Mentors Magazine: Issue 3

48 | MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 3

If you’re a social entrepreneur, I’ve got

some bad news for you: You weren’t born

to scale. But here’s some good news: You

can learn to do it anyway.

In reviewing 100 successful social enter-

prises from the past 10 years, our team at

the Miller Center found that less than 10%

were able to scale successfully – not just

growing incrementally, but rapidly expand-

ing their organizations into new markets to

multiply impact and revenues. Our analysis

of a database of over 10,000 commercial

startups paints an even bleaker picture:

Fewer than 1 in 100 of these enterprises

scale.

Why is scaling a social enterprise so hard?

Because what got you this far is not

enough to get you the rest of the way. If

you want to scale, you need to shift man-

agement gears, learn some new things and

act differently. Just pushing harder with

your existing model won’t work.

By Rob Shelton