We just raised $40m. What does this mean for us as an impact business?

Last week, Hireup announced that we have raised $40m in capital from SEEK Investments.

There are many reasons why this is significant for both us and the Australian disability sector, but as Director of Impact & Innovation at Hireup, the thing I’ve been reflecting on most this past week is what this tells us about the Australian impact economy.

When Hireup launched in 2015, thanks to the venture philanthropy of The Myer Foundation and what was then known as the NAB Impact Readiness Fund, as well as the support of organisations like Impact Generation Partners and early impact investors the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation and William Buckland Foundation, being an impact business in Australia was still pretty novel. While there were a few notable examples of nationally-scaling purposeful business like Thankyou and Who Gives a Crap, our sector was largely populated by hyper-local social enterprises tackling important issues at the community level.

In late 2015, when we raised $2.5m from a handful of impact investors, it was noted as one of the largest impact investments in an Australian organisation at the time. And it felt that way. Although we knew we needed significant resourcing to build a multi-sided platform, and in hindsight $2.5m was very much just the beginning, it still felt like a big moment and a step change for the Australian impact economy.

In the six years since, I have noticed a significant mainstreaming of these ideas. There is an increasing amount of quantifiable evidence in support of being purpose-led as a business, with notable reports published by the Harvard Business Review, EY Beacon Institute, Deloitte and PwC. There has also been a broadening of the kinds of brands wading into the mix with companies like Airbnb, Goldman Sachs and even PepsiCo touting purpose-led strategies in their core operations.

In Australia, our first Social Impact Taskforce was formed, global impact investment firm LeapFrog Investments, which is based in Sydney, received the largest single commitment to an impact investor ever at US$500m and the mainstream Australian media features stories on impact investment more frequently.

And yet, Probono, Australia’s leading news outlet for the impact economy, reports that there is still work to do for impact businesses to assert themselves in the mainstream context, acknowledging that “social enterprises risk getting left behind if they don’t start thinking bigger.”

As someone who knows what it’s like to be in an impact business that is trying to think bigger, one of the most powerful propellants for us has always been looking at how others have done it. For many years in our Hireup journey, this has been drawing on examples from overseas, mostly in the UK and USA.

But this week I’m proud of Hireup for the example it sets as a homegrown impact business and the signals it might send to other fledgling social businesses here.

So what would I want them to notice in our story?

Your purpose is as important to the growth and commercial success of your business as it is to your social impact. Since day one we have known that improving the quality of life for people with disability is why we exist. However, our success is built on more than just knowing this, it’s built on finding ways to operationalise it.

We have taken care to hire teams that are as passionate about our purpose as we are, to ask our customers what a better life looks like for them, to build strategies that reflect these insights and to always take responsibility for our actions as a business.

These things are hard and time consuming to do as an impact business because you are asking people to do them in order to break down wicked and deeply entrenched issues of social injustice, not just to solve for more simple linear problems like “how do I bank my money”. But our success to date shows that if you do this, you will build a community of highly motivated employees and customers, the ultimate keys to both social and commercial success.

Choosing the right kind of investor is part of your impact strategy, but maybe not always in the ways you think. As any investor is, our impact investors have been critical to our early success because of the tone they set for our culture and ambition from the outset. They have given us the space to work out what it means to generate both social and financial value as a business, ensuring they get the double bottom line returns they’re investing for.

In this new phase of growth for Hireup, partnering with SEEK Investments has been just as strategic. The challenges we face now in growing our impact include making smart investments in our team and technology in order to scale our multi-sided platform. In other words, challenges that are very familiar to SEEK, so by partnering with them we are better equipped to realise the vision for social impact of our early impact investors. This makes the SEEK team an integral part of our impact strategy.

Think beyond what is already known. The Australian impact economy is still very much under development, or at least I hope so. There is so much more to be done to bring business and social impact together. To ensure that tackling social disadvantage is not just the responsibility of the charity sector alone. So if you are an impact business just starting out, remember that your work and choices are shaping our impact economy.

Find new ways and partners to realise your purpose, whether that’s in the resources you use, the people you work with or the strategies you build to get there. Harness the entrepreneurial creativity that gave you the idea for your business in the first place so that your efforts push the boundaries and set a new precedent for the next person who comes along with a great idea for an impact business.

Piece originally published on Harriet's LinkedIn