Preface

What brings you here?

It’s a question you might want to ponder, and ponder well, before you get too far into running one of these things we call a social enterprise. If making a real difference for the planet and the species therein is inspiring, then this is the most inspirational work you could possibly get into. And if living your professional life within an endless series of paradoxes and tensions is your idea of a great challenge, then nothing is more challenging than what you’re setting out to do. So before you sign on for it, spend some time with that question and see how your answers fits in with the story of your life.

As for what brought your friendly neighborhood authors, Kevin Lynch and Julius Walls, Jr., here, well, that’s a bit of a story too.

We met each other a long time ago at a Social Venture Network conference and have been good friends as well as professional colleagues ever since. Since we are fellow practitioners of social enterprises who happen to run somewhat similar operations, we became, along the way, trusted confidants and counselors to each other.

What has always characterized the advice we’ve asked of and given to each other over the years has been its practical nature. Not “What’s your theory about so and so?” but “What should I do about this, now?” When we had the opportunity to write this book about social enterprise for the SVN book series, we quickly realized that all we are qualified to talk about is life in the trenches. That’s where we’ve lived, and certainly where we’ve learned, and where our mutual respect has been built. It is from this perspective that we bring you Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise.

Through all the joys and challenges we’ve found in running our enterprises, we’ve learned perhaps the most important lesson of all. You won’t be good at social enterprise unless you’re passionately in love with the very idea of it. From this perspective, it seems only appropriate to tell you a bit about what brought each of us to the work that we now love so much.

Kevin Lynch’s Story

Although the “social” part didn’t come around until much later, the “enterprise” part of social enterprise was, I suppose, always in my blood. My sisters like to tell rather unflattering stories of how I talked them into becoming my subcontractors on my paper routes at a significantly lower rate of pay than I was earning—my first encounter with the concept of profit margin.

In college, my buddy and I started a business delivering birthday cakes to on-campus students from their parents, which evolved into a related line of Finals Week Survival Kits. We talked a local banker into a $350 start-up loan. I will never forget the rush I felt about a week after sending out our first direct-mail solicitation to a few hundred parents, when we opened our post office box and found dozens of orders, checks enclosed, falling out. We paid off our loan a month later, and for the remaining three years of college I had all the pocket money I ever needed. (Most of it I spent on beer and pot, which becomes relevant to the story almost two decades later.)

I got out of college in 1980 and found a job right away at a big ad agency. The agency business was a good place for someone with a level of creativity, business sense, and salesmanship. But it was a perfect place for someone like me, who was also deceitful, manipulative, ruthless, and political. I rose quickly, on my own merits and on the backs of others. I was given the opportunity to work on a diverse portfolio of clients, giving me exposure to dozens of different companies, industries, and ways of doing business. I was and still am a student of how business works.

The ad agency business seduced this young man quite thoroughly. I thought it was all about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. In retrospect, there was no sex and there were way too many drugs, but the music was pretty good. By 1987, I certainly hadn’t figured any of this out. What I thought I had unearthed, though, was that I was smarter than the company I worked for, so I left to start my own agency.

I do believe that the first time I ever experienced the word “humble” was in the process of starting up an agency. I was young, completely undercapitalized, and without a clue about how to really do it. It didn’t help that I had never grown out of my daily use of marijuana and alcohol that stemmed back to my college days. I struggled along, trying to get something started, relying largely on my wife’s income to support our young family.

It finally got off the ground in 1989 when I teamed up with some partners and we created Lynch Jarvis Jones. We had some ideas on how to run an ad agency that brought a modicum of success and profitability. It occurred to me that the agency might fulfill my desires for fame, fortune, and ego gratification. Our partnership didn’t do all that well, however, due in no small part to my growing chemical dependency, which I managed to hide from my partners while becoming increasingly domineering and isolated. The partnership blew apart after a few years, and I was left owning the bones of what had been a good, if not great, little agency.

I was struggling for a way to go forward after the loss of a large portion of the agency’s intellectual capital. It struck me that we had had some pretty good luck with a few social marketing clients who had happened to hire us along the way. I thought we could get a few more. We came up with the tagline “Marketing That Matters” to describe a new focus on working for meaningful clients and projects. I must stress that my intent at that point was not to change the world at all. It was only to find a niche into which I could retreat. Nobody else was occupying this space, and it was a nice positioning.

Right about this time, my addiction bottomed out. I was terrified at the prospect of continuing to smoke pot 24/7, and I was terrified at the idea of quitting. On March 6, 1994, I fell to my knees and turned my life over to a Higher Power. Thus began a love affair with the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous that continues to make my life rich and manageable to this day.

My agency looked very different when viewed through sober eyes each morning. Twelve Step recovery is very much a spiritual process. I had a spiritual reawakening, which was just fine by me. But what I hadn’t counted on was that this spiritual reawakening would, of necessity, lead to a social reawakening. When that happened, I was suddenly in big trouble. I came to believe rather quickly that I was in a fundamentally corrupt industry. At best, I came to believe, advertising is a meaningless little device that trivializes the sacred and magnifies the mundane.1 And at its worst, it is the fuel that feeds the consumptive frenzy that is decimating the planet, the people, and the culture.

I remember panicking when all this hit me. I had spent more than a dozen years in the ad business. I thought it was all I was cut out to do. I began to wonder if it was possible to be in the advertising business with a different purpose—not backed into a little niche of necessity but with a whole different mission that would be squarely focused on impact. And right then, quite serendipitously I was introduced to Social Venture Network. The moment I walked into my first SVN conference and met an entire community of folks who were dedicating their businesses to a social purpose, I knew I was home.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was turning Lynch Jarvis Jones into a social enterprise. Our mission was to create positive social change through the power of advertising, and we did that by doing really good work for clients, issues, and causes that were changing the world for the good. If I do say so myself, Lynch Jarvis Jones was quite a place to work. It was rewarding in more ways than I have the space to describe, including financially.

By the new millennium, though, I was getting restless. I was going to conferences and taking tours of places like Greyston Bakery that were hands on changing people’s lives. But I was still doing what I had been doing for twenty years: getting clients, selling them ad campaigns, struggling to get the campaign produced without too much watering down, making media buys in the same old toxic media, and hoping somebody would quit flipping through the channels long enough to maybe catch the message. I started to wonder if an ad agency was really the most efficient vehicle by which to change the world.

As luck would have it, a series of events came together very quickly that gave me the opportunity to exit the agency at a financial high-water mark and get all of my stakeholders out whole as well. I jumped through the window of opportunity in 2001 and haven’t looked back.

When I jumped, I hadn’t a clue what I was going to do next. At the risk of turning this into the mushy book about Twelve Step spirituality that it does not intend to be, I will simply say that I turned it over to my Higher Power. I planned on taking a midlife retirement of two years. Eighteen months later, and not yet actively looking for my next gig, I learned, through a wonderful series of synchronicities, that Rebuild Resources was looking for a new president. Years earlier I had toured Rebuild. I remembered that it was a social enterprise that was helping addicts and alcoholics just like me get back on their feet by giving them jobs in businesses it was running. The moment I heard about the job, as I sat there with a cup of coffee, I said to myself, out loud, “I guess this is what I’m going to be doing next.”

That was almost six years ago, and I’m still at Rebuild as of this writing. I can say without hesitation that this is the most difficult and the most joyful work I have ever done—by a huge margin. On my third or fourth day on the job, the bookkeeper walked in and mentioned that I might like to know that we had $45 left and payroll was due. I suggested that we would have to use that big credit line I had been told about. She clarified that we had $45 left on the line of credit. That same day, a young man in our program showed me his new driver’s license and thanked me for Rebuild’s being there because he could drive to Nebraska for the first time in ten years to see his kids—and for the first time ever to see them while he was sober. The most difficult and the most joyful work I have ever done, indeed, and all in the same day.

No other work that I could be doing could require so much of me as a businessman and give back so much to me as a human. The twelfth of the Twelve Steps is about keeping our own gift of sobriety by helping others attain it. When I got sober in 1994, all I wanted was to not be sick and tired of being sick and tired any more. I got what I wanted—I haven’t picked up a drug or a drink in over fourteen years—but little did I know I’d be given the opportunity to change the world. That’s what brought me to and keeps me at this amazing social enterprise called Rebuild Resources.

Julius Walls, Jr.’s Story

I started in the business world working for a chocolate manufacturer in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, for twelve years. The chocolate factory was only a few blocks south of where I grew up in the public housing projects. The square block on which I lived was exclusively projects. Our buildings were twenty stories high, with eight apartments per floor. At least ten buildings were on my block. Using an average of five people per apartment, eight thousand people were living there. Just north of the chocolate factory was another public housing complex.

Both of these projects were predominantly African-American. At almost any given time of any given day, you could see men and boys hanging out. The unemployment rate was high. The school dropout rate was high. So when I talk about men and boys hanging out, I am talking about substantial numbers in these two complexes. Yet, if you looked at the workers providing services or simply working in the neighborhood, they weren’t African-American. There were factories in the neighborhood, but most of the employees were not African-American. There were stores in the neighborhood, but none of them were owned by African-Americans. There were employees in these stores, but very, very few were African-American and none of those were behind the cash registers.

I knew a few African-American men who were successful. My father worked as a corrections officer for thirty-three years, a working man until he retired. My uncle, Furman Walls, was an educator. My maternal grandfather was a Baptist preacher. These men had a powerful impact on my life. But what is missing from this list of men is a businessman, a business leader. I can’t recall ever meeting an African-American business leader during my youth. I can’t recall ever meeting an African-American leader who owned something—other than occasionally meeting someone who owned a house.

At the chocolate company where I started out, I asked my boss and the owners to try offering English as a Second Language classes or forming a softball team or promoting from within. I am not claiming to be the originator of these ideas, but I was an advocate. We now know the impact these and other employee-sensitive practices can have on a business when done right. But back then, my bosses simply looked at me and asked how much money they would make from them. Today we have evidence that these types of activities can influence worker productivity through worker satisfaction. But back then, they were seen as liberal nonsense by many of the most successful busi-nesspeople. They thought a business should simply drive its people as hard as possible, take as much as possible from its customers, and put as much as possible into the owners’ pockets, regardless of the impact on the community, employees, or the world. I was an impressionable young man looking up to these successful businesspeople, and I said to myself, “They must be right; look at their success. If I am to satisfy my desire to help someone, I should volunteer at my church.”

Please understand that these were not heartless men. I know for a fact that the owner and the president gave away significant dollars to charity, but there was no place for that type of thinking within the business. I know they gave people a chance, but there was limited room for risk. One of those people they gave a chance to was me. There were limited opportunities for an African-American male in the management of a successful company. This company provided me that opportunity and for that I am eternally grateful. My training as a productive business leader came from within that institution. I didn’t get my bachelor’s degree until 2005, when I was forty-three years old and had been president of Greyston Bakery for seven years.

While my business training began at the chocolate company, my leadership and compassion training had begun when I decided I wanted to be a priest. I pursued the priesthood through high school seminary and the middle of sophomore year at college seminary. I wanted to be a priest because I felt a calling to serve my people in general and through spiritual leadership in particular. I didn’t see a black priest until the fifth grade, and that priest had traveled from Uganda to visit us. He asked the class which of us would follow God’s calling to serve. Right then, I decided I would. I thought that calling meant the priesthood. I now know it meant more than that vocation. It meant how I would lead my life, through the vocation of business that eventually led me to Greyston. I never did become a priest, but I have become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. And between that and Greyston, I know I am doing God’s work.

I am not the same individual who arrived at the Bakery some thirteen years ago. I first encountered Greyston in 1992. I had left the chocolate company to start my own chocolate business. I called on Greyston while operating that business and doing some consulting for others in marketing and sales. I ended up volunteering to bring Greyston’s cookies to the White House in 1993. Over the course of three years, I had a shifting of values that led me to be psychologically available to work there. By 1995, I had joined the then $2.5 million Greyston Bakery as a consultant in the role of director of marketing and sales. Then in early 1997, I was asked to join the Bakery as director of operations. Later that year, I was appointed CEO of the Bakery. I added the position of vice president of Greyston Foundation in 2000 and eventually senior vice president in 2003. I have been fortunate in that my ascent to president and CEO has coincided with the growth of the business and its increased renown.

My work today is a combination of business, priesthood, leadership, and advocacy. I am not easily defined. Beyond my work, I am an active husband, father, son, brother, and uncle. My experiences have shaped me into someone who wants to contribute my energies, skills, and efforts toward positive, life-changing impact. My personal mission, which I carry with me every day, reads

Live my life in integrity, daily growing in my spiritual relationship with God; reading, studying, and meditating on His word and endeavoring to do His will.

Love, attend and be faithful to my wife, Cheryl. Love and attend to my children, Nicole, Julius and Taylor. Love and honor my Mother and Father. Love my siblings, Denise, Monica, Gerard, Todd, and William. Remember Catherine.

Serve my people with the guidance and wisdom of God. Be sensitive to their needs, wants and desires. Help them grow in spirit and understand all that the world offers.

This is my mission in life. I will keep it in my heart. (“For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Prov. 23:7)

My God-given mission has informed my decision to work in the social enterprise world as opposed to the general business world. My God-given mission influences my decisions of what I will do and what I will not do. xviii

We came here on different paths, but our paths now converge with you and every other social enterpriser who seeks to change the world for the better through business.

What brings you here?

KEVIN LYNCH

St. Paul, Minnesota

JULIUS WALLS, JR.

Yonkers, New York

November 2008