Stewart Satter, MBA '82

Profiled in the December 7, 2010 issue of the NYU Stern Opportunity.

Stewart Satter (MBA '82) always had an entrepreneurial spirit. In high school, Satter founded a car detailing business that became so profitable that he kept it up through college. "You have to invest a lot of time and energy into a business," Satter says. "I got up very early on Saturday mornings, distributing brochures in my hometown that I'd made myself. Some people responded, became customers and were so impressed with my work that they referred me. Then during college, I'd drive home every weekend to run my business and eventually had a couple of people working for me. Many think it's easy to operate a business, but it isn't. You have to give up a lot of other things in life and so, you better love what you're doing."

After graduating from Stern, Satter moved to Hong Kong to set up and run a laboratory for his U.S. based family business, Consumer Testing Laboratories. After four years abroad, he returned, bought out the other company stakeholders and as CEO, grew the firm from 30 to the 1000 employees that it has today. The key to his success? "I looked at the business differently than my family and other people. Entrepreneurs require a lot of different skills, but thinking independently is definitely one of the most important. You can't just follow conventional wisdoms and you must have the conviction to follow through. An opportunity presented itself; I seized it and, thankfully, was able to execute well to build a much larger firm."

Several years ago a different kind of opportunity presented itself to this for-profit entrepreneur. "I always found it interesting that the lines between social and for-profit firms can get muted. For example, CTL is certainly a for-profit business, but there is some public good to what we do – testing products for safety. That maybe created some of my interest in social enterprise. However, my real motivation was to give something back to Stern by helping aspiring entrepreneurs achieve their goals."

Since the birth of the Stewart Satter Program in Social Entrepreneurship in 2004, Satter has reviewed many student business plans for the annual competition. "A weakness we see is that, in terms of evaluating revenue potential, they're not self-critical and introspective enough. Everyone has ideas, but when you sit down to actualize them, you find that implementation is the hard part." Satter goes on to highlight two common hurdles that social ventures face once they're actually operational.

First, fundraising often consumes the majority of the social entrepreneur's time, detracting from the social mission. More importantly perhaps, both non-profit and for-profit social ventures frequently fail to come up with a long-term sustainability strategy. "The social entrepreneur cares more about the mission than the money. However, social ventures aren't tremendously dissimilar from for-profit firms, in that they too need to sustain themselves. I've met many social entrepreneurs who are really focused on the mission and I think that's great, but ultimately, they need to sustain the organization in order to be successful."

Professor Jill Kickul PhD, director of the Satter Program elaborates on this blended value approach. "The hybrid venture combines innovative problem-solving with growing and scaling the enterprise. That's what we're thinking about at Stern: how to build a sound business model that can sustain a well-functioning, efficient, even profit-oriented social enterprise, while still having a social mission as its foundation. How is the innovation that the entrepreneur is doing in the field going to generate its own revenue base? What are the revenue and cost drivers? How can the social entrepreneur stay true to the mission while still using business acumen to execute it?"

Sustaining social ventures is closely linked to measuring their impact. "There are many different ways out there of measuring what a successful social enterprise is," Satter says. "Various organizations try to measure it and I've worked with Stern in the past to create an impact index. It can certainly seem subjective and difficult to get your head around." Measuring impact was also the focus at this year's Seventh Annual NYU Stern Satter Conference of Social Entrepreneurs, organized by Professor Kickul and considered the "world's preeminent social enterprise conference," according to Professor Alex Nicholls (Oxford University).

One hot topic discussed at the conference, which was attended by over 60 Stern students, was TRASI (Tools and Resources for Assessing Social Impact), a McKinsey project that outlines 150 different approaches of measuring impact. Kickul and 20 of her colleagues have assessed the feasibility and credibility of each approach in the field. "TRASI is compelling because it reaches across sectors and is based on outcomes," Kickul explains. "In social entrepreneurship, we talk about the theory of change. Specifically, what outcomes are generated by the resources that you put into your social venture? How many people were employed as a result of your effort? How much revenue was created for the community? Ultimately, we need to be able to measure impact. But before impact, which is seven to ten years down the road, we can measure outcomes. That is where the field is moving: focusing on the immediate outcomes, the immediate wins."

Satter has met many Stern MBAs who specialize in Entrepreneurship and he is excited about their passion and success in the field. But he also points to a strong entrepreneurial streak in the Stern student body more generally. "Stern is educating the entrepreneurs of the future," Satter says, "whether social or for-profit. The school has had an impact and continues to evolve. It generates cutting edge ideas and its students are entrepreneurial in so many different sectors."

So come graduation, even if you don't immediately start your own venture, even if life lands you in an investment banking cubicle or in a plane on a consulting mission, remember that we're all entrepreneurs in our own way, otherwise we wouldn't be here. Your job description doesn't define you, but rather you can define it. So, undertake risks and look at your business differently than others might. Put simply, think forward. And finally, if your passion is indeed a social mission, then keep Satter's words fresh in your mind as you craft the wings for your venture: "A lot of Stern students want to change the world and that is wonderful and I'm certain that they will. But to change the world in even a small way, you have to be able to sustain yourself."