Replication

Jeff Tollefson of Genesys Works shared his experiences about how to successfully replicate an existing social enterprise.

Replication: Taking a Social Venture to Scale

Download the presentation Taking a Social Venture to Scale, created by Jeff Tollefson of Genesys Works and Jim McCorkell of Admission Possible.

Why Expand?

  • Genesys Works was very successful in Houston
  • The model was replicable
  • Ashoka has a focus on replication

Growth Options 

  • Geographic (horizontal growth)
    • Another city in Texas
    • A similar city outside of Texas
    • Eventually go national?
  • Different fields (vertical growth) - expand in the Houston region by training students to provide services other than IT
  • Genesys Works expanded in both directions
    • Replicated their IT program in the Twin Cities
    • Expanded to offer Finance and Accounting services to their existing clients

Pillars of Successful Growth

Genesys Works planned their expansion according to this process:

  • Assess the market (potential customers), competitors, city infrastructure, capacity of schools & students
  • Assess yourself - funding, resources, structure
  • Map out results of the assessments, including other geographic areas that might work
    • New York, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Los Angeles scored the highest
  • Consider other factors
    • Presence of key partners
      • SVP Minnesota - the Houston SVP chapter was instrumental in Genesys Works' initial success. 
      • Jim McCorkell was in the same Ashoka Fellows class as Genesys Works' founder, so we could leverage existing networks
    • Geography
    • Local market buy-in

Expansion Process

  • Develop clearly articulated theory of change
  • Define essential program elements to be replicated
    • What was core to the Genesys Works' model and what could be site specific?
  • Tap into and leverage existing networks
  • Find effective local leader (Executive Director)
  • Execute in each "pillar"
    • Schools
    • Companies
    • Infrastructure
    • Funding

What Went Well

  • Pilot program a success
    • Satisfied corporate clients
      • Companies re-upped and some want more students
      • New clients
    • Schools recognized value of program - St Paul schools on board
    • Achieved modest financial "gain"
  • Year Two underway with 50 students in training
  • Twin Cities to serve as model for future replication

What Could Be Improved

  • Overly optimistic thoughts about first day
    • Working with at-risk students
    • Minimize obstacles to success - transit, office location, etc
  • Trying to pitch unknown program directly to CIOs
    • Use testimonials from Houston CIOs (and now from other MN clients)
    • Leverage network to get in the door
  • Should have incorporated in MN earlier
  • Get a really good lay of the land - who are the key players, who might be your competition for clients, funding dollars, etc

Factors to Consider for Future Expansion

  • Relationship between national office and affiliates
    • Ranges from "tight" to "loose"
    • Level of control dictates profile of ED to hire
  • Role of "national" Genesys Works - more of a flagship than a national office
    • Quality control
    • Peer-to-peer learning, sharing of best practices
    • Providing central services - accounting, marketing, website, benefits, etc
      • Percentage of earned (not contributed) income goes to national to pay for these services
  • Legal structure
    • Currently incorporated as a 503c3 in Texas
      • Incorporated in MN as an LLC, with the sole shareholder the Houston Genesys Works nonprofit
      • All contributed income goes through Houston nonprofit
    • MN board
    • Continue to assess the legal structure
  • Flow of funds

Lessons Learned

Local versus National

  • Need "local ownership"
    • To be successful, it needed to look and feel like a Minnesota initiative (especially to funders)
      • Embraced the "pull" versus "push" (from Houston)
        • SVP Minnesota and other interested parties invited Genesys Works here to share best practices and replicate their program
    • Genesys Works model: local franchises with Houston flagship and loose national structure
  • Tension between national office, Houston site, and other affiliates
    • How much time should staff help replicate in other cities and how much time should they spend on their own jobs
      • Strike balance to meet local needs and help other sites get off the ground
      • With Twin Cities site up and running it's more balanced, can share best practices
        • Houston ended up adopting some Minnesota practices
  • The "Pull" Strategy
    • Go where a local group already has interest and buy-in
    • Let them self select the Genesys Works model and pull it there

Building relationships with the corporate community

  • Personal connections in the corporate sector make a big difference
    • Especially connections with CIOs or other decision-makers in IT departments
  • Leverage networks of partners to get in the door
    • Another reason that local leadership, buy-in, and enthusiasm really matter
  • Build new relationships - go out there and make things happen
    • Sometimes you need to be creative to find the right avenue to the decision-maker
  • First clients were crucial
    • Success with them opened doors and provided testimonials, pitches became a lot easier after that
  • Easier to make the case to IT that this will work and get the rest of management to sign off, than to have the students be a part of a larger social good initiative 
    • Emphasize value to organization, rather than the social good
      • Product, service and value added make the sale
    • Pitch like an intern program
      • Help prepare future workers
      • Free up full-time staff to do more complex tasks (because the students were tackling the lower level work)
      • Groom staff to be supervisors
        • Identify leaders and put them on a management track
  • Lifecycle with each client
    • Start out as an experiment with only a few students
    • If successful, expand to
  • Decided not to ask corporate clients for donations

Making the case to foundations

  • Asking for seed capital
    • Genesys Works business model projects earned income to cover 85% of budget
  • Itasca Project
    • Indicated that the Twin Cities have a work force imbalance, especially in IT
    • Genesys Works is helping prepare the next generation of IT workers
  • Results
    • Stories of lives transformed (qualitative)
    • Working on identifying the best metrics & quantitative results to make the case about impact

Other Lessons

  • Reproduce program results, not every feature
  • Constant tension between social mission and business demands
    • Needs to be a fit for both the students and the corporate clients, 100% placement rate may not be possible
    • Providing value to the corporate clients who may not know (or care about) social purpose
  • Have a big vision, but small plans
  • Know your competition (direct and indirect)
  • Don't be afraid to ask for what you need
    • In grants, of donors, from the community
  • There will be setbacks; plan for them, learn from them
    • Henry Ford: "A setback is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
    • Step back and look at things differently
  • Brush aside disappointment, celebrate every success, focus on keeping the momentum

What's Next

Genesys Works wants to apply the lessons learned from Houston and the successful Twin Cities replication to help guide future expansion.

Twin Cities

  • In 2010 expanding to Minneapolis to increase ability to serve clients in the Northwest Corridor
    • 2 training sites, 1 in St Paul and 1 in Minneapolis
    • The number of students will still be limited by the number of possible jobs
  • When saturate the IT market, must decide if/how to expand program
    • Identify other needs of current clients and how Genesys Works could serve them
      • Houston now provides Accounting and Engineering services
    • Leverage networks within current corporate clients to see if other departments would try the program
    • There may be other competitors operating outside of IT
    • Balance growth with quality control - key is maintaining excellence for clients and students

Chicago (third site)

  • Pulled in, folks on the ground heard about the Genesys Works model and requested a visit then
    • Local community - including education thought-leaders, business community, and funders - already interested and bought-in
  • Local group has a lot of control
  • Houston takes the lead and serves as the national office, but other sites also offer help and assistance
    • Regular ED conference call where all the executives engage in dialogue and share best practices
    • Creating an online database to facilitate sharing of best practices

Future Expansions

  • Find local leaders early on
  • Look for places with the right local conditions/market and position Genesys Works to be pulled in
  • Assess where key partners, such as SVP and Accenture, have existing presences and leverage these networks
  • Really understand local conditions and players
  • Identify core elements of success

About Genesys Works

Gensys Works mission is "To enable economically-disadvantaged high school students to enter and thrive in the economic mainstream by providing them the knowledge and work experience required to succeed as professionals."  Students enter the program in the summer before their senior year and receive training in areas such as Information Technology (IT) and professional skills. The students work part-time for a corporate client during their senior year of high school. 

For more on Genesys Works, you can visit their website or read notes from the session on Business Planning for Social Enterprise.