Hi. This is Paul Zalester, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On the show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have a positive impact through values based business. Thank you very much. Today, I'm thrilled to be back doing a solo episode.

Our last solo episode was back in May, May 14th, but we took a 2 month break and didn't publish any episodes, and now we're at the end of August. So it's like 3 months since I've done a solo episode. It's so good to be here with you. And our title today is being realistic about social enterprise growth. So 2 questions lately that I've got asked by a number of different social entrepreneurs and wanna be social entrepreneurs. And those two questions seem like they would be batched up. They both have to do with the big how long questions. So specifically, the two questions are, how long does it take to grow a thriving social impact company? And number 2 is how long should I stay at it if my impact company isn't yet thriving? So one was a little bit more coming from several newer social entrepreneurs who are thinking of launching something or were in the early stages, and a couple of folks who've been at it for a while where things were up and running and there was revenue, but it wasn't thriving yet.

And is it time for a pivot question? Those are the kinds of questions I wanna play with today. Now to be fair, I think it's always gonna be the standard answer that everybody hates to hear but is always true which is the good old it depends. Now your situation isn't gonna be like other people's situation and trying to apply a cookie cutter answer to every situation is just guaranteed to bring a lot of pain and suffering. But in today's episode, I wanna unpack a little bit more, like, what are some of the very specific factors that can help you determine how long it might take to grow out your impact company, to be a thriving social enterprise if you are earlier in the journey, as well as does it make sense to continue on? And if so, how long should you be thinking about getting to a point where your impact company is financially viable? So we're gonna dive into 4 buckets today. I'm gonna tell you what those buckets are and then we're gonna get into it. Number 1 is understanding your customer and market. Every business is gonna be different, but every business that's gonna thrive has to have customers or clients that are really excited about it. And so we're gonna unpack a little bit what's happening there, how you can assess, and depending on what you're seeing in your assessment, how that can help you in that second question of, does it make sense to stay at it? And if so, how long should be thinking about it in terms of timelines? Number 2, knowing when to scale and when not to.

The scaling question, once you do start to get some momentum or you see the foundations are in place is a really significant factor in that how long. So we're gonna talk about issues in the knowing when to scale and when not to bucket. Number 3, we're gonna talk about the role of funding and investment on the pace of growth. If you're bootstrapping, the pace of growth is gonna be entirely up to you and your team. If you have private investors or VCs, they're gonna have some pretty strong opinions about your growth, and that's gonna be a different, you know, dance. And we're gonna talk about some issues in that bucket. And lastly, we're gonna talk about when does it make sense to reevaluate and perhaps pivot in a different direction if you're not yet seeing the growth that you want to see. So those are our 4 buckets.