Attila von Unruh was finished. Or so he thought. A few years after he had sold his small event technology company, it went bankrupt. Through a legal clause, he was liable, and had to file for insolvency. Attila went through a living hell of shame, financial deprivation, and family trouble.
Attila was not alone. There are over 30,000 small business bankruptcies every year in Germany, destroying €50 billion in economic value. Most micro entrepreneurs enter an abyss of isolation until their six year period of suspended income is over. Almost all cut social ties, and many remain scarred for life. Not so for Attila. After a while, he bounced back, launching Insolvents Anonymous, a peer support scheme modelled loosely after Alcoholics Anonymous. From the first moment, the demand was everywhere, and soon he started an association with chapters in 12 major cities. Attila had turned from business entrepreneur to social entrepreneur, and he found a business model that worked: By training experts who had been through the years-long doom period after insolvency and referring them to companies threatened by bankruptcy, he could create a million Euro market and new opportunities for a stigmatised group at the same time.
In the classic story of social entrepreneurship, this would be the chapter in which the entrepreneur undergoes a painful process of searching for growth capital. Though social entrepreneurs are experts at fixing market failures, there is one market failure even the most brilliant haven’t been able to overcome: The capital they need to scale is simply not available in the financial ecosystem as we know it.
In much the same way most organisations are either charitable or commercial, the sources of finance neatly divide between non-repayable and repayable. Or, to use a metaphor: The money is all there, originating from private donors, foundations, governments, investors, companies, and of course banks, but each of these sources is like a different planet, each with its own laws of nature. This setup may work for a social and a business sector that each existed in its own silo, but it forces entrepreneurs like Attila to tell a different story about their work on each of the planets
And in this challenge, too, Attila has plenty of company. Increasingly, the most transformational ideas in any field are hybrids: part social, part business. More than half of the leading social entrepreneurs find their market mechanisms (and refusal to think in neat project packages) are at odds with most philanthropic sources of funding, and yet their commitment to solving a social problem alienate investors.
Sounds like a challenge for finance professionals. And in fact, many such folks have brought commercial funding instruments to the world of social entrepreneurship. All across Europe, so-called impact investing funds now compete not only for investors but even more for the few social entrepreneurs that can (and want to) pay back hundreds of thousands Euros, or preferably millions, with investor returns greater than five percent.
Despite this transfer of financial expertise, the dilemma of hybrid organisations being faced by a fragmented financial system remained unsolved—a surprising fact given that commercial markets have long ago solved a similar problem. Most complex projects like, say, a new power plant, are not financed by one source of money but by piecing together several sources of money with often quite different risk-returnprofiles. A pension fund may be invested with a low risk and low return, a venture capitalist with a much higher return for his higher risk, while a public authority provides a guarantee and is happy to lose money for a different kind of benefit. This practice is called syndication, and it has been great business for banks and other intermediaries for more than a century.
So why not syndicate deals for social entrepreneurs?
Marketing entrepreneur Ellinor Dienst and former McKinsey consultant Markus Freiburg started a Financing Agency for Social Entrepreneurship in early 2013. Their first client: Attila von Unruh.
Within a few months, the FASE team had built a database of mostly private (and many of them first time) investors, matched two of them to Attila, and created a deal with terms that no established funder in the market could have offered. The FASE engineered a long term revenue sharing mechanism with an overall cap to the profits going to the investors. The new social business had found its early growth capital where no one had looked before.
The early experience with Attila and half a dozen similar deals closed by FASE staff and business angels from Ashoka networks in Germany, the UK, and France points to a bigger mindset shift around "social investments." The space in between traditional donation models and impact investment models has always been void of financial instruments. No investor wanted to lose money, and no donor expected to see any of his money again. That space in between, however, is where most transformational ideas start. Philanthropy, often chided as old-fashioned in the wake of growing impact investing trends, holds the key to financing innovations that can expect to generate returns of less than five percent (or even zero percent). And one does not need a business degree to imagine that what is true for the niche of social entrepreneurship is also true inside every large company: There are business investments on the one end of the spectrum and corporate donations on the other. Smart deals using various financing paradigms within companies could unlock business models to serve disadvantaged populations and solve social problems.
There are myriad potential financing deals for the good of all that are not served by the current system. And there are probably many finance professionals who would love to help make it happen.
The world is going hybrid. Now it needs a financial ecosystem without silos.
