EPISODE #2:

Secrets to Becoming a Successful Social Entrepreneur with Anne Chambers

Or listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Hey, you aspiring social entrepreneurs. Have you been considering how you can create a business for both profit and social impact?  If so, this episode is for you!

Now if you are thinking, “I am not ready to start a business so this episode doesn’t apply to me,” stick with me, because my guest today shares some nuggets that will help you increase your power for good works no matter what your vocation or job.  

In today’s episode, my guest is Anne Chambers, serial social entrepreneur and CEO of startup, Certifiably, an on-line platform that enables values-driven, like-minded businesses to find each other. 

Anne has been pursuing social activism through work since the ’90s when she worked for Procter and Gamble. 

She shares her stories and lessons she has learned. She talks about how she has navigated around the bumps she has encountered along the way. And she provides you with tips on how to do the same. 

Anne provides you with practical advice for framing your own journey, whether you are an entrepreneur looking for ways to start a new social impact business or are seeking ways to increase your impact in your current job. 

Here is a snapshot of a few topics we cover in this podcast…

• How she handled efforts that didn’t quite succeed, such as her attempt to make Olay the brand that would empower women around the world, when she worked for Procter and Gamble. 
• Her struggle to find like-minded businesses to work with
• How she narrows down the issues she will address
• Connecting purchasing decisions with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• How women CEOs of B Corporations are working together to make change in a group called WetheChange. 
• How she avoids becoming overwhelmed as an impact entrepreneur. 

If you are interested in more information, here are some additional links related to this episode: 

1. Certifiably’s main website https://buycertifiably.com/
2. The WetheChange website https://wethechange.net/
3. We the Change, Women Envision a Better Earth Through Better Business by Sara Schley https://bthechange.com/we-the-change-women-together-envision-a-better-earth-through-better-business-8c9524777a14

EPISODE #2 TRANSCRIPT

Kathy Miller Perkins: Welcome to the Conscious Culture Cafe, the podcast that explores how you can lean into your purpose, live your values and enhance your social impact through your work. I’m your host, Kathy Miller Perkins. Today I’m talking with Ann Chambers, serial entrepreneur and CEO of the marketing agency Red212 and also more importantly for our topic today, the founder of the startup Certifiably.  Ann is going to share tips with us about how to start a business targeting social impact. And she’s going to base that advice to us on her experience today with Certifiably, which as I understand it, she positioned to become a social impact business from the get-go. So, Anne, welcome to Conscious Culture Cafe podcast. And before we dive into the topic of how you founded a startup for social impact, can you give us some highlights of your backstory?

Ann Chambers: Sure. Hi Kathy. I’m so happy to be here and I really appreciate you thinking of me and reaching out to do this. It’s the work you’re doing is really, really important and I’m thrilled to be a part of it. My back story is I’ve always been an entrepreneur and a social entrepreneur in my heart, but I did have a chapter about 10 years of working at Proctor & Gamble, so I feel like the Procter & Gamble experience kind of gave me tons of business acumen that I would not have gotten elsewhere. Obviously it’s like going to getting an MBA somewhere, but I was lucky when I was at P&G I worked, for part of my time there, I worked in what they called their in-house production company, which really we turned into an in-house ad agency and then I bought that company from P&G and turned it into Red212, the agency that I currently have.  So that was kind of the beginning, but even at Procter & Gamble, I spent a lot of time at Proctor really trying to introduce, in the early 90’s, this concept of business as a force for change.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Wow. As early as the nineties to do that. 

Ann Chambers: We worked in 1994 we put a team together to try to get Olay to become the brand that empowers women around the world. And we were going to partner with Grameen America to do, or it wasn’t even Grameen America at the time. It was Grameen Bank to do micro loans. So to take some of the money from Olay and then reinvest it into micro loans and then tell the story of those women as they built their businesses around the world.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Oh, what a good idea. Did that come to be? 

Ann Chambers: No. You know what? It was just too early. I think the day P&G or any other company wouldn’t be really open to an idea like that. And you can see that they’re doing all kinds of things like that. In the 1990s it was way too early for them to understand the impact of where the world was going with, with social business.

Kathy Miller Perkins: So is that why you decided to purchase the Red212 or how did you make that decision or why did you make that decision? 

Ann Chambers: Well, actually I was getting ready to leave P&G and I was building a mission driven edamame snack brand called Mame and I was all set. We had figured it all out where to source the edamame beans and the whole tagline was, “I want my Mame”. We were using the brand as a voice for children around the world who need homes. So the tagline, “I want my Mame”, I really tied to the children as well as that was getting ready to do that. But mind you, I knew nothing about sourcing beans and packaging and shipping and distribution. So P&G came to me and said that they wanted to divest the division that I was working in and my husband and I were all in production and marketing and advertising, and so we thought, well what a wonderful opportunity to create a family business with the world’s biggest CPG company. I felt that I had to delay creating the mission driven brand because my skills and the opportunity to build this other business where were much more in line with buying the business from P&G.

Kathy Miller Perkins: But you had in mind from the beginning then that it would be mission-driven, social impact?

Ann Chambers: I hoped that it would be, but to be honest, at that point I wasn’t clear, so I always knew that any business I did would be, in fact, we named the company and made a commitment that any business that we did would be called Bright Future, either Bright Future brands or partners or products. Whatever we did with the intention that our stakeholders would be more than just shareholders. We would have to be creating a bright future for our employees, for the consumers that touched us for our clients. So having this vision of a brighter future, that in and of itself, was really a social impact.

Kathy Miller Perkins: I see. So your husband is with you in this venture? I didn’t know that. That’s interesting.

Ann Chambers: He isn’t anymore, but he was at the beginning. He’s a film director and so he did a lot of our work.

Kathy Miller Perkins: I see. All right. So as you worked within Red212 how did that evolve into Certifiably or is Certifiably completely separate from Red212?

Ann Chambers: Well, Certifiably and Red212 are now combined very recently as of literally this last week. And the reason that we did Certifiably is really my experience with Red212 was say a woman owned business. And in going to all the conferences for women owned businesses, one of the things that I noticed was that the women really didn’t make a big, big, big effort to work together and I felt that as a woman owned business, I want to work with other women businesses. Right? You know, you want to support each other, you want to see them be successful because the more successful we are collectively, the greater our impact will be. And that’s such an important concept to me. So, it kind of struck me as odd that there was no easy way for me to just get on a platform and find other women owned businesses to work with. So what happened next is Red212 became a certified B Corp. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: You were early in in getting certified, weren’t you? 

Ann Chambers: Well, fairly early only because B Corps have only been around for 10 years. So yeah, right, right. So B Corp is a certification that you get through an organization called B Lab. And the belief of all B Corp’s is that we are all part of business as a force for good. And we are very strict on our policies relative to who our stakeholders are. So it’s employees, it’s basically people, profit and planet. So we’re all about profits, but we’re also all about how does our business impact the rest of the world. Once we were part of the B Corp community, I experienced the same thing, the same phenomenon that I did when I was with my certified women owned businesses. And that is that the businesses were not working together.  And I found that to be even more unusual because these are like tribe people were all like kind of marching together. You would think we’d all be working together but we weren’t. And as I peeled away the onion like why is this happening? The answer was really simple and it is, there was no platform to make it easy to do it. So that was the inspiration for me. I saw as an entrepreneur, you know you see a problem, problems are opportunities.  So I, I just jumped into it and decided to build the platform Certifiably to solve the problem of businesses or people being able to work with, with other impact businesses. And now we’ve expanded it in order to scale. Kathy, we went beyond B Corp and are doing women owned, veteran owned, fair trade, LGBTQ. So you could just have an opportunity and post it on the platform and you can say what types of certifications you would like to be working with.

Kathy Miller Perkins: So who are the customers for Certifiably? 

Ann Chambers: Well, we have basically two types of customers, one type is a multinational big company that is looking to really expand their supplier base. These are companies that are really looking to change the way they’re doing business. And I’m going to say that I’m going to guess that most of our future companies will be companies that have signed on to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Ah, that’s good. So how does, how do the sustainable development goals fit with certifiably? 

Ann Chambers: Well, what we’re building inside certifiably is eventually, and you know, as a startup, you know how that is. One of the really important things that we’re building is a way to track every purchase against one or more of the United Nations SDGs. So it’s going to be very cool. So in the, at the end of the year, you’ll be able to see any company will be able to look at a report and see the impact that they’ve made. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Oh, that’s wonderful. And so the big business clients would welcome that because they’ve already signed on to the SDGs and they need a way to show what they’re doing. I take it. Is that your thought? 

Ann Chambers: Yep. That’s our thought. And then it’s really partly also in response to Larry Fink from Blackrock last year, really saying companies have to stand for something and have to be on a mission to do something. So this will be an easy way for companies to track and show shareholders what they’re really doing. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Right. And so your other customers, the B Corps, how’s that working? How does that work? 

Ann Chambers: So the other customers are any small business that wants to either, number one, have an opportunity to work with the big companies that will be on the platform. But two companies that want to do what I described earlier, which is work with other B Corp’s work with other women on businesses, find a fair trade business to work with. So you don’t have to be certified to buy from someone on the platform, but it gives you a way to search for the type of company that you’re looking for. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Okay. So you don’t have to be certified to buy from the platform, but you do have to be certified to offer services on the platform. Is that correct? 

Ann Chambers: Yes, that is correct.

Kathy Miller Perkins: What’s your marketing plan? How are you getting the word out? 

Ann Chambers: Basically we’re targeting multinationals and B Corps first because they’re pretty much early adopters. The B Corp people, they want this solution. So once we get traction with our B Corps, then we’ll start to roll it out group by group. So then we’ll go into women owned, LGBTQ, so we want to get it right with the first group. Always like a beta. Right? You need to be refined when you’re doing a startup. We are trying to get it right with the right group of people that will give us feedback and so it’s a process that it’s a co-creation process really. Kathy 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Co-creation with whom?

Ann Chambers: With our members and with our, any of our clients. I really want them to have say in what they need, because this is a new product and being a new product, we need to be very open to say, okay, we think that you’re going to want all of these different types of reporting. They may say, no, we really would like to see, instead of going there first with your build, create a platform for sharing videos of all the company. I don’t know, you didn’t ever know what told them, Oh, we’re trying to be very open and taking the lead from our clients.

Kathy Miller Perkins: That’s wonderful. So, I take it then that your vision for Certifiably has evolved over time. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Ann Chambers: It has evolved over time? Well, actually the first form of Certifiably was actually an e-Commerce platform to help people buy from more, CPG type businesses that actually had products to offer. So that was the way we started. We just wanted to have a platform that made it easy for consumers to find and do business with companies that shared their values.  It is all consumer focused. So the big shift, to your point, is how things shift is that we discovered the need was so big with the B2B companies, we have shifted to B2B. Someday we might choose again to have more consumer facing, but right now it’s B2B.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Has your vision for the types of services changed or is that you’re still working with your customers to figure that out? Or where are you with that?

Ann Chambers: I’m still working with my customers to figure it out. There are some areas like a lot of our customers are smaller businesses and so I’m asking the question, you know, do we need to have some kind of a portal that makes it easy for a big company to work with lots of small companies with only one vendor at the helm. So, basically a corporate pay master in a way. Those are the kinds of things that I just don’t know for sure. But I think those are some of the things we’re going to need.

Kathy Miller Perkins: So what it sounds like to me, correct me if I’m wrong, it sounds like you had an idea you wanted to create something that would serve in need and it’s evolving as you go. You’re co-creating with your clients, you’re changing how you’re thinking about it as you go. Would that be a fair question?

Ann Chambers: That’s a fair thing to say Kathy, it has, it changes all the time. I mean there’s some fundamental things. I think as an entrepreneur, if you keep your purpose in mind, which is we need to make it easy for impact companies to find each other and do business together. Because more, as I said earlier, the even with I was talking about women then, but in general, the more impact companies are successful, the greater impact they’re going to have in the world. For me, helping to power and empower those impact businesses is really my mission because they’re all so great. I mean they’re so brilliant in genius and they have these ideas about how to change the world and what to do with it. And I’m not good at that. I’m good at like helping other people get ahead, supporting, I’m the “rah-rah” team in the back.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Do you think that there’s anything different about a start-up for impact versus any kind of startup or is the process pretty much the same? 

Ann Chambers: I think that the process is pretty much the same. I will say that the group that we’re working with, the B Corps, they are very focused and very clear on impact. So you get really great feedback from them. It’s a very tough audience. I think impact businesses have a really tight North star. No one can stand a lot of scrutiny, but boy, when you’re in this space, you’ve got to be ready to be scrutinized. I think it’s a little bit harder because you have to be willing to be very transparent and, you know, being a B Corp requires that transparency, which is great. It’s, I mean, everyone should be transparent, you know, you have to be ready for all of that.  You have to be ready for the scrutiny. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Yeah. So my next question is going to be, have you run into any obstacles? Would that scrutiny piece be something, a hurdle for you, or what obstacles have you faced, if any? 

Ann Chambers: I would say some that I would not be surprised about and some that did surprise me. So we were going down a path of creating an alliance with several multinational companies. And as a startup I was told that a certain point that there were some dangers of antitrust laws. I’m not even a business yet. How could I be in the middle of an antitrust? So it really was an issue that kind of stopped us in our tracks of a path we were going down and we had to pivot. We couldn’t go down the path. And I would say it definitely cost us several months of our planning.

Kathy Miller Perkins: So you have to be resilient? 

Ann Chambers: Or you just have to go, okay. I did not see that one coming. I did not antitrust waters. But the other challenge, Kathy, I would say is the challenge of any woman starting in a technology startup or pretty much any startup. And that is access to capital is a very big issue for startups. And we know it’s a really big issue for women led startups. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: So that’s not unique to a social impact business per se, it’s more unique to, it’s not unique but harder for women. 

Ann Chambers: Yeah, well, for example, in the venture capital world, 2%, the numbers vary between 2% and 4%, of all venture funding went to women led startups in 2017. And so the numbers are just ridiculous. So you know when you’re going into pitch to raise a fund, you’re really up against the wall and there’s a lot of issues around it.  So that’s another one of my projects on the side. I’m working with an organization that has been recently formed with all the B Corp CEOs, female CEOs, that was really led by Eileen Fisher and we now call it “We the Change”. So, there’s a website called “wethechange.com” and it has our manifesto about what we want to be as women leaders in the world as women. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Wonderful. So that’s another offshoot for you. Very interesting. Very interesting 

Ann Chambers: Part of social impact. Right? So yes, of course I make an impact. And so in addition to what I’m doing with Certifiably, yes. I mean you have to look at, okay, my experience was hard to raise money as a woman. So take action. Right? I’m an activist so when I see an issue, I’ve got to kind of take it on, not every issue, but some.

Kathy Miller Perkins: You select the ones that you want to take on, right? You can’t take them off and no you can’t. But with somebody with your enthusiasm, I can see where it would be hard to be selective.

Ann Chambers: You want to say yes to everything because things are, people are doing such important work out there and you want to help as much as you can, but you do have to say no or you just get overwhelmed. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: So would that be one bit of advice to our listeners is to be careful about not getting overwhelmed by all of these needs? 

Ann Chambers: Yes, I definitely think that making space for the work that needs to be done and really working, this idea of working deeply on something is so important and you can’t do that if you’re saying yes to everything. I think that a couple of other tips are for anyone. I think entrepreneurs are a little bit different and impact entrepreneurs, just really finding quiet time in your work day so that you can work deeply, but you can also work very mindfully because our whole movement is about mindfulness and conscious consumerism. Really. It all comes together, right? I mean, mindfulness is about how you make your purchase decisions. Who are you buying from, and those things all relate back to Certifiably. That’s what it’s all about. Good to speak with your dollars. Even the consumer purchase, it’s a business purchase. Every single purchase makes an impact, right? It can make an impact in, in helping somebody build nuclear bombs, right? Right. Impact in helping someone with solutions for climate change. Every purchase should be choice-ful decision, 

Kathy Miller Perkins: So concentrate on a few things. Learn to say no. Take some time during your day to really reflect and be mindful of what you’re doing. What other tips would you offer to our listeners?

Ann Chambers: Just as a human, I think having a great morning routine is important because mornings are so awesome. Every day is a new day, you don’t know what’s going to come and having a little time in your morning to set yourself right for the day is really, really an important thing.  I think that partnerships are underrated. They’re so important, and I think a lot of businesses are very kind of a territorial. They surround themselves with protection. I think the new world is not about that, it’s about busting open so that you can engage with other people and there’s a lot of power in partnerships and reciprocity. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Do you find that social impact businesses are more open to partnerships and others or not? 

Ann Chambers: I do find that Kathy, that’s a really interesting point to me because everyone is on this same mission of changing the world through business, the idea of having conversations around how can we collectively make greater impact, I do think the impact businesses are more open to that. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: I thought that would be true in some of the research that we’ve done about cultures of social impact businesses. One of the biggest differences between social impact companies and the more traditional companies is their attitude towards externals. People and institutions outside of their own boundaries. The way they collaborate externally is very different and that’s worth pursuing a little bit at some point, I think is to understand that. 

Ann Chambers: I think that’s a really, that would be a great topic for your podcast because I do think that there’s something very important about that. I also think that impact companies, in order to make a greater impact, they have to work with NGOs, they have to work with other organizations. You just can’t, it’s not possible to do it yourself. 

Kathy Miller Perkins: Right, right. And that also promotes innovation, which is another big issue these days. So it kind of all comes together. I think 

Ann Chambers: it does all come together. I mean, even for us with Certifiably, when we talk about every business purchase being tied to one of the United Nations SDGs, it won’t be that the purchase itself, you would have to track it through a non-government organization like you know any one of a million of them, but they’re the ones who are actually doing the work on the ground to make a difference with climate change or anything or any other of the issues, hunger, all of the issues.  Not the actual company, but it’s the choice that the company made to use their money wisely to make that impact.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Yeah. Good point. One of the other people I’ve interviewed for this podcast said, it’s all about how you make your money and how you spend your money. It’s true, isn’t it? I like that way of viewing it, that that was very succinct and tells a story, I think. All right. Well you’ve given some good advice to people who would like to start up a social impact business. Do you have any other words of wisdom before we go? 

Ann Chambers: Well, Kathy, I think, but it should read your book.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Ann Chambers: I think that that would be really important for people. No. I say all the same things that most entrepreneurs would say. Surround yourself with brilliant people because we don’t have all the answers and you can go a lot faster as a team than alone. That’s an old proverb or something. I should probably have that down; to go fast go alone or to go far go as a team. I don’t know.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Oh, I love it. I love it. We’ll attribute that to you.

Ann Chambers: I don’t think I have anything else, but I just love the work you’re doing and it’s so important to get the word out about what impact entrepreneurs are trying to do. So I appreciate what you’re doing, Kathy.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Well, thank you so much for giving us your time today and your advice and, and we’ll get you back to talk about this venture again after your vision evolves more.

Ann Chambers: Awesome. Thank you so much, Kathy.

Kathy Miller Perkins: Bye. 

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