I think that all social enterprises should focus primarily on mission-related opportunities. Not merely because it’s the right thing to do (which it is), nor because it helps avoid running into trouble with the tax man (which it does), but mostly because it’s good for business.

Mission-related opportunities focus on what you’re already good at, and involve the people who already know and trust you. This reduces cost, time-to-market and risk, by ensuring more fundable proposals, a more committed and aligned team, better partnerships, higher-quality products and services, more satisfied customers, and a better financial bottom line. Here’s why.

If you’ve stayed true to your mission over the years, you’ve likely invested in getting really good at a few things—your core competencies. New products and services related to these core competencies will benefit from the time, money and experience you’ve accumulated over your years of mission-related activities.  They will require less time to be developed, fewer new suppliers, less training for staff, and lower investments in new facilities and equipment.  The result: higher quality, lower cost, and more competitive and profitable products and services.

Likewise, if you have stuck with your mission, you will likely have developed a strong reputation and solid, long-term relationships with certain funders, clients, customers, suppliers, community partners, members of the media, and others in your community – people and organizations who have come to trust what your organization delivers.  You have also come to know their real needs and priorities.  This trust and understanding can support the development, funding, sale and delivery of your new products and services.  New partnerships, purchase terms, funding, and sales are far easier to create with old partners, suppliers, funders and customers than they are with new ones.  And this all reduces the time, money and risk required to get the enterprise launched.

Take funders for example. Negotiating a major financial contribution – be it a loan, grant or donation – has at least as much to do with trust and relationship as logic.  Even if you find a logical funder for your new, unrelated venture, it will take time to build something approaching the trust you already have with the funders who support your existing mission-related activities.

The same goes for customers. Selling new products and services to current customers – or at least new ones who share certain key characteristics with them– is more likely to produce satisfied customers, because you’re likely to know what they want and how they want it – packaging, distribution, timing, pricing, level of service.  You’re also more likely to know what an “A” customer – that small segment of the total market who will account for a majority of your sales – looks like and how to reach them effectively.  And, if you happen to make a mistake, current customers may be more understanding than new ones who aren’t quite so invested in your relationship.

Finally mission-related opportunities are far more likely to enlist the imagination, passions and capabilities of your staff and volunteers. When you pitch your new idea to them, you want them to be clapping their hands, not scratching their heads. If your idea is aligned with your mission, your staff or volunteers will require less time to develop it, and will do it with a higher level of competence, because your idea will be connected in a fundamental way to those products and services they have already been producing and delivering.

So, let’s add up the benefits of focusing on mission-related opportunities:

• Higher quality, more competitive products that require less time and money to produce and deliver;
• Suppliers, partners and funders who are more likely to negotiate a good deal;
• Better customers who are easier to reach, more likely to buy and more likely to be satisfied; and,
• Staff who are more likely to invest their time and energy in making the new venture a success.

All this, and you get to directly and profitably fulfill your organization’s purpose, instead of gambling on some new, unrelated idea that might, if every new and untested factor comes together, produce a surplus that can be channelled back to your mission-related activities.  That’s a gamble you simply don’t need to take. 

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