Social Folks | Social Focus Consulting: 2016

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

The Making of SFC's Birthday Logos

SFC's first four birthday logos

In 2012, Social Focus Consulting celebrated its first birthday with a professionally-made delicious cake with our logo on top. When the same time came around the following year, I thought about getting two cakes to celebrate two years (and three cakes the following year and so on), but thought about doing something much more fun. I'd think of another dessert to re-create the SFC logo - in 2013, it was an ice cream sundae with three scoops of Breyers vanilla ice cream to represent the three circles and a cherry on top to represent the red middle from the logo. In retrospect, it would have been more complete to add three circles of fudge to outline the ice cream.

In 2014, the logo was re-created using three Tim Hortons chocolate-glazed donuts with a Timbit in the middle. Since Timmy's didn't have any red Timbits, I had to coat a plain one with vanilla frosting, tinged red with food coloring. For the 2015 re-creation, I took over 100 coconut, cherry, and blueberry (for the black - could have got licorice, but blech) Jelly Belly jelly beans and placed them over a print-out of the logo.

SFC's 2016 birthday logo (steps in the making of)

The 2016 version was the most technically complicated one to make so far. I decided to make it out of Jell-O but had to make it in stages. First was the white base but since the good people at Jell-O don't make a white colored one, I had to follow an Internet-sourced recipe that had me mix condensed milk with plain gelatin powder. Once the gelatin had set, I used stencil print-outs to help guide me on what needed to be cut out with a paring knife and what needed to be left behind (the pen scribbles on those latter pieces were a great reminder! - see top left of above pic).

The next step was to make black Jell-O which there were many recipes for as this gelatin color is a popular variant during Halloween. Mixing a package of grape flavor with a small amount of orange Jell-O powder doesn't give a completely black color, but it still looked pretty good (see top right of above pic). With some added plain gelatin for stability, the black concoction was more difficult to handle as it dried so fast. The last step was to use the stencil again to make a cutout for the red middle of the logo (see bottom left of above pic). Although this was the smallest component, it was also the easiest as red-colored (in this case, strawberry) gelatin is in ample supply!

As always, I had fun making this year's birthday logo (see bottom right of above pic) and I have already thought of next year's version - any guesses?

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

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."