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It’s widely said that 90% of startup businesses fail. For those that survive, 70% will fold before reaching their tenth year. The enduring challenges in sustaining a business over time are great and many.
As Christian entrepreneurs, we also want our ventures to have redemptive impact, bringing about restorative change.
The marketplace has responded to entrepreneurial challenges with frameworks, methodologies, tools, etc. Many are useful, but are they built to consider redemptive outcomes?
In the world of business planning, a canvas has become a very popular tool to help create a blueprint for a business. While many types of canvases exist, the common benefit is its visual experience. Like a blueprint, you can see how the pieces fit together, flow into one another, and affect each other as they operate. A canvas is a visually laid out business plan.
While canvases common in the market have proven to be helpful, they fall short in helping faith-driven entrepreneurs build for redemptive outcomes. These tools have not been designed with the values, beliefs, and definitions that ground a redemptive business. They do not consider the ‘causes of failure’ that the 90% have suffered from.
A Difference in Priorities
Most existing canvases are designed to prioritize the building of a business model; an economic engine that will answer a question of velocity, 'how do we make money in the fastest way possible?'. Once that is answered, the model on the canvas needs to be adapted into an organizational structure.
The organization's role is to house the engine and keep it running. In this way, the organization and its people are here to serve the engine. Business first, organization second.
The redemptive approach believes the order should be reversed. That a business should be guided by direction and purpose set out by the people. The business is for people, not people for the business. Tools that are redemptive in nature begin with direction and purpose, answering, 'where are we going?', a question of trajectory.
From there, an economic engine is built within the parameters of the direction and core values. In a redemptive business, the business model is still important, but not the center of the universe. It resides in a bigger context, led by a foundational direction, housed in an organizational structure, and surrounded by the right people.
Building a redemptive business should not be a wilderness to navigate.
We’re here to help you think it all through and launch into restorative action!