Where’s the (Local) Beef?

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I just wrote about Business Accelerator for Sustainable Entrepreneurship (BASE), a business incubator for triple-bottom-line startups. While looking into the program, I was introduced to Jen Curtis, one of 21 North Carolina entrepreneurs in the program and the founder of NC Choices. Her experience is a great illustration of the complexities mission-focused entrepreneurs face when forging their business plans.

Curtis signed on with BASE last summer during a three-month-pilot. At that point, she was a nonprofit with funding from the Kellogg Foundation, charged with finding a business solution to a particular problem–building a supply chain that provides local cattle farmers with a way to process and distribute their product locally. While the movement to grow and sell local fruits and vegetables has taken off around the country, beef is another matter. It’s a much-more complicated, highly regulated, multi-step process.

Thanks to all those parts, creating a viable business has proved to be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Her original idea was to start a company that would act as a broker, negotiating on behalf of farmers. But some researchers at the Center for Sustainable Enterprise, which is connected to BASE, determined that the plan would mean higher prices for consumers or lower payments to farmers. So, she scrapped that strategy. This semester, as part of BASE, she enrolled in a class at the university about startups and she’s now thinking about a different business model, which would focus on other roles in the supply chain, including processing, marketing, and distribution.

It’s all still a work in progress. But Curtis, who has 20 years experience focusing on sustainable agriculture issues, is determined to launch this as a for-profit venture, not a nonprofit. “We don’t want to live on grants forever,” is what she said. “If we can’t make this sustainable as an enterprise in the world of commerce, then we shouldn’t do it.”

Her experience shows, however, that finding a business model to fit some missions simply is a lot harder than for others.