Monica Nowaczyk and Micheal McKay On Utilising E-Commerce To Strengthen Social Enterprises

Beebee+Bongo was spun out of Cambodia Knits, a passion project created by Monika Nowaczyk, to help disadvantaged women in Cambodia have a fair, flexible income.

Monika has 20+ years professional experience in curriculum development, teacher training, project management, and social enterprise. As an avid knitter, she saw the potential for creating home-based employment. While she is involved in virtually every aspect of the business, Monika has the pulse of the customer and leads every aspect of product development, from the quality and source of materials to the marketability potential.

Micheal is a big-picture thinker with 17 years professional experience ranging from marketing, entrepreneurship, human-centered design, and innovation. After working closely with many high-profile INGOs in Asia and Africa he saw gaps in the international development model, and believes that its purpose-driven, for-profit companies that can, and will, change the world for the better.

Monica and Micheal discuss how creating eco-friendly products can establish a competitive advantage for businesses, and the social benefits generated through employing diverse individuals from disadvantaged communities.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you both please share a bit about your background and what led to your interest and work in social enterprise?

[Monica Nowaczyk] - I have been working in international development for many years. I then came back to Cambodia in the early 2000’s to work in the educational sector. While I loved the work that I was doing and I was very passionate about helping the Cambodian education system develop, I did recognise that what was missing for a lot of the people that we worked for was a regular income (or an income of any kind). In some villages where we were working, an NGO was providing educational services, but another NGO in a different village was providing health services.

Therefore, if you were in the village opposite to what you needed, you were out of luck, and this takes a lot of agency away from people to be able to access the services that they need.

I also growing up was never very interested in business. I expected to go into academia and discovered social enterprise by chance. I realised you can help people and do good for this planet through a more sustainable model than the NGO model. You can run a for-profit business that can sustain itself and then provide a social impact.

[Micheal McKay] - My first career was actually in commercial advertising, so selling things to people that they probably didn't need with money that they might not of had! It's a fun career, but the most enjoyable projects were always for non-profits. Those were always the projects that were really fun, so fast forward a few years, I got to work in Cambodia for a social innovation company where we were working with NGOs on different marketing for good causes. We were working with social enterprises or NGOs to improve their marketing communications as well as their behaviour change interventions. This meant working with rural communities and minority populations to improve their products and services that are targeted at the rural and poor. One of the things that was just really evident was there were so many good intentions by all these organisations and people.

However, if the project ran out of money or the project finished, all you may have had time to do was test one new product, and then say, "okay that's all our budget was for.” Then the communities were out of luck. Now they've gotten excited about a potential product for testing or a potential service that they might be interested in, but there was no more funding to take it to the next level, or there was never going to be any funding and it was always just about finding product viability. In this area of the world, different organisations were popping up that were considered social enterprises, where people were doing what Monica was doing. They were thinking about how do I give employment to people? How do I create something that's more sustainable? For me, business is something that I am passionate about. I was an entrepreneur before, and I've been working on my MBA and have a really strong belief that for-profit, purpose driven companies can make the big difference, because profit is a real driver for long-term sustainability. If you can have people who have that mentality and who can channel that force for good, I think that's really powerful. Social enterprise is definitely a passion of mine.

You are the co-founders of the eco-friendly children's toy maker Beebee+Bongo. Can you explain the organisations’ goal and how you guys came to found this amazing organisation?

[Monica Nowaczyk] - We aim to be more than a toy company; we aim to create connections through play and be a company that lives by its values. We try to bring the best of everything together with the company and putting all of our activities before profit. Of course, profit is very important for sustainability and existence, but also doing things by our values sometimes means making decisions that may be counter to profiting. We really focus on being as eco-friendly as we can in all the materials that we source and the way that we do our production, all the way through to how we do packaging.

We're not perfect, but we strive in all our decisions and from day to day and month to month to always improve and make the most eco-friendly children's toys possible.

Our main goal is to support Cambodia Knits, which is the production partner on the ground in Cambodia. Realising in 2020 that our production partner needed to scale and grow, we had a lot of opportunities for scaling growth and to create more employment and impact on the ground here in Cambodia. But it needed help to reach global markets through a much stronger brand. This is how Beebee+Bongo was born, between the two of us having lots of conversations about what was important and where we could see this brand and the business going.

[Micheal McKay] - I also want to give credit to the real founder of the store. I think she's downplaying it a little bit, but Monica's been working on this since 2009. It started as a very small group of women in her living room with no intention necessarily of their products becoming a business. Monica was just really wanting to help these women have flexible income for their families. It grew over the years to be a fairly sustainable and large organisation that was sustaining one hundred families at one point. Within Cambodia, Cambodia Knits was selling lots of great products to tourists who would visit, and it became locally a fairly well-known brand. COVID-19 however was a devastating experience for businesses and social enterprises here in Cambodia, when 98% of tourists left Cambodia. Cambodia Knits, which had been supporting all these communities for so long was really threatened and unsure of how to keep supporting these families when the customers had mostly left the country. The challenge became what do you do as an entrepreneur? That's when Monica and I got together. It was at this pivotal point she'd reached out to her community saying, "who can help and what's the next step for this project?" That global branding became the next step. If we couldn't count on people coming to Cambodia, then we had to try to take our products to the world.

Because the product had already been so successful with tourists, we already knew that people love the product, so now it was just a matter of looking for new sales opportunities, channels and a business model essentially.

It's been an adventure going into the e-commerce space and then also trying to compete globally. Right now, we're not just competing within the Cambodian tourist market, now we're up against other products for people who've never been to Cambodia. It's definitely been a journey, but there was a lot of routes that made even the concept of Beebee+Bongo possible, which if there hadn't been so much work already done with Cambodia Knits it would have been a different story.

Monica, as the founder and managing director of Cambodia Knits, how is it empowering marginalised communities within Cambodia to escape poverty amongst other issues?

[Monica Nowaczyk] - This is the core of what we do and why we do what we do. I have a slightly difficult relationship with the word 'empowering' or to empower others, and we try not to use it. I feel in saying that we empower the women and the communities that we work with it is somewhat taking away their strength and agency, putting the focus on ourselves and implying we need to be there to do the empowering and empower people.

They don't really need to be empowered, they don't need to be given strength. The women that we work with always amaze me in their resilience, strength and capacity to keep going.

I think what they need more from us is fair conditions and opportunities, which is what we try to provide so that they can challenge the poverty and conditions they’re subject to. Rather than saying we empower them, we prefer to say we create an empowering situation for them, namely access to fairly paid and flexible work. Many of the women we work with have never had a job before. They've never been able to access paid employment formally or informally ever before, which is one of the key challenges here to Cambodia's growth and future development. For many years, generations in fact, women were limited in the amount of education they had access to. Many of them have only finished up to a grade two or three education, a few of the people that we work with in their thirties and fifties can't read or write. We actually have to create all of our patterns in pictorial form so they can engage in the work. This is the way we help or support them to overcome the constraints they have faced throughout their lives, and then to be able to have a regular income through us. We try to say what we're doing is create flexible economic opportunities for them, and they empower themselves to be able to do that work on their own schedule. Especially because women have a lot of workloads in the household and a lot of responsibilities which makes it very difficult for them, even if they have an opportunity, to join formal income streams. We really try to work within the constraints, and we can see that with the income, communities, families and women that we work with, they are able to invest this back into their families, children and futures.

Micheal, how do you believe entrepreneurs can best inspire innovation and progress in their organisations?

[Micheal McKay] - Innovation is something that I feel so many organisations love the idea of, but to action is quite hard. I think it's because we generally as people have a tendency to adopt a perfectionist mindset where we want things to be perfect before we put them out in the world. Due to this, the concept of the lean start-up was revolutionary for a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, and it's becoming more and more revolutionary in the developing space and the concept is largely to fail fast and fail cheap. Try out your ideas at the very basic early level and find out what's the cheapest version of this idea that you could put out there and test with users. Whether it's a brochure or a product, can you make it out of paper and just get it in front of a few people and say, "what do you think about this?" Don't spend time and money on something that's not going to work.

That can be true for whether you're doing a product or a service, it doesn't have to be anything complicated, you can test things with a sign-up form or your colleagues around you, it can be just enough to get the idea across.

Definitely one aspect of being innovative is you really need to have lots of ideas often. We get a lot of people just talking about different product ideas, but to actually go through the process and start to test it takes a bit of time. It's just this iterative process that you have to be dedicated to, because you won't get it right the first time with new ideas, so I really encourage people to embrace that failure mentality. I think as entrepreneurs you're more inclined to that anyway, because you have to move forward, whether you're a first-time entrepreneur or a multiple time entrepreneur, the way is never always clear. Failing fast, failing cheap, moving on and building on your learnings is the best thing that people can do to be innovative in progress and to move forward and progress in their businesses.

As entrepreneurs, what have you both observed to be the most crucial trait for a successful changemaker to possess?

[Monica Nowaczyk] - I wrote down resilience, because running a business (especially a small start-up) can feel like just a series of challenges, problems and obstacles that you have to overcome. There are ebbs and flows and ups and downs, but having the resilience to be able to get up every morning and just keep going is crucial.

I'm very inspired by the women around us who really just put one foot in front of the other, because you just have to keep going. I think resilience is a really key factor and it's something that you can work on all the time.

It's not that you have resilience and then you're done, and you tick that box. It's a muscle you have to keep working at, keep growing and making better.

[Micheal McKay] - That was mine as well actually, but if I had to build on that, I would say commitment is important. I've worked with different entrepreneurs who are getting started on their business, so they were struggling, maybe while working in other jobs, and they aren't really sure, and that uncertainty was scary for them. I think, especially for people who are driven by a social purpose, that commitment is important. If you're deciding to do this, you have to be two feet in because you will never be able to focus on it the way that you need to really have the resiliency, so you have to be committed. You can't be one foot out the door, like either jump in the pool or get out.

What other organisations do you both believe are creating strong social impact?

[Monica Nowaczyk] - I will mention a few that are local here in Cambodia. Dorsu and Tonle are two fashion brands that are really challenging the way factory production is done (especially fast fashion) and how waste is treated. They make zero waste (or very low waste) garments using factory offcuts. FAIRWEAVE is also an amazing local brand that's very committed to traditional weaving and dyeing techniques in Cambodia, and they have an incredible product line.

[Micheal McKay] - I want to mention the Unreasonable Group, they're a global organisation. I do some work with those guys, but they have a really exceptional fellowship program where they work with social entrepreneurs to scale during the growth stage of their businesses and they focus on five main social impact areas. These include education, energy and environment, food and water, health, and then ‘new frontiers’ which are things we don't know yet will be new industries. If we want to change the world, we need these mission-driven social businesses to be big enough to compete at a global level. Now, you see the Unreasonable Group who has funders and investors bring these big ideas to the global stage. I think that's where the big change starts to happen. I really think it's organisations like the Unreasonable Group that are making big impacts.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend for our listeners to check out?

[Monica Nowaczyk] - On the topic of resilience, I think a really great guide for this is Mindset by Carol Dweck. I found this changed my perspective on so many things, especially during my own personal struggle with having resilience. She's got great exercises in there about having a growth mindset not just in yourself and in business, but in relationships, with kids’, education and so on. Also, I've just picked up and started reading Give and Take by Adam Grant.

[Micheal McKay] - Probably my top recommendation for most people, and I know it's been recommended on other podcasts of yours, is A Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It’s about his survival in the Holocaust, I first read it in high school and it remains to be an inspiration. I've read it many times since. Start With Why by Simon Sinek is great. Monica mentioned our why earlier, and I think that's really crucial for any anybody who's on a new mission. Then I'd also recommend the Lean Startup and Lean Impact, they're two different books. Lean Startup is the Eric Ries original book and then Lean Impact by Ann Mei Chang is where she took those principles and applied them to the development or social impact world. For people who are really interested in that social space, I recommend Lean Impact. Lastly, I'll just mention Dr. Seuss as an author. We're a fun-loving company and I've always enjoyed the insights and delights of Dr. Seuss!