Ishani Chattopadhyay On Defragmenting And Inspiring Collaboration In The Australian Social Enterprise Sector

Ishani is the Chief Executive Officer of SENVIC (Social Enterprise Network of Victoria), the peak body for the social enterprise sector in Victoria. She is also Founder and Managing Director of Arctic 90, a boutique advisory that helps impact driven enterprises with strategic execution.

She grew up in India and Melbourne with a 24+ year career across India, Australia, USA and the UK focused on strategic advisory, entrepreneurship, market expansion, investment and innovation.

Ishani has run several incubation and acceleration programs and mentored many social enterprises, SMEs and businesses on their strategy and operations. Ishani is a Chemical Engineering and Science graduate (BSc/BE) from the University of Melbourne, Australia and holds an MBA degree with a major in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from the London Business School, UK. She has been on several Boards and holds advisory roles with multiple impact driven companies.

Ishani discusses the challenges currently being encountered by social enterprises big or small and why collaboration is the key to defragmenting and scaling the business for good movement.

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 for social enterprise?

[Ishani Chattopadhyay] - Impact was embedded in my life from childhood. I probably didn't have the language around it, but I knew from an early stage of my childhood as I was growing up in India there are strong economic disparities, lack of opportunities, and life was not an equal playing field for all.

I understood that I saw that, and I experienced that. I heard stories of the freedom movement from my grandfather, I had family members who had fought for freedom in India.

I had an inkling early on there was a lot which needed to be done to create an equitable and fair world. This passion was subliminally in my mind as I entered the world of consulting to hone my problem-solving skillset, because I knew that at some stage, we would need to solve big problems.

When my family originally migrated to Australia, I ended up studying chemical engineering. When I finished, I thought, "I don't want to work in the oil and gas sector.” That is the most natural extension of a chemical engineering degree, so I went into mainstream consulting to instead try and understand those tool kits for problem solving.

I ended up in the U.S. at one point as part of my work was in Washington DC, where 9/11 happened. It was a bit of a pivotal moment for me to reflect on life and where I wanted to take my career. I came back with a very clear understanding that I wanted to go to business school and learn about the mainstream business tool kit and how to apply it for impact. That's how I ended up in London Business School, where I became involved with climate change mitigation.

I ended up in a class called finance and sustainability at Columbia Business School when I was doing an exchange, and therefore I ended up taking my professor's startup at the time to India.

My first 10 years of impact work were focused on clean energy, renewable energy transitions, and decarbonisation, way back in 2004 before the current debate was happening.

As the CEO of the Social Enterprise Network of Victoria (SENVIC), what are your observations of the social enterprise movement in Victoria?

I think the social enterprise sector in Victoria is vibrant and growing. There is a very strong interest in developing social enterprise as a model to solve social and environmental challenges we are all faced with.

Often, I also teach entrepreneurship part time at a university, and I constantly hear from students wanting to build a social enterprise. This is so amazing for me to hear, because that means impact is well and truly a priority for the next generation.

From a long-term perspective, I feel very positive that the social enterprise movement in Victoria is in good hands. Future leaders all care about the movement and want to build businesses which will tackle problems. A potential opportunity for us to work on is a degree of efficiency; we still need to showcase impact can happen at scale.

Those are things we're still working on in the Victorian sector (and in the other states for that matter). My middle band observation is that we need to be doing a lot more to support the micro, small and medium sized social enterprises, because otherwise we're not building the funnel which needs to be continuous.

There's always the big end of town social enterprises that are doing well and are viable, but I think in the middle band is where work is needed. Hopefully at SENVIC we will be serving everyone, but also working with those small-medium social enterprises as well.

Where do you see opportunities in the Australian social enterprise landscape in Australia and further afield to grow the movement?

When I started my impact journey (I would say seriously from 2003-2004 when I was at business school), the social enterprise sector at the time was not seen as a serious contender. It felt like an afterthought, and I think that has massively shifted.

I think the gamut of the entire landscape has gone from there to having more active interest, may that be led by ESG metrics and reporting or otherwise.

In general, we're seeing a massive shift in what social enterprise could do. It doesn't feel like an afterthought now, it feels very much like the future. In terms of being able to take this movement forward, I think we need a more integrated and collaborative approach.

I'm aware that I’m using buzzwords, but to me what that really means is we need to be able to work together to share learnings effectively. Often when I talk to businesses separately, I'm hearing similar problems they're trying to solve but it feels like no one's talking to each other actively.

As a sector, if this movement is to grow and become an actual mainstream methodology of running businesses day to day, then I think we need to work together better. We also need to talk about failure in a more meaningful way, more honestly and authentically.

Failure to me is a necessary step to success. If you're not making room to talk about what worked and what didn't, then we are not doing ourselves justice in the sector. We need to be able to lean in and connect what are seemingly silos or subgroups within the sector.

What do you think must happen to defragment and mainstream this business for good movement?

Let me start by looking at it from the government perspective. From a government perspective, I think we just need a longer-term funding strategy and more integrated social procurement policies. We've seen it happen in some cases, but it needs to be a lot more integrated, stable, and long-term.

From an industry perspective (so businesses, corporates, general industry stakeholders), I think we need them to understand business for good is good business. It's good for shareholders, stakeholders, employees, the long-term viability of their brand, and relevance of their services and products.

Social enterprise is not something on the sidelines, to me, the world of social enterprise is about doing good business. If you want your business to have a legacy, to have done the things you wanted to do as a business leader, then you need to be thinking about social and environmental impact as a part of your business.

The social enterprise sector to defragment itself, right from idea seed stage businesses to scaled up social enterprises, needs to create better peer to peer integrated learning and sharing platforms. This is so you can learn and not repeat the mistakes of others.

You also need to be a bit more realistic about viability, that is a gap I often see. You need to understand if there is underlying viability in your business model. How might you fund it? What are your pricing strategies? A big vision is not enough. I think you need to underlie that with a solid, viable business model.

Lastly to defragment and take this mainstream, you need to understand and measure impact more meaningfully. We need more rigour around reporting impact metrics, because that is the one thing which will tell the story of if we have gotten it right or wrong.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to start or grow their business? Where have you observed common pitfalls that passionate founders find themselves in?

I have so many stories, and I think they extend right from when I was teaching in the classroom and people would come to me with ideas. They potentially wanted mentoring, they had been a part of my programs, or they were seeking connections to grow or scale their enterprises.

I tend to give less advice, instead I like to share lived experience. One of the key things I always ask social entrepreneurs is to think about it firstly as an entrepreneur. Understand the ecosystem within which you operate.

For example, food related businesses are common in the social enterprise ecosystem, and at the end of the day, even though you have a strong mission, vision and impact as part of your food business, you're still operating as a food business. You still need to understand what makes that viable? What are your potential margins? How many people are going to come in for a cup of coffee?

I would recommend social entrepreneurs spend serious time deep diving into their idea, doing hardcore validation research, understanding their business model, numbers and getting help. If there are businesses or founders who might be vision or mission led, they may not have all the skill sets they need (which is very common). I also don't have every single skill set, but you need to be aware of what you have and what you don't to find the resources you need.

Guess what? There's a myth that you must pay big fees to get these resources, many of these are available in the public domain. You can look things up, whether that be on business websites provided by the government or Social Change Central. Look these things up, ask questions, and get mentorship around how to build a viable business model.

Mission is great, it's imperative, but I think creating that business model viability will help you grow to achieve the impact you want. A common pitfall is we have a lot of conversation around vision and not enough around the rigorously testing business models with potential customers.

I’ve also observed founders can believe that their impact is primary, and as a result people will come in to buy a cup of coffee from them because they are doing good. But if they're not creating a delicious, lovely coffee in the right place at the right price point, it can become hard to sustain a business model.

Absolutely, that's a very common pitfall. My recommendation would be to think like your customer. Put on that hat and have a look at how do you make your decisions?

I think impact is important, but many other things are important to me also. As a customer you look at pricing, location, and product portfolios. That is an important thing for us to be able to do as social entrepreneurs.

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

Rather than mentioning specific projects (because I don't want to play favourites) I will tell you about the ones I'm finding most exciting. These are system level initiatives, so circular regenerative business models are of massive interest to me. I'm seeing a lot of great ideas pop up in that sector.

The other thing I’ve noticed is a much more integrated use of technology in social enterprise business models. That's exciting to me, having been part of technology start-ups previously.

Probably the most inspiring of all is the unwavering commitment of the next generation towards running and growing social enterprises. That gives me hope and keeps me going.

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

I'm currently reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I love the idea of using behavioural economics to create meaningful impact, so that's something I think about a lot.

On days when I'm a bit down and out, I read a few pages of The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. His power of compassion helps me contextualise my reality somewhat.

In terms of fiction, I would probably recommend an author I love called Jhumpa Lahiri. She's based in the U.S. and is the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies is probably one of my all-time favourite books, because it was completely relatable to myself who grew up a part of a migrant family.

In general, I'm seeing a lot of good stuff also being written in online forums, may that be on Medium or Substack, I find quite interesting reads there, if you love reading and learning honestly the resources are limitless at this point.