Build With Impact: The Cheat Code to Social Entrepreneurship

Preface

By Tiffany Yau

Entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and learning how to build a plane on the way down. Before even making the jump, you get an idea, and you go to your friends and family to talk about it. Mom, I’m going to go to the highest cliff around, jump off, and build a plane that will soar unlike any other. I’ll be the first to ever do it and succeed, making history. Chances are, you’ll think your idea is brilliant. Chances are that the people around you will tell you that your idea is silly or not worth pursuing. You take their comments to heart and think about what they said, maybe even questioning your idea too for a bit. You realize there’s some truth to what they said but you do it anyway .

You do the best you can to learn how to build a plane (probably, most realistically, from YouTube) and go to your local supply store to get all the parts you need. You buy everything and load your bag full of parts to assemble once you get to the cliff. You get to the cliff and then you build… and you jump—but as you jump, you realize you probably missed a lot of steps. Now? You’re falling at breakneck speed and doing your best to be hacky and make all the tweaks needed as you plummet, knowing all too well that you could end up on the ground.

If you’re an entrepreneur or are trying to become one, I bet you know exactly what this feels like. This very accurately describes how we all feel every day. We, entrepreneurs, feel this from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. But we do it anyway.

If you’re not into scrappiness, this is probably not the thing for you. Entrepreneurship is all about the thrill of scrappiness. Every entrepreneur jumps off that cliff with uncertainty and at least a bit of ignorance. Often, they’ll have absolutely no idea what they’re doing when they jump—they simply don’t know what they don’t know. But they do it anyway for the thrill of it and hope for the best. Entrepreneurship comes with a lot of uncertainty and risk, but when it comes to social entrepreneurship there’s even more. With social entrepreneurship, also comes lots of growth from learning by doing, but there is an even more complex layer added on—the urgency to solve a pressing social issue through the impact of your own innovation. This is exactly what sparked my interest and drew me into the world of social entrepreneurship.

When I first learned about the concept of social entrepreneurship, I was fascinated by its unique nature to drive an empowering sense of urgency and contingency behind one’s actions to create a tangible impact. As Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka says, social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

For social entrepreneurs, there is always more impact that can be made. There is a refreshing beauty in this relentlessness. In a way, we’ve normalized seeing and accepting the world as it is, as opposed to seeing it through the lens of how it could be.

And this is by no fault of our own. People have so much potential. We are all natural-born problem-solvers, but when we allow the size of the world and the massive systemic problems that plague it overwhelm us, it can feel as though things are happening to us, completely outside our control. It is easy and valid to feel helpless, perhaps even more so the deeper our knowledge about these complex systemic issues grows. Whether we’re learning more about these big problems through the news, quick Google searches, or our break-time TikTok feeds, it’s far too easy to get bogged down. When we lose hope and optimism, our motivation to problem-solve diminishes, and eventually, so does our desire to make some kind of difference.

It’s unfortunate.

I’ve always believed that everyone has the potential to make a difference in the world—and not just any difference—a real, meaningful positive difference. The problem is, many of us often don’t know how or where to start, which effectively causes us to feel overwhelmed and incapable of making any impact at all. The idea of making an impact can then feel unrealistic.

This dilemma, paired with my fascination of social entrepreneurship, made me realize the vast potential behind teaching social entrepreneurship to people. There is a certain degree of idealism that one must embody if they choose to pursue social entrepreneurship. Pursuing social entrepreneurship is a way for giving permission to those who undertake it to be stubbornly and unapologetically idealistic.

This realization is what inspired me to create Fulphil. This organization has grown from a dorm room hustle I started in 2018 during my time studying at the University of Pennsylvania into an education nonprofit that creates fun and engaging educational content to inspire society’s youth to make an impact and, in the process, become career-ready and equipped to succeed in this 21st century of work as compassionate and impactful problem-solvers and changemakers of tomorrow.

Build With Impact is based on the social entrepreneurship curriculum our Fulphil team has created for schools across the country. In addition to this, all the other books in our series are also based on our courses. All our courses and books have come together as a five-year-long feat in effort to provide access to equitable and inclusive educational content teaching students across the country to build compassion, instilling the idea that everyone has the potential to make a positive difference in the world.

I hope this book inspires you to envision and embody the impact that you are capable of making and to nurture compassion, just like it has for or students. This is everything—once an individual sees the impact she is capable of making, it is hard and perhaps even impossible to unsee it. Based on our team’s experience with our students and teachers, we believe with all our hearts that this is the key to changing the trajectories of the future of our youth, our communities, and the world. And we can’t wait for you, our readers, to be part of this journey!

When I first began working on the idea of Fulphil, I surveyed over 680 high school students who participated in a Fulphil workshop. The results from that survey revealed that many students care about making a positive social impact and also want to begin their own businesses. But it also revealed that these students did not know how or have the confidence to do either of those things.

As I sat with those findings, I found that the difference in these numbers proved to be even more pronounced in lower socioeconomic status communities—62% of students lack access or cannot afford an entrepreneurship education at their schools. I saw this as an opportunity to create equitable access to an impactful entrepreneurship education course.

Since 2019, the content from this book has been taught to a few thousand students nationally in business, marketing, and entrepreneurship classes—while also weathering the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic presented to education systems across the world.

After having successfully implemented our curriculum nationally in various school districts from Philadelphia to the Bay Area, we’re proud of our students’ outcomes: 70% report feeling more invested in their local communities, 84% report feeling more motivated to use their future careers to make a positive social impact, 80% report increased confidence in their ability to overcome obstacles, 80% report increased belief in their ability to make a tangible impact on the world, 86% report increased confidence in their ability to start an impactful business, and 70% report having learned new skills that will help them succeed in their future careers.

Although the content from Build With Impact was initially created for youth across the country, I believe that anyone who is interested in building a socially impactful business can benefit from the material and also apply key lessons to their own personal life pursuits. Build With Impact will teach you how to build a social enterprise, but more importantly, it will teach you how to build a social entrepreneurial mindset. I believe that developing a mindset driven by our potential and ability to problem-solve is the key to succeeding in our future careers and cultivating influence wherever life takes us. My sincere hope is that this book makes learning social entrepreneurship a fun, relevant, inspiring, and empowering experience for every reader so they can do well and do good.

This book is designed as an actionable guide, so I encourage you to skip around to the sections you believe will be most helpful to you as you build out the business model for your social enterprise. Build With Impact is divided into five parts. Here is an overview of what you can expect from each part and the chapters they contain:

Part 1, Redefining Impact, Entrepreneurship, & Yourself, covers the first three chapters which explore the building blocks that will set you up for success as you embark on your social entrepreneurial journey. Chapter 1 redefines the meaning of social impact and entrepreneurship using Fulphil’s sociopsychological lens to look at these concepts in a new light that makes them more feasible and relevant to the world. Chapter 2 continues the conversation of social impact and the different forms it takes in the business world. You’ll learn about how this concept has evolved over time to become what social entrepreneurship is today in addition to the foundations and promises of social entrepreneurship and what distinguishes it from other business models in addition to learning from an array of social enterprise case studies in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Chapter 3 introduces the concepts of the entrepreneurial mindset and social entrepreneurial mindset. You will be guided to reflect on the accomplishments that excited or challenged you and leverage those through interactive learning activities to define your core values, motivations, and social entrepreneurial mindset.

Part 2, Designing Your Impact, takes you step-by-step through the process of intentionally creating your social enterprise through the iterative design thinking methodology. Chapter 4 introduces the innovative framework of design thinking and why it’s important as you build out your social enterprise. Chapter 5 focuses on problem-finding—to be a successful problem-solver, you need to know how to be an effective problem-finder. Here, you’ll learn how to narrow down on the social problems you are hoping to solve to ensure your impact can be as actionable as possible. Chapter 6 covers problem-solving but more specifically ideation. In this chapter, you’ll explore the interactive process of ideation to help you think of some exciting business ideas for a problem you hope to solve. Chapter 7 dives into prototyping. Here, you’ll learn everything you need to understand the process of prototyping so that you can create your own minimum viable product. Chapter 8 then branches into the concept of product-market fit. Without the superpower that allows you to read other people’s minds, can you still develop a product or solution that others want? Absolutely! Well, sort of. First, you need to understand your own biases and assumptions. In this chapter, you’ll define your assumptions, conduct user interviews, and validate your prototypes and assumptions by testing them out like a scientist!

Part 3, Getting Down to Business, outlines what you will need in order to assemble a business plan. Chapter 9 guides you step-by-step through the process of defining and quantifying your market and understanding how much potential your business has. This metric is vital for helping you decide how much time you want to pour into your social enterprise and determine how attractive it will be to investors and funders. Chapter 10 explores the concept of competition. Try to think about an industry where competition does not exist. It is hard to come up with anything because almost every company has competitors. In this chapter, we will explore different types of competition by analyzing Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Taylor Swift’s music, and more. Chapter 11 introduces the topic of marketing. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to effectively leverage all the information you’ve gathered from your users and customers in Part 2 and learn how to sell your product or solutions! The chapter opens by introducing some marketing metrics and commonly used marketing strategies, setting the groundwork for Chapter 13. Chapter 12 teaches you about pricing strategies. If you have ever been curious about how businesses set their prices, you will be able to relate to this chapter! Here, you’ll learn the three pricing strategies most commonly used today: cost-based pricing, market-based pricing, and value-based pricing. Try out different pricing strategies to find what works best for you and your company by reflecting on the customer information you’ve collected from your user interviews. You will also learn how to create three different types of financial statements.

Part 4, Getting It Out There, is where we’ll bring it all together. This section covers chapters on marketing strategies and branding and will unveil everything you need to be able to breathe life into your idea. Chapter 13 takes a deep dive into more marketing strategies. We will have an in-depth discussion on social media marketing with examples from the top social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Here, you’ll learn about Spotify’s marketing strategies and how they’ve managed to be a sticky brand over the years. Chapter 14 focuses on building your brand. Branding is all about what people say about your company when you are not around. In this chapter, we will introduce the four components of branding. From aesthetics to content, we compiled a comprehensive overview of the power of effective branding, including case studies covering companies like Nike, Starbucks, Airbnb, and Uber.

Finally, Part 5, Manifesting Your Impact focuses on measuring and showcasing your progress and impact, as well as building your essential business documents and presentations. This section is the bookend that brings together everything you’ll learn throughout this book. Chapter 15 teaches you how to measure your success—this includes operational success, financial success, and impact success. Here, we will cover key performance indicators (KPIs) and objectives and key results (OKRs), which are used to determine how well your business is doing in terms of strategic and operational goals. In this chapter, we will talk about different types of KPIs and effective goal-setting tactics to help your business stay on track using frameworks like logic models and the balanced scorecard developed by Harvard Business School to keep you on track! Chapter 16 helps you build your essential business documents, which include executive summaries, pitch decks, and business canvas models. This chapter also focuses on helping you craft your pitch and public speaking skills and storytelling.

Beyond these chapters, we have additional resources—including our cheat code recap, glossary, cited sources, and downloadable worksheet activities—that can help supplement your learning experience. If you are interested in teaching the content from this book to a class or group, we also have turnkey slideshows available for download on our website that our team and teachers across the country have vetted.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you to my co-authors Aditya Desai and Brooke McCormick and to all of our students, teachers, board of directors, supporters, team, and contributors, including Emma O’Neil, Riley Gonta, Sam Stern, Grace Coughlan, Erin Flannery, Ashley Han, Elizabeth Guan, Emma Gould, Tyler Dickens, Geethika Koneru, Yunling Huang, Freya Busser, Jenny Tan, Abhi Suresh, April Zhou, and Osase Edogun. Thank you for all your effort and unconditional support to inspire and produce the first iterations of our curriculum, which provided the foundation of this book.

Part I:

Redefining Impact, Entrepreneurship, & Yourself

Chapter 1

Making Sense of Impact & Entrepreneurship

Written by: Tiffany Yau, Aditya Desai, and Riley Gonta

Little strokes fell great oaks. —Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

I. Redefining Impact

Let’s first take a moment to answer a few questions:

• What is the biggest , craziest, wildest thing you could do to make a difference and impact on the world? It doesn’t matter if you think this thing is out of reach—for now, don’t think about how you’ll get there. Be bold and honest!

• Got it? Now, what is the smallest thing you could do to make an impact? Something so small that it requires a minimal amount of effort but still makes a difference?

These are the first two questions we pose to Fulphil students when they begin our curriculum. We’ve received answers as big as curing cancer, ending world hunger, or starting a nonprofit. Students have also responded with answers as small as smiling at a stranger, helping a friend or family member, or joining a volunteer club at school.

Your answer to the first question may feel quite grand, distant, and maybe even impossible, whereas your answer to the second question should feel stress-free and easy to execute.

But that’s the problem!

As a society, we’re led to believe (by no fault of our own) that impact always needs to be big. When we think of social impact initiatives, the first thing that might pop up is the variety of well-funded initiatives in developing countries that empower vulnerable populations. Big problems likely require big solutions! In Tiffany Yau’s TEDx talk in 2020, she explained that media conditions us at a young age to believe that for us to have any impact, we must be making a direct and tangible difference on big problems.¹ It can even be paralyzing to think about the extent we must go to bring our impact to life. The issue with impact is the stark contrast between what we think we need to do and what we can actually do to make a difference.

After all, it’s the stories of global initiatives that build wells to increase access to clean drinkable water or of local communities that clean up beaches to decrease plastic pollution that make the most eye-catching and heartwarming stories. In the same vein, the people we usually hear most about and associate with social impact are people like Bill Gates, who is eradicating poverty and life-threatening diseases and happens to also be able to read over 50 books annually, or Greta Thunberg, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize at seventeen-years-old for inspiring seven million people to strike against climate change.² We think of these high-profile people—Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Ben Franklin, Elon Musk—and consider them superhumans. They aren’t your average person. And we believe we need to be like them to be able to make a difference—we might as well have superheroes who fly through the skies sucking the excess of carbon out of the air, dropping food from out of the sky to food deserts, and creating airborne cures to lethal diseases.

The thing is, impact doesn’t have to be big! Social impact is the net effect of actions on a community and the well-being of individuals, families, and society. Read that again: social impact is the net effect—it is not a singular action but rather our collective efforts. Because of this, impact can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. And in fact, the smallest things can make the biggest impact. For example, if every American recycled just one plastic water bottle in a single day, 54 million T-shirts or 6.4 million fleece jackets could be produced.³ Isn’t that incredible?!

You might be thinking, But I can’t control the actions of every American. Well, technically, you can—beginning with yourself!

If you were to spend just one minute less showering every day, you would save five gallons of water every day. If you multiply that by 365 days, you would conserve approximately 1,825 gallons of water annually—and that’s just from your shower alone! Now that’s what we call impact. Not only can impact be small but it can also happen right in your own community, beginning with you and the decisions you make.

Whether it’s the seemingly small daily decisions you make or the company you decide to build, what matters is being able to impact someone at some level. Even if your action or idea seems insignificant, there are people—whether it’s one or many—who could benefit from what you have to offer.

Let’s look at some real-life examples to give you an idea of what’s possible. Below are some examples of what former Fulphil students have created due to what they learned from our curriculum about solving problems they care most about:

• The Health & Rights of Animals: This is for the dog lovers out there! Freya created a junk-free dog treat company called Anubis in response to her experience trying to feed her dog who was diagnosed with cancer and could only eat limited ingredients.

• The Representation of Gender-Nonconforming Individuals: Shia created a gender-nonconforming and plus-size clothing line because Shia kept saying to himself that looks so cute, just not on me over and over again when they would go shopping.

• Inclusive Beauty: Tiara created Twisted Spirit, a hair product company that caters to women of color and those with curly hair.

• Environmental Justice: A group of three young ladies in our class created biodegradable cafeteria trays that are embedded with seeds. When the trays are composted, trees are planted. This created a more sustainable solution than the trays made of Styrofoam they saw being thrown away in their cafeterias.

First-hand experiences with the problems in our communities equip us with the depth of knowledge and familiarity to solve them. But even more importantly, our experiences drive us. We care because we are affected by the problems in our communities, and when we share experiences, we act out of compassion. We embody meaning in our experiences.

The people closest to the problems are closest to the solutions.

We care more about tackling issues close to home, and consequently, we are more emotionally invested in the solutions addressing those problems. On the flip side, we don’t work hard for things we don’t care about. It makes the most sense to address the problems we’ve been affected by or the hardships we’ve endured so that others don’t have to experience the same problems or so that they have the resources necessary to better overcome them. This is what impact is all about! This is what makes it so exciting. And this is what makes you the right person to make an impact and solve the problems closest to your heart.

Oftentimes, however, we get sucked into the idea of becoming the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, or Michelle Obama. We get stuck thinking we are too small to make a difference or too unimportant to ask big questions. We get stuck in a state of analysis paralysis, overanalyzing the issues we strive to solve to the point of not being able to move forward.

Impact comes in all shapes and sizes. The one thing Bill Gates doesn’t have is your life story. He’s not you. He doesn’t have the unique compassion, empathy, or level of care you do toward the problems closest to you. It’s about discovering your "why" (what motivates you to make a difference) and leveraging that.

In this book, we teach you what we know best: entrepreneurship!

II. Why is entrepreneurship important?

We’ll admit it, entrepreneurship is a big word! Seriously! It’s sixteen letters long and the average English word only has, on average, five letters. Just like spelling out entrepreneurship for the first time, the field itself can be a little tricky—but that is why we’ve written this book.

We define entrepreneurship as the act of creating one or more business entities with the hope of creating value and making a profit while taking on financial risk.

Entrepreneurship plays a key role in society. Entrepreneurship creates businesses. Businesses create jobs, which stabilize and grow economies and provide a route for collaboration toward global innovation. All of this is a result of entrepreneurship! Entrepreneurship really does have the potential to create social and economic value.

Job Creation

Because of entrepreneurship, people can create businesses and organizations that exist to provide jobs and career opportunities for individuals in a local community. This, in turn, empowers individuals to care for their families, pay their bills, and more. According to the Small Business Administration, small and new businesses added 1.9 million net new jobs in 2018 alone.⁴ There are 30.2 million small businesses in the United States, which employ 47.5% of the state’s private workforce! Those are some major numbers and percentages!

Economic Success

Entrepreneurship supports the growth of the local economy. When everyone in a community has a job, the community earns more money as a whole and the people in it are able to both support themselves and give back to the local economy. When you support local businesses and mom-and-pop shops in your community, many benefit: the business owners, those who work for the business, and the community. According to Amy Hartzler, director of communications for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, as cited in a Forbes article and various research studies, for every $100 spent at a small business, $68 stays circulating in the local economy compared to the $48 that remains local if you were to spend $100 at a national chain.⁵ Supporting local businesses means money stays in the community and raises the overall level of economic activity, leaving more margin to pay higher salaries and building the local tax base.

Globalization and innovation

When local economies grow, the businesses involved often scale beyond their regions. This process builds momentum and gives