Case Studies

Small & Medium Sized Enterprises – Storytelling – The Tiffinday Business Model

Tiffinday began with an idea, of creating a company that was tri-profitable – with strong economic returns, a commitment to the environment and a social hiring policy for mothers with young children.

Seema Pabari presents the powerful WHY behind her business, but there is much more to her story. The challenge for small business owners is how to effectively tell the story of their enterprise to potential partners, customers, and investors. Each audience needs to know different parts of the enterprise’s business model. Using the Flourishing Business Canvas they were able to develop a complete story of their business, allowing them to weave stories by connecting different sets of sticky notes on the canvas. You can watch a full walk through of their flourishing business model here.

Another challenge for social purpose enterprises is ensuring that while they work towards their social and environmental goals, they also remain financially viable. The Canvas below shows the full business model, with sections in blue highlighting the financial story of the company.

Entrepreneurs – Designing & Evaluating Different Possibilities – Fr8 Living Solutions

Entrepreneurs have begun using the Flourishing Business Canvas as a key tool to rapidly prototype and iterate on their business models. The Canvas allows them to start with their core values, striving to be flourishing entrepreneurs, and then allows them to design and test potential models.

Fr8 Living Solutions, with coaching and support from First Explorer Pillar Non-Profit, used the Flourishing Business Canvas to design and test multiple possible business models for their enterprise. The broad sections on the canvas ( People, Value, Process and Outcomes) and the three perspectives (Environment, Society and Economic) forced them to reflect on all aspects of their business. As they explored and tested, they were able to pivot, updating and changing sections on the canvas to reflect their new understanding.

Small & Medium Sized Enterprises – Designing the Customer Experience – Dear Green Coffee Roasters

First Explorers Simon and Maria Robinson have used the Flourishing Business Canvas to explore a wide range on companies, including the case study below from Dear Green Coffee Roasters in Glasgow Scotland. In Simon’s interview with the founder, Lisa Lawson, they discuss the importance of building strong relationships with suppliers and customers who share the same values, and developing a quality product while giving back to the communities that provide the raw materials.

The challenge is then how do you succinctly capture all of this information about the full value chain that has made Dear Green so successful? And do so in a way that can be useful for the business to study themselves to find ways to improve? Or in a way that allows you to tell powerful stories to potential partners and customers that captures the soul of the enterprise?  Simon and Maria created a version of the Flourishing Business Canvas for the company to help capture their story and display it in a way that could be useful to them, or to a potential customer.