Harvind(on the cover; Hugo Menino Aguiar, co-founder of SPEAK at Chivas Venture Competition)
Everything starts with ambition
Everything starts with ambition. ambition that has a noble-minded purpose: make a positive change and creating something meaningful for society.
Because that’s why you decided to start a business that is more impact-driven than profit-oriented and make your contribution in solving one of today’s main global challenges: be these – climate change issues, refugees crisis, poverty, and unemployment – just to name few. But once you are able to turn your ambition into an expressed reality (a workable solution with a proven impact), your success is determined by how many people you are able to reach with your solution. And here’s where social franchising comes in.
Social Franchising has a huge potential to help us address the biggest problems of the world
The social franchising model is a way for small projects that successfully tackle social issues in a local context to scale internationally. It is a relatively easy, low-cost way, with reduced risks.
By definition, social franchising is a replication strategy of a proven organizational model according to the principles of commercial franchising, and with the last aim of maximizing the social impact, while also guaranteeing financial sustainability.
By adopting this model, social enterprises are able to save time and resources as they don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Therefore, it is important that the franchisor shares with the franchisee the learning processes, the methodologies and technologies. Also, the franchise agreement always involves a fee structure and assumes central training and support for the franchisee.
Act local, think Global
Several businesses were able to scale their success internationally through social franchising. To mention a few: Trussel Trust Foodbank (UK), Child Line (India) and CAP Markets (Germany).
Because your success at scale needs a business model designed in a way that makes its replication strategy easy and almost natural. Most importantly, it’s key to determine beforehand which elements are scalable, identify which are the core aspects of your local success and what elements are open to adaptation and evolution. Therefore, when entering the scaling process, you should answer some questions: is your social impact proven and evaluated? Then, is this a sustainable business model with clear ownership? Not to mention, should you consider any cultural clashes? Basically, before the next step, you need to be “franchise ready”.
Social franchising can learn from commercial franchising
As an illustration take McDonald’s, Benetton, IKEA or Body Shop for successful scaling through commercial franchising.
And now it’s time for social enterprises to learn from the techniques of commercial franchising, without prejudices.
By looking at the best practices adopted by commercial franchises, you can draw your successful scaling strategy:
- design your business for scale;
- choose the right partners aligned with your values;
- continuously develop, train and support your team,
- test your business again and again;
- create and foster a learning culture, open to feedback, innovation and new practices.
It all starts with an ambition, now you can make it possible.
Lastly, if you are a changemaker who cares about social integration, migrants and refugees empowerment, there’s a proven and scalable solution ready to take off. Check our program Take SPEAK to your city.
Do you enjoy this post? We have a 5 part blog series about social franchising, take a look into part 02 - "Scale your impact with a Social Franchising", part 03 - "6 Tips to start your own impact venture", part 04 - "Four things SPEAK has learnt" and part 05 "A deep-dive with 5 SPEAK founders"
6 Replies to “Part 01 – What is social franchising?”