YOUR Education

Creating the Next Generation of Social Entrepreneurs

WITH BATTLE GROUND ACADEMY

BY HALLIE HEITER

Social entrepreneurs want to leave the world better than they found it. With business acumen and creativity as their tools, these entrepreneurs take a look at the world’s problems, identify how they can make a positive impact and create a business model to achieve that goal. Whether a nonprofit or a B Corporation (a type of business that balances profit and purpose), these businesses focus on making a difference.

As the Director of Battle Ground Academy’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program, one of my primary goals is to help students understand they can make an impact through entrepreneurship that extends beyond the bottom line. As social entrepreneurs, students have the opportunity to leverage their talent for the betterment of their communities, from local to global.

But what does that process look like? Here are a few tips my students and I have discovered as we’ve progressed through BGA’s entrepreneurship curriculum and our senior capstone course, Applied Models of Economics.

Identify a Problem and Create a Solution If you want to use your business for good— whether a nonprofit or a B Corporation—you have to identify what that good is. In our senior capstone course, BGA students get the chance to work directly with social entrepreneurs who are living what we’ve been studying. For ABLE, one of the Nashville-area businesses our students have worked with, the problem is poverty. ABLE’s solution is employing and empowering women so they can break the cycle of poverty. Women—spanning local to third-world countries-create ABLE’s products, including leather bags, jewelry, clothing, and more. Whatever your focus, as a social entrepreneur, you need to be clear about the problem you’re trying to solve and the solution your business can offer.

Be Creative Innovation and creativity are essential skills for entrepreneurs to hone. Even if the nonprofit is well-established, such as Nashville’s Thistle Farms, leaders have to make a number of entrepreneurial decisions every day. That’s especially true when it comes to adding new products. Thistle Farms’ business model centers on the sale of candles, lotions and more, much of which is made by the women that the organization has been built to serve. So, when the nonprofit partnered with our students as part of BGA’s senior capstone class, Thistle Farms’ team challenged our students to identify a potential product line extension. The winning team of students developed an all-natural baby product and a corresponding product launch. If adopted, the product would represent a new market for Thistle Farms. It takes creativity to launch a new nonprofit, but it also takes vision and ingenuity to help an established business thrive.

Take Advantage of Training A variety of resources are available to local entrepreneurs, from the Nashville Entrepreneur Center and Launch TN to local training opportunities. At BGA, we offer two entrepreneurship symposiums a year, and each one is centered on a different topic or theme. Our next symposium, “The Impact of Big Technology on Nashville’s Startup Ecosystem,” is scheduled for Oct. 20 in The Sondra Morris and Robert N. Moore Jr. ‘52 Center for Arts and Entrepreneurship. It will be moderated by Brian Moyer, the President and CEO of the Greater Nashville Technology Council, with panelists: Silas Deane, Founder and CEO of VendEngine; Amanda Lafiti, Co-Founder and CEO of Hafta Have; and Bryan Frist, CEO and Co-Founder of Yoshi. For entrepreneurs, nonprofit and for-profit alike, learning from the experiences, setbacks, and resilience is always a valuable lesson.

Entrepreneurship is vital to creating more industry within Williamson County and across the state—but it can also play an integral role in making our world a better place. Whether that’s being part of a B Corporation or operating within a nonprofit context, entrepreneurs can have an impact well beyond their financial footprint.

“they can make an impact through entrepreneurship that extends beyond the bottom line”

HALLIE HEITER Director of Entrepreneurial Leadership, Battle Ground Academy Hallie Heiter is the Director of the Entrepreneurial Leadership program at Battle Ground Academy in Franklin. She holds an MBA with a concentration in entrepreneurship from The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and an undergraduate degree from Colgate University. Heiter has worked in management positions with Vanguard, The Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard University, and Assurant during her career.