Taking that one more step towards becoming a social entrepreneur

Yes, I'm taking one more step towards becoming a social entrepreneur! Briefly, I have sketched out my ideas below as well as my progress towards those goals.

A niche field - Starting a consultancy for non-profits:

This was something that I wanted to do for some time but I kept putting off due to a lack of expertise, and partners who share the same interest and commitment, and also because I've been so damn busy with other things in life.

I envisioned this business to be a B2B service provider for non-profits, providing consulting for strategic management, branding, business planning, fund-raising, project management, marketing & PR, creating a learning environment, HRM, and a whole list of back-end issues.

A stint at Synesi Consulting - a branding and marketing consultancy - under the tutelage of Mr Joseph Lee who aspires to start a social business too, also gave impetus to this business idea. As fate has it, I am now working to bring him in as an external trainer for AIESEC Singapore.

And in the summer, Grace came up with the initiative of starting a National Trainers' Team (NTT) for AIESEC Singapore and I jumped at the chance because it provided me an avenue to learn the ropes of training and consulting, and starting a new functional department within the organisation (which brought with it a host of strategic issues that reflect common problems faced in the corporate world).

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to say that the NTT has been a success so far. With our increased internal branding within AIESEC, our SOPs and sustainability plans laid out, the compilation of an effective curriculum, and a handful of successful workshops delivered since August, we have our hands full with more training demands until year-end. By then, we will have expanded the NTT to about 13 members, serving the needs of the 250-strong AIESEC Singapore community.

Of course, the road ahead is not easy and the NTT is facing the impossible task of centralising all training needs of AIESEC Singapore under us. But no one says the experience will be easy either! Phew!

Love sells - Creating a match-making club in SMU:

I envisioned this club to be a platform for increasing awareness of couple-hood, sustainable relationships, and of course promote the dating game among stressed-out undergraduates. People looking for friendship are welcome to join as well.

Yes, I've got friends laughing at this idea and I did started this as a joke and shelved the idea. But a series of recent events made me think twice.

This week, I was talking to Kamil and Charlene about relationships and the idea of match-making came up. We soon revisited the idea of starting the club and Kamil shared that it was something that he has always wanted to do. So pretty soon, he went around spreading the word about the club and it has garnered some attention. I did a straw poll and found that people actually are curious about the concept and the topic of match-making is hardly as taboo as people think it is.

Well, this idea is still in the brainstorming phase and the jury is out on whether we will actually implement this idea. But I honestly believe that the idea will sell, especially if the club diversifies its clientele by providing workshops on work-life balance, time management, relationship management and conflict resolution.

Of course, how can we miss out on the speed-dating lunches, the socialising sessions, and all the interesting initiatives to get all the shy people getting out of their comfort zones and start making serious friendships!

As any casual observer of the match-making scene will say: hope in love really sells!

A rising trend - Incorporating mentorship with business:

Mentorship is a concept that is fast catching up in the corporate world, but honestly, I'm still very green about the intricacies and process of mentorship. My skepticism on the topic also waned after two chanced events.

Firstly, I had the opportunity to mentor a 6-person project team working for the International Day of Peace (IDP) Committee in SMU which just concluded, and was recently asked to mentor another 2 AIESEC project teams from NUS and NTU. The challenge of mentorship really got me thinking once again about its benefits.

And about two weeks ago, I had the chance to meet Mr John Bittleston, author and founder of terrificmentors.com and www.wiglingtonandwenks.com. A business and personal mentor by training, he built an entire business around the idea of mentorship. Now that's one smart bloke who truly understands how money can be made from serving a niche social field.

And this got me thinking of how mentorship and mentoring programmes can be incorporated into business ideas. What a truly powerful product it can be!

Responsible consumerism - Promoting socially-conscious products:

I know this idea has been done to death but in SMU, there is a demand for such an in-house vendor given the rising number of OCIPs that are focusing on social entrepreneurship, which includes getting their target beneficiaries to make products. The idea of selling such products is to promote awareness of the plight of these beneficiaries, create employment and generate cash where it's most needed.

We examined this idea under Project ENP this year and according to Daniel, my team's Business Development head, he will be meeting some staff from the school's Career Office who are interested in this idea.

Previously, we studied the feasibility of this idea and found that it's almost impossible to ensure the supply promises of the target beneficiaries (especially if they are based overseas). Simply put, they will make verbal promises to deliver the goods but they won't make the products because they don't see a point to most of the time.

Hence, most of the suppliers will have to come from Singapore and we seriously need to consider if we can serve certain target beneficiaries here, even though the market is pretty saturated!

The way forward?

I will have to see how these plans tie in together in the next couple of months. School work is now catching up on me, and finding people with the same dreams and passion is difficult. But the thought of realising these ideas under the SMU Business Incubation Generator (BIG) is really tempting.

How great it will be if we can get access to investors, enjoy the tutelage of business mentors, and don't even have to use our own finances.

Till then, I can only dream and play around with my imagination a little.