It is classic story amongst social enterprises; once they scale up they loose sight of their real constituents. Despite a clear recognition of this trend, the simple drive to ‘profit maximizing’ measures is still accepted wholesale. In my view an unimaginative run up the value chain.
This trend is particularly worrying amongst business advisors supporting social enterprises. Not only are the most innovative and challenging grassroot entities ignored, but by moving blindly up the value chain consultants lead by example. This is a clear failure of the advisers, charged with finding creative and workable solutions to systematic problems. In doing so they may well be turning a genuine opportunity into overpaid hype.
Of course all businesses worthy of their name should strive to make a profit. Planning, budgeting, billability and other best practices belong to the social enterprise space the same way they belong to mainstream consultancies. There are advantages for the enterprise to; they gain a reliable, accountable, quality, lasting advisor.
But it is a dangerous misconception to say that these things cannot be delivered without the high prices that go with typical consultancies. IDG is one example of how we can find sustainable business models to serve people who could most benefit, but there must be others. It may require 180 degree thinking, but of multinationals targeting the BOP space we demand no less.