The Purpose-Driven Social Entrepreneur

by Karim Abouelnaga

  First, create a routine.

  Start by putting together a frame of what you would like to achieve on an average day. There are plenty of templates you can find to spur ideas, but there is something special about owning this part of the planning. This part starts with your goals. If you do not set your goals, it will be hard to create a routine that you truly feel ownership over. Design your routine with ideal start and end times that help meet your daily needs

  Second, add variety.

  As you are designing your days, make sure that they consist of different tasks. I cannot imagine doing the same exact things every single day. If you go to the gym, make sure you change the workout up. If you are at the office, change where you do work. Whatever it is you decide to do, avoid monotonous days by adding variety to your routine. Otherwise, you will get bored and may burn out very quickly.

  Lastly, follow your routine religiously.

  This is probably the hardest part, especially when you don’t have full control over your environment, such as when you are traveling. You may not have access to a gym, or there may be flight delays that cause you to make compromises to your regimen. However, when you are not traveling, this should be simple. When you finally get in a groove, you also become a lot more efficient.

  Of course, this is one of those “easier said than done” secrets. If you can own the process, you should be able to avoid burning out. This secret has worked for me for many years.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Discover What Helps You Persist

  “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

  —Benjamin Franklin

  One of my friends told me, “I’ve never thought seriously about becoming an entrepreneur, so I’m very inspired that you took that step so early on and did it for the sake of others, rather than yourself.”

  It must have been during a point in my work season where the pressure was starting to mount and things were not going as great and dandy as I would have liked them to be. I quickly told her that I sometimes wondered why anyone would want to be an entrepreneur. There are a lot of glamourless things that go into it. I cannot imagine someone going into entrepreneurship and succeeding at building something meaningful if they were in it for their own selfish desire. Yes, the reason has to move and compel you to act, but it has to be about much more than just yourself. When I shared that response, she responded, “What helps you to persist despite those things?”

  That question I did not answer as quickly. I knew there was an element of purpose, but was there more? Am I missing something in this conversation that goes beyond my own reflection? After all, this conversation was about something much larger than education; it was about being an entrepreneur and starting and building a business. You need more than just passion and purpose to deal with the clunk and gunk of running a company. The business side of things can get ugly. It is where you have to think through compensation, benefits, evaluating people, tracking goals and outcomes, picking insurance providers, and employee grievances.

  After days of reflection, I finally settled on what I believe drives me to go beyond just engaging in purpose-driven work and trying to build a purpose-driven company. There are three pieces: purpose, potential, and legacy.

  This entire book has been about how to live a more purpose-driven life and how to engage in more purpose-driven work. To be engaged in your purpose means you have to believe beyond any reasonable doubt that the work you are doing is the reason you were put on this Earth. That is essential to taking on anything that others see as daunting and especially challenging. For me, I know beyond a reasonable doubt that I was put on this Earth to help alleviate the inequality in education. That is what drives my work and my reason for being involved in education.

  The next piece for me was all about potential. My entire life has been defined by potential. When I got to college, I heard the famous quote “talent is everywhere, even though opportunity is not.” I was surrounded by bodies of research that made it clear that I had defied significant odds to be where I was at that moment. I started to become fascinated by human potential. If—given the right support at the right time—I was capable of producing Practice Makes Perfect and having the impact that I had on my community, what would it look like if I could help other people unleash their potential within my company? Building and growing a business provides me with the opportunity to do that within my company.

  The third piece for me is all about legacy. I chose to commit myself to doing work that was about something much greater than myself. It was about other people. It was about creating opportunity. And it was about giving everyone an equal chance. It was about influencing policy and informing legislation.

  Because building a purpose-driven company is so much harder than just being engaged in purpose-driven work, it helps to have these other motivations that are pushing you, especially in those moments where you find yourself doubting your purpose or when you have been given a reason to believe that the work you are doing is only out of passion.

  Part iii: Starting

  Not every passion or purpose project should manifest itself into an organization or a company. In fact, I have many friends who are driven by their life’s purpose and work on projects in a lab, in government, and in large corporations. Here are a couple of things to consider before you decide if this is a project worth building a new organization or company:

  Scope

  Start by giving thought to how large the impact is that you would like to have. Begin to think about the number of people you want to impact. Give some thought to how long you want to impact them for and how much that will cost. Ask yourself if you could imagine having several people working on your efforts full time.

  If you decide you want to start a volunteer mentoring program between college students and local high school students for one summer, you probably don’t need to start a nonprofit. If you decide you want to provide three-year job training for dozens of formerly incarcerated people, then you should probably incorporate and apply for tax-exempt status.

  Funding

  Most of the time, when people ask me if they should incorporate a nonprofit, it is because they want to raise money to support their cause later that week or that summer. They come to me with a sense of urgency. They believe that foundations and individuals won’t fund them until they have a 501(c)(3) status, and once they receive that designation and put in a little bit of work, that funding will start to come in from individuals, foundations, and corporations. It took us over a year to get incorporated and receive our exempt status. That didn’t stop us from soliciting people for support. When you’re starting out, the donations you’re likely to get will be under $500, which for most people doesn’t have a large impact on their taxes.

  People will support you because they believe in you and the work you’re trying to carry out, not because of a tax deduction. You won’t get funding from a foundation or a corporation, but most of them won’t give you money immediately after you have your 501(c)(3) either. They care more about your governance and alignment. Those are things you can work on without tax-exempt status.

  If urgency of funding is what is driving your desire to get tax-exempt status, consider crowdfunding through a site like Indiegogo, Crowdrise, or GoFundMe. You don’t need to be a tax-exempt organization and you can customize your profile to share your story. I highly encourage crowdfunding or peer-to-peer fundraising if it is going to be a short-term project or eventually become a nonprofit. If you’re on the fence and have an opportunity to collect funding from a foundation or a corporation, consider finding a fiscal sponsor. Organizations like Social Good, Net Roots Foundation, or TSNE allow you to use their tax-exempt status to receive donations and provide your donors or funders with a tax deduction. I encourage most organizations, projects, or nonprofits to seek out fis
cal sponsorship during the early stages of their development.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Very Beginning

  “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

  —Walt Disney

  How do you start? This is undoubtedly the first question I always get from people who are interested in starting their own businesses but haven’t taken the leap yet. Most of the time, they have an idea they have been toying with for a few weeks or a few years. Some of them may have gone as far as registering a domain or even incorporating an LLC.

  The very first step I tell people to take is to write their idea down on paper. Most of the time, your idea is just in your head. When it is in your head, you cannot really share it with anyone. Also, there are some ideas that sound really good in our heads but do not make a lot of sense when we put them on paper. Writing the idea down forces you to communicate what you were thinking on paper. It also sets you up for the next step.

  Share your written idea with people. Make a list of four to five close friends or entrepreneurs and ask them if they’d be willing to review your idea and give you some feedback. Their initial review will likely turn up some interesting results. Sometimes you might find out that your ideas are actually not that unique; in fact, someone else has already created what you want to create. The bad news is that you no longer have a business. The good news is that you might just have to find another angle.

  The most common reason people give me for why they have not shared their ideas with anyone else is because they were afraid someone else would take their idea and run with it. I don’t know what movie or television show gave people this idea, but this is very seldom the reality. Building a business is hard work.

  Most entrepreneurs will tell you, ideas are second to execution in business. You can have a great idea, but with poor execution, you will not get anywhere. Similarly, a bad idea with great execution has a better chance of succeeding.

  When I was starting Practice Makes Perfect, I shared my idea with more than 200 different people via email, in-person conversations, and business pitches. Today, my idea has been shared with millions of people. Nothing has been stolen or profited off of in a way that has hindered my own ability to succeed or scale my own business. In fact, my original idea for Practice Makes Perfect would have probably failed. Part of building a business is being able to adapt. That’s exactly what we did. My idea got better because of the input I have received from others since we started.

  Once you have shared your idea with enough people and you have a strong sense that it is a great idea waiting to be unleashed, the next step is to figure out how to test your idea with as little money as possible. At this point, all you need to do is make sure that your assumptions are true. My team ran the first Practice Makes Perfect program on $10,000, which now costs $30,000 to run. We used volunteers instead of paid labor, and we paid stipends instead of an hourly rate. We leveraged friends’ time to build a website, and we didn’t worry too much about having fancy fliers or business cards. We ultimately wanted to see if what we were doing was valuable.

  If your idea creates value on a shoestring budget, then you know there’s hope that it could create more value at a larger scale. If your idea does not create value in its minimal form, odds are it is not going to add a tremendous amount of value at a larger scale; of course, there are always exceptions.

  The last step of the starting phase is to edit your initial idea on paper to reflect what you learned from feedback and from your test. Then you can summarize it in a one-page document that includes the idea and how much money you need to take the next step. This should be a document you can share with potential partners and investors.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Order of Operations

  “Don’t put the cart before the horse.”

  —John Heywood

  Just recently, a friend asked me how I started Practice Makes Perfect. After being unable to readily answer him, I thought it must be a result of one of two things: there were too many possible ways to answer this question, or that starting companies has become so natural that I don’t have to think about it anymore—it’s like breathing or blinking. A quick moment of reflection proved the former to be true.

  I realized that a lot of people try to start companies backward—that is, with the final step first. The actual incorporation, the documents to register with your state, should be that last thing you worry about. I have had friends who put really good ideas to the side because they didn’t know how to incorporate a company or were worried about how they would find money to pay lawyers to help them get through the legal recognition phase.

  The main reason entrepreneurial ventures fail is because of a lack of execution. I started my first venture at the age of thirteen. In hindsight, my internet startup failed because I was missing the most important ingredient in running a company: other people. This included customers, cofounders, and investors.

  The value of supporters cannot be underestimated. In fact, the most important of all people is your first supporter. Oftentimes, too much credit is given to the original idea generator. Yes, it’s true that they had to persuade the first person to buy in, but it is the first follower who signals to everyone else that you may be working on something interesting.

  Once you have an idea and a support team, you’re well on your way. A business is informally born when a group of people provide a product or service consistently. At this point, the most important thing to do is to figure out your competitive advantage. This phase is all about identifying what it is about your product or service that will ensure its existence.

  The final thing you need to do to make things official is to incorporate. I highly suggest putting this part off until you are certain that you want to pursue the business you are working on. Filing with the state and gathering articles of incorporation can be time consuming, and if you decide to pay a lawyer, the early expenses could slow your growth. Ultimately, expenses should be kept minimal with any startup venture.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Starting Up Lean

  “Don’t be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.”

  —Eric Ries

  With so many changes still to be faced and iterations of your idea yet to come, you don’t want to spend a disproportionate amount of your time creating bureaucracy and processes that you will only end up changing. Looking back, there are a handful of things that we did at Practice Makes Perfect when we first started out that we would never do as an established company. However, I can’t imagine getting our business to where it is today without having done them. The beginning is all about the lean startup, and there are some things you can delay when starting lean.

  Payroll provider:Trying to be too legitimate from day one means you’re going to burn more cash. We didn’t start with a payroll provider until we had our second hire a few months into his role. Though doing payroll gets easier when you have a company calculating the deferrals and the taxes to withhold, it also comes with a hefty monthly fee and additional transaction costs. I have friends who have started companies and gotten up to five people before they actually signed on to a payroll provider. I don’t know that I would’ve waited that long, but I know for sure it is one of those things you can put off for a bit.

  Your dream domain name:It would be nice to have your dream domain name from the start of your business, but the truth is that something close to it is perfectly fine to begin with. Since we had a common phrase as our company name, we quickly put ourselves in a boat where our domain wouldn’t be available at a normal rate. Instead of buying the “practice makes perfect” domain at the very beginning, we settled for www.pmpnyc.org. We didn’t actually buy the domain we wanted until we were two and half years into the company’s development. Luckily, we were able to get it for $800 when we were ready. It wasn’t terrible, but was still more than you should spend on
a domain name when you first start a business.

  Team member professional development:As a smaller company, you can generally get away without a formal professional development policy. However, as you start to get bigger, you need to put a plan in place for how people will access resources within the company to grow and develop.

  At the beginning it is also rare to get a person who fits the company culture and has all of the skills to do their job with the amount of compensation you’re able to offer. Training helps fill the skill gaps.

  Company phones and computers:If not getting a company computer or phone isn’t obvious to the new team member, they probably don’t know they are interviewing at a startup. For every single hire we made up to our seventh or eighth one, we reminded them to bring their own laptop to work on day one. This saved the company the overhead cost of purchasing and having to account for any hardware. As you get larger, your teammates expect the company to provide the tools that they need to be able to do their job effectively.

  Some of the corners we cut in the beginning would make me cringe if we cut them today, but they were essential for a faster launch. Today we dot almost every i and cross almost every t, but it is absolutely okay not to start that way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Building a Strong Founding Team

  “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

  —African proverb

  Think you can do it alone? Think again. The last thing you want to do is try to launch a venture on your own. Having a team can speed up your startup’s timeline, and it sends a signal to potential investors that you can persuade other people to believe in your idea. This skill is significant. Imagine an entrepreneur who can’t persuade people to join his team trying to persuade a customer to buy his product.