Michael Lim On The Internal Challenges Impact-Led Entrepreneurs Face Throughout Their Journey

Michael Lim's entrepreneurial journey is characterised by his passion for social impact and his dedication to making a difference to his local community in Melbourne’s west. As a 3x Award-Winning social entrepreneur, he has been acknowledged for his innovative and impactful work across a range of industries such as health, education, employment, and social enterprise.

He is currently the Founder and Managing Director of Beyond Value, a social impact consultancy helping organisations do more good. Through Beyond Value, he collaborates with a diverse range of clients, providing strategic guidance, advisory services, and developing programs and initiatives that align with their social missions.

Prior to this role, Michael was a Director at YLab Global and previously the CEO of Community Health Advancement and Student Engagement (CHASE). Under Michael’s leadership, CHASE worked with over 1,000 students in schools across Melbourne’s west and received the inaugural WeAreBrimbank Leadership Award in 2018.

Michael was the youngest member to appointed by the Minister for Suburban Development to be a board member of the Tarneit Revitalisation Board, Melton Revitalisation Board and Western Metropolitan Partnership, where he is currently the Chair of the Jobs and Skills Working Group.

Michael discusses how social procurement can equalise opportunity for underprivileged communities and how problematic mindsets manifest real world challenges for entrepreneurs.

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

[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in social impact?

[Michael Lim] - My passion in social impact is deeply personal. You might not believe it, but in year nine I was a terrible student. When I was 15 years old, I was classified at-risk of not finishing high school. I had poor behaviour, poor grades, and I did not get along with any of my teachers at school. Then, I was enrolled in a program in year 10 that aimed to re-engage disenfranchised young men back into the education system. In this program, you viewed your teachers as mentors; you pitched what you would like to learn as part of this one-year program. Then, you would have to pitch this idea back to your teachers, parents, and the school principal. This was the first time in my whole education career where I was asked, "what do you want to learn and how do you want to learn it?" I was given the opportunity to not only take responsibility, but ownership and accountability over my education. This one-year program did so many things for my life. It got me back on track with education, and it really made me explore how systems work and how I could have a career in social impact. The lessons that I took from this one-year program when I was 15-16 years old were essentially regarding how systems work and how they impact real people in them.

I didn't know this at the time, but my work in systems change was founded on this experience, and what I started to see was that every system has three components. You've got the actual components of the system, the relationships of the system, and then the purpose of the system. If you look at a tree as an example, the components of a tree are its leaves, branches, bark, and roots. The relationships are the veins and arteries inside that deliver nutrients from the roots all the way up to the branches and then to the leaves. Then, the purpose of a tree, if I were to ask you what that is, would be to inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. But if we change the purpose of a tree, we fundamentally change the whole system. If every tree instead was inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, we would cut down every single tree in the world because they are taking up too much oxygen. That was the same thing I experienced in my education.

I was fundamentally still in the same school; I had the same teachers, was in the same classrooms and with the same peer group. The components of the system were the same, the relationships I shared to my fellow students and teachers were also fundamentally the same. But what changed it for me in that program was the purpose of the education experience. Up until year nine, I only experienced a compliance-based education system. Learn this, do this test, do well, move on. It was essentially all I experienced, and that felt like the purpose of it. I couldn't see the purpose of how this education would impact my life. In year 10, that program fundamentally changed the purpose of my education. It became about what type of man or person I wanted to become as a part of this program?

The change of my education’s purpose had fundamentally different outcomes to what I experienced before, and that is why I've continued this journey into social impact and how if we change the systems, most of the symptoms that we experience as part of that system will also change.

Without that program, I don't think I would be where I'm at in my life right now. My own lived experience of a system helps inform how I put my own social impact into practice. The challenges of what human’s experience within a system can fundamentally change if you change the system. I'm passionate about finding (in whatever industry) where the small leverage points exist in a system, we could change that would have the greatest impact on the most amount of people.

As the Founder of social impact consultancy Beyond Value, what projects are you involved in?

After going through that experience in high school, I've really transferred all that experience into everything I've done since. I ran a not-for-profit when I was in my early twenties called Community Health Advancement and Student Engagement (CHASE). That was really looking at transforming systems within the health sector. Then I worked as a director at YLab for a couple of years, looking at how we could partner with young people to be able to co-design solutions to complex social challenges. I've turned all this learning and experience into starting up Beyond Value, which is a social impact consultancy helping businesses to do better. I work on range of projects.

Firstly, I do social procurement, where I am working with tier one organisations who have been successful in their bids for large infrastructure projects to incorporate into their supply chain social enterprises so they're procuring or purchasing directly from these organisations. On the flip side of that, I also help social enterprises with their business development strategies so they can be a part of these social procurement supply chains. I also work with a variety of other organisations around place-based interventions. This involves working with a think tank on how they can create a local jobs and skills collaboration across Melbourne's West and working with other organisations around communicating and positioning their social impact while working with mainstream businesses. I work in and around the social impact ecosystem, which is exciting, and it keeps it interesting because there's a lot of variety. What draws me into the social impact space is really the people. People like you Tom I got to work with for the Social Enterprise World Forum last year, and the passion, drive, and ambition that people have for social impact is immense.

The one trait I see in all social entrepreneurs and people in the impact space is they're all unreasonable quite frankly! When I say unreasonable, I don't mean they're difficult to work with or they're nasty. Being unreasonable means not accepting the status quo, not judging things for how they are but for what they could be and being relentlessly optimistic.

That is a powerful ingredient for changing the world, just not being reasonable. Every social entrepreneur I know is very unreasonable because they refuse to accept what it is and only focus on what the world could be, which is really intoxicating and inspiring at the same time.

What have been some of the key challenges you have faced on your own entrepreneurial journey?

I've faced a lot of challenges in the first 12 months of starting my consultancy. I would categorise them both in internal and external categories.

I believe when you start your own business or you back yourself, the external challenges you face are just a reflection of the internal mindsets or challenges you have.

For the first 12 months, I really struggled with my mindset when it came to business and understanding that the challenges I experienced as a business were just internal challenges manifesting themselves as a business challenge. All the issues I had with my own ego, the inability to delay gratification and the insecurities I had manifested. It sounds weird, but even the relationship I have with my parents came out! The challenge was how can I first identify that this is the challenge I'm facing, and then work to resolve it?

A lot of the challenges I've had around starting Beyond Value have been internal, around my mindset, how I process uncertainty and react to risk. These are challenges you inevitably face as a solo entrepreneur that you would never experience unless you do it yourself.

The biggest challenge has been all internal, and what I've found is that any internal growth I've had has manifested itself as business growth. I don't want this to sound like I've gone crazy, but I firmly believe when you start your own business, all your insecurities and the issues you have potentially with your own ego are reflected onto you. It's about how you then deal with it. For me, entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship are some of the highest forms of psychological and mental mastery that you'll ever have to do. Challenges such as your project is not going well, money is not coming in, clients are potentially ghosting you and contracts are not working out will occur. How you deal with these issues and respond to them is all internal, and everything is about your mindset.

For all the purpose-led founders, entrepreneurs and innovators listening, what general advice would you give them to take their organisations and enterprises to the next level?

The biggest thing I've done to supercharge my own development as an entrepreneur has been to find community. I said this in a quote before on the Impact Boom podcast; ‘if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.’

The number one thing that's helped my development, growth, and mental health has been surrounding myself with other people who are on the same journey as me.

They could be a couple of steps behind me, on the same step as me or a couple of steps in front of me. Just having people, you can, one, either look towards, two that you can teach, and three that you can share in the challenges and problems you've had with your own journey is just incredibly liberating. One of the other things I think about whenever I'm struggling is sometimes it's easier to change your environment than it is to change yourself, and your environment also includes your social environment.

If you feel like you're stuck and you're not growing, try changing your social environment and putting yourself into a community of people who are doing the same things you are doing and want to achieve the same things you want to achieve.

I come from a migrant community. My family obviously loves me, but the path I've chosen is very unconventional, and they don't really know what I do. Aside from just loving me as a human being, there's not much support in the way of professional advice, because they don't understand what I do. Finding people, friends, peers, colleagues, mentees, and mentors who can help you is the number one recommendation I could give to any purpose led entrepreneur at any stage of their development. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned veteran, community is probably the best return on investment you can get.

What key opportunities are you seeing for communities to tackle social, cultural, or environmental problems?

This answer is not going to surprise you, but I think the number one opportunity I see, particularly in Victoria and in the Melbourne West is social procurement. For me it is one of the greatest levers we're seeing to tackle social, cultural, and environmental problems. Put very simply, social procurement is about leveraging the spend that organisations must make to achieve social and environmental outcomes. You can achieve this with two ways, one is to directly purchase from a purpose-led businesses or a social benefits supplier. This could be an Aboriginal business, an Australian disability enterprise, or more commonly in my field of work, a social enterprise. These are all businesses that operate with a profit, but they have a purpose beyond that profit. This could be a whole range of different things, but generally it is employment. In the area I live in, we've got about $27 billion of public infrastructure and investment coming into Melbourne’s West. At the same time, Melbourne's West is a region which historically has experienced lots of place-based disadvantage. For instance, we have one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the country, one of the fastest growing populations, and some of the highest prevalence of preventable diseases across the nation. With the policy of social procurement combined with spend coming into the region, this is an opportunity to create meaningful employment outcomes for people across the community, to have meaningful work and to change lives through these opportunities.

Through social procurement, I see several things happening in Melbourne’s West.

Number one is the opportunity for economic development of the social enterprise sector or the social benefit supply sector, which is lacking in Melbourne's West.

Number two it's an opportunity to deliver excellent world class infrastructure such as hospitals, roads, or railways across the region.

Number three, and most importantly, through leveraging the spend that government and tier one organisations will have across the west, this will create jobs as well as retain jobs in sectors that traditionally don't employ women or don't really have many young people working with them. This is providing opportunities for many people in my community that otherwise would not have access to that opportunity. One of my favourite sayings from Terry Bracks, who is the founder of Western Chances, is that young people in Melbourne's West don't lack talent, they only lack opportunity.

Social procurement has the ability to equalise opportunity right across the community for a range of priority cohorts, whether that's women, young people, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, or people living with a disability.

It's a very powerful policy, and for me it's more than just the policy. I get quite emotional when I talk about it, which sounds weird when you're talking about a piece of government policy! But I don't just see it as a policy, I see it for what it can do to transform my local community.

What inspiring projects or initiatives are you seeing that are creating some positive social change?

One of the inspiring projects I'm currently working on is with a think tank, and what we're looking to do is create a place-based local jobs and skills collaboration. This is bringing together actors from right across the sector, whether it's government, not-for-profit or the private sector to be able to address the place-based disadvantages to employment. It's really getting the who's who of the Melbourne West across sectors and bringing industries together to ask what the three biggest challenges are we face, and how can we as a 13-person collaboration representing different organisations aim to break down these systemic barriers.

Then, we want to create a new pathway that is user-friendly to young people to access, to then get opportunities into growing and emerging sectors such as technology or care. This is exciting because of the collaboration opportunities. Youth unemployment is such a complex challenge that no one person, group, or organisation no matter how powerful or well-resourced they are can just throw money at to solve. The challenge of youth unemployment is so dispersed. It requires the collaboration of organisations from the job service sector, local and state government, local governance groups and not-for-profit think tanks to come together and work to create equal opportunity for young people across Melbourne's West. That's what I really see as exciting, the collaboration aspect and how willing these organisations are to work with each other. What I've learned is that inspiring projects don't need to be high tech or do something fundamentally different. They need to have the right intention with the right people working on the right aspect of the problem to achieve meaningful outcomes. Sometimes the best solutions are in fact low tech that no one has thought of, and you don't need to create impact on ten million people. If you create an impact on your local community and you can see the impact that it has had, that completes that feedback cycle you might not otherwise see if you're impacting a million people. That makes it a great and inspiring project, and I would love to be a part of it. It really fuels the work I do, because I can see the tangible aspects of the day-to-day mixed with the long-term impact we want to have as a collaboration.

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

There are three books I read religiously every year. Number one is Lean Impact by Ann Mei Chang, and this is riffing off Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup. If you have an idea, a project, or a challenge you want to solve, this book really provides the roadmap to be able to think through that challenge and how you can create a minimal viable product to test your hypothesis. When you get into this social change space, you're really marrying the problem, you're not marrying the solution. Your solution is just a hypothesis to solving the challenge, so get ready to marry your problem and iterate on your solution, because that's going to happen time and time again!

The second book I reread religiously is Range by David Epstein. It demonstrates that whatever experience you have you can embed into your next job, career, or project you're working on. If you do make drastic changes or pivots, you're not starting from nothing, you're starting from lots of experience, so really embed that into what you do.

The third book, and this is just more general self-help and self-improvement advice is Atomic Habits by James Clear. That is the number one book which has really changed how I approach what I do on a day-to-day basis. It talks about how small 1% changes in your day-to-day life can drastically improve your happiness and mental health over the long term. For any entrepreneur, we're playing an infinite game. The game we are playing is that we want to keep playing, and to keep playing, you need to be physically and mentally. That book has been the number one thing that's helped me overcome burnout, stress and difficult challenges in my life.