7. Apply the Integrated Investing Toolkit
In Chapter 7 I shared the practical tips and tools you can apply to your investment activities in order to identify and evaluate impactful investment opportunities. By combining traditional investment evaluation tools, venture development and evaluation tools, and impact identification and evaluation tools, you give yourself a complete set of processes and methods for evaluating impact investment opportunities.
The integrated investing toolkit helps you gather the information needed for integrated decision making when you are presented with an investment opportunity. Bear in mind that access to essential resources, your motivations for investing, your values, and your mindsets all affect your decision making. Keep these foundational pieces and techniques in mind as you gather the information you need through application of the integrated investing toolkit.
The knowledge you have, your awareness of risk and impact, and the information you collect through your application of the integrated investing toolkit will lead you to the exciting point of making an investment decision.
8. Join Other People Who Are Investing
Integrated investing requires practice. When you’re new to impact investing, joining a community, network, or group of like-minded people that can support you and collaborate with you is a great place to start.
Impact investing is not just a transaction; it is an investment relationship (recall the relationship mindset from Chapter 6). Remember that building relationships with entrepreneurs takes time. Look for someone you feel a desire to work with—and who wants to work with you as well—and don’t be afraid to ask tough questions. You want to be able to make it through good times and bad with the entrepreneur you’re investing in. Be clear about what you’re looking for in the investment relationship. As in any relationship, there should be both give and take, and you want the relationship to feel fair and balanced.
Impact investing can be an exciting opportunity to meet other investors and entrepreneurs involved in impact ventures, and to invest in and build meaningful, purposeful businesses of the future together.
9. Consider Investing with a Gender Lens
Gender lens investing means taking into consideration the participation, needs, realities, and leadership of both women and men when evaluating businesses for the purposes of investing.
Gender equality in investing is important because it is one of the ways we can effect change, level the playing field amongst men and women, and restore the balance in life. Diversity is natural in living systems like the rainforest and animal habitats; it should be just as natural in human systems, business and investing included.
This book opened with a discussion of the things in life we all want and need to survive, thrive, and be happy. Gender lens investing matters because it is one of the actions we can take to reverse the lack of gender equality and equity, and to restore diversity, which enables thriving and happier societies and economies.
The next time you evaluate an investment opportunity, do so with a gender lens. Reflect on how the participation, needs, realities, and leadership of both women and men are affected by the business you’re evaluating. Take gender equality and diversity into consideration before you make your next investment decision.
Final Thoughts
If we are going to really change the landscape of investing and have a positive impact on the world around us, we need to change how we think about investing and how we make investment decisions.
This change starts with looking at the products and services we buy and the activities we undertake—including investing—as more than just things we consume. These products, services, and activities are essential resources we need to survive, thrive, and be happy. For essential resources to exist, we need to invest in the businesses that give us access to them.
We need to think again about why we invest in the first place and about how our investing activities and investment choices express our values and align with them. We can be more holistic about how we make investment decisions and use all the inputs available to us. That means integrating inputs from analysis, emotion, body, and intuition into our investment decisions. We need to shift our mindsets before we invest.
These are profound changes. I hope integrated investing helps you take a step closer toward investing for positive impact with head, heart, body, and soul.
FURTHER READING
C O MPILED HERE IS a list of books and resources that I’ve found helpful. Some are directly related to specific chapters of integrated investing, while others are interesting reads that could expand your worldview and be useful in your evaluation of impact and in your investment decisions.
The field of impact investing is growing and evolving. It pays to gather more information and practice continuous learning. Here are some resources to help you do that.
For further guidance on how to categorize opportunities into one or more of the six essential resources discussed in Chapter 1, refer to the Essential Resources Chart on the Integrated Investing website at integratedinvesting.ca . On the chart, I’ve listed areas of business and investment ranging from food to financial services to information and placed checkmarks under one or more essential resources that are applicable.
For further insights on the subject of motivations in a broader context, the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) featured a great video1 through their RSA Animate series called Drive , based on the critically acclaimed book of the same name by Daniel Pink (Riverhead Books, 2009). Pink provides useful insight on three elements of motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
On investing as taking care of the village and to deepen your knowledge on the issues of income and wealth inequality, dig deeper into Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (Penguin, 2010). A much heavier tome on the subject of capital and inequality is Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap, 2014), written by French economist Thomas Piketty. Some of Piketty’s theories could be challenged, but the historical account of capital and income is certainly helpful for understanding some of the principles that underlie present-day issues. Prosperity Without Growth (Earthscan Publications, 2009) by Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development, is a daring book that challenges the concept of unfettered economic growth and considers how to sustain human prosperity and well-being in the future.
On the topic of integrated decision making (Chapter 5), Eyes Wide Open (HarperBusiness, 2013) by economist Noreena Hertz encourages us to be more discerning and empowered in our decision making. Blink (Back Bay Books, 2007) by popular author Malcolm Gladwell is an easy introduction to concepts of rapid cognition, intuition, and quick decision making. The Intuitive Investor (Select Books, 2010) is written by Jason Voss, CFA and former Wall Street investment manager, and is one of the rare sources that talks about mindfulness and spirituality in the context of money management. An interesting book that links human instincts and social behavior to economic decisions is Basic Instincts (Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 2010) by Pete Lunn. Lunn points out that altruism and fairness, not only profit-maximizing self-interest, have strong influences on economic decisions. Lastly, Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf (Random House Canada, 2012) by Wall Street trader turned neuroscientist, John Coates, provides insight on how our bodies and our physiology affects risk taking and decision making, with examples from the financial industry.
Mind Set! (HarperCollins Publishers, 2006) by John Naisbitt suggests ways to open your mind to understand today’s world and reveal the opportunities of the future. It was the first book that exposed me to the idea of mindset change. It provided me with a basis for recognizing mindsets (which are discussed in Chapter 6) and how they impact our thinking and decision making.
We can thank the Lean Startup movement for all the amazing and useful resources for entrepreneurs making their venture ideas a reality. The Lean Startup (Crown Business, 2011) by Eric Ries is the go-to book for starting a venture. It often goes
hand-in-hand with Business Model Generation (Wiley, 2010) by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany (K&S Ranch, 2005) by Steve Blank. John Mullins, a professor at the London School of Business wrote two useful books, The New Business Road Test (Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2003) and Getting to Plan B (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), coauthored with Randy Komisar. An example due diligence checklist can be found on the Integrated Investing website at integratedinvesting.ca .
There are a number of references in Chapter 9 to Criterion Institute, a not-for-profit research and advocacy organization based in Connecticut and a leader in gender lens investing. I found my community amongst the people that Criterion Institute convened for their Convergence events over the course of 2011 to 2014, focused on gender lens investing. Joy Anderson and Criterion Institute continue to be my go-to resource for the space where finance and gender intersect. You can find a wealth of resources on gender and investing at their website at https://criterioninstitute.org/revaluegender / (last accessed April 10, 2016). Meredith A. Jones has been researching and writing about women in alternative investments for several years and her first book, Women of the Street (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), offers a rare perspective in gender lens investing by focusing on female money managers.
There are more books than I have listed above that have informed the development of integrated investing. The suggestions here offer great insights, unusual perspectives, and a good starting point for understanding the landscape that influences impact investing.
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1 Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us , The RSA , accessed April 14, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6 XAP nuFjJc
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
T H IS BOOK HAS drawn from my experience as a financier, as an investor in startups for good, and as the founder of Pique Ventures and Pique Fund. With that in mind, I want to thank MyBestHelper, Wearable Therapeutics, Beanworks Solutions, and ePact Network and the incredible CEO s that founded and lead these companies. They are all amazing early-stage companies that make a difference in the world through their products, services, and business culture. It’s an honor to have the opportunity to invest in them through Pique Fund and work with the great women who lead them. Thank you in particular to Catherine Dahl, whose story I’ve included in brief in this book.
We put the integrated investing tools into practice in Pique Fund’s investment activities and I thank Crystal Lo for helping to put them to the test.
I gratefully acknowledge Satya Patel for granting permission to quote his blog article about emotional resonance in Chapter 5.
Thank you to participants of the integrated investing course for providing feedback on the course content that was largely drawn from this book.
I am thankfully surrounded by social innovators, entrepreneurs, change makers, and impact investors that I’m honored to call colleagues, friends, and trusted advisors, in particular Servane Mouazan, David Hodgson, and Joy Anderson. Not only did they review, advise on, or comment on parts of the book, but they also do amazing work that inspires me to continue on this often complex and challenging path.
Writing in the financial industry is often technical and full of jargon that makes it opaque to most people. Thank you to Lauren Bacon for introducing me to Brooke Warner. Many thanks to Brooke for coaching me and reviewing my writing as it unfolded. Her experience and advice helped me evolve my writing and she encouraged me to take a stand.
Thank you to Lally Rementilla, the first investor and my fellow board member in Pique Fund. Working with Lally and talking through exciting opportunities, as well as tough investment decisions, with her has helped me be a better investor. It was my hope that what I’ve learned over the past few years could be shared through this book.
The biggest supporter of my writing endeavors is my lovely husband, who put up with many Sundays spent apart as I wrote in our local cafés. I thank him for reading drafts of my manuscript, for engaging in countless conversations about my work, investing, and current affairs, and for distracting our young daughter from the shiny screen of my computer as I worked.
LINDA MACKIE PHOTOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A N IMPACT INVESTOR and alternative investment manager, Bonnie Foley-Wong is the founder of Pique Ventures and founding investor of Pique Fund.
Foley-Wong began her career as an auditor with a Big 4 accounting firm, after receiving a Bachelor of Mathematics degree and a Master of Accounting degree from the University of Waterloo. She spent twelve years in London as a corporate finance advisor and investment banker, then as an advisor to entrepreneurs and impact investors. With over two decades’ experience in finance, investment banking and venture capital, Foley-Wong has financed over $ 1 billion of alternative investments in Europe and North America.
Foley-Wong is a Chartered Public Accountant, Chartered Accountant, and CFA charterholder. She presently resides in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband and young daughter.
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