Rethinking Social Ventures

After spending more then half of the semester in this new world of Social Ventures, it seems that most ventures start with the idea of helping people in some capacity. After the entrepreneur fleshes out how they want to create social impact, they then build a business around it. I wonder if this is the only way to go about creating social ventures. I wonder if you can change the thinking - what if you started with a business concept and found a way to create social impact from the concept? It seems that most ventures fail because they are not financially sustainable. The entrepreneur spends too much time trying to make sure that the venture can create social impact and does not create a financially viable business. As a finance major, creating a financially viable business is my number one thought.

In order to decipher the feasibility of this, I want to start by starting a discussion around my friends new venture - Midnight Madness Distilling LLC. My friend, Anthony Lorubbio is the current CEO of Midnight Madness Distilling. He, along with his two partners are all CMU undergraduate students. Their main product is supposed to be Synth, a product marketed as an absinthe liqueur. However, in order to gain some cash while they flesh out the finer details of Synth, they launched their first product, fortis vida - a craft vodka distilled from 100% organic sugar cane. If you're interested in learning more about their product, feel free to check them out at http://fortisvodka.com. Currently, Midnight Madness Distilling is a for profit business. However, I think that it is possible to turn this into a social venture. As a finance major, the first social problem I see is unemployment. It is a huge problem for the economy when people cannot find work. I think in order to help solve this problem, Midnight Madness Distilling could only hire people to work in the distillery or hire people to join the salesforce who are currently unemployed. This would provide Midnight Madness Distilling with cheap labor, while helping unemployment go down. Another way to turn this for profit business into a social venture could be to allow people to return used bottles back to the store. Depending on whether Midnight Madness Distilling opens their own stores or distributes through retailers, they could offer some sort of incentive for returning the used bottle, such as a couple dollars of their next purchase. Midnight Madness Distilling could then recycle the bottle, which would help reduce waste, since most people do not recycle. Another benefit could be that Midnight Madness Distilling would get money from recycling. They could then use this money to create a charity fund. This fund could go to numerous amount of causes, such as finding a cure for caner or helping children in poverty.

Thinking about this one business and applying this thought process gave me what I believe to be some viable way to turn this for profit business into a social venture. I wonder if more social ventures would have a higher success rate as far as financial feasibility if other start ups employed this thought process.