Scaling a Social Enterprise? Help please...

Deep dark confessions of a social entrepreneur: Scaling often seems like mission impossible when the required ingredient – standardization – is meant to apply to (1) customers, who – by definition – have non-standard barriers to participation, and (2) operations whose success has required a customized dose of empathy and supportive services to get the job done.

Examples from the world of job placement for the hard-to-employ? Waking up at 3am worried that a skilled Kreyol-speaking Dishwasher scheduled to start a new job at 7am will not be successful if he’s unable to communicate sufficiently with his Spanish-speaking supervisor. Receiving a 6am phone call from an employee who had her wallet stolen last night, explaining that she’s unable to come up with bus fare to get to work unless we can quickly get her a cash advance. These and scores of other everyday scenarios are cause for the frequent forehead slap and lament: “How in the world do we ever scale this???”

Vikram Akula’s A Fistful of Rice had the great insight that scale requires two things – standardization of services and a technology that can enable volume. The first of these means a drastic reduction in the custom-tailoring of solutions that we socially-minded operators like to offer our customers in the name of being helpful. Individualized attention has its place, but McDonald’s did not become McDonald’s by asking customers how they like their burgers cooked. We can’t provide all solutions to all people and need to be ready to quickly refer to other service-providers when a need is outside the scope of our mission. Akula’s second ingredient of scale also requires an intense minimization of variables, lest the technology become so over-complicated that it impedes usability and makes iterative development cost-prohibitive. I’ve made this mistake. Ouch.

As Matthew Forti points out in his Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, Ensuring That ‘Scaling What Works’ Actually Works, much of what makes many social enterprises ‘successful’ are idiosyncratic or qualitative factors that prevent them from scaling cleanly. How to get around this and develop a model that is truly scalable? Please, send ideas…we need them. In the meantime, a few of our best practices and ideas on how we might continue to move toward the goal of scale:

1. Create a financially self-sustaining model that eliminates risk of funder-induced operational and mission creep. As a profitable company, we have few concerns raising capital.

2. Minimize the number of products/services we offer, ideally to ONE. This involves saying “no” and “I’m sorry, we can’t help you” to a lot of people, which most of us are not good at. This is a work in progress.

3. Create partnerships with other service-providers to refer customers quickly and efficiently to other organizations that can address those needs that fall outside our scope (e.g., language training, legal assistance, etc).

4. Find or develop the technology required to provide our one service automatically, remotely, reliably and conveniently, with processes in place to respond quickly to inevitable problems and aberrations.