If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, one proven way to do so is to be smarter than your competition. And one surefire way to be smarter than the competition is to read more than they do.
Profit is Not a Four-Letter Word
I attend many entrepreneurship events and belong to several entrepreneurship groups. There I see entrepreneurs hungry for success, entrepreneurs who recognize that the bottom line is the most important measure of their success - an organization that makes healthy profits can grow, can scale, and can impact more customers.
I would describe very few of these entrepreneurs as greedy - they are simply driven to make their companies succeed. They're driven by passion for an idea and recognize that the best way to see that idea spread is to build a highly profitable enterprise.
Applied to the social enterprise sector, that same profit drive, would, in my humble opinion, be transformative. It's why I urge social entrepreneurs to address their business model first, then build out their 'social' model.
Good Intentions Aren't Enough
Social entrepreneurship is blowing up – in a good way. Although ‘social entrepreneurship’ is a loosely-defined term, and reliable statistics are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence points to an explosion in the social enterprise sector. [more]