Three Things To Know Before Becoming CEO
It’s 10pm on a Saturday and I’m sitting in the lobby of a small town in northern California checking my email, exhausted after a day of constant pitching and passing out samples. My photo had been front and center on the business section of a major Bay Area newspaper the week before, and dozens of friends had reached out telling me how exciting it was to see my social enterprise Kuli Kuli take off. Success is an easier metric to portray than to feel, particularly in social business where you’re defining success by both tangible revenue and more elusive impact metrics. I’ve had a lot of success, no matter which way you define it, but the journey has been much harder and way less glamorous than I expected. Though I firmly believe that I have the best job in the world, there are a lot of myths that I wish I’d known about before starting my social enterprise.
Myth # 1: The Freedom of Being Your Own Boss
One of the reasons I quit my day job was for the freedom. I’ve never been the type of person who does well with authority – I even struggle to follow directions in recipes. I imagined that once I was my own boss I’d be able to work where and when I wanted to, and solely on things that I cared about. I discovered that being CEO gives you the absolute freedom to work whichever 80 hours a week you want to.
Being the boss is the kind of power that is tethered to responsibility. I now have ten high-performing and opinionated teammates, and as the CEO, I am personally responsible for the successful merging of visions for how to run our company and develop our brand. Rather than the freedom to work when and how I please, I need to be exceptionally cooperative and conscientious with my team in order to facilitate success. That often means that when I’m not traveling for work, I’m generally the first person in the office and the last person to leave, taking care to make myself available to anyone who needs me.
Myth # 2: You’ll Spend All Your Time on Productive, Meaningful Work
Before I built a team, I had this idea that every new person you hire adds another 40-50 hours of bandwidth. The logic that hiring two new people doubles output only works if you hire robots. Humans are complex entities with emotional and spiritual needs, some of which they want fulfilled by work, the place where they spend half their life’s waking hours. We’ve hired incredible people, and they’ve added a tremoundous amount of bandwidth, but they also take energy from myself and other managers to make sure that they are supported in their work. Social enterprises often aren’t able to pay as much as strictly for-profit businesses. I believe that we have an extra responsibility to make sure that we bridge that compensation gap by making our businesses the best places in the world to work.
Like any entrepreneur, I have an extensive network with which I engage professionally for advice and inspiration. As a social entrepreneur, these networks are even more expansive, requiring partnerships with a myriad of other businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and advisors. For example, I spent a lot of time networking with international development groups who are interested in supporting our work to build an impactful moringa supply chain. While often this networking feels like it isn’t as productive as spending my day making sales calls, I’ve found that it has indirectly led to much of our success.
Myth # 3: The Cause is Enough
When I first returned from the Peace Corps and started selling moringa superfood products in farmers markets I led all of my pitches with stories about how the product they were purchasing was directly helping an amazing women’s cooperative in Ghana. I found that people would spend hours standing by my table, asking me questions about my Peace Corps service and then walk away without purchasing a thing. I slowly realized that by leading with impact I had led them to a nonprofit space in their minds, which was very different from helping them understand why these moringa bars will fulfill their craving for a healthy, delicious snack.
The harsh reality is that consumers purchase products first and foremost because of what if does for them as an individual. This isn’t to say that they don’t care about the story behind the product-- they do-- but the story only matters if the product is already of a quality and price that is pleasing to them.
I’ve learned to give equal weight to both parts of the phrase social business as I create a brand that prioritizes both cause and quality. While I would love to talk about moringa farmers all day with the people that care, a large part of my job is dealing with the people who don’t. If I were to focus solely on the cause of my business all the time, my reach would be smaller, and our profits would reflect that. And fewer profits mean fewer possibilities for social good.
As a matter of fact, social enterprises can--and should--be both profitable and sustainable, the difference being that they take on profit for a purpose. However, consumer priorities may be shifting, as 87% of millennials are interested in purchasing products with a social or environmental benefit. As a Benefit Corporation, Kuli Kuli uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems, acknowledging that business and society are interdependent. As a social entrepreneur, it is important to give credence to every component of the triple bottom line regarding people, planet, and profit.
The stories of the successful brands we engage with each day are oftentimes much more glamorous than the behind-the-scenes. I imagine that many of the successful entrepreneurs we regard probably feel like less of a strategic “social entrepreneur” and more like people who wanted to fix something in society, and therefore had to start a business to make it happen faster. Yet, at the end of the day, business is business, and social entrepreneurs just have a different fuel driving their ventures.
As it nears midnight at the small hotel, a janitor walks into the lobby and glances at me, startled to see anyone here so late on a Saturday night. I tell her that the wifi wasn’t working in my room and that I was just finishing up some work and then will be going to bed. She gives me a wide smile and says, “Oh honey, you must really love what you do.” I smile back and tell her that she’s right. Then I hand her a moringa bar, give her a quick pitch, and head to bed.