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FIP 100: What I’ve learnt building my social enterprise after 100 episodes, interview by Andrew Foote of Sanivation

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This is an interview to mark the 100th episode. Andrew Foote is the host. He’s the co-founder of Sanivation – a social enterprise in Kenya that takes human waste from cities and converts it into fuel. Andrew is interviewing Andy Narracott, founder of Finding Impact.

On this episode you’ll learn:

  • It’s important to stop and celebrate in any social enterprise, to mark milestones and recognise how far you’ve traveled on your journey. It’s good for your mental health, and it’s good for building a positive culture in your team.
  • Finding Impact is process driven. Andy created a process to uncover insights for social entrepreneurs through interviews. Then improved that process via feedback (from listeners and himself), and once all the kinks were ironed out, he trained other people to follow the process. Andy claims this to be the most basic form of creating an enterprise.
  • Andy recognises the incredible help he’s received from volunteers, and the power of creating win-win partnerships. Andy offers new skills training and an opportunity to learn and build experience, and in return he gets help with the creating content procedures.
  • People naturally want to share their knowledge. The goal of the podcast is the make that as easy as possible – to remove friction to knowledge sharing.
  • Andy shares a couple of books that taught him the importance of a repeatable process for continuous improvement. The first is Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, then Work the System by Sam Carpenter, and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. All are instructive on procedures, experimentation and feedback.
  • On how to determine what procedures are important, it depends on what the goal is, and this will probably change over time. For Andy, the goal of the first episode was to record a half-decent interview, develop the basic process of getting it onto the web and hoping a few people listen and share feedback. Nowadays, his goal is to create content that is relevant and has some urgency in need, and he’s moving onto measuring impact in the traditional sense, with a a theory of change and an M&E plan.
  • On what he’s learnt about himself, Andy says he needs structure and process in his life, as the alternative seems to be chaos and continuous reinventing the wheel. This dovetails into his interest in efficiency.
  • Journalling can help us monitor ourselves so we get better at understanding our strengths and weaknesses, and help us be the best version of ourselves.
  • Andy plans his week on a Sunday night using Google Calendar. He sees what phone calls and meetings have been scheduled, what pieces of work he has to do, and then puts chunks of work into this calendar, so when he starts his day, he doesn’t waste time by thinking about what he has to do. He also puts in family time and exercise time.
    Streaks is a google chrome add on that sits within Gmail, which Andy uses to track projects, processes and initiatives.
  • Andy’s vision for Finding Impact is to continue providing content for social entrepreneurs in emerging markets, as he believes they’re pushing the boundaries of creating systemic change in these markets. Meanwhile, he wants to scale knowledge sharing to build local podcasts for local markets.

Links to resources:

Connect with Andrew Foote

Connect with Andy Narracott

FIP 87: Audience Stories – Ravi Shankar from AcceleratED

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Today, we speak with Ravi Shankar of AcceleratED on how Finding Impact has helped the company as it doubles its operations during its growth phase, for which learning from others’ mistakes has been critical.

On this episode:

  • Ravi noted that there had been multiple podcast episodes that have been helpful to his company.
  • An episode that was particularly helpful to Ravi was Episode 78 with Raghu Krishnaswamy. Ravi took away Raghu’s focus on “casting” and building a diverse culture within a team. Some tricks that AcceleratED borrowed from the episode include:
    • Hiring: The company is now taking a “casting” approach to hiring and employing a portfolio approach to human capital management.
    • Retainment: Thinking through the employee life cycle and applying user center design aspects to it.
    • Culture: Connecting with people on a personal level, not just a professional level. They have created a “Hobby Hour” to share interests from outside the office.
  • Ravi noted that when any company is very small, it is easy to develop a culture but can often result in people becoming copies of each other or suffering from group think. Now, AcceleratED is building an internal culture guide to share both successes and vulnerabilities.
  • Ravi was struck by the irony that AcceleratED itself is a behavior change-focused organization, but it is only now that they are incorporating some of the behavior change elements from the business model back into the operations of the company.

Links to Resources:

Connect with Ravi:

Rachel Sklar Finding Impact

FIP 86: Audience Stories – Rachel Sklar from Pit Vidura

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Rachel Sklar takes the guest seat this week to tell us how the Finding Impact Podcast is helping her with her business in Rwanda. Rachel runs Pit Vidura, which offers pit latrine emptying services in dense urban areas where there are no sewers.

On this episode you’ll learn

  • Apart from helping to improve her business, the podcast has helped Rachel get back into long distance running! When she’s back at her desk Rachel listens to bits again and writes down the parts that were the most insightful and sends it to members of her team, inviting them to listen and come back to her to have a conversation about it.
  • The podcast is confirmation to Rachel that they’re on the right track. Sometimes they have to make stuff up on the fly and under pressure. So later when they listen, they realise others have taken their course of action as well. The podcast also confirms that not everyone has the answers before they start.
  • Rachel and her team are not from a business background so some of the knowledge, in the form of frameworks or processes, is really useful.
  • They also hear that others are doing the same thing they are, but they speak about it using more formal language and approaches. So it allows Rachel and her team to redevelop their strategy in a more structured way and speak to people externally using the right language.
  • She loved the episode with Lauren from GetIt about how her food distribution business soon became a logistics business, since this is what their pit emptying business has become.
  • Fausto’s episode was also instructive in that he shared how the early days were so scrappy, and they survived from winning a few prizes and surviving off of customer revenues, which is how it’s been with Pit Vidura. Fausto was also open and honest about the emotional side of a startup, and the thoughts of failure, which Rachel experiences.
  • The interview with Jonathan Lewis also resonated with Rachel, about a sector-wide problem which is the lack of diversity in social enterprise, and which she’s now building into the values of her company to intentionally confront this.
  • The episode with Rob Mills helped Rachel talk about social enterprise to more traditional investors, and help them understand what a social enterprise is.
  • Rachel really enjoyed the episode on unit economics with Steve Andrews. As with many social enterprises serving the base of the pyramid, you need to be so clued-up on your unit economics and use it as a management tool for decision making.
  • We talk about imposter syndrome, where you feel you don’t have enough of experience, knowledge, skills, (insert next one here!)… to build a business. Rachel has found listening to the podcast has made her realise that everyone’s in the same boat – no one really knows everything they’re going to do from the beginning and there are times you’ve just got to do your best.
  • Human capital is a constant struggle and something that doesn’t just go away, but needs constant effort behind a clear strategy. Cycling through employees, particularly during the early days, is an approach others take as well, whilst jealously guarding culture.
  • Also, we discuss a very open style of management, where you get to know your team personally, as described by Raghu Krishnasway.
  • Rachel suggests a way to improve the podcast could be to touch on people’s personal careers or lives, maybe even an activity, a quote, a joke, or something, so that listeners get a little more sense of their personality.

Links to resources:

Connect with Rachel:

 

FIP 85: Audience Stories – Emily Woods from Sanivation

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Today, we speak with Emily Woods of Sanivation on how one episode of Finding Impact helped her re-think how her company’s culture and values were created and defined.

On this episode:

  • Emily talks about the process of defining the company culture and establishing its values in advance of a high growth phase. The first time they had done this exercise was in 2015 when the company had 15 employees. At the time, they established seven core values but it seemed that these were too numerous for employees to remember and act upon.
  • They decided to do a second exercise to define the company’s purpose and values,  which was inspired by FIP’s Episode 63 with guest Ayla Schlosser. Multiple people within the company had recommended the episode, and Emily found that Ayla not only gave a clear description of her organization’s purpose but also really showed why company values are important.
  • She realized that Alya’s hummingbird story was really great for Resonate, but would not work for Sanivation. Emily noted that the story of the sanitation sector was that people were always looking to solve a problem, but not necessarily thinking through how to do it in the clear and best ways so the hummingbird story would need some adaptation.
  • Emily employed Ayla’s process for drafting company values in Sanivation, including making sure that everyone at the company was consulted and asking everyone what they are proudest of about the company.
  • Sanivation’s culture creation process focused on the management meeting with each team to discuss the current core values, if they remember them, and how they use them. That information was taken from each team to a day-long workshop with the managers, where discussion continued. Emily learned that it takes a while for people to think about what they are most proud of and would even recommend that companies take even longer with this process to ensure thorough feedback.
  • For Sanivation, the outcomes of the second company value creation workshop reduced the number of values from seven to three. Sanivation’s corporate values are: passion for impact, putting people first, and delivering results. From these core values, Sanivation wants to go on to create competencies upon which evaluative KPIs can be used, as well as decision principles for staff to use in everyday operations.

Links to Resources:

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