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Growing an ESE

Learn more about how to grow your ESE to new and sustainable heights!

Welcome to the pivotal stage of growing your Employment Social Enterprise (ESE), where your vision expands and the possibilities are boundless. This phase involves a strategic process of evaluating feasibility and crafting a comprehensive strategy for pursuing new avenues of expansion, each holding the potential to amplify your social impact.

Growing an ESE isn’t just about scaling up; it’s about making well-informed choices that align with your mission and values. These choices may include exploring new business lines, launching innovative products, diversifying your sales channels, establishing partnerships with government agencies, or expanding your reach into new geographical areas.

A thoughtfully developed growth plan is your compass in this journey. It empowers you to allocate your limited resources optimally, ensuring they are directed toward the most promising initiatives. It also equips you to analyze growth options from various angles, considering social, financial, operational, and organizational aspects. Importantly, it enables you to effectively communicate the rationale behind your growth decisions to key stakeholders, including your dedicated employees, board members, and valued funders.

In this section of our website, our comprehensive resources will equip you with the knowledge and tools to assess the requirements for your growth journey, from personnel and equipment to facilities, all while carefully considering the potential impact on your current operations.We understand that growth can be both exhilarating and challenging, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.

Welcome to the world of expanding possibilities and deepening impact. Your journey to grow your Employment Social Enterprise is not just about doing more; it’s about doing more with purpose. Together, we’ll continue to shape a brighter future for your organization and the communities it serves. Get ready to embark on this exciting adventure of growth and positive change.

Resources For Your Journey

Showing 11 to 20 of 47 posts
7 minutes | Employee Success Program | Grow a Social Enterprise

What does it mean to be “job ready”?

The participant worker’s “job readiness” can be thought of as the combination of three areas for professional and personal development: soft skills, hard skills, and personal readiness.
3 minutes | Employee Success Program | Grow a Social Enterprise

Job Readiness Assessment Tool

The tool establishes a threshold for essential skills and personal readiness for social enterprise employees ready to move into competitive employment. The standards are compelling because they are designed to measure workers’ on-the-job performance, rather than a measurement of inputs or test-based performance.
4 minutes | Employee Success Program | Grow a Social Enterprise

Retention Bonuses and Earnings Supplements

Retention bonuses and earnings supplements support the employee supports strategy of incentivizing success by rewarding employees for the long term retention of employment outside of the social enterprise.
3 minutes | Employee Success Program | Grow a Social Enterprise

Employee Retention Deep Dive

Service providers and program managers want to see their participants thrive on their employment pathway and record positive impact metrics on the effectiveness of their program. Social Enterprises can approach this phase in two primary ways: tracking and continued services.
10 minutes | Employee Success Program | Grow a Social Enterprise

Effective Employee Retention Strategies

This deep dive summarizes some key research and strategies on employee retention originally shared by Richard Hendra from MDRC.
13 minutes | Growth Planning | Grow a Social Enterprise

Growing a Social Enterprise: The Vision Stage

This resource provides key operational, social, and financial criteria a social enterprise should consider when deciding how to grow. Social enterprise executive teams who are evaluating the potential of a growth strategy should review this resource and develop their own set of venture criteria.
8 minutes | Growth Planning | Grow a Social Enterprise

Core Drivers of Success: Growth Capital

Growth Capital is enterprise-level funding or investment that builds the capacity for business expansion and strategic planning. Growth Capital provides social enterprises with the space for deep reflection before tackling the next step in their plan to scale.