Thursday, July 30, 2015

„If no one is laughing at your idea – you are not thinking big enough!“

 Be(e) love – how Sweet Beginnings and Brenda Palms Barber change lives and what other businesses can learn from it.


By Konstantin Keller

It is a good thing to have an idea for a business. It is even better if that idea helps a lot of people and provides a well-deserved second chance for them that others are not willing to give them. And if you are actually able to make profit with it, it is actually a quite amazing business and a wonderful story.

All of those aspects come together at Sweet Beginnings – a Chicagoan company that I visited with my fellow students in the framework of our entrepreneur program. Brenda Palms Barber, CEO of the company, took the time to introduce the business and it's philosophy and culture to us. She made it her task to provide jobs in difficult neighborhoods and to people who did their time in prison and want a chance to complete their own personal “U-Turn” - a second chance to improve their own lives that they are way too often denied. At Sweet Beginnings, the employees are being introduced and included into the honey business – in this multisided work environment, they learn aspects of bee-keeping, science, education, inventory, accounting and many more. In this way, the company gives it's employees the tools to build their own future and leave their past behind them: Less than 10% of the people who worked with Sweet Beginnings return to prison. Some of them actually used their new knowledge to open up small own businesses in the bee-keeping sector and become entrepreneurs themselves – another proof that Sweet Beginnings is all about encouraging people to improve their lives on their own!


Brenda had and has a clear vision of what she wants her business to do and what kind of culture she wants in it: “If nobody else is going to provide jobs and hire – we will!” She told us that many people did not believe that a business idea like this could survive or actually make a profit – and how she and all the other people in Sweet Beginnings proved them all wrong: “You need to think creatively, put some trust into people and them into the right positions and above all – you need to do your business with passion!”

Her passion for her idea was definitely tangible in the whole room during her whole presentation and was followed by the sentence that stayed in my head for the rest of the day: “If you have an idea for a business and no one's laughing at it – you're not thinking big enough!”

Creativity and new business ideas, trust in yourself and others and passion indeed made the organization a company with over 400 employees and – probably even more important – a company that actually makes a profit. When the pure tablehoney business was not profitable enough, Sweet Beginnings found other ways and business fields to make money with it, e.g. with skincare products on a honey base.


Since our own project “säft.” is a creative new business idea that has suffered some backlashs, I could identify myself a lot with Brenda's words and advices. Even though unfortunately we are not able to do so much for the community, I personally took a lot of ideas for organizational culture away today. The most important ones:

1: Believe in yourself and your colleagues – if you do not believe in your idea, nobody else will!
2: Always be open to new business ideas and keep developing existing products – their might be new markets and opportunities that you probably did not even think about yet!

And the most important one for me as CEO of our company as well as in any future professional career:

3: Real leadership means getting into something you care about and be a game changer – make a difference!


I will definitely make sure to keep that in mind – thanks Brenda and thanks Sweet Beginnings!

For those of you who want to read more about being a “game changer” and making a difference, I stumbled across this interesting article that I can recommend: http://onforb.es/1HozzJW

And if you want to keep updated about säft. - follow us on Facebook (http://on.fb.me/1LQZOLz) and Instagram (http://bit.ly/1U5A7di)!

Thanks for reading!
Konstantin (@Konstanberlin)

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