When looking to start a social enterprise or community initiative, there are lots of details that need to be worked on.

A couple months ago Matthew Rempel from Strategy Made Simple was able to sit down with Geoff Reimer before the opening of the Pitikwé skatepark. He has been involved in figuring out the details that will be part of making this new project work. He graciously offered his time and thoughts on governance, pricing, community building, and organizational development based on his experience in starting this indoor skatepark in downtown Winnipeg.

When you’re looking to sell products and services with your social enterprise, you have to appeal to customers, and be the best option that they can think of when they are looking for a solution to their problem or the best way to fill their wants or needs.

If you look at it from the other side; Customers will choose the best option for solving their problems or fulfilling their wants from among the options they’re aware of and based on their specific priorities.

The more simply you can present what you do, the easier it will be for customers to choose your products/services.

One of the biggest challenges when you're running a business is how to price your products or services.

In this episode of Off the Top of My Head Matthew Rempel goes over some of the factors that social enterprise managers should consider when setting their prices.

Matthew Rempel, Lead Social Enterprise Coach shares his impressions and topics that were discussed at SEWF23

Main topics include:

- How supply chain decision can ripple through an industry,

- How SE connections to corporations can enable access to capital,

- Internationalization,

- The benefits and potential drawbacks from taking investment.

It's the day before Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) 2023 in Amsterdam. SEWF is an international gathering of social enterprise professionals, from practitioners, to academics and everyone in between. Today several organizations that are involved in the social economy held independent fringe events that were promoted by SEWF organizers, and I (Matt) was able to attend two of the events.

First was a presentation and workshop put on by Hey Girls; a nonprofit focused on reducing period poverty in Scotland and beyond.

Second was a presentation and workshop put on by Impact Hub Amsterdam. Impact Hub Amsterdam provides networking, mentorship, and social enterprise accelerator services.

Both sessions had a focus on partnerships. With Hey Girls, the partnerships were focused on creating laws mandating local councils provide free period sanitation products, then working with the councils to fulfill the products and promote where the products could be picked up. With Impact Hub Amsterdam, the focus was on partnerships to build up and improve the impacts within the supply chains and business models of the textile industry.

It's two days before Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) 2023 in Amsterdam. SEWF is an international gathering of social enterprise professionals, from practitioners, to academics and everyone in between. Preparing for the conference, Matt wanted to put together this video on the ways social enterprises make impacts.

Social Enterprises can make impact in many different ways, but you could categorize them as making impact within the organization, or enabling impact to be made outside the organization.

In this video, Matthew Rempel summarizes his thoughts on how impact is made, and what considerations need to be taken in some of those cases.

A big part of running a social enterprise is making sure that you have enough customers coming when you need them to. It’s about finding and selling products and/or services that provide value to your customers. One of the tricky things is about making sure customers know what they need to know to make a decision about your products or services.

In this episode, Matthew Rempel explains what the marketing funnel is, how it can be used to better understand your marketing, and how you can use the ideas in the funnel to improve your communication with your current and potential customers.

He also goes over two more ways to think of how customers engage with your organization: Customer as going through their own Hero’s Journey, and Customer Journey.

Matthew Rempel from Strategy Made Simple goes over what options are available to build up initial capital to start a social enterprise, including:
- Impact Investment
- Debt Investment
- Equity Investment
- Bootstrapping

Jobs need to get done, so people, systems, or technology need to do the work. In many cases automation can help improve your work, but we should be aware of what we lose when we automate tasks.

In this episode, Matthew Rempel talks about how you can identify what tasks could be good for automating, and how you can start evaluate if the changes to your organizational culture will be positive after automating a task.

Often when discussing social enterprise ideas, people will say: "There are other businesses already doing that." This doesn't mean that there isn't space for a new social enterprise to also serve those customers.

In this video, Matthew Rempel describes four reasons why there may still be enough customers within a market for a new social enterprise to start up and earn enough to sustain itself.

When considering several ideas for a potential social enterprise, you need to consider what ideas are more likely to create impact, and which ideas are more likely to create a financial return.
At Strategy Made Simple we use the Impact and Financial Viability Matrix to help teams visualize the differences between the ideas that they're considering.

The Business Model Canvas is a powerful tool to get a quick sense of how a business works. It can also be used to show how businesses can create social good. In this episode, several ways of understanding the activities that are essential to your social enterprise, and use Mother Earth Recycling as a case study.

The Business Model Canvas is a powerful tool to get a quick sense of how a business works. It can also be used to show how businesses can create social good. In this episode, Matthew Rempel presents the 5 phases that channels should address, and use the Aravind Eye Care System as a case study.

The Business Model Canvas is a powerful tool to get a quick sense of how a business works. It can also be used to show how businesses can create social good. In this episode, we present four common ways that businesses partner together, and use the Habitat ReStore as a case study.