Your Social Enterprise Startup Guide: Social Impact Business Plans and Startup Budgets

If you hope to make a positive social impact with your business idea, startup, or service offering and be financially sustainable, you my friend may too be a social entrepreneur!

You’re in the right place to learn how to create a social impact business if you:

• Are a values-driven person with a new business idea (or a business you want to uplevel),
• Are thinking of creating a project, offering, or startup to address a social issue,
• Want to incorporate support for an issue you care about into your work.

In this article we explore social impact entrepreneurship and you’ll learn from the startup world how to do three crucial activities that will help you focus in on creating a sustainable business.

SOCIAL IMPACT ENTERPRISE

Social Impact businesses can donate a section of profits like REI or goods like Toms, help get fair trade wages for makers, or be lead by workers like co-ops in the household, tech, and many other industries.

Social entrepreneurship is on the rise, with rising stars lists, networks, programs, and brand-name school certificate programs all on offer. Large companies can now be mission-driven B-Corps, and big businesses are slowly normalizing reporting a “triple bottom line” — on profits, environmental impact, and social impact. Meanwhile small shops, co-ops, and one-person projects have been leading the way for years by combining values with sustainable business practices and innovative ideas.

As a small business or startup, you may be starting a socially-motivated project for the reasons most people do it: you see a problem and you believe you can solve it, if you can be sustained in the process. Not only is social entrepreneurship a huge plus for values-driven innovators, it’s also smart to wave your flag from a business (that is, financial) standpoint. Forbes notes, “research shows that many customers choose to buy from the companies whose values they most align with.” No wonder the big guys are latching on.

But, launching a startup is NO joke. Take it from someone who’s launched several and works with startup founders weekly — this is not for the faint of heart, though it can be done sustainably and without martyrdom. You will experience lows, rejection, and failure and need to take it…