Jose Corona became the CEO of Innercityadvisors (ICA) in Oakland,
CA, a little over ten years ago, and every year he becomes even more passionate
about the mission of his organization. As summarized on their website: “ICA works
tirelessly with entrepreneurs, advisors, employees and sponsors to create a
more equitable and impactful economic ecosystem in the Bay Area. Our unique
approach has developed many amazing companies who have created good jobs for
local residents."
Jose has three of the most critical features of social entrepreneurs: Personal
commitment to a cause, team-building capabilities, and result-orientation.
Personal
commitment to a cause:
Social entrepreneurs see the world around them and
passionately want to transform it. For Jose Corona, social entrepreneurship deeply resonates
with his own upbringing. When I asked him why he is doing what he does, his
first reaction was to speak of his dad, who came from Mexico as
a teenager to be a seasonal worker in Watsonville, CA, then ended up buying a
piece of land there, creating his own strawberry farm and bringing over his
family. "It was truly through his
entrepreneurship spirit and how he tried to live the American dream that I
asked myself how I could support businesses like my dad had. I saw firsthand how he gave
opportunities to others or helped others start their own business, family
members and also some friends of his. Working with companies to create
employment I feel like I am very much in line with these values I learned early
on as a young boy: what people want is opportunities. They do not want handouts."
Jose's cause is to help people get jobs to be part of a community
and strengthen the identity of that community. Dedicated social leaders
understand that it's not because a company is located in an inner city area
that it will automatically help the development of that community. "We actually found the opposite,"
Jose notes. "Most of these companies
were relocating here, whether it was East Oakland or West Oakland because it
was cheaper real estate. It was a business decision for them; it wasn't that
they wanted to support E. or W. Oakland; only 27% of the employees were from
the community. So we made the conscious choice to really work with
entrepreneurs who are committed and have the values of the community. In a five-year period we turned that around to go from
27% to 73%. Our companies hire locally. The majority of the business owners are actually not
from the community but what they are committed to is actually hiring from the
community." How do you manage this? By bringing people together.
Team-building
capabilities
ICA was founded in 1996 by Michael Porter as a project to
revitalize
distressed urban communities. It included Baltimore, Boston, Kansas City,
Milwaukee, and Oakland. The Oakland branch is the only surviving entity, and it
operates in dense communities primarily composed of Hispanics (40%) and
African-Americans (30%) where graduation rates from high school are low and the
poverty rate is about 20% higher than in the surrounding metropolitan area. "We made it work here," Jose says.
Quite humbly, he emphasizes the fact that ICA is blessed with having a great entrepreneurial culture and socially
responsible entrepreneurs in Oakland and in the Bay Area.
The key piece of the model, he underlines, "is that we have advisors, mentors and
volunteers, in other words professionals with experience in growing a business.
How do you bring the right tools and people to accelerate that path to growth?"
That's obviously the hard part... because ultimately, and despite the gigantic
resources of the Silicon Valley, there are actually very few initiatives comparable
to ICA. This is where the
exceptional wisdom and continuous involvement of a committed leader does make a
difference: "We were able to figure
it out. We were able to figure out how to match the right entrepreneurs with
the right advisors the right touch, the right expertise, the right experience
to have the right impact and help the entrepreneur grow their business."
Jose
is a born matchmaker, and part of that rare breed of recruiters who are able to
select the perfect role models for new business owners. Talent is the glue of
communities, and the key to success is ICA's talent management
program: "It connects people to jobs and people want to keep engaged.
Companies do not want to exit our portfolio because they see the value."
They feel compelled to give back. "Once
the entrepreneurs start to see the value they realize 'you helped me, I want to
help you too.' You can become a mentor to an
entrepreneur at an ealier stage. Now we have companies like Revolution foods
and Blue Bottle that can give back." Just like leading
social entrepreneurs, Jose
is a "mass recruiter of local changemakers," to use an expression coined
by Ashoka.
Result orientation
Success breeds success. Social responsibility isn’t just the
dream of making a difference, it's the ability to change the world for the
better, one place at a time through focus and attention to results.
ICA is selective in the
companies they support: "We take a lot of time in our due diligence process
and are very careful in picking the right characters beyond looking at
financial viability; we spend a lot of time trying to understand the
entrepreneur. Do you want our services just because they are free or do you
want them because you see the real value and will contribute to our mission?
" As a result, some segments are more relevant than others. "We started to focus on particular industries such as
consumer products, manufacturing, transportation, solar installations because
the people running these businesses really value the community where they
operate. Also, in these industries, people get opportunities in entry level
positions and then advance their career within that company. We have many
stories where someone started with working on the floor and five years later, became
an operation manager. Giving a job is not enough, career path opportunities is
paramount.”
Social
entrepreneurs are all about the practical implementation of their vision. The ICA's accomplishments are nothing short of being stunning. "Over
my 10 years we have seen around 2,000 companies and we have only taken
45." How many of those have failed? Jose
paused. "I can count two," he said. "One of them actually didn't fail but got acquired and moved to
Redwood City. They took the talent with them. It was a success financially, but
the jobs were lost here. The second one was a real failure.”
The size of these companies varies;
exponential growth is not necessarily the goal. “Revolution Foods is an exception – and grew from two people to 1,300
and from zero to 100M in revenue. The rest of our companies are companies that
are sustainable and have anywhere between five to 50 or 100 employees. They
are the typical SMBs that constitute the actual texture of our economy. ICA created 6,500 jobs over 10 years and 2700 in 2,013 alone.
What's next for Jose? Maybe the same work on a larger scale, without,
however, diluting the vision and the mission: "Where we are now and how we sustain this movement is something
that we are thinking about. How do we make a larger impact?” No doubt we’ll
hear more about Jose Corona's pragmatic idealism and persistent ambition to positively
impact the lives of people!
