Impact Gathering: Business Models For Impact-Led Business
On August 28th, Impact Boom and Mumma Got Skills hosted the THird panel for Impact Gathering: Business models for impact-led business. Impact Gathering is a 6-part webinar series of Candid Conversations With Women In Impact-Led Business.
Panelists Ingrid Burkett, Angharad Lubbock and Katie Richards joined Carlie Dole to speak about the current issues surrounding being a female with strong impact, with the particular focus on working with business models and trends in the space of social entrepreneurship.
The Panelists
Professor Ingrid Burkett
Professor & Co-Director, The Yunus Centre, Griffith University.
Ingrid Burkett is Professor and Co-Director at The Yunus Centre at Griffith University. She is a social designer, designing processes, products and knowledge that deepen social impact and facilitate social innovation. She is passionate about how we can grow social impact, and particularly about how we can develop more effective ways to foster 'the business of social impact'.
Ingrid has worked in the community sector, government and with the private sector and believes that each of these sectors has a valuable role to play in social innovation. She is a Past President of the International Association for Community Development and was the Inaugural Social Design Fellow at the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW and UWA.
Angharad Lubbock
Head of Programs, White Box Enterprises.
Angharad is Head of Programs at White Box Enterprises, following a wide-ranging career in Australia and Europe encompassing corporate finance and treasury, strategy and corporate development, and purpose-led consulting.
Angharad is also the Founder and CEO of SPRINGBOARD. Angharad has a Bachelor of Business (University of Queensland, Golden Key Honour Society) and a Master of Applied Finance (Kaplan Professional).
Katie Richards
Founder & CEO, Virtual Legal and Law On Earth .
Entrepreneur, Lawyer, Educator, Author and Innovator. Katie is a commercial solicitor passionate about systematisation and efficiency. Katie is the Founder and CEO of Virtual Legal, driving a high-energy team of lawyers to provide standard legal services through an online platform.
Katie has also founded Law On Earth, a social enterprise, self-service legal platform, aiming to make legal services accessible for everybody.
Carlie Dole (Moderator)
Founder, Mumma got skills.
Carlie Dole is the Founder of Mumma Got Skills, a social enterprise working to provide Post Natal support through creative experiences. Carlie is also a specialist Arts Teacher and works at Impact Boom in mentorship and communications.
Carlie has been on a journey since giving birth to her son to understand how women work, juggle, balance, thrive and survive in life and work. She is an advocate for female leadership, impact entrepreneurship and a new way of doing business for good. Impact Gathering is the passionate beginning of a greater project to come.
Highlights from the Panel
(listen to the podcast for full details)
[Carlie Dole] - It's good to be speaking with you all. I would love to start by hearing a little bit more from each of you about your journey to where you are now.
Ingrid, can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
[Ingrid Burkett] - Thank you. I've got a really diverse background, and sometimes it's a little bit difficult to see the threads. I actually started my professional career as a social worker and community development worker, but I also trained as a graphic designer. It's a very unrecommended pathway in life, don't try and do some of those things simultaneously.
But, I think what I've found working in the communities where I was working was that I could see the rest of my life, the term of my natural life, I could be working in those communities and really not even scratch the surface of making a real difference in those communities. That's what initially got me interested in enterprise and business, as a way to explore what the possibilities were, because I saw so much skill and talent in those communities.
People just did not have the opportunity to harness that. I actually went off and did a business degree and started a few businesses myself. I started a few social enterprises and I've been in that space ever since. I think what I'm really interested in now is what are the systems that we need to have in place for those enterprises to really flourish and make a difference to have an impact.
Brilliant, thank you Ingrid.
Angharad, can you tell us a bit more about your background?
[Angharad Lubbock] - Thank you. I grew up in a household with vocationally employed parents and felt very strongly about social justice and serving others less fortunate than ourselves from a young age. I suppose like many people, I didn't have a clear pathway to executing that in conjunction with commercial interests. I studied business but realised very early on that I needed to find a way to apply myself to the world of business, with more of a social intention.
I've worked for the Queensland state public sector financing organisation, otherwise known as the Queensland Treasury Corporation. There I got to understand capital markets, systems of finance and capital flow, and therein laid an opportunity to understand those systems that Ingrid referred to, those big systems that actually often unintentionally or intentionally result in outcomes that are less than supportive of human progress.
I went on a journey to study a Master of Applied Finance. I worked in re-insurance and understood large balance sheets and organisations that control a lot of the capital flows of the world.
I became very interested in the work they do in their foundations because they operate these philanthropic organisations as a way to balance out some of the less positive aspects of their business.
I was particularly interested therefore in the shared value concepts that emerged from the Harvard Business School, which talked about shared value creation, in the sense that we move along from philanthropy and corporate social responsibility to a designed way to create economic and social and economic value together. I became very inspired by that. I worked alongside Danielle Duell from People With Purpose, who I know has also featured in your series. I got to see a person of great intellect and insight work with mature organisations to help them uncover a purpose beyond pure profit, which was really fantastic work to see in action. Now I'm working for myself in conjunction with White Box Enterprises.
I saw an opportunity to work with more organisations that didn't have the resources to bring on board a full team to support them and realise their vision for a purpose beyond profit. I've set up Springboard to try to help smaller organisations realise their vision, and I'm a multidisciplinary general management resource who can come in and help them execute on some of the big rocks that need to be done in order for them to progress to their vision. That's really what I do. I live in Toowoomba; I've got a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. We live on five acres and we'd love to set up a social enterprise on this farm, on this property, and give people a chance to do some fun and interesting stuff in the area of regeneration and permaculture at some point in time. That's another little thing going on.
Angharad, there’s so many exciting things going on.
Katie, can we hear from you a little bit more about where you've come from and where you are today? Because you're in a very exciting place.
[Katie Richards] - I was just saying Carlie before that when I grew up in a tiny little town in North Queensland to a long line of nurses and electricians, my dad was really disappointed when I said I wanted to go to university because I should have just worked at the chemist, that's just my job, I should know my place.
Where I come from is very much still like that, and no one understood when I wanted to go into a field that was very male dominated; law. I just have never been of the mindset that you have to be a certain sex to do anything at all.
You don't have to be any sex or colour or size or whatever… if you want to do it, just go and do it and find a way. Be resourceful about it.
I think I've done pretty much everything the hard way growing up. But fortunately, because I broke the mold in our family, the rest of my young cousins coming through have all started to go and do university or what jobs they wanted to do. Not what grandma, granddad, or their parents told them that they should do. It's actually been really liberating for our family and for people around our family as well, just saying to do whatever your heart is set on.
I think going through law was probably one of the tougher experiences, until I came to start-up land. Just that notion of ‘know your place’ was just very well ingrained say 20 years ago, that probably tells you my age. But I think it's getting a lot better, and women are a lot more supportive of each other in those male dominated fields now. As we're coming into the start-up space, you're seeing a lot more of it now, but you'll still see someone throw a comment out and I think it's not gender related as much anymore. It's just about you have to toughen up to survive these kinds of conditions, but it's not saying don't be a girl, just don't be weak.
You have to find a way to support each other regardless of gender. I try to live a gender-neutral life and run my companies in the same way. But my little firm and the software platform have really taken off now.
We actually have more females that work here than males, just because that's how it's turned out. But it's exciting times at the moment.
Thanks so much, Katie. Can you explain the difference between the two businesses that you have, because the audience might not know?
[Katie Richards] - Virtual Legal, my older seven-and-a-half-year start-up is an online law firm. We used Virtual Legal initially because I wanted to try and deal with the access to justice issue. I grew up in a family that didn't have any money, and we just weren't entitled to have whatever everyone else had. We had no protection; you couldn't ask anyone. Like I said, you just knew your place. I wanted to make sure I could do something about that. But what I've found over time is that even though we still run Virtual Legal, we couldn't access a lot of the people in Australia, who still couldn't even afford the rates that we were charging.
That's where we went down the path of building a platform that completely replicated about 80-90% of what all the lawyers were doing (Law on Earth), and that now actually also runs under Virtual Legal, but it also runs publicly now. The public don't have to come to Virtual Legal to use that self-service system.
You can go there and you can save up to 90% of the time and costs you would have used to use any law firm, and still get the legal insurance that comes with it, same high quality documentation and advice on the platform.
It just needs you to self-service. If you want to do the work yourself and save heaps of money, you'll use self-service. If you want to be lazy, just get us to do it, then we will do it for you in Virtual Legal.
Impact Boom x Yunus Centre Social Enterprise Breakfast Discussion, 2019.
Thank you, Katie.
Ingrid, I'm going to move to you, because I first heard about you when I used the business model canvas adaptation that you have created. I found it really helpful as someone in a small impact-led business, it really just outlined some things for me. Can you please elaborate a bit more about what it is, how it should be used, and what you've seen from that beginning of the adaptation and where it is now.
[Ingrid Burkett] - I guess just a bit of history first. I developed it first when I was working for Foresters Community Finance, which was Australia's first community development finance institution, and we were trying to get off the ground loan funds that focus specifically on social enterprises. I was seeing a lot of social entrepreneurs and impact enterprises coming in looking for capital, and the first thing we'd do is say, “do you have a business plan?” And they'd say, "oh yes, I have a business plan. Here it is. It's been sitting on my shelf for a few years. I didn't actually write it. I got a consultant who was given to me pro bono to write it."
My question would then be, "give me an idea of what your business model is. What's the impact that you're trying to create, and what's the business model that's going to underpin that?"
What I've found was very few people could actually tell that story. That made me think what we need to do is to have a tool that we can use to help people tell that story really effectively, but not just tell the story, live the story.
I found the business model canvas, which was developed by someone in their PhD, Alexander Osterwalder. I went and chatted to Alex and said, "what do you think about social enterprise? Do they fit into your business model?" He said, "I don't know. I think that might have a separate thing." As I explored that and tested it with social entrepreneurs, I realised that if we keep thinking of ourselves as special, then what we'll end up with is really niche opportunities and not the ability to be able to change the world.
Personally, I'm interested in changing the world of any one person, and there's all these fantastic women here on this call who are also on this journey. I don't want a niche solution; I want to be able to have social enterprises sit alongside mainstream enterprises. What we did with the business model canvas is have the ability to tell within that canvas (which is a one page summary of what your business model is), what's the intersection, the story of the intersection between the commercial and your impact on the same canvas?
If you can tell me that story, I can understand your business, and it makes it much easier for me as someone who's interested in investment to be able to invest in that.
Before we had the business model canvas, I could spend six hours trying to unpick someone's financial statements in order to be able to just make a decision about if I could lend to you because I couldn't get the intersection between the impact and the commerce. Now we've tested it pretty extensively. We've got a lot more people who are able to tell that story, and we're utilising it to explore how to get mainstream finance.
Yunus Centre Co-Directors Prof Ingrid Burkett and Alex Hannant.
That's really exciting, and that's totally what it's about right? It's that intersection and getting to that and being able to explain it. Katie and Angharad, did you have anything to add, have you used this canvas in your travels so far?
[Angharad Lubbock] - Not yet, but I'm going to! I really love that, particularly at an investment stage. But to be telling that story to yourself and anyone who's in your ecosystem from the very beginning sets you up for a very consistent story line, and you get to hear it and test it and come back to it. Then you also get to test the market relevance of it over time.
Great. Katie, I'm going to come to you now. I spoke to you a little while ago about when you began your business, and you told me that you actually ignored your gender in those first few years. You just said that was how you had to get along. We've spoken about it a little bit, but I'm interested in why you felt like you needed to do that, but then how you use that to completely change and create the business that you have now?
[Katie Richards] - For those that don't know really how legal works, it's improving a lot, but it always has been quite male dominated in that there's mostly male partners, and the female roles are a lower level. It's a lot harder for the females to get into partnership, not because men are smarter or women don't work as hard, but it's just an uncomfortable thing for a lot of the older male traditional partners that actually have to work beside them.
[This is because] the idea is that the female will just leave and go and have children and it'll mess up the business model. That's sort of how they used to definitely think about it. When I was coming through, I just focused on how I'm going to be at the top of my game, regardless of what gender I am, and if they don't like it, then I'll start my own firm.
That's what I did, I did start my own firm. But when I started that, I took a different approach of ‘we don't have titles here’. No one has titles.
Obviously, there's people that are lawyers and not lawyers, that's important because insurance attaches to what we do, so they're different job types. But I'm not the 'senior' partner. Everyone is in the same boat; we all get charged at the same levels.
Then I thought maybe we can take that one step further and see what are those roles that we would traditionally have had the females do, and it just seemed to be the roles that are of lower value. We just found ways to completely automate all of those roles where possible. [We decided] we will make the robots do them if they're low value, because they don't really need to be done by a female or a male.
One of the roles that the guys are deemed to have been better at is usually big decision making and negotiating in big group sessions or mediations. We just retrained anyone that wanted the training in our firm, asking, "what do you want to do? This is the training that you need, let's get it done.” We do that every quarter in my business, in both of my businesses. Instead of having a conversation around KPIs about how are you performing, it's about how are you performing, how are you feeling and where would you like to go? We have that conversation every three months so that we can make sure as people change their lifestyles and their mindset around what they want, we just adjust.
I just feel as though someone's going to give you say 40 plus hours a week, the least we can do is have policies that are just not [just saying], “this is how we deal with things.”
Katie Richards and the 2020 Impact Boom Elevate+ Accelerator cohort, pre-COVID-19.
It's more now, “here's the policy that we have for you, because you're an individual.”
We've just found different ways to actually treat humans as humans and individuals, giving them the skills that they don't have. Not saying you can't do it because you don't have what it takes, help them get to where they want to go. If they get there and it didn't turn out to be what they wanted, then help them to work out where they want to go next and just try to help them along the way.
If we've got someone who prefers to do property more than commercial work, we just go find someone to do the commercial stuff so that she can do what she loves, and we'll find someone else that loves the other side of things.
I think it's just about looking at the individual, and not basing it on any kind of gender. if someone doesn't like doing jobs a specific way, let's try to take those jobs away and find another way to do them.
Disrupting the model, I feel like that's what you're about Katie. I love that.
Ingrid and Angharad, do you have any stories about disruption of the business model itself, what you've seen or what you've been a part of so far?
[Angharad Lubbock] - I can totally identify with being the only female in the room as a credit analyst, sitting in the annual meetings with some of the major rated banks in Australia. I think I asked a question to my boss once about the influence on credit ratings back in probably 2007, when everything was about to crash.
I asked ‘what influence does the operating environment have on the inherent creditworthiness of an organisation?’ If anyone loves credit, they'd get excited by that. Probably not in this room, but Ingrid you're nodding! He said, “who's asking?” I said, “I'm asking.” It occurred to me that my boss expected me to simply administer the existing thinking, not expand on it, which was the opposite of my reason for taking the job. I think those are the defining moments where, without realising it, you are simply leading with impact and brining about the change that is needed. Sure enough, 2 years later, the global credit rating methodology changed to reflect contextual factors and my curiosity was validated.
The thinking needs to change. There needs to be action around that thinking, it needs to be lived and sustained, and you need to attract the right people.
Your model Katie no doubt attracts a certain type of client that is not interested in title. Then you start to get that self-sustaining model where you don't disappoint your customers because they weren't there for the titles to start with. Once you've been in that long enough, you've then got that self-sufficiency, which is exciting.
[Ingrid Burkett]- I think it's also true that it's not an accident that there are so many women who are disruptors, and sometimes I think that we've got a fairly narrow view of what an entrepreneur is. I see a lot of women who are intrapreneurs who are making really disruptive changes inside organisations and inside systems. That's what it's all about, disrupting and challenging what has been assumed to be the norm or just the way that we do it. That's the way it's always happened. If you've got any kind of entrepreneurial streak, you'll be a disruptor and it could be in a really small way, or it could be in a massive way like Katie's done.
[Katie Richards] - We have to manage it a little bit too though, because we attract obviously other entrepreneurially minded people, and we all have shiny object syndrome. Let's be honest, we do, it's like a mental illness. We have to make sure we try to keep each other on track. Now I can get off track, and I hope my co-worker will get me back on track and then she'll come up with an idea. It's really good, we always foster that. But then we say, "let's as a team agree, where do we want to go?" Then we just nut that out, otherwise. the entrepreneurial mindset can be quite disruptive to business too. You have to accommodate it.
[Ingrid Burkett] - I think that's so true, and a really good call out Katie. We are attracted to shiny things, but I think there's lots of roles to play. We often focus on the entrepreneur or the intrapreneur, but it's a team.
This is a team effort; we're not going to change the world on our own.
Team is so key here. Even starting something myself, I constantly questioned, "do I need to be the one that started this? Is this about my ego or is this about the impact that I'm having?" I think that's a really valid question for a lot of people to keep coming back to, “am I the best person for this, or can I support someone else who's doing similar work?” I think that's when we get this tremendous change that we're looking for. Thank you, that was super insightful.
Angharad, we're going to move to you because you work with finding business capital for profit, for purpose and social enterprises led by both men and women. I'm interested to know about the differences that you've noticed in your work so far?
[Angharad] - I think as I reflect on the question, there are a lot of things that are common. It doesn't matter what gender you are or where you see yourself on the gender spectrum. In fact, I think deeply intentional businesses are fundamentally tied to a certain temperament and a way of seeing the world.
I think it's a mindset that's brought in by the intentionality that the business is designed to do something that fundamentally is worthy of doing beyond short-term motivations.
I think what comes with that is essentially a belief that your financial resources particularly, are simply that. They are not an end in themselves, but simply a resource that you use to fuel your vision and your ambition and the actions. The other thing that I noticed is that businesses that are impact-driven are inherently more likely to be complex in the sense that they are constantly trying to balance and be ambidextrous in addressing long-term priorities, respond to short term challenges, and changes in operating context.
That's something that really influences capital raising, and I think that goes back to the intersection of commercial and impact, you really have to have in your mind and in the minds of your people a very strong and clear narrative that explains it in ways that people from different backgrounds can understand and interact with.
I think what women do really well is spend the time, do the thinking and invite other people into that. I think women have a tendency to have very high expectations of themselves, and perhaps underestimate their abilities in general.
That's maybe not true for everybody, but it's certainly something I struggle with. I think we are also very prone to invite contributions, but I think that therein lies the inherent value of the feminine, I won't say female, but the feminine. This is because I think men are just as capable of having that capacity to invite, engage, respond and to take people on that journey. When it comes to raising capital, that story is vital, and having the confidence to respond to questions and also to be very firm in that long-term outcome.
I think James Bartle from Outland Denim is a great example of someone who embodies a commitment to a long-term goal and is not prepared to compromise for the sake of short-term concerns or challenges. There are many examples, but that's a very recent one that I've encountered in the marketplace. Having gone through capital raising and having cheques written and put on the table and all sorts of pressures applied in the face of short-term challenges in cash in bank, was firm, really firm.
The other thing I wanted to mention that I've noticed is that often the products and services that fit feminine impact business models have to actually lead the market, like Katie described. You actually have to see the future differently.
You have to see a future that doesn't exist today, and design for that future and create the things that you think will get us to that future. That takes an enormous amount of design thinking and anticipation of an objection handling. You become everybody.
You become your future customer, your future banker, and your future board director. I think women are really good, and people with a feminine skill set are really good at playing different roles because we do it day in, day out.
I couldn't agree more about all the roles that we play.
Katie and Ingrid, do you have anything to add to that?
[Ingrid Burkett] - I think one of the things that really stood out for me, and you mentioned it just before we came on air. I'll have to repeat Angharad, you were talking about how this is a moment for that multitasking. I think so many of us have experienced that multitasking on speed in this moment.
Also, what I think is really interesting is that sort of shift of focus into much more female dominant areas like care, and that we've had this sort of swing over the COVID period, into the exploration of what those more female dominated areas could look like. I wonder whether that is an opportunity for us who are interested in impact-led enterprises to really open up this conversation and say that there are so many opportunities for these really innovative business models to stand out in designing the future of care models.
[Katie Richards] – One of the things I've noticed as well is, I think we're getting a little bit better as social entrepreneurs and females as well at cutting ourselves a bit of slack and not expecting that you have to have things perfect from day one.
One of my massive downfalls in the first few years of business was I just thought I had to do everything, that I had to work a hundred hours a week.
There weren't as many female businesses at that time, and so you felt like you had to keep up all the time and have these incredible businesses that are 10 years old. But you only pull things together over 10 years, you have to start somewhere. I think we're becoming more supportive of each other, not pulling each other down if things aren't quite right. I think that's sort of been a good development that we're starting to see as well.
It’s about letting go isn’t it? What is your important goal? What is that impact that you want to make? That’s your overarching goal. What are the other things that we can just relax a little bit on?
We can finish on some insight from all of you. What can we do in this sector now to help females in particular, to build strong foundational businesses that support their impact? What are you seeing? You’re studying, you’re looking at trends we’re in this new kind of era of working. What’s this future look like and how can we best support each other going forward? Who would like to go first, Angharad?
[Angharad Lubbock] - I really love the discipline of how does this help us create impact in every meeting and every conversation. I think that's really what Katie talked about earlier in staying on track, having our purpose and our impact model as central to every conversation. Not finishing a conversation but talking about how this relates to our impact and how can we make sure that's captured and who's responsible.
I like the distinction of accountability and authority as well. The decision makers aren't the ones responsible for making sure things happen. Katie, you've got people who know that you can trust to tell you if things aren't on track so that you don't have to be in every single thing.
Building that team that is sharing the accountability for the impact, I think responds really well to the female way of leading impact business.
[Ingrid Burkett] - I really liked that Angharad, I think that's great. It makes me think too about how we share the stage with teams, and that ecosystem that's needed in order to make these businesses happen.
One of the things I'm hoping to explore is not just putting women forward but putting groups of women forward. It's not just a hero entrepreneur or intrapreneur, it's a whole group of people who are working with each other to create future businesses.
I think that's what's going to fundamentally shift the business narrative that happens about the strong man or the hero who saves the world. It's teams of people.
[Katie Richards] - I think one of the things is we also need to support each other with moving forward. They say that guys will apply for something or go for something when they have 10-20% of the skills required, and females will wait to collect 80% of what they think they need, or the resources to go ahead and do that.
What I've been noticing especially from other female businesses around us is women are just taking a chance, taking a bit more of a punt just to see if they can actually do it. I think that's one of the things that we need to foster in the mindset of the younger females in groups and teams coming through.
It doesn't matter if you've only got 20% of what you need right now, let's sit down, let's look at how you can be resourceful, and dig deeper. You may actually have 10 times more skills than you realise, you just haven't accessed them before, you haven't drawn on them. You don't know that's what you're capable of. That's not just for females, that's for everyone. Teaching people just to have more confidence, rather than hiding behind social media profiles all the time. Actually dig into yourself and see what you could do, just give it a go. I think that's really important.
Only last night I was talking about this fact that when we work on ourselves first, and really understand the games we play out in our own selves, that sabotage what we do and sabotage other people, then, and only then, can you go on and have true outstanding impact. This is because you've recognised that you might be in the way of what you're trying to do.
Thank you so much for being part of this panel.
Register for the next Impact Gathering on August 28th, 12:30pm AEST: Funding and Growing Your Impact Business.
Books and Resources Recommended by panelists
From Angharad:
The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek
From Ingrid:
Using the Business Model Canvas for Social Enterprise Design, Ingrid Burkett
