion having identified a higher priority from the above that will greatly facilitate community building. Can you guess which one it is?
Paul can be reached on LinkedInPeople on Work
When I left the corporate life and entered the entrepreneurial world I discovered one asset to be invaluable (besides the black book discussed in the previous episode with Warwick Hill). That asset is the ability to create value from scratch. My guest Elena Branet, a marketing leader at Vodafone, attributes her successful career to that ability. In her spare time Elena created from scratch the Digital Camp stemming from a desire for her teenage children to develop skills useful for the growing sustainability ecosystem. At the camp, students participate in workshops and create projects under the guidance of mentors. Some of these projects will become startups through residency at the Digital Incubator. Indeed Elena's mission inspired me to volunteer to be a mentor.
Elena Branet
The next Digital Camp
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I met Warwick Hill in 2016 when he was the CEO of Microsoft for Startups and the company that I worked for at the time was a resident. Warwick is a hard core serial entrepreneur who started his first business in his early 20s and has since built and sold a number of companies of increasing complexity which included the effective use of Indian and Chinese resources.
Many startups focus all of their efforts in delivering product/market fit of a single new technology before scaling. By contrast Warwick is delivering social change in sustainable energy by pooling a diversity of technologies and services. He is achieving this through several business activities. He is a partner at Supercapital Partners which invests in proven high growth businesses and stages the payments based on pre-agreed milestones. He is also the CEO of ElectricBoxx, which combines 3 core component: 1. Clean energy infrastructures to power homes and electric vehicles; 2. A marketplace where carbon neutral homes can trade excess energy certificates with ElectricBoxx's corporate customers; 3. Financing through flexible OPEX. Warwick is also a board member of several companies.
If this landscape sounds highly complex, that's because it is. But wait, there is more. Warwick is also pursuing formal leadership education whereby the outputs of an MBA research project feed directly into his business project.
**So where does Warwick find the time to do all of these business activities while focusing on his MBA? Over the years Warwick's has built up a black book of relationships from which he draws upon for team building, financing and finding his early customers. In my opinion such a black book is a prerequisite for solving the next generation of business challenges.
Warwick Hill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/warwickhill/ Supercapital Partners LLP: https://www.supercapitalpartners.com/how-we-do-it/ ElectricBoxx**: https://electricboxx.com
A while back I read a blog by Seth Godin called The point of maximum leverage and found this assertion arresting: "For a job search, fixing your resume isn’t nearly as important as shipping a personal project." I totally agree and from my own experience, carefully presenting some kind of relevant personal project can shift the job interview in the candidates' favour. In this conversation, Paul Diamond and I explore the constituents of a personal project which often involves technology such as podcasting, vlogging, or website creation but can be anything. We examine the value of personal projects for SMEs, especially startups. I particularly enjoyed exploring the idea of spinning out a new project during the job interview.
Paul can be reached on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgdiamond/
People on Work:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdPNXATHGUWUv_FQWdBrcKA
**Jo Spolton's startup, Rumage helps users search second hand items from multiple sites. What distinguishes Rumage from other aggregator sites is it's circular economy model and a compelling mission that engages its stakeholders and customers. The current success of Rumage is attributed in no small measure to Jo's pursuit of complex challenges that engage her creatively, physically and mentally to the point of generating a persistent feeling of flow. To this end, she started out as an artist building statues from scrap cars but decided to park her artistic pursuits to race around the world in a yacht. Twice.
https://rumage.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-spolton-46ab923**
**This is the forth part of the series on the Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on careers. In the previous 3 episodes my guest Paul Diamond and I tried to rationalise the various aspects of career development that have been disrupted by the pandemic. During those conversations, I sometimes brought up my personal experience with politically toxic working environments which prompted my desire for trust and an ethical framework in my professional projects going forward. The following conversation with Paul explores this further. We discuss how leadership from the top can make or break political toxicity. We expand on how political toxicity often manifests during the job interview and the ways in which the job candidate can effectively deal with this. We translate this approach for the entrepreneur, such as myself, when trying to find their early adopters.
This conversation radically changed my relationship with political toxicity and in particular the importance of not running away from it, but instead managing it within my complex projects. If political toxicity at work gets you down, you've come to the right place.
Paul can be reached on LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgdiamond/
People on Work: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdPNXATHGUWUv_FQWdBrcKA
This is the third part of the series on the Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on careers. In the previous episode my guest Paul Diamond and I discussed career reinvention whereby I presented my career journey from my earliest jobs to my current challenges and Paul, acting as career coach, analysed it to identify a logical progression. From this episode on career management, it is clear that each career journey is unique and is governed by different principals and goals which are best managed by the employee rather than the their employer in order to ensure continuity if the employee changes jobs. To this end, a daily journal can be effective in maintaining career reflection and facilitating a job change. We cover the complete job cycle starting with recruitment and ending with leaving a job which is commonplace in this pandemic.
Paul can be reached on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgdiamond/
People on Work: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdPNXATHGUWUv_FQWdBrcKA
In the previous episode my guest Paul Diamond and I discussed the importance of understanding one's own relationship with their work as a prerequisite for career development. Although we spoke mostly in general terms we did introduce a couple of case studies, one of which was my own. For this episode on career reinvention we expand on my case study whereby I presented my entire career journey from my earliest jobs to my current challenges and Paul assumed his professional role as a career management coach. It was the first time that I reflected on my career in this way. While I often felt that my career reinventions were a sign of meandering, Paul managed to tease out a logical progression that justified most of my decisions to the present. We discuss career reinvention covering summer jobs, academic studies, working in a big corporate environment, entrepreneurship and even volunteering.
Paul can be reached on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgdiamond/
His People on Work Project: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdPNXATHGUWUv_FQWdBrcKA
On the previous episode where I interviewed Paul Diamond and Tom Lethaby about their project People on Work, we discussed the impact that the COVID pandemic was having on people's working lives. Indeed the pandemic has forced me to adapt my own working life. Because so many people find themselves in this situation, I wanted to devote the next few episodes to exploring career changes during the pandemic and Paul Diamond from the previous interview kindly agreed to help. Paul is a career coach and has written several books and has blogged on the subject.
In Part 1 of this series we do a deep dive on people's relationships with work from different perspectives including elements of behaviour psychology and toxic relationships with bosses. It forms a basis for the follow-on episodes and has helped me to rationalise my own situation.
Paul can be reached on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgdiamond/
His People on Work project: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdPNXATHGUWUv_FQWdBrcKA
Paul Diamond and Tom Lethaby's project People on Work is a YouTube channel with over 100 brief interviews of individuals pursuing a wide diversity of careers. Each interviewee is asked the same 3 questions that essentially charts their career journey. Paul and Tom's vision is to scale People on Work to literally thousands of interviews to become a useful resource for virtually anyone starting their career or considering a career change. This is achievable based on a growth hacking model where interviewees introduce their network to the platform. Moreover Paul and Tom also envision a flywheel approach where the platform becomes more valuable as the amount of interviews grows. However, because YouTube channels are clearly not designed for this level of scale, a more suitable approach is being considered as we discuss in this podcast.
Jorim Rademaker began his entrepreneurial journey in 2015 by building a next generation digital media platform that harnessed his deep and extensive experience in the creative and design industries. The first product built on this platform was used for multilingual storytelling. That led to the subsequent breakthrough product and the business that Jorim built around it is called Manual.to. By following a network economy model, Manual.to facilitates the rapid collaborative creation of manuals used for employee training and onboarding. Jorim is now scaling Manual.to for rapid product manual creation with the participation of consumers. Underpinning this growth is his strong belief in building a business model into a social mission.