Social Entrepreneurs, Step Out of the Way...

A thought about social entrepreneurs and those who develop growing social ventures.  

I don't have hard stats so I'm basing this on experience, observation and instinct...individuals who start social ventures often lack the necessary skills to implement robust structures, systems and strategy to grow their businesses into financially and socially sustainable enterprises.  Is this a generalization?  Yes.  Does this make social entrepreneurs bad or wrong in some way?  No.  

In the dot com days, entrepreneurs would often start up businesses, grow them to a certain size and then recruit someone else, often an MBA type, to run the day-to-day operations while they either worked in a division that suited their strengths or went out and started something new.  (Note: I acknowledge that there's a financial incentive here too).  

In the social economy, social entrepreneurs usually stay at the top for too long to the potential detriment of what they try to achieve.  Managing a board, staff, volunteers, partners, finances, operations, sales and marketing all start to get in the way of the original vision.  Do social entrepreneurs need to be experts at all areas of a business?  No, but they should know their limits and hand over the reigns when appropriate.  "Just getting by" and "making it up" work well as a start-up concepts but do not help when sales significantly increase and quality of service matters.  

So what do I suggest?  Either get skilled up or recruit someone with the know how and the values to take the social enterprise to the next level.