The Road Travelled Bumpily

"Shitty first drafts," the writer Ann Lamont calls them. Nor are the second or even third drafts necessarily perfect. Few authors, including the greatest, avoid them. Even Tolstoy slaved over countless drafts of Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

Few entrepreneurs, especially the greatest, escape them either, as Peter Sims notes in his excellent book Little Bets. Failures and misguided attempts are a rite of passage. Just as buried in an early page is a single fabulous sentence that lives on, so somewhere deep within the first (unsuccessful) business is the gem of a market or product insight.

When lauded for producing, as if overnight, the prize-winning book or high-growth startup, authors and entrepreneurs respond with exactly the same astonishment and protestation.

But it's not just the journey: the likeness plays out with strange fidelity in structure too.

Architecture of the Bestseller(ing)

Great books, I think, have three pillars: interesting characters, a compelling plot and an engaging voice. Most bad books are insubstantial on all three counts.

A boring business, selling boring copycat widgets is the equivalent of a cheap airport thriller:

1. The (characterless) characters are the customers who face a simple problem: wanting cheaper or better widgets.
2. The (predictable) plot involves leveraging capital and other resources in order to produce slightly cheaper or slightly better widgets, and selling them for a profit.
3. The (dull) voice is the marketing messages which advise the (characterless) characters they can make their life marginally better by buying the cheaper or better widgets.

At the other extreme, a clever flourishing social enterprise is a veritable top notch literary novel.

Characters that get under your skin

No longer are characters one dimensional props on which to hang a breathless plot. Central, and fascinating, they instead face a situation that is intricate, important and far-reaching.

Just as Anna and Vronsky's tortured affair reverberated in all directions and frequencies across Russian high society, so the problems that many social enterprises tackle lie within a web of other problems. Solutions can likewise have multiple impacts and bring unintended benefits for minor characters.

Taddy Blecher, an award-winning social entrepreneur, set out to provide tertiary business education to poor South Africans. The young men and women he wanted to help came from deeply impoverished and often violent homes. Most hardly had a secondary education. On their side, they had only enthusiasm. Uneducated, they would become a drain on their family, offer little to younger people in the community and in many cases probably turn to crime. Educated, they'd bring money into households, skills into communities and ultimately jobs to the economy.

Many plots lead to great novels

When an organisation can change people's lives, how you get there becomes less important. So in a great novel: had Anna Karenina, with its rich diversity of subplots, been resolved as something other than a tragedy, the book, still, would be beloved. Innovative organisations – social and otherwise – likewise succeed with multifarious business models.

But social enterprises, with profit no longer imperative, have even more choice to be boldly inventive.

To give his eager students a free tertiary education, Taddy Blecher had first to provide fast-track secondary education. For this to have maximum impact at high velocity, given the often traumatic backgrounds, he introduced meditation as well. To scale the model, he needed to enable students to help pay their own way, without compromising their studies. So he created Invincible Outsourcing, in which students work, and through which they not only earn an income but learn valuable business skills to complement their studies.

The power of the compelling voice

With such bold ideas, the voice – articulating the ambitious (perhaps crazy) vision – becomes a critical tool for social enterprises. It also becomes more urgent. Unlike a conventional business, when you do your messaging post product, with social enterprises, to get people to buy into your idea, you need to do it early. In the first page of your shitty first draft, you need that one killer sentence. Every great social entrepreneur has their seductive equivalent of

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Get this right and the world will help you. Nigel Kershaw is CEO of the Big Issue Invest, which now invests in social enterprises – some of which support the homeless people the Big Issue magazine was originally created to help, and which became one of the world's most successful social enterprises on the simple elegant premise of "a hand up, not a hand out". For Leila Janah, founder of Samasource, which outsources microwork to impoverished women, youth and refugees in the developing world, it was "Give Work" which the organisation trademarked. John Elkington coined a phrase that gave a voice to a whole movement, enterprises big and small, with his "triple bottom line".

You can also go a long way on a little. David Godwin, my literary agent, famously booked a flight to India to meet Arundhati Roy having read only a few chapters of God of Small Things. "I didn't need more," he explained. Matthew Bishop talks about the power of the compelling anecdote for social entrepreneurs. They may be helping just a handful of people affected by a problem that affects millions, but because of the sheer fresh style with which they are tackling it, they can attract disproportionate interest, which in turn powers the organisation – the equivalent of a publishers advance.

From manuscript to shelf: an army of connections

All of this means that as a social entrepreneur starting out you need a vast array of connections – from the beginning of your journey, taking you over all the bumps, right to the never-ending end: people to test ideas with, raise money from, engage as mentors, partner with, invite to your board and so on. The writers equivalent of: first long-suffering partner, then sympathetic friend, other writer friends, agents, publishers, editors, journalists and so on.

This is why we're particularly excited to be launching oneleap.to/SocialEntrepreneurs, featuring, among many others, the inspirational innovators mentioned above.

Being able to get in touch with people like this is essential for earlier social entrepreneurs. And similarly these are the kind of people who are constantly looking for new ideas and talent to develop their own organisations further. Ultimately, of course, it's not just about reaching other social entrepreneurs. Infinitely varied problems and plots mean infinitely varied constituencies must also be engaged, from big corporates to investors – to which OneLeap is likewise a path. 

This is a guest post by Robyn Scott, Managing Director & Co-Founder, OneLeap.