Justin MacDonald On Reigniting The Australian Social Enterprise Movement

Justin is a dynamic and transformative leader who is making a significant impact in the business world and beyond. As a senior leader, innovator, project manager, and business builder, Justin's expertise spans multiple sectors, including property development, project management, construction, banking and finance, social enterprises, and the not-for-profit sector.

Justin's passion for creating pathways for people with disabilities to purchase and own their own homes is a testament to his commitment to empowering marginalised communities. He has served on several boards for social impact organizations, including Hotel House Keeping, Research for Development Impact Network, and ENACTUS Australia, advocating for people facing barriers to employment and access to services.

Justin is also inspiring the next generation of change-makers by teaching courses at QUT and serves as an ambassador for EPIC Assist, a Disability Employment Service provider, championing the rights of people with disabilities to participate fully in the workforce.

Justin discusses his key learnings gained from a lifetime of professional experience working in impact and what is required for the Australia social enterprise movement to regain momentum and push forward.

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

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a little bit about your background and what led you to where you are now?

[Justin MacDonald] - I started my first business when I was seven; I was a bit of a late starter! Surprisingly, I started a social impact business without even knowing what a social impact business was. I was collecting cans at the footy ground; it was more about funding my Lego habit than anything else. Since then, I've always been curious about business. I've got a background in banking and finance, construction projects, property, and I now work in consulting and run a disability housing business. There has always been a common theme about helping people and having a social impact. My banking work was always in credit unions, building societies and volunteering. How I ended up where I am now was I met two of my favourite people in the world, Lisa Siganto and Luke Terry. I was completing my master's degree at QUT (Queensland University of Technology), and they invited me to come into Whitebox [Enterprises] to analyse potential initiatives they were looking to launch as social enterprises. I'd always been curious about purpose driven businesses, but I didn't realise there was a thing called a social enterprise. Then off the back of that, I've launched my consulting firm, which focus purely on social impact businesses.

Are there any significant milestones you would like to share?

Just realising what social enterprise is was a milestone, and it's weird we call it a social enterprise. For me, it’s good business, it just makes sense to do business that way. I believe in paying it forward or creating a ripple. My firm this year has decided to donate $100,000 worth of pro bono or low bono consulting. We've still got a few months to go, and I've got about $30,000 more to give away. We're currently working with four amazing organisations. One of my favourite milestones is I do a lot of mentoring work with entrepreneurs with disability. We mentored one young chap called Finn who lives with autism and has real challenges in public spaces and speaking.

He went from struggling to have a conversation to pitching in front of 400 people to win the Young Innovation Award for the entire Moreton Bay region last year. That was a big moment and unlocking someone's potential is just the most amazing thing.

I got a real soft spot for entrepreneurs, but then I’ve got an even softer spot for entrepreneurs living with disability.

Can you share more about your work, what you're currently doing and the impact you’re generating?

When I set up my consulting firm, there were a few ways I was going to do it. I could either go out and set up my own social enterprise business or impact business, but I felt I could create more impact and a ripple by helping others along the way. I wanted to give a helping hand or just help level up everybody. I wanted to use my diverse range of skills gained from working all over the world in a whole range of sectors to support businesses. There are three clients I typically support. One is either an organisation that's got an idea and they haven't worked out how to get it to market. That's very common. Other clients which are becoming more common are organisations who have lost their recent funding through a grant, initiative, or a government support contract. They're either looking at alternative revenue streams to help reduce their reliance on government grants or becoming more financially resilient. The other client I work with have got a lot of capital or underutilised assets like property. We work with them to identify how they can mobilise those assets to benefit society rather than just sit in a bank account earning interest. They are the organisations I support and I'm working with now. I'm working with a beautiful broad range of projects, anything from sustainable timber to the homelessness and rough sleeping space. I work in the disability housing space because I run a disability housing business, and I also do a lot of work around supporting pathways to employment for young adults facing barriers to the workplace. The causes I'm passionate about are homelessness, rough sleeping, disability, mental health justice, incarceration, and domestic violence.

Justin, can you tell us more about your work in the disability housing space?

I run an organization called Just SDA Management. We're what they call a Specialist Disability Accommodation Provider, or an SDA Provider if you want to get into acronyms. Acronyms are what the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) is all about! What we do is provide housing for people at the complex end of the NDIS Scheme, so the top five or six percent of complexity. These facilities are designed for people who can't live in typical mainstream housing because of accessibility. This could be for something like a wheelchair potentially, but also psychosocial challenges and visual/hearing impairment. Our accommodation uses tools such as assistive technology, automation, voice recognition, or even eye gaze technology so a resident may adjust the temperature of their shower through their gaze. I've been involved in this sector for four or five years now. We have around 50 houses under our management, which is fantastic. Seeing lives change because of our work is one of the most truly rewarding things I've ever done in my life. I did my thesis on this work when I did my master’s degree. My thesis was around how we can use the funding from the NDIS to allow people with disability to own their own home.

Sadly, the current set up in this system keeps them as perpetual tenants. The legacy I'd love to leave is a home ownership model, where they've got an asset to hand down through generations. This would have the benefits of breaking down the poverty cycle and decreasing their financial dependence on government systems.

It's just a win for everybody, for the government and the individuals.

Any examples of what the benefits have been for the people living with disabilities in these homes designed for them?

The people who end up in our properties are normally coming out of other places like public housing, which is virtually inaccessible. We've had people who haven't been able to access the bathroom for two years, so they can't even have a shower. Instead, they need to be sponge washed, which is dehumanising. I've had people living in accommodation which has grown mould all the way through. This is impacting their health even further, especially for someone who is already immunocompromised. We are transitioning people out of either hospitals, aged care facilities or public housing, and some of the change has been amazing. There was a young chap I worked with a couple of years ago, he had some real challenges with managing his behaviour due to a lot of traumas and everything he experienced in his life.

Pattern recognition and pattern behaviour was important to him. He was at a point where there were chemical restraints in place, so he was on medication to sedate him for 29 days a month, which is unheard of. There are a whole lot of issues stemming from that, especially with recent articles. But over time, with the right housing environment, we created the foundation and footprint for him to be in a safe place, which became his place. By implementing the right care and support team (which we didn't do we just helped facilitate), we helped regulate and provide a safe environment for him to thrive. Over time, they've been able to work down his medication; he's no longer sedated which is amazing. Now he's contributing back to society and living a full life rather than being in a chemical daze all the time.

That's one example, one more recent example in the last couple of months was Josh. I love Josh, he's just moved out of inappropriate housing and away from an inappropriate care provider who caused physical harm to him and inflicted a lot of traumas on him as a result. We moved him to his house a couple of months ago and he's absolutely buzzing. It's his forever home, he's already told us that. He's a massive Gold Coast Titans fan, so he's now got all these paintings and posters up on the wall. He's absolutely thriving, just seeing him smile and not be in this PTSD state anymore had his mother crying when we moved him in. It's just been win after win every single day. Every time you go see him, he's loving it, he's found his jam. These are some of the intangible pieces we're starting to put impact measurement frameworks around, so we can start to measure these benefits and communicate them back to the community.

As a social impact professional with rich portfolio spanning multiple sectors, can you share some of your key learnings?

I'd say the common threads and themes are focusing on the problem you're trying to solve as an organisation rather than the way you want to solve it. Sometimes the way you want to solve it comes from a lived personal experience, which is amazing. But there may also be someone else out there doing the same thing. By setting up a duplicate business, you're taking resources, putting them into admin, duplication, triplication, and then cannibalising the marketplace by competing for the same dollars. If you look at the stats nationally, we have 60,000 charities.

I don't know if there are 60,000 different causes in existence, but while there probably are, I think there might be a bit of duplication there. I wonder whether we should focus more on the problem; focus on solving the problem itself while not being too picky about putting your name and branding on there.

Another key learning is with businesses I see a lot of people registering a business name and getting a website early. They apparently need a website to survive, but it's not always the case. The first step is just being critical of your own business idea, ripping it apart and going beyond your friend and family circle who will always back and champion you. As you validate that in the broader market, conduct a deep analysis on others in the sector by looking at three different competitors. I always do this three-point analysis. The first point is looking at who is in the marketplace solving the same problem in the same way, so who's a direct competitor. The second point is looking at who is solving the same problem but in a different way. They might be using a different tool, product, or service. Then, who's solving a similar problem further up or further down the supply chain which might impact your market. For example, if you're working in a homelessness space, what if there's someone providing financial education literacy? That may mean people less people in the homelessness world, which is amazing, but it might impact how your business works and where you should focus. After this analysis, build the right team and find a series of people who can fill the gaps in your skills and depth of knowledge. Lastly, I see that everyone loves to bootstrap a business and do it themselves. But really consider the time cost of money. What I mean by that is if there a task that's repeatable, mundane, and administrative, it might be draining you away from winning a new $5,000-$10,000 client or customer when you could instead be outsourcing that work for $30 an hour. Admin resources as entrepreneur/solopreneur can become very expensive, so consider whether can you replicate, automate or delegate that out to someone else?

What challenges, opportunities, or insights have you gained from working in the purpose led space?

It's an interesting time in Australia. Victoria was leading the way when it came to the social space and social procurement frameworks. They're doing a great job still, but they've seemed to have almost slowed down a little bit. New South Wales, due to the amazing work Kylie Flament’s doing with the Social Enterprise Council for New South Wales and Australia is just powering ahead. New South Wales is providing an amazing ecosystem to create change. Looking at where we are in Meanjiin (Brisbane), Queensland, it seems we've almost lost a bit of steam. We had amazing momentum last year with this Social Enterprise World Forum, and it just seems the government has backed away a little bit and doesn't recognise social enterprise like the other states.

There's a real risk there if we don't really wrap around and provide support to our sector; it's just going to become a lot harder to scale our sector when recognising it as purely small business.

The other challenge and opportunity, especially in Queensland, is because we've got some of the oldest social enterprises in Australia. But we're still a cottage industry in my mind, where we've got a lot of people trying to solve their own problems in their own way in isolation. We haven't broken down ways to bring everyone together. The work Impact Boom does with QSEC (Queensland Social Enterprise Council) to bring everyone together for events and networking is amazing, a lot of other organisations like QUT and Griffith [University] are doing similar things. But I wonder how we can start a conversation to help us level up and collaborate more. Again, we need to focus on the problem we're trying to solve, get more voices and build a groundswell to start scaling our levels of impact across Australia. Change is only going to come from working together rather than working in isolation.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?

I'm a massive fan of Australian Spatial Analytics. I've still got a scar from helping set up their first tables while building their offices in Brisbane! Because I'm a disability advocate and work in the sector, I love seeing people turn neurodiversity and autism into a superpower. It breaks down the preconceived notions around disability and employment, that's why I love the work they do. Also, Jeff and Sam who are driving that are amazing. One organisation whoI don't think have realised their superpower just yet is called Atlas Soils. They're based in Townsville; it is a fascinating business. What they do is replicate and convert waste from anything, like material waste like clothing, couches or even sewage sludge waste in drains. What they do is use biodynamic processes to expedite the breakdown of materials to three months, which naturally occurs over 70 years. Their superpower is deploying these processes into flood and cyclone areas. Their natural processes can break down debris, and the out product at the end is a natural fertiliser which can be introduced back into the soil. I’ve done a little bit of work in and around them, but not with them directly. They're probably one of my favourites. My other favourite is a chap by the name of Tom, he runs Lifecycle Timbers. I describe him as the Steve Irwin of the timber industry. He is so passionate about it. Tom lives with autism as well, which I love even more, and they're creating jobs for people in incarceration, First Nations people and young adults facing barriers to employment because of mental health. His superpower is when you cut down trees, we typically only utilise 60 percent of that timber. The rest is wasted, which is just extraordinary. What he can do is get the recycling and utilisation rate up to 98 percent through technology and research. I've been working instrumentally with him and a few others to make that happen. I'd love to see that evolve over the next couple of years.

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

I'd say if you're starting out a business from scratch, there's an amazing book called The Slight Edge. It’s all about doing something small but consistent every single day. The analogy they use is if you drank a can of Coke for lunch today, that wouldn't have much of an impact, but if you drank a can of coke every day for the next year, there might be major health impacts. But doing something positive, like reading 10 pages of a book, writing one blog article, doing an activity, or making a phone call every day over that time of a year will allow you to escalate and scale you and your business. For those trying to build out a business or enter the market, I'm a massive fan of design thinking. Jeanne Liedtka is one of my heroes in that space, and she's written a cost-effective book (it’s around $40) called The Designing for Growth Field Book. That book gives you a whole series of tools, ways to think and ways to look at things while ripping apart your own idea. One of my favourite public speakers (and an amazing author as well) is Michael McQueen. If you haven't seen him speak live, find a venue or space he's speaking at. He wrote a book a while back called Winning the Battle for Relevance, which is all around evolving and adapting. He uses Darwinian theory to talk about how you need to be ahead of game and constantly evolving. It's not enough now to do an annual plan, you've got to be constantly evolving your business to tackle the market, especially in an evolving sector like social impact.