In order to scale your impact and profit, management teams have to organize for fitting capital: to get the right investors who support your dual aims and are willing to do so long enough for you to actually be able to scale your impact. How to make this happen?
You need to do three things:
Keep an eye on your long term goals
Impact entrepreneurs spend a large share of their time on attracting finance, and can fail to factor in whether this funding truly supports their growth and mission in the long run. Subsidies and grants, for example, can seem like ‘free money’. However, our research indicates that 62% of scale-ups are independent of subsidies, compared to 36% of stall-ups.
Fig 1. Independency of subsidies as a success factor for scaling
Build a strong case for investors
To attract patient capital, you need to demonstrate that you are already making an impact, have delighted customers, and have a realistic plan how to grow both impact and profit. Building your case will require you to think about the value of your impact and how to bring this across to investors.
Develop relationships with the right investors
Finding investors who fit your dual goals of profit and impact will be an extensive process, but it will pay off in the long run. The right investor will value the synergetic combination between your dual goals, instead of perceiving the combination as an inherent trade-off.
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