Stanford EntrepreneurEntrepreneurship isn’t a career, it’s a way of life

Social Entrepreneurship ASB - Elliot BrownFiled Under: class, social entrepreneurship

Class today was great because we had Elliot Brown of Springboard Forward talk to us. He had a very interesting story, which I will highlight below, and then for the last remaining portion we talked about “theories of change” - what they are, what they mean, and the impact they have. Overall a very good class, with a couple of lessons learned highlighted, and one of the better stories told about a nonprofit and their success.

Elliot Brown Background

Elliot is a Stanford graduate who started working at Sun Microsystems corporation in their philanthropic arm to get a feel for the CSR landscape. After working there he worked at an East Palo Alto office running a small program and learned how not to do many things. One of the biggest downfalls was that there wasn’t enough talent in the environment, but one of the major bonuses was getting a view of how about thirty organizations worked. Then, he left that organization and started doing some consulting. One thing he started to notice is that when organizations are looking for manpower, they call temp agencies versus nonprofits that are working to find employment for their constituents. In other words, he was perplexed at why companies would pay temp agencies for workers when certain nonprofit groups were providing the service for free.

The Birth of SpringBoard & SpringBoard Forward

It was at this insight that led to the development of his first company - SpringBoard. The idea was to take the nonprofit people’s and provide them with jobs by being a middle man staffing agency “cover.” After four years, he started SpringBoard Forward, a nonprofit, that focused on helping these unemployed individuals develop the skill and mindset to succeed in the workplace. After  running two organizations for six months, he definitely felt taxed and decided to shut down the for-profit and focus on the nonprofit. The reason being is that with a nonprofit you can be market driven, get funding, and have access to resources that regular businesses don’t have access. But, he also admits that he felt he needed to learn how to run a business before jumping to the nonprofit idea.

Where is SpringBoard Forward Today?

Even though traditional nonprofits have problems of scaling (due to lack of resources), he is working to create a much larger organization that can accomplish the vision of the organization. The issue that he has identified is that many of the individuals being placed by these temp agencies are low income and don’t have hope in the process of getting out of poverty and going places. His job is to help them develop and come to the job with a completely different attitude - come in with a passion, belief, and vision for the future. The ideal question he wants the people he’s helping to ask is, “How can I use the position I’m in to get where I want to go?”

While they feel they have some initial results, it hasn’t been in effect long enough to develop the proof of concept they need to scale more effectively. Because the lowest paid employees interact the most with the customers (and are Eliot’s target “client”), companies want these individuals to be engaged and effective. As such, the goal is to cut turnover in half and measure employee engagement in the process to determine effectiveness. They have a small amount of success for the people they help because 44% are promoted and receive a raise within four months of employment. But, this doesn’t do enough to establish much business value. One test he would like to do is perform several projects on a pretty big scale and evaluate the results. Did sales go up in the project group or control group?

Personal Training

This was my favorite part of the talk and stemmed from a question I asked, and that was, what is the process you provide to help these people figure out what they want to do with their lives? Elliot starts out with the amazing insight that the ethic used to be to have a good living and now it is to love what you’re doing. This developed because of the emptyness many felt from monetarily successful jobs. The idea, then, is to provide a 1 on 1 coach that asks you wat you want and what are you going to do about it? Most have the mindset that SpringBoard Forward is going to help them, but the problem is that the individual doesn’t know what to do after the coach is gone. Instead, the coach kicks them in the @ss and keeps them going. They also spend eight hours going through a “9 Step Process to Clarity.”

Getting Managers on Board

A second prong is to work with managers so that they are bought into the value of helping employees.  For example, if the employee is interested in being a plumber and is working in a hotel, the manager could hand off all plumbing jobs to that employee. The result is a completely changed relationship, and this relationship is important because the #1 factor for turnover is relationship with the manager.

Lessons Learned

•  Build small successes before shooting for huge ones. Prove the concept before trying to score huge deals that would most probably collapse in failure.
• Think outside the box. The idea of creating a for profit placement agency that used the nonprofit’s people was creative and worked to accomplish goals for all parties involved.
• Inspire hope. This is a bit about philosophy, but inspiring hope and meaning into a person’s life provides that individual with a sense of purpose.
• Identify and eliminate biggest impediments to success. If the number one reason for problems that prevent your success aren’t being addressed - like managers in Elliot’s case - then you will never attain the level of success you are looking for.
• Set up metrics to measure progress and maintain accountability. Even though Elliot is the manager, and admits he isn’t very good at it, he is still accountable to his board and the board can fire him if he’s not performing.

Theory of Change

The general idea is to identify the major problems that prevent your goal from being implemented. Then, for each of these problems, figure out some action that can be done to take care of this issue, then follow up by measuring your success. Performing case studies on a couple organizations was very helpful in understanding the significance of this process and I think it is a great idea for any mission-driven organization.

Conclusion

Very cool class that provided a lot of insight into the life of a nonprofit. Elliot was very insightful and someone I would like to see in the future to hear how SpringBoard is progressing. The idea of a theory of change is definitely interesting, and I think it is necessary for any nonprofit to use this method of evaluation every six months to keep a hold on what they are doing and whether or not it is furthering their mission.