Happy 5th birthday, Social Focus Consulting!

Social Focus Consulting 5th birthday logo (made with white, black, and strawberry jello)

Hello my chums,

Social Focus Consulting turns a very special five years old today so rather than just re-cap the last 365 days like on previous December 13ths, let's first look at our major milestones and accomplishments from the beginning:

- helped NPOs raise more funds and awareness (e.g. social enterprise raised 400% more revenues)
- achieved an average 91% satisfaction rating from 29 clients on 34 projects
- helped 100+ students/team members from four Ontario Universities gain more professional skills and experience, securing roles at KPMG, Deloitte Canada, A.T. Kearney, and Oliver Wyman
- partnered with Queen's/Smith, Schulich, Rotman/UofT and Ivey programs and clubs on over 25+ events and speaking engagements
- recognized by the Globe & Mail as one of Canada's 10 most remarkable small businesses and featured in several more newspaper, magazine, and TV pieces

Social Focus Consulting 'birthday logos' made with cake (2012), ice cream sundae (2013), donuts (2014), and jelly beans (2015)

Even with all our accomplishments, we're continually implementing initiatives to be more effective and efficient. Here are some of the team member-driven changes to SFC in the last year:

- weekly calls between Project Managers and myself for updates that are more productive and personal than just emails (via Albert Oppenheimer)
- year-end check-ins with each team member to ensure higher engagement and mutual value b/w the student and the company (via Jenny Liu)
- integration of the undergrad and MBA student hiring processes (w/ help from Selina Wang)
- hiring of graduate students outside of the MBA program (namely, Master of International Business), offsetting the mistiming of the MBA program start with our project cycles and giving our team a more global perspective
- new organizational structure to encourage higher performance, engagement, leadership, and innovation

Collectively, these changes have made us a better company, but as we look toward 2017 and beyond, we have a smoldering desire for more growth and impact. One initiative is to co-create a new mission and set of values. This is important because if we continue with a student-driven organizational model, we need them to have ownership of higher level strategic decisions too. We'll also explore new business models that keep social impact at the core of our mission while finding new and exciting ways to drive revenues that are not just from NPOs.

So much appreciation and gratitude to everyone for your support of Social Focus over the last five years. You are living proof that the world will be better tomorrow than it was yesterday.

#SFC5

"Welcome to (social) turf, harder than immigrants work. (SFC) is stitched into my shirt. Get up off the pavement, brush the dirt up off my psyche."

John Paul de Silva, MBA

Founder and Managing Director

Social Focus Consulting

when it comes to your cause, we mean business
JohnPaul@SocialFocusConsulting.ca
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416.830.2507