entrepreneurship Archives - Ministry Incubators

Entrepreneur? 5 (Unconventional) Tips You’ll Never Learn at Business School

November 7, 2018 by Antonin Ficatier

A cultural tsunami is currently storming through the church—and for the best! The name is Missional Entrepreneurship or Missional Innovation: a fancy name to describe what the church has been doing for centuries (think of the monks in European monastery who were selling craft beer!), creating innovative, self-sustainable economic models to better serve the local community! More than a trend, missional entrepreneurship is becoming a way of life for many Christians today.

Wherever you’re at in your missional enterprise, it always feels like a long road to develop a self-sustainable project! I have been to business school and learned all the nuts and bolts of entrepreneurship, but you won’t find what I’m sharing with you today in any textbooks. It’s the result of years spent working alongside missional innovators. Enjoy, and share with others!

1. Assess your social capital.

When it comes to starting a new project, we all tend to do the same thing: rushing for money, thinking that it is the only thing that will make our project successful. While money is obviously important (and not only in the rich man’s world!)—it tends to overshadow the many other resources we possess. And one resource that we all have in abundance is our social capital.

The origin of the expression social capital is said to originate from the one-year trip of French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville to the US in 1831. When traveling across the country, Tocqueville was fascinated by the many meetings Americans were holding with their peers to discuss current matters of the nation and peacefully solve issues. He thought that this ability to congregate, discuss, and move forward was an amazing asset, very different from our wealth (economic capital), our level of study (human capital), or the skills learned from our upbringing (cultural capital).

No one told me when I was in business school that mapping out and assessing my social capital was very important to the success of my enterprise. So as you’re reading this article, create a one-hour event in your calendar and name it “Social Capital Assessment.” During this allotted time, take a piece of paper and create two columns. In the left column, write down all the names that come to your mind. On the other, in what capacity these people can help your project to grow. You’ll quickly realize that the help you’ll receive is very diverse: it can be people who have a good knowledge of your field, people with financial capacities, people who are wise and provide you with good advise, or just good friends you can laugh with (important for your emotional health!)

Feel free to email me if you need more help to map out your social capital!

2. Move to the prototype level ASAP.

Let’s pretend you work for a big company. Your boss asked you to send an important email to all the partners of the firm. You’ve drafted the email, read it a few times, but still you can’t hit the button “send” on your screen. What’s happening here is that you’re afraid the email is not perfect, or that it contains mistakes. Moving from a draft to a final product is something we dread, isn’t it? French have a great expression to describe this attitude: they call it tourner autour du pot, which literally means to walk around a pot. So wherever you are in the development of your social enterprise, jump as soon as possible to prototyping instead of waiting for your product to be perfect (which will never happen anyway!).

As you’re developing your product, please do not tourner autour du pot, send a prototype to some users. It will really help your project to get going!

3. Have a creative window in your week.

If you’ve been to business school like me, you’ve learned a lot about innovation, but not so much about creativity. But these are two very different concepts! Being creative means developing an attitude of openness to change and to new ideas. If you’re an entrepreneur, chances are that you’re a creative person who likes looking for new endeavors to change the world. But what I learned from coaching entrepreneurs is that creativity is like a muscle: it needs to be stretched and trained in order to function properly!

There’s no magical recipe here, if you want to remain creative you have to practice it. One recommendation that I usually give to entrepreneurs is to put in their weekly calendar a “creative window” to force themselves to remain creative. Give it a try. Put in your calendar a 30 minute window where it’s just you and your notebook (no distraction, phones away!) The only assignment for this task is to think of big ideas, to dream of how you can change the world, and to practice daytime dreaming. It will feel awkward at first, but I can promise you that it’ll soon become a cherished window in your weekly schedule!

4. Invest in a coach.

At Ministry Incubators we coach many entrepreneurs at various stages of their missional enterprise. And all of them can attest to how coaching is fundamental for their personal growth. The value of coaching is no secret (read this Ministry Incubators article to learn more) but very few entrepreneurs are actually taking advantage of it.

Equipping yourself with a coach is probably the best decision you can make for your missional enterprise and for yourself! Let me break three false ideas about coaching:

I can’t afford coaching. Answer: Well, yes, coaching has a cost, but it is a long-term investment (think of the social capital that I mentioned earlier!), not a one-off expense in your budget.
Coaching takes too much time. Answer: Not true! Coaching is usually a one-hour-per-month program. So to put it differently it’s like two minutes per day!
I’ll never find the perfect coach. Answer: Well, that’s good news, because this person doesn’t exist! Apply the prototyping process that I described above: instead of waiting for the perfect coach, why don’t you give it a try with one?

5. “Think Tabernacle”: Celebrate along the way.

This last tip is my favorite one, and the one I really wish I’d learned when I was studying business. When I look back at my own past as an entrepreneur—I started a company called Chinese Institute in 2011—I think I could have celebrated a lot more along the way!

The golden rule is the following: At every little stage of your project, celebrate with others and with God. Most of us think that unless we’ve achieved a big milestone, it’s not really worth celebrating anything. Well, that’s a lie! Celebrating all the small progresses in your project is key! I call this attitude “Thinking Tabernacle” in reference to the process that prompted the Israelites to build a Tabernacle for God when they were in the wilderness (Exodus 14 onward). The Israelites did not wait to be fully back in Israel to build a strong Temple to God. They decided to celebrate Him in the desert, with the limited resources they had at this point of their exile. Celebrating along the way does not mean having a grandiose reception with 300 friends. It means doing a little something you don’t do on a regular basis, in order to treat yourself, and with the idea that a small celebration is better than no celebration…opening a nice bottle of wine, eating your favorite chocolate, gathering with a few friends…you name it! It means to acknowledge the progress you are making in your project, and thanking God along the way. It is the best way to train yourself to be joyful and grateful, which is the spirit of missional innovation!

Spiritual Entrepreneurship: It’s a Full-Blown Movement Now

August 29, 2018 by Kenda Creasy Dean

Christian social innovation, redemptive entrepreneurship, missional innovation, spiritual entrepreneurship – pick your handle – is no longer niche. It’s a full-blown, interfaith movement—and if you’re a Christian social innovator who is curious about learning with social innovators from other faith backgrounds, here’s your chance.

I recently met Alan Harlam, Director of Spiritual Entrepreneurship at Clal, an organization committed to drawing on Jewish wisdom to serve the public good. If I thought social innovation was a Christian thing (and it is), Alan blew open my imagination by pointing out that all religious traditions participate in it in various ways. Alan used to serve as Director of Social Innovation at Brown University. As a professor, he leveraged years of business experience to help students develop and launch social impact ventures. Then he had an epiphany: he realized that his teaching on social entrepreneurship was a strikingly faithful expression of his deep-rooted Jewish values. “I really rediscovered my faith through social entrepreneurship,” he told me. Soon he joined several other Jewish leaders in building Clal’s “Glean Incubator” for spiritual entrepreneurs.

That’s where you come in. The Glean Incubator offers online education for spiritual entrepreneurs of any faith background, and encourages them to draw on the strengths of their faith traditions as they create new spiritual ventures. Baptists and Buddhists, Methodists and Muslims, Jews and Unitarians – they’re all there. Glean offers two opportunities, and they are accepting applications now:

SHIFT is a 6 week, multi-faith community of “change agents,” led by six guest faculty, to equip participants “with the mindset shift necessary to approach our changing world with a lens of abundance,” and the tools to begin building something new. Go here to learn more: shift

START is an intensive, 20-week MBA-level program in Spiritual Entrepreneurship from Columbia Business School that teaches human-centered design, empathy-building, prototyping, fundraising, and everything in between. Start’s faculty includes Columbia Business School professors, thought leaders in faith innovation, and field experts to deliver tools, insights, and coaching for your venture. Go here to learn more: gleannetwork.org/start

If you join one of these courses, please write and let us know how it went!

Matt Overton: Why I started a social enterprise at my church

October 12, 2017 by Matt Overton

This article was first published in Faith & Leadership on April 18th. You can find the original article here.

This week’s post comes from our friend Matt Overton, associate pastor for youth and family ministry at Columbia Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, Washington and founder of Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and Columbia Teen Enterprises. In this article, he talks about why he started a social enterprise in his church. You can find more of his thoughts on his Entrepreneurial Youth Ministry website and blog.

Many people who learn about the social enterprises at our church ask me why I started them.

The simple answer: I was tired.

Mostly, I was tired of doing ministry in the same old ways. I was tired of pretending that our programs were accomplishing what they claimed to when so many of them seemed hollow. (Any youth pastor who has ever come crashing down from the post-mission-trip high can attest to this.)

I was tired of reading books by experts that framed the problem but offered no solutions beyond theological generalities, slight adjustments to existing techniques or ideas feasible only for wealthy congregations.

I saw that social enterprise — essentially, a business with a social good in mind — represented a new kind of experiment that offered a truly new way forward in ministry. The church needs more of those.

My experiments focused on jobs training with enterprises called Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and The Columbia Future Forge,(link is external) as well as Youth Ministry Innovators, a website and blog designed for writing about the church as a vehicle for social enterprise.

But a church could try any number of business models.

There’s more to it, of course.

When I arrived at my church seven years ago, I knew that the gospel was about risk. I knew that if the American church was ever going to be born again in the 21st century, it would need people willing to risk everything for kingdom ideas that were worth their very blood, sweat and tears. The church needed to start swinging for the fences.

So I started a social enterprise, first, because I wanted to attempt something great — something risky — for God.

The gospel is, at its core, a risky proposition by God in behalf of human beings. It promises no security, despite our best attempts to deify security and regularity in our worshipping communities.

I wanted to find a way to give myself more fully to the gospel and justice of Jesus Christ — something more than doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I wanted something bolder than the staid mainline missions efforts I had grown up with.

Second, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of perpetuating disengaged faith. I wanted to help my congregation — both youth and adults — figure out what their Sunday faith has to do with their Monday life.

Social enterprise allows participants to engage a myriad of life gifts and professional gifts every time they show up. To be a part of a social enterprise-based ministry, participants must be fully engaged in whatever the enterprise is. They are essential to the success or failure of the mission.

Too often, our churches make people passive recipients of ministry and even of faith itself. When they don’t get a call from anyone at church when they haven’t been there in four months, they think the show simply goes on without them. They feel excluded or ancillary to the mission of God. They think their presence, passion, talents and dollars aren’t really needed. I wanted my congregation to discover the value of each member’s engagement.

Third, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of our acts of charity and mission taking away people’s dignity. So many of our charitable works place us in positions of power and influence over those we serve.

I had been offering the typical camperships and canned-food drives to the low-income youth in my group so they could be part of our middle-class model — only to see those students drift away, weary or embarrassed of being the focus of our love and charity. I wanted them to be a part of a ministry where they were full, vital participants.

People hear the Jesus story and want to be involved. They don’t want simply to be helped.

We need ministries that actually enable people to move forward with their lives. Social enterprise allows us to do that in creative ways.

At our church, we offer job skills, training and experience. We talk about faith and about people coming fully alive (John 10:10), but we don’t give our participants much of anything. Their dignity remains intact, and they are given a chance to move forward.

Finally, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of losing our middle- and upper-class youth and families to outside activities.

I didn’t blame them. In the current culture, parents are afraid for their children’s economic future and feel pressured to enroll them in activities they believe will enhance that future.

It’s hard for a low-accountability and low-participation youth ministry model to compete with a state robotics tournament or a soccer club in which a family has invested thousands of dollars and hours.

But I was convinced that the church could compete. What we needed was something that the kids wanted to be a part of. Something that would engage their passions and invigorate their faith.

I figured that if we used employment as our model, kids from a variety of backgrounds might actually show up. I was right.

In addition, this model required heavy adult commitment and involvement. Social enterprise gave my adults an essential role in our youth ministry. They weren’t consuming church. Kingdom work began to consume them. It was enlivening dry bones and scratching itches they didn’t know they had.

We have adults investing unbelievable amounts of time and energy and their personal gifts. We think it might be the zephyr of God, and I am gobsmacked with emotion every time I think about what I am seeing.

Social enterprises have to compete in the agora at marketplace speed. They demand risk taking, commitment, empowerment and passion. People want something to lay down their lives for. If we want to compete for people’s precious time, we are going to need to give them that.

That’s why I started a social enterprise.