The big driver of the business is simply to make a difference.
“I have been back to where our first lights went out over two years ago and I went to meetings in a village where they got the lights and 50 people turned up to say thank you. They said things like, ‘I have had this cough for 10 years, now I don’t have one’.”
“Our shareholders aren’t in it to make money but to make sure people get our solar lights and to do environmental good as well, although we hope ultimately to make money.”
Market value
Normally, entrepreneurs are looking to drive up the value of their enterprise. That’s not always the aim of the social enterprise. Doesn’t that slow down their growth?
Thatcher says it actually works the other way, pointing out that most businesses operate in competitive markets that are flooded with their kind of products.
“There is not a lot of room in their market and they have to move somewhere else,’’ he says.
“But for us, there are still one-and-a-half billion people that use kerosene lights so our market is a long way from being flooded.”
“At some point, those pressures will come but it’s a long way off because the market is so untapped at the moment.”
Jesse Bridge, the hospitality service manager at Charcoal Lane, says balancing the mission of the business with the need to grow revenue is a challenge.
The restaurant – named after an Archie Roach song – is located in a 150-year-old bluestone building in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. Run by Mission Australia, the restaurant sits 70 people.
It runs a training program for disadvantaged youth that gives them skills and helps them find jobs in the hospitality industry. All the profits go back to Mission Australia.
“At times, you want the business to be the focus because you want to generate income and you want to generate revenue so that the business can be more profitable and you can divert money into their programs,” Bridge says.
“But there are times when you need to swing that see-saw back the other way so that the focus is on trainees, because, realistically, without the trainees and the greater social purpose and social enterprise, we would be just another restaurant and that’s not what we are here for.”
Putting profits second
The primary driver of the business is to give young people who have few social and work skills the ability and know-how to make relationships for the first time in their lives and find a place in the workforce.
Making a profit is not what gets management up in the morning.
“None of us are here because we want to make money,’’ Bridge says. “If we were after that, we would go somewhere else.
“We are here of the greater purpose of working in a social enterprise business model for Mission Australian. It’s to empower those trainees, to give them the skills to move forward with their lives and careers.”
