1 Simple Rule: Do Amazing Things with Your Venture to Help Those Suffering

Invest (rather than conserve) personal resources to help those suffering.

Adverse events (such as natural or artificial disasters) may cause you to lose some of your physical resources and suffer. Investing your resources to help other suffering people can improve their lives and your functioning.

Offer compassion to those who are suffering.

Take entrepreneurial action to respond to the uncertainty of a crisis and help others. Your entrepreneurial action can help overcome constraints to deliver compassionate products and services that are customized and delivered urgently at a large scale and scope.

Invest personal resources to build personal resources.

Investing your resources to help those suffering can make you more resilient. By engaging in compassion venturing (entrepreneurial action to alleviate the suffering of others), you can meet other positive people who can make a positive difference. These interactions can have a positive impact on you. Your help may also cause people to express gratitude. That gratitude can help you generate positive emotions, which also represent a resource. For example, helping others can strengthen relationships. Relationships are critical to resilience. Moreover, taking action and making a positive difference can increase your coping self-efficacy. Coping self-efficacy is believing you can successfully deal with adverse events. This coping self-efficacy provides positive beliefs that enable you to cope successfully with subsequent adverse events.

You likely have more resources than you imagine.

Even though adverse events can take away many physical resources, people are often left with intangible resources. By investing in those intangible resources, you can help alleviate suffering. These intangible resources include local knowledge, customs, and relationships. Use them to make a positive difference in people’s lives.

Use bricolage to make the most of remaining resources.

Bricolage involves using the resources you have at hand, combining them, and recombining them to use them in ways they were not originally conceived. This creative behavior can generate essential solutions that help alleviate others’ suffering.

2 Simple Rule: Align Your Motivation with the Type of Venture You Want to Build

Know why you want to help those suffering.

While some entrepreneurs found ventures to alleviate suffering primarily based on the compassion they feel for those in need, others use such ventures also to fulfill their personal goals, such as being independent or learning. If you know your motivations, you can build the venture that fits you best. If you are mainly driven by compassion, your venture should provide quick and scalable help by acquiring a large base of resource providers. If you see your venture as a means for becoming independent and developing yourself, try to develop a sustainable business model by evaluating multiple opportunities for help and building a solid team around you.

Focus on the right activities to maximize your impact.

Depending on the type of venture you are building, you may focus on different activities to meet your goals. If you want to help many people in need and do so quickly, you should focus on execution. In this case, you should concentrate on setting up a clear structure for your venture that allows you to distribute tasks and resources efficiently. If you aim for a more long-term solution, your structure should be flexible to adjust to feedback and the changing needs of those you help and your stakeholders.

Develop and balance dual logics.

Suppose you want to build a venture that helps others. In that case, you need to pursue multiple goals—financial goals to keep your venture running, social goals to help others, and/or perhaps even ecological goals if you want to address environmental problems. These different logics need to be built into your venture’s mission. Balancing/emphasizing different logics is not easy but requires thorough consideration because your venture’s mission can impact which stakeholders and resource providers you can attract to your venture and your ability to find opportunities.

Be aware of mission drift.

One of the challenges you face when pursuing multiple logics is that your mission can drift toward one goal over time while neglecting the other(s). Although there might be good reasons for this, mission drift can decrease stakeholder commitment and damage your reputation. If you realize your venture’s mission is drifting, explain to stakeholders why this is the case and emphasize your venture’s positive impact.

Be open to criticism and take responsibility for your mission (drift).

Even if you have the best intentions and have helped many people, some may criticize aspects of your venture as not being social or sustainable enough. Rather than justifying this critique by referring to the many good things you have achieved, try to embrace it. By critically thinking about how you can improve, you can build an even stronger venture with more impact.

3 Simple Rule: Be Sensitive to the Needs of Your Venture Members

Attract people with strong prosocial motivation.

To maximize your venture’s impact, you may consider attracting helpers based on their qualifications to fulfill the tasks at hand. However, given that a strong social mission often does not allow you to pay employees high salaries, make sure that they share the social motivation of your venture; otherwise, they may quickly leave once they receive offers with higher salaries and better promotion opportunities.

Invest time to keep your venture members motivated.

While motivating employees is critical for any venture, it is particularly challenging for ventures with a social mission because they only have limited resources for financial compensation. Therefore, you must invest time and effort to create an atmosphere that employees, particularly volunteers, enjoy. You may have to invest considerable time in communication, conflict management, trust-building, and a strong organizational identity and culture. In doing so, you ensure that all “pull the cart” in the right direction.

Make employees and volunteers emotionally connected to your venture.

The dual logics pursued by your venture mission can create ambivalence and rejection of some venture activities by members. To understand these members’ feelings, you can put yourself in their shoes by establishing meetings and platforms where they can share conflict experiences and discuss the feelings caused by your venture’s dual mission. To counteract aversive feelings, energize your employees and volunteers. Try to induce excitement and enthusiasm for your venture by crafting a vision about the future outcomes of the venture’s activities or by establishing rituals that enhance engagement with the venture.

Actively address declining volunteer commitment.

Sometimes, unforeseen external developments, such as economic crises or misconduct by some of the individuals you are trying to help, can diminish the motivation of volunteers. Closely monitor your environment for such potential threats. If you recognize potentially threatening events and circumstances, counteract decreasing volunteer commitment proactively. Try to emphasize the positive aspects of what you have achieved so far and remind volunteers that those in need may suffer most from a crisis and need even more help and that most of them are not accountable for the misconduct of a few. You may also want to reinforce your venture’s identity and culture by establishing more frequent meetings and generally enhancing communication with venture members.

4 Simple Rule: Don’t Burnout in Pursuing Your Venture’s Social Mission

Manage your compassion.

Your compassion for those suffering has motivated you to make social goals part of your venture’s mission. However, there is always more suffering than one entrepreneur or venture can address. As for many engaged in social work, your compassion may drive you to invest more personal and psychological resources than you have, leading to fatigue and burnout. Carefully monitor your energy levels and take regular breaks to recharge emotionally.

Monitor your passion for helping those in need.

You can avoid fatigue by pursuing a social mission with your venture. An essential element of avoiding fatigue is being passionate about what you do. If your passion is high, you will feel energized, rather than exhausted, from helping others. When you feel your passion declining, take a break to fill up your battery and regain passion for what you are doing.

Be self-compassionate.

While we often feel compassion for others, we tend to be harder on ourselves. The more you care about yourself and acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes, the more you will have the energy to help others.

Build support networks.

Although some entrepreneurs see themselves as the lonely hero at the helm of a venture, particularly if they pursue a social mission, this view can be dangerous. Support from family, friends, mentors, and other entrepreneurs can be crucial for coping with social venturing demands. Support networks can provide important resources and emotional encouragement and can make you more resilient to the high demands of helping others. You can build these networks as part of your venturing activities, at networking events, or within incubation programs. Try to frequently interact and communicate with others within and outside your venture.

Be prepared to cope with negative feedback.

Since you are helping others, you might expect gratitude rather than complaints from those being helped. While negative feedback might be hard to swallow and may drain your energy at first, consider it as a source for improvement. Perhaps you can enhance your venture’s helping activities so that more people are served, or maybe your help offers can be improved by listening more to victims about what they need.