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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