Bright ideas don’t always sell, and being headstrong won’t help
OXFORD, U.K. — At my first Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurs a year ago, the world’s leading change agents were rattled. Donald Trump had been president of the United States for 10 weeks, and his bullheaded populism challenged the values these global activists held most dear: tolerance, equality and radical inclusion.
Given that tectonic shift, last year’s annual Skoll conference in Oxford had chosen the theme of “Fault Lines.” Even a rookie attendee could tell that all these entrepreneurs — from idealistic youth creating employment programs in sub-Saharan Africa and east London to U2 frontman Bono, co-founder of the anti-poverty organization One — were still reeling as the American mood shifted from giving back to getting even.
But entrepreneurs are nothing if not resilient. Last week, the 15th annual Skoll World Forum convened with the theme “The Power of Proximity.” This means that social entrepreneurs, to make greater impact, must double down on the actions that create real, sustainable change: building stronger relationships with clients, partners, funders and institutions through empathy, listening, genuine understanding and the willingness to acknowledge failure.
This was the first Skoll World Forum held without Jeff Skoll, its Canadian founder. Skoll, the first president of eBay, who has committed much of his early dot-com wealth to building the global entrepreneurship community, was at home recovering from spinal surgery.
Sally Osberg, longtime CEO of the Silicon Valley-based Skoll Foundation, kicked off the proceedings instead. She explained the proximity theme in business terms by noting that the better you understand the status quo, the more effectively you can disrupt it. “Proximity triggers empathy,” she said. “Social entrepreneurs must commit to proximity to gain knowledge of the contexts affecting the communities they serve and the institutions that can help them scale their solutions.”
Yes, this sounds like the business bromide “Get closer to your customer.” But Skoll’s adoption of this theme demonstrated that this advice applies to any entrepreneur — especially when times are tough. It’s so easy to neglect your mission amid the day-to-day struggle to survive. As a leader, you have to stay focused on relationships even when things are so hard and complex that you feel you’ll never get home for dinner again.
The challenge was aptly defined at a panel on leveraging technology to improve global healthcare. Alinafe Kasiya, a deputy country director in Malawi with Seattle-based medical charity Village Reach, spoke for the whole panel when he noted that “the strength of our partnerships will define our success.”
Every entrepreneur should mount that quote on their wall or laptop screen. Then close your computer, go outside and talk to some customer, ally or potential prospect.
A great example of proximity power comes from a company called Hello Tractor. I met the founder and CEO, former Atlanta investment banker Jehiel Oliver, at a Skoll session on “Innovations in Sustainable Agriculture.” At the panel, Oliver admitted that his plan — approved by experts — to disrupt agriculture by putting affordable tractors in the hands of small African landholders failed because he wasn’t close enough to the market.
Oliver, 35, told me he comes from a family of social activists — and went into capital markets mainly to find ways to get institutional funders to offer microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing world. He learned that agriculture is the key to job creation and economic development tool in Africa, but because of the high risks, no one likes lending to farmers. Three years ago, Oliver launched Hello Tractor, to produce US$3,500 multi-purpose tractors to help cash-strapped African farmers till their fields.
In Nigeria, Oliver had watched farmers exhaust themselves slamming hoes into the hard, clay-based soil to make it ready for seeding. He figured mechanization was a no-brainer: it would make farmers 40 times more productive, at one-third the cost of manual labour. As well, he equipped his tractors with monitoring devices that track their location, operations and maintenance status. He hoped this tool would reduce ownership costs, by enabling customers to more efficiently rent out their new vehicles to other farmers.
But Hello Tractor’s sales never got any, well, traction. The economy slowed, credit dried up, and $3,500 was too much for most African farmers. But embedding himself in Nigeria helped Oliver spot an adjacent opportunity. In early 2017, Hello Tractor started selling monitoring and rental-management systems to tractor dealers and brokers. Tractor owners pay US$75 for the device, and $15 a month for the management/booking app that makes it easy for them to monitor their tractor’s operation and rent it out when it’s idle.
Today Hello Tractor sells its systems in six African counties (Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa), and it’s about to launch in Bangladesh. Oliver says 75 per cent of all tractors sold in Nigeria now come with his systems. He’s especially proud that his company is empowering a new breed of rural entrepreneur: the tractor broker. These young, digitally savvy market-makers not only help tractor owners understand the app, but become automation evangelists by helping round up more renters for each vehicle.
Oliver says he erred by assuming that his technology would sell itself. “That’s the Silicon Valley mindset,” he says. “You build a platform that creates value, and people will buy it.” In rural Africa, he says, “We had to invest in the demand side. We created booking agents who could leverage their personal networks to make the system work.”
Nothing replaces empathy. “We tried to do it the Silicon Valley way,” says Oliver. “But we had to do it the community way instead.”
Should “proximity” be the theme at your business this year?
• Rick Spence is a writer, consultant and speaker specializing in entrepreneurship.
rick@rickspence.ca | Twitter.com/RickSpence