What are boards, investors and management teams to do when there is tension between the financial and social bottom lines of social enterprises? Social Capital Partners shares learnings gleaned from seven years of investing in employment-based social enterprises. We identify the five most important factors that determine whether a social enterprise will be profitable or require some form of subsidy.
Simply put, our advice is to do everything possible to choose businesses that are not overly complex to operate and to build management teams that have the inherent business capacity to operate them effectively.
Share with a friend
Related reading
BANC committee submission on SME financing
Canada can continue treating its financing monoculture as inevitable, or it can follow the lead of peer jurisdictions and intentionally build the institutional diversity required for a different outcome. The status quo produces predictable, cumulative exclusions that compound over time into lower productivity, narrower entrepreneurship, weaker community resilience and entrenched inequity.
Social Capital Partners’ 2026 Federal Pre-Budget Submission
Budget 2026 should double down on the ownership agenda.
🏦 The banks can’t do everything
A new report by SCP Policy Manager Michelle Arnold, Built to Exclude: Why Canada's enterprises need a different kind of financing.