Bal Dhital On Converting Social Enterprise Failures Into Learning Opportunities

Bal Dhital is one of the co-founders of Borne Clothing, a social enterprise and fashion label that creates mosquito-repellent clothing and donates half of their profits to funding the fight against mosquito-borne diseases.

When he’s not packing shirts or trying to find the car keys he always seems to lose, he works as a junior doctor in Newcastle, pursuing a career that mixes clinical medicine and public health. His most recent achievement is standing up for 7 seconds on the surfboard he has been learning on – though he does admits to that being seven attempts lasting 1-second rather than one attempt lasting seven.

Bal discusses the role of enterprise competitions in crafting your narrative and how it is better to 'fail forwards' than endlessly seek perfection.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Bal, I'd love to learn a little bit about your background and what led to your interest in social enterprise?

[Bal Dhital] - My way to social enterprise and really the way for the rest of the team also wasn't a clear-cut path. We were finishing up the last few years of our degrees at the University of Newcastle in 2019, and that's when our university decided to start a series of competitions called The Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge effectively had two fundamental questions revolving around mosquitoes. The first question was, "how do you tackle the problem of mosquitoes on the campus?" This was because, as anyone who is listening who has also been to the University of Newcastle campus knows, it's pretty much impossible to get from one side of the campus to the other without being bitten by a mosquito. The second part of that question was, “how do you tackle the problem that mosquitoes pose around the world?” Mosquitoes continue to be one of the biggest killers of humanity, but also contribute a significant burden of disease.

700 million people every year will capture mosquito-borne disease, and of those malaria alone will kill 400,000 people. The horrifying part about that number is that more than half of those fatalities are children.

Many of those children are under the age of five, which means malaria effectively takes the life of one child every two minutes. The problem initially became that none of us had any experience with social enterprise, but we really liked the idea of having a question, a problem and then just having a crack at solving it. We created a team that ended up having a bit of variation, and we actually found each other by trawling through our Facebook friends list to find the people that we wanted to include in a multidisciplinary team.

The real benefit of having such a varied team is that we've approached this problem from a few different perspectives.

Just to give a quick introduction to the people on the team, Dan is the king of design and marketing. Dan has got a technical background in graphic design and a track record of working with not-for-profits and social enterprises, and he shaped our branding from day one. Pat is the guy with the numbers, he's a mechatronic engineer by day and he moonlights as the guy who is getting increasingly sick of us asking him to write a little bit of code to do different things! He has taken on the role of optimising everything that we do with Borne, whether that's allocating our advertising budget or forecasting how we might sell stock in the future so that we can optimise what we're ordering to attain more capital. Tim is the guy who cemented the idea of running Borne as a social enterprise. He's passionate about the intersection of health with business and how we can leverage common interests to achieve some real change. Tim like myself is a Junior Doctor, and so I've approached Borne from a similar angle to Tim.

I'm a bit more interested in health inequities and motivated by the idea that a social enterprise like Borne can give power to people to make a real difference in global health problems.

I go through people's backgrounds because I think that for us it hasn’t been a common entry point into business, but I think we've really got some benefit from having different disciplines.

I'm curious to learn a little bit more about Borne Clothing. You're a social enterprise and you create clothing to tackle mosquito-borne diseases. Tell us a little bit more about this brand and the key challenges that you face in getting it off the ground?

To elaborate a bit further on that introductory sentence, we make mosquito free T-shirts, and we like to call them 'Mozzie Free T's'. It's clothing that protects you from mosquitoes through being mosquito repellent, but also, they protect other people by helping to fund global health interventions across the world. In keeping with this idea of trying to create some social good, we've set ourselves up as a social enterprise. That really is fundamentally to achieve two goals that we've had from the beginning. The first goal is to solidify our commitment to donating profit that we generate.

We donate 50% of our profit to funding these health interventions, and that's a key part of our business model. The way that that's been taking shape so far is with a partnership with Nothing But Nets.

Nothing But Nets are a UN foundation and grassroots campaign on a mission to end malaria. They work across the world with partners on the ground to distribute much needed interventions like mosquito repellent bed nets, indoor residual spraying, malaria testing kits, preventive medications for pregnant women and children, as well as providing education to local healthcare providers about how to best manage malaria. That's been a really fulfilling relationship we've decided to develop with them, and in fact we've actually just made our first donation of $2,000 this year. Now that I think about it, we actually haven't told anyone else about that yet, so really your audience is the first group to know!

The second social enterprise goal we've had is to make sure that this focus on creating social good doesn't come at a cost to the people and the places that are involved in achieving our goal. [By this we mean] the people and places involved in our supply chain, and that's been a bit more of a laborious task. Although, it has also been very fulfilling because we've been able to get into the nitty-gritty of what we're doing by using the B-Corp Assessment Tool as a scaffold for how we go about making business decisions. We've also partnered up with SD Strategies, who are a local consulting firm in Newcastle who do really fantastic work in helping people mitigate human rights risks in supply chains.

We've really made a commitment to developing this from the ground up as a sustainable and positive social impact-oriented project.

What this looks like on a day-to-day basis is we've got a few ideals that we work towards socially, environmentally and economically. Our clothing for example is made from 100% organic cotton, and we work with manufacturers approved by the Fair Wear Foundation, which means that their workers are employed and live up to certain ethical standards of employment. We also carbon offset the journey of each shirt from the factory floor to the customer's front door. Now, of course, that's all pretty easy to say and there's a lot of green washing that goes on definitely in the fashion industry and also more broadly with a lot of companies. The big challenge for us has actually been making that a part of something we do.

Creating a supply chain was definitely easier when we didn't have to do it. We really didn't realise the size of the task in front of us and especially building an international supply chain in the middle of a once in a lifetime pandemic has been a bit of a struggle.

I'd say that coming back to your question about where the challenges have been, developing something sustainable in such a tough time has really been the major source of our problems. But we've learned to fail forwards and really make the most of our mistakes.

I'm sure it's taken a lot of grit, persistence and passion Bal. You are entering your second year of business with Borne Clothing, so what do you see as some of the most important traits of a social entrepreneur and where can support be found as well? When we look at those other aspiring change makers out there who are keen to start something themselves, where can they find support?

That's a really good question, and that's the question that we're always probing to find the answer to. When you're trying to break that down, the question becomes, "what support are you looking for?" I think for us that's definitely varied from stage to stage. We were really lucky to kick off by winning that Grand Challenge that I mentioned earlier. We got a bit of grant funding to go ahead, and since then, we've made a point of regularly checking in to see what programs are available. It is really encouraging just how many there are even in Australia alone that are putting a bit of money out there for social entrepreneurs to have a go at building something meaningful. But in terms of financial support, which ultimately can dictate how much capital you have, how much money you have and how much you can do with it is, we've made a point of looking for hackathons and grant pitching competitions to enter.

The main benefit of those events is the financial support you may receive obviously, but the secondary benefit is that you really start to develop your narrative and the words that you use around your branding, company and mission.

They become very valuable, and I think that in and of itself is actually a fantastic support and a really valuable resource to find. What that probably comes down to in terms of applying for grants and competitions is having a crack at doing something and putting yourself out there.

I think that having a go at anything, to answer the first part of your question is one of the most important traits of an entrepreneur.

I'm only a budding social entrepreneur myself, and I'd really love to have a fantastically clear answer and for someone else to be able to tell me exactly what we need to be doing! But truthfully looking at myself and the rest of the team, I don't think it's anything special within each and every one of us. We didn't have anything clearly going for us from a business point of view in terms of not having any experience, but we saw a problem and we just decided we'd love to have a crack at solving it. I guess most importantly, we were happy for that attempt to maybe not work out.

It's important to be passionate about what you're doing, but I think perhaps what's even more important is realising that it's inevitable you're going to make mistakes and you're going to fail at some things. You just have to make a point of trying to fail forwards.

It has definitely been the easiest way to grow, and I think really adopting that mentality has probably been our most important trait. It has definitely been what we talk about at a lot of meetings.

One of the things we often say is that perfect is the enemy of good, and that's not a quote that we have made up. But it's something we really try and remind ourselves of, because we stalled a lot of stuff that we had been doing in the pursuit of perfection.

Once we actually finally got the ball rolling and started getting some sales was when we thought, "this isn't exactly how we want Borne to be, but it's in line with our ideals and it's achieving our mission."

It's a hugely valuable lesson. What advice then would you be giving to a social entrepreneur who is also working to validate their business model? What lessons can you share?

I don't want to labour the point, but I would like to really emphasise that point about perfection being the enemy of good and just having a crack at something. To take a quick sidestep from that though, I think finding a group of people with different skills and interests as we mentioned before is very valuable also.

You don't only learn from the other people in your team, but you learn the things that you didn't know that you didn't know.

You really realise what your blind spots are, and you realise that it's because you're all carrying different parts of a shared weight that you're actually able to pick it up. One thing that Tim and I learned a lot about during medical school was the Swiss Cheese Model, which is the idea that if you get a block of Swiss cheese and you cut it into slices and you for example try to run water from the top to the bottom, even if it goes through a hole on one of the slices of the cheese, it won't go the whole way through. The idea is that every different person is a different slice of this Swiss cheese, and your holes are in different areas. By working together, you can make sure you create a block that things do not pass through super easily, and that's been the way that we've approached decision making as a business, especially because we don't as a team have much experience.

It's been really valuable to see how people approach it from different angles. The other advice I'd give is invest emotionally in what you're doing and make a point of doing the small silly things like writing out an elevator pitch and practicing in the mirror. The small things build up, and just being able to talk through your mission when you're going to hackathons and grant competitions is invaluable.

You learn this by just practicing very basic things and the way that you tell the story of your enterprise, because you're the person who's going to sell it best.

You're the person who fundamentally understands what you're trying to achieve, and by practicing it out and looking silly in front of the mirror for a bit, that's how you begin to convince yourself of the mission, and it's how you allow yourself to convince others of the mission as well. I think that that's very important, because obviously you're trying to get people on board with what you're doing. Also, find things like a hackathon or a grant competition and test out your hypothesis. These are very risk-free environments. It doesn't matter if you fail, and if you don't win you come away with no money, but if you win you come away with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to create something. I think it really comes down to just giving things a go and backing yourself to fail and to learn from that failure.

That's great advice there. You've participated in a number of these hackathons along the way, so I'm sure you've come across some other really interesting people, projects or initiatives. Who else is doing some great work Bal?

One thing that we've really been blown away by is not just the support we've had for starting a social enterprise, but the support we've had from other people who are in the process of building their own. Generally, just the environment that seems to be brewing in Australia for social enterprise is amazing. There are really a lot of people out there doing some fantastic things, and obviously I can't go through a massive list of people, but there are a few people and projects that have stuck out to us and there are a few that we've looked towards when we were building Borne. There's obviously the big social enterprises that I'm not suddenly name dropping because they're already massive companies, social enterprises like Thank You and Who Gives A Crap?

They've really been the models that we've worked towards building, but there are other projects that we've seen start to develop, who have been a few paces ahead and have given us some of their wisdom as well.

We came across these initiatives actually during the SEFA [Social Enterprise Funding Australia] Kickstarter program, which was run with the Macquarie Group. We actually had the opportunity to learn alongside them as well and one of them was called A/C Official, and they're in a similar space to us. They make handbags, but they're made out of vegan leather and cactus leather which are a very uncommonly used fabrics for making fashion products. The founder, Tessa Carroll has extensive experience working with the fashion industry, and what was really inspiring about her story was that she noticed the consumption, overproduction and waste that was going on with most fashion brands and really struck out on our own to make a product that demonstrated to people that you can buy ethical products that have very little environmental impact.

Another project in a similar space which is a pretty big social enterprise now is HoMie, and they actually work as a not-for-profit organisation. They're a clothing company that facilitate a lot of leadership building programs and empowerment programs for homeless people. I think they're based out of Melbourne. The other initiative that we came across during that the SEFA Kickstarter program was a social enterprise called Play For All, and Play For All work with local councils throughout Australia to provide access to children with disabilities to normal playgrounds that are in their suburbs.

The standard swing set for example does not necessarily cater towards children of different abilities. So, Play For All go around and source funding for swings that are suitable for all and allow everyone to play.

Caroline Ghatt is one of the co-founders and we worked with her during the Kickstarter program. Her mission was really inspiring to us and that's actually an area that Tim is quite passionate about. We've really been pushed on and encouraged by the missions that other people have had, and it's definitely a fantastic environment to start growing something yourself.

Bal, to finish off, what books would you recommend to our listeners?

I think from a social enterprise point of view and in terms of the books that we've used on our way to building Borne, the first one that Tim and I actually read was The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. I don't know if it's a useful book to learn the practical day-to-day running of a business, but I think what it really reinforced to us is the importance of having overarching ideals and doing what you're doing.

It's definitely in some cases influenced us to make decisions that prioritise our ethics, values and long-term success over short-term gain, so I really recommend that book.

Outliers I'm sure is a book that many people listening will have read, and that's by Malcolm Gladwell. I think the reason that I recommend that book is because it really gives you the impression that the time you're living in and the place you're living in is very important to what you can achieve. As I mentioned before, social enterprise is really a burgeoning industry in Australia. I think it's a really fantastic time to get involved with it and I think that that's the lesson to draw from that book. We've also started using a book written by some old consultants at McKinsey which is called Bulletproof Problem Solving. That's been giving us a really fantastic scaffold to approaching some of the problems we've been encountering as a growing enterprise.