I haven’t written for sometime and I find my aptitude for it deteriorating. All through April and mid-May I was quite tied up with the preparations for our regional business planning workshop for young/ early-stage social entrepreneurs. Bringing together 19 young social entrepreneurs (ages ranging 23 - 33) in Kuala Lumpur (in conjunction with WCIT), Rahul, Simon, Sunit and I got to working with each of the entrepreneurs’ business plans.

We went through everything an entrepreneur needs to think about and plan for during venture implementation - vision, mission, business model, social impact assessment etc. Through my work, I find that there are usually 2 types of social entrepreneurs:

- socially-tipped

A socially-tipped entrepreneur has a very strong social mission but has little or no idea of his/ her business model. Typically, this type of entrepreneur ends up relying on grant support to run the venture. We all know purely grant-based ventures end being chronically undercapitalised and are unable to expand the coverage of their services or products. My passion lies in helping socially-tipped entrepreneurs build their business models which is in essence diversifying their income streams from grant funding. This could include nominal fees, in-kind support, micro-credit packages etc.

- business-strong

These type of entrepreneurs run commercial businesses with strong CSR programs (CSR from traditional perspective). Our interest is to help their ventures optimise the creation of social and/or environmental value without sacrificing the creation of economic value (profits). The goal here is to truly create sustainable/ blended value entities.