What do you do?
I’m participating in the Milestone Circles Program for women business owners at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. On the first day of onboarding, we were asked to take our “what” and layer it with our “why’s.” We were encouraged to think of the most annoying (ahem, adorable) two-year-old ever and go deep.
Mine looked like this:
What do you do?
Digital, Intercultural and Real-Life Marketing
Why do you do it?
- Why—It helps people tell and amplify their stories to reach their goals.
- Why—People need to feel valued. They want to know they contribute and have value.
- Why—Because the world is cold and heartless, but individuals can connect and make a difference.
- Why—That’s the only way we get meaning in the world, through individual stories and action.
- Why—If we don’t connect with others, we will fall off the planet.
- Why—It’s our shared humanity—I see you. I see your value. I understand you, where you are.
And now, what do you do?
I help people promote and communicate what they do to connect to our shared humanity and bring meaning to the world.
Before you say “that’s great, but how will you make a buck?”
I’d like you to consider the research of one of today’s guests, Suntae Kim, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, who looked at the difference between “scaling up” and “scaling deep” to make a difference in the community, using Detroit as the example.
Scaling up was the more traditional business accelerator model. Look for resources and investments from outside of the community and figure out how to grow and scale fast. The idea is that money pumped into a community will prompt sustainable revitalization.
The other model, scaling deep, intentionally drew upon resources already in the community. The idea was for it to “grow like a living organism” by looking locally to nurture its growth.
You can read the full article about the study in the Harvard Business Review here.
The headline is that the entrepreneurs who scaled deep, and focused locally, had the biggest long-term effect.
Those with investors, trying to grow fast, found that they had to forsake some of their community-connected ideals to be faster and more nimble, beholden to the return on investment for their sponsors. Those scaling deep, however, “invested in fostering lasting, local relationships, leveraging local resources and solving local problems,” says Kim.
Scaling deep was not mutually exclusive with being a successful entrepreneur running a profitable business.
I’ve long advocated that small business owners, even micro-entrepreneurs (fewer than 10 employees) are the secret power to saving democracy, civility and the world. Now there’s the research to back that up. There are millions of small-business owners, even solopreneurs, running businesses, supporting their families and connecting with their communities. An added note–if your customers are local or largely from referrals, you have to be nice to everyone. Yay for kindness!
As Suntae and his co-author, Anna Kim found, “Our research illustrates that venture-capital-backed, rapid expansion is not the only way to grow — ventures can also grow by deepening local embeddedness, simultaneously feeding on and cultivating local resources.”