verynice

When you are making a billion dollars a year, it is easy to donate a million to a good cause. When you are a small business, or an independent contractor, likely bringing in a revenue that is barely pushing 6 figures, it is really hard to give back. We’ve seen lots of success from models over the years such as the One Laptop per Child initiative, and the famous One for One model from TOMS that proceeded it, but what about the service business? What model of business can be created to turn philanthropy into an integral and viable component of service-oriented business? We hear about billionaires like Bill Gates giving away half of their net-worth upon death, but is that kind of impact really limited to the mega-rich? What would a very nice business look like? 5 years ago I founded a company called verynice to begin to answer these questions. verynice is a full service design and innovation consultancy that is dedicated to disrupting the way the design industry operates. Over 50% of our efforts are given away for free to non-profit organizations around the world. I chose to settle on the “over 50%” philanthropy model because it is my philosophy that anything you spend less than 50% of your time doing is just an extracurricular activity. To have a true impact, I believe we need to make giving back an integral component (at least 50%) of our daily lives. Over the course of 5 years, we have had the pleasure of donating our services to over 200 non-profit organizations, all adding up to a pro-bono dollar amount of close to $750,000. By the beginning of 2014, if all goes according to plan, we will have hit the million dollar mark in donated services. All of this with a staff of 7 people in our downtown LA office, and over 170 people located around the world. A recent article in Harvard Business Review estimates that the annual marketing and design expenditure amongst non-profit organizations in the United States alone is a whopping 7.6 Billion dollars. Let’s put that into perspective. $7.6 Billion dollars can but up to 100,000 homes in the United States. $7.6 Billion dollars can provide over 1 Million college educations. For about a dollar a day, World Vision estimates that a child in an impoverished community can be granted access to fresh water, nutritious food, healthcare, and even an education. Imagine, then, what could be accomplished with the spare funding that would result from the eradication of marketing and design expenditures amongst non-profit organizations… So here is the thing. Myself and the people at verynice have been able to donate the equivalent of $750k. That is amazing, and I have seen the impact that saved money has had on these organizations, but at the end of the day, it took us 5 years to accomplish that. Here is the other harsh reality check - $750k is only .01% of the amount of money non-profits are spending each and every year. That is just not enough. We can’t do this alone anymore. If we truly want to create a world in which any and all marketing and design expenditures belonging to non-profit organizations are eliminated, we need to get serious about the replication of our model. My vision for verynice has never been to build a big successful business. Instead, the vision has always been to build a big and successful model that is capable of replicating itself by inspiring others to leverage it as their own. To do this, I am launching a new project, beverynice, which is a platform for inspiring and holding accountable independent contractors and small business owners for their philanthropy by offering resources and tools to make “extreme philanthropy” a viable endeavor in the small business arena. All of that is getting a bit ahead of myself, but to start this long-term journey, I am creating a “beverynice startup-kit” that will completely open-source the verynice business model for other entrepreneurs in service-oriented business at large (consultants, doctors, designers, lawyers, hairstylists, etc.) to leverage. If all goes according to plan, this startup-kit will pave the way for a successful replication of our model. There is no company in the world that comes close to matching our pro-bono ration while still maintaining profitability. I sincerely hope that this project creates more competition for us. To get started, I already have assembled a team of 14 entrepreneurs / beverynice “alpha testers” from around the world that have expressed specific interest in leveraging verynice’s business model in their own companies, and I am mentoring them all free of charge to make that happen. I have a lot of long-term plans for this project, but in the interest of beging specific for this application, the project’s scope will include the completion, production, distribution, and dissemination of my toolkit, to make Los Angeles a leader in small business philanthropy.