Cynthia Banks On Opportunities For Impact-Led Entrepreneurs
Cynthia Banks is an experienced entrepreneur and spent 25 years as Founder and CEO of GlobaLinks, a global education company whose mission was to send students around the world to study. During her tenure she helped over 30,000 students gain a global experience. After selling the venture in 2014 she went on to raise two other for profit ventures and one non profit foundation.
Through her work, over $2 million dollars has been donated to support students in higher education. She has a Masters degree in Organisational Development and is now on the faculty of University of Colorado, Boulder, teaching entreprenurship and global business.
During her career she has received awards such as the Small Business of the Year from the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and received recognition as one of the top three minority owned businesses in Colorado.
Cynthia discusses some of the missed opportunities for founders and the broader business for good movement in the States, whilst reflecting on her deep experience in international education and women-owned business.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Steve Williams] - Could you share a little bit about your background and tell us what led you to your interest and passion in social enterprise and women-owned businesses?
[Cynthia Banks] - Well, we always say nobody really has a plan for where they end up and I grew up in Colorado, went to a local university and studied marketing. I didn't really know what I was going to do in life. When I went to Australia in 1989 and fell into raising this venture, which at the time was called Australearn, we started to bring students to study here. I went back to the US and started my own company. And what I recognised was that I was responsible to hire my own staff, amazing women and men that came to work with me. I was also in the business of really impacting students' lives by sending them abroad. And so what happened was that kind of a convalescence of these two concepts of what it meant to be a woman-owned business and then also to be in a social enterprise. And so my passion for it really came together because that's what I was doing for a living. Since then, I've been able to help a lot of women-owned businesses, very passionate about businesses for good. And so I would say later in my life, now I understand how those two things fit together.
Amazing. You know what we are able to see when we're looking in the rear view mirror…!
It's amazing because we don't always have a plan, but if we keep going it usually comes to light. Yeah.
Trust in the process. Yeah. So as the faculty director for global initiatives at the Leeds Business School, University of Colorado, Boulder, what can you tell us about your role there and tell us a little bit about the Business School; what are some of the exciting projects that you're working on?
Well, I'm really very proud to work for the Leeds Business School. It's ranked number 20 out of all top business schools. And so it's fantastic to be with a renowned faculty. We hit the business subjects, hard accounting management, finance, you know, we go hard on those. And then we also have created a very large entrepreneurship centre to help our students find creative ways to solve world problems. We focus on corporate and social responsibility. And so we also want our students to have a global education. Like most people in the world, we need to meet other people to learn about diversity. We need to see people to understand how to help solve those problems. So my role having been appointed by the Dean is to help our students get out into the world. And one of the things I'm most proud of is that we have a program for our freshmen where over 60% of all of our first year students get to go abroad and we take them to really interesting places in the world and start the journey for them to think about what it means to be a business person in the world.
So that's one of the big projects we've worked on in the last couple years, and it's really, really very successful. And then just this last year, I had the opportunity to help a young female Pakistani student come to study with us from a scholarship program called the Sister to Sister Program. And from the largest numbers of students to just the single individual, I would say that we really can see the impact that getting our students out in the world creates.
That's incredible. What are some of the major destinations that students are going to?
Well, we've made an effort for particular in our first year programs to take them a little bit off the beaten path. So you won't find us in London necessarily. And unfortunately you won't find us in Australia right now because it's just a little too far away for a 10 day program, but we've taken our students to Croatia, Brazil and Portugal and a lot of other places that are just a little bit different that they have not been to on vacation with their parents. And we look for places that have language, different currencies and a lot of economic impact.
Clearly you've been involved in lots of different projects and you are involved in many projects as an advisor like the Greenhouse Scholars in Boulder, the Fund for Education Abroad and Diversity Abroad. Can you unpack a little bit about what being an advisor for these organisations does and some of their major achievements?
It's interesting that all three things that I donate my advisor time to kind of have one singular purpose and that is to help students who otherwise would not have had opportunity get an opportunity. And some of these it's just about college education, like Greenhouse Scholars were trying to help incredibly bright students who have had very, very poor upbringing. We're trying to get them into college and make sure that they stay and they graduate. The Fund for Education Abroad and Diversity Abroad are all about helping students of a different race and a different background find a global experience because that actually helps them in their future careers. So they kind of all are similar in that regard. I now mentor a student from Senegal and I'll be with her for five years. It's a five year mentoring experience. That's a long time, but what a great way to form a relationship with a young woman and be a part of her life. And in the other places we raise money. We make a lot of big scholarship decisions. We celebrate amazing opportunities that students have to go out and then to come home and do great careers when they get here.
Clearly you've had a long relationship with Australia which the listeners might not know about. Tell us when you first came and what have you been doing when you come to Australia? Why are you here now?
I have to say Australia is such a beautiful country. What an honour to be able to come travel here. But I came to Australia in 1989, the first time. And this was right after Crocodile Dundee had come out in America. So everybody was all like, what is this shrimp on the barbie? And what are these people doing? And so to get on that long airplane flight, it felt like a world away. And of course we didn't have the internet in 1989. So we wrote letters to people. Because I met some people in Australia that wanted to bring more Americans here, that's how I started my first business called Australearn. And we spent five, six years bringing hundreds of American students back down to study and then expanded to taking them other places in the world like Europe and Asia, but Australia's always been a second home. I've made the journey probably over 40 times at this point in time. And it doesn't get any shorter on the airplane, but it's still worthwhile to come. I lived here with my family in 2011 and my young kids got to go to school here. That was incredibly impactful to their life and a real neat opportunity for us to cement some really long term friendships here as well.
Great. So you spotted an opportunity. Well, you spotted a problem really that there weren't enough American students coming here. You thought there was potentially an opportunity and you went for it. Classic entrepreneurial behaviour.
I always say, look for a market gap. You'll find that Australia’s export of education is the third largest export I think here. So it's been wonderful to see the country change, how they do education overall.
The work that you do in America is clearly linked to entrepreneurship and business development. And you are obviously also across some of the entrepreneurial startup culture here in Australia. What do you think that we could learn here in Australia from the US?
Well, I'd have to say, I have a lot more research and a lot more time I would like to put into learning about those things. We are very in our entrepreneurial space, very fast moving; our venture space is big. The amount of money we have from angel investors supporting particularly tech businesses is massive. So we can scale things at a rate that I don't know that I've seen in other places.
And the flip side of that is, unfortunately, I think we oftentimes miss social enterprises because we're so busy trying to scale the next big tech adventure that we don't focus enough on businesses that are good for community.
And even in our entrepreneurship program, sometimes we're training people about much larger businesses. And I think to be successful in social enterprise, you have to reorientate your thinking, because all the standard business solutions don't always work in a small social enterprise and we could do better in the United States, I think, to teach both sides of that.
Not everything has to be a scalable Silicon valley venture.
So true. And what is the kind of narrative around social enterprise in the States? Because here, the movement has been growing and growing certainly over the last 10 years. And we've seen in Australia now, each state has now developed its own peak body for social enterprise. There's now a national body for social enterprise, state governments supporting social enterprise through things like their procurement strategies, or through funding. What's that scene like in America?
Well, the one word I would put on that is envious. Having worked with you on the iActivate Program and learned about this support that you're seeing from the state and federal level, it is envious to understand how much you're kind of trying to get a cohesive strategy built in America. We don't have that. Our states are very diverse and out of all the priorities that we have, social enterprise wouldn't even factor into the thinking of most states. And so we allow social enterprise to flourish. We have small little incubators and little small business administration supports, but nothing that's really focused on that from a government level. And it's something that we could learn definitely from this side of the world.
What do you think the role of universities and educational institutions are in supporting that growth?
When I think about where people go to get education, when I was talking to your participants of iActivate, I asked them, where did you go look for things that you were trying to learn about how to run your social enterprise? And they all said, I started at the university and that's where we in a community look for our education. And so to take an active role in supporting people who are practicing what you're teaching, showing them the ropes, helping them really effectually come up with their business, I think is the role of a university. And it's wonderful to see not only heavy research programs at universities, but very practical, this is how we raise our community opportunities. So I think universities always have that role to play.
At this university and particularly in our Office of Social Innovation, we use human centred design as a framework for helping people solve environmental and social problems. And we do that because we want to ensure that the people’s experience in the problem is placed right at the centre of decision making and designing solutions to those problems. So in your work, do you use human centred design or other crucial frameworks that you could tell us about?
Yes, we use human centred design. We often just say design thinking when we do that. And it factors greatly into the curriculum we teach in entrepreneurship and in the Leeds Business School, it's huge. It's interesting Steve, we teach it, we talk about it, we say it it's one of those things that we bake into so many of the curriculum pieces we deliver. Surprisingly, when it comes to seeing how ventures actually try and raise their business model or figure out what the customer wants, I think in practice that we don't use it as much as we could.
And the shame about it is that if we don't involve the customer into that process, we really have no idea if we're designing the right thing.
So I think it's what I call theory to practice is challenging. It's interesting to learn how to do it.
We need to slow down sometimes in our ventures and take more time to talk to the customers.
Oh yeah. I'm a hundred percent behind that. I'm going to steal that actually; theory to practice.
From theory to practice. There's always a gap isn't there?
You helped us here at the university with a review of iActivate, the social enterprise course, which we developed in partnership with Impact Boom. Was there anything that really stood out to you as being helpful for prospective participants?
Well it really was a pleasure to talk to so many students that had taken the course and I'd like to thank Impact Boom, because I loved all of the podcasts. I enjoyed listening to all of the stories. The impactful piece was understanding that many of the participants didn't know any of the practices, the policies, the procedures, the business lingo. And iActivate in that short period of time gave them this amazing toolkit where they can go back and speak the language. They know how to structure their thinking.
Entrepreneurship can be the wild, wild west, but it gave them a really nice game plan and a process to go through. Overall, I would say the greatest part about it is it's online. People are taking it when they have time to take it. And I think it was an amazingly packed, consolidated way to talk about business learning. They all said that they got so much out of it.
That's great to hear. We do get consistently great feedback from participants and some of them have seen some significant business growth, which is obviously what we are here for to help people grow their businesses that have impact.
What are some of the inspiring projects or initiatives that you've come across recently that are creating positive social change that might be in Colorado, the States or wider a field?
That's a really long list. I speak to and coach and counsel so many different ventures and a few come to mind. I'm working with a young couple of girls who are running a program called Thinking Huts and they're building 3D schools in Madagascar. Because there was a need to somehow come up with structures where school systems could be put in quicker than waiting for bricks and mortar and trying to come up with different funders. They have invested a lot in this 3D technology and, and it's fascinating, it's just a different paradigm shift to how to look at what a school structure should be.
Another one is called The Connection. It's about mental health for college students and beyond, I guess I have personal need to want to feel positive about that, having a young daughter.
But I think learning to deliver that online, meet the generation where they are, it's hard to do, but she's getting a lot of notoriety for how she's coming up with the content for that.
Then the last one's interesting, I met a New Zealand woman who is helping people navigate disaster recovery and work with change management in their organisations. It's called Hummingly. And she does it with a deck of cards that you can use, like conversation starters among groups. And while a deck of cards sounds super simple, many of us need to have a facilitated conversation and it's worked out really well.
To finish off, have you got any books that you could recommend to our listeners?
I love to read. I'm sure your listeners have read Zero to One by Peter Thiel. It’s a great book about how to raise a venture basically from zero and just get to one. Design thinking plays a great role in that book as well.
I love Adam Grant. If you've read Originals by Adam Grant, he's got a great podcast as well. It's called Highly Habits of Original Thinkers and some interesting lessons to be learned about how you can come up with a new idea and actually foster that.
One author, I just read who I adore is Brene Brown. Brene Brown wrote a new book called Braving the Wilderness. And it isn't just about being brave in business. It's about being brave in our own thoughts, really standing in our own self and taking ownership of who we are. I find her very inspiring, so I I'll continue to read a lot more from her.
