Creating a compelling strategy is step number one for every business. But almost no one gets it right on the first try. Aniket Doegar and “Guns” Ganapathy, co-founders of the Indian social enterprise Haqdarshak, pivoted multiple times while remaining focused on financial sustainability and their mission: eliminating generational poverty in India through access to social security.
India, with a population of 1.4 billion, has about a billion people dependent on some form of social security, according to Aniket Doegar. And India has over 20,000 government programs. But most families are accessing only a tiny percentage of the programs they’re eligible for. “An urban family living in cities like Delhi and Bombay is eligible for about 25 to 30 programs, and all these families at any given point of time are not accessing more than 10 percent of them,” explains Doegar. That’s the problem Haqdarshak wants to solve — how to enable people in need to access the life-changing benefits they deserve.
From the very beginning, Haqdarshak’s strategy was focused on generating revenue so the company wouldn’t be dependent on handouts or grants in the traditional nonprofit model. “It was almost an article of faith for me that scale can be achieved and lots of social problems can be addressed by thinking through a revenue model, by having financial sustainability built into the DNA of the organization,” says Ganapathy, who is not only a co-founder of Haqdarshak, but also its first investor, and formerly Stanford Seed’s regional director for South Asia.
The two assumed that building a platform for end users to access benefits would be too expensive and that government contracts would be more financially reliable. Unfortunately they weren’t, and after not getting paid, they made their first pivot. And the pivots kept coming. But along the way, they learned — and built upon —every setback. “I think this is an important lesson for social enterprises, that you've got to remain flexible sometimes and see the way in which the market responds to what you want to do,” advises Ganapathy.
Ganapathy also warns social enterprises of the tension between financial sustainability and risk of mission drift. “It’s a challenge that most social enterprises face at some point in their journey. I think we did face this two or three years in where there was this temptation that we had this network of field agents, and we could have gone the way of adding financial products, insurance sales, things like that to the basket of goods that an agent carried, and made the organization more financially viable, but it would have meant a significant mission drift away from our original focus,” Ganapathy recalls.
Having mission-driven investors can help you stay on track. Throughout the company’s journey, Doegar reminds himself of the big picture: “Do we want to be an organization which runs after capital and does everything, or do we want to be a specialized social security organization and really build an institution?
Hear how Doegar and Ganapathy adjusted their strategy on the fly and stayed true to their foundational values, and learn where the company is headed now.
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