How much control of your company are you willing to give up in exchange for funds? is a question that all investment-seeking entrepreneurs need to answer. Social entrepreneurs are confronted with another key question that impacts how they want to set legally establish their organization: How important is profit versus mission? With these two questions [...]
How to let your mission guide you: Your mission should guide your decisions, but sometimes you’ll have to prioritize long-term mission over short-term consequences as Organic Valley did when it shipped milk from Ohio to North Carolina to help farmers there start a local business. The short-term compromise was the environmental impact of shipping milk so [...]
Start small and focus your efforts on your mission. Â You’ve probably heard this at some point, but it’s hard to do. Â How do you know if your perception of focus is, well, out of focus? Â Your employees can be the best reflection of reality. “If your employees or people connected to your company can’t tell [...]
How does good beget good? And what are you doing to tip the domino? In his book, The HIP Investor: Make Bigger Profits by Building a Better World, R. Paul Herman lists employee satisfaction as an indicator of strong investment returns.  He points to Wharton finance professor Alex Edmans’ work identifying a “direct positive correlation over [...]
Part of building a successful business is being able to let other people tell you how to do it better. Â Companies that set up mechanisms to learn from their employees, particularly those at the base of the company who do automated work and aren’t brought into weekly meetings to voice their say, see economic gain [...]
Employees are the crux of your company.  Successful leaders have known this for years. Take away my people and leave the factories, and soon there will be grass growing on the factory floors, but take away my factories and leave my people, and soon we will have bigger and better factories.  –Andrew Carnegie When you enfranchise your [...]
“If you’re not scared by what you’re revealing, than you’re not being transparent enough†–Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation If real transparency is scary, why create it?  Like with most things that bring real value (and take real effort), there are several benefits of having a glass-walled company.  A note before the benefits: transparency isn’t a [...]
This point is often overlooked. Â Your do-gooding and good deeding aren’t a substitute for marketing. Â Customers can’t love you for what you do if they don’t know you. Â At this point you might be thinking: But Wait! Â One of the benefits of a social mission is the visibility it brings to my company. Â I’ve even [...]
Click the player or right-click and save for the MP3. Business structures for Triple Bottom Line ventures are my Bermuda Triangle.  I’m whipped around to end up confused about the benefits of each structure (L3C, LLC, Special Purpose Corporation, hybrid for-profit and nonprofit) and its respective requirements and restrictions.  So I asked Jenny Kassan, managing director at Katovich [...]
You have your board. Â Now what? I wrote before about when and how to assemble your advisory board. Â If you already have an advisory board though, what can you realistically expect from the people who comprise it and how do you best leverage their skills and commitment? The first part–what you can realistically expect from [...]
I'm Olivia Khalili. I created Cause Capitalism to show you how to grow your business by incorporating a social mission. 
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