Mark Horoszowski On Elevating Social Entrepreneurs By Building Partnerships And Market Traction
Mark Horoszowski is the Co-founder & CEO at MovingWorlds, a global capacity building platform.
MovingWorlds’ work focuses on three pillars of capacity building for social enterprises, by educating social entrepreneurs and corporate professionals on how to scale social innovation, connecting professionals to skills-based volunteering projects with social innovators, and integrating social enterprises into corporate supply chains.
MovingWorlds have supported organisations in over 110 countries and have unleashed over $52 Million worth of expertise and resources to social enterprises.
Mark discusses scaling social enterprises through global skills-based volunteering, assisting entrepreneurs with tapping into key customer insights, and facilitating cross-sector collaboration to help impact-led businesses gain market traction.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to the world of social enterprise and building the capacity of organisations to create change?
[Mark Horoszowski] - It was never my plan; I didn’t at any point have some grand plan for starting a start-up let alone a social enterprise. I grew up in America, close to the Seattle area. Both of my parents were immigrant, with my dad coming from communist Poland and my mum coming from what was then Yugoslavia. Contributing to community was something I just grew up with.
I was very engaged as a volunteer, active in my community, and committed to this idea of building a better future, especially coming from parents who had such a rough start to their lives. Through these experiences, I internalised the importance of contributing to the community and seeing what impact you can have.
When I entered the business world, I continued to volunteer with a few different organisations, and I actually attribute my early career successes to volunteering. I had all this extra experience beyond school, which helped me stand out in the job search.
I was lucky when coming out of college to receive multiple job offers; I basically had my choice of where to go. I’d studied accounting, which at the time was a very employable degree, and I ended up at an organisation where I quickly realised that while I was hired because I had this great experience (I could talk to people, manage projects, and deliver on time) once I was inside the corporate machine, none of those skills seemed to matter anymore.
The breaking point for me came when I was asked to speak at a conference as a volunteer one weekend, and my manager said I couldn’t go because it was ‘busy season’. Don’t get me wrong, I understand things can get hard during busy season, but to me, that felt like a broken contract. I was hired by this company which would say, “yes, we care about sustainability and helping our people to find their purpose,” but as soon as that started to impact their bottom line, none of it was supported.
This made me curious. I didn’t want to go into the nonprofit sector because I’d volunteered already closely enough to some and saw the challenges they had. This was around 2007, when Muhammad Yunus had just published his book about the rise of social business.
Acumen was just starting to gain fringe popularity around the idea of impact investing, and so I became curious about social entrepreneurship. As I continued to advance in my career in another corporate environment, I made it through the Great Recession and thought, “Okay, this is the time.” I was lucky enough to remain employed during that period, but I hated seeing what was happening on the other side, things like growing income inequality, worsening environmental degradation, all at the cost of economic growth.
By that point, the concept of social entrepreneurship was so embedded in me I decided to spend a year travelling and volunteering with social enterprises around the world. I treated it like an MBA, not as a start-up research project. I wanted to learn what it would take to grow and scale social enterprises. I was curious about ecosystem building because I wanted everyone to know about this movement.
Along the way, I met a gentleman named Derek Nord, a Dutch guy who was living in Argentina and in the process of moving to Colombia at the time. He came from the world of impact investing. His kind of famous quote, which sparked our research journey, was, “I’m so tired of entrepreneurs asking for money when they just need their accounting systems first. Mark, are there a lot of people like you doing this thing? Are there a lot of professionals contributing their skills to support start-ups and social innovators?”
We set out to find out. What we’ve learned over ten years now is that yes, there are absolutely professionals interested in contributing to social enterprises. While they won’t blow up their careers and take a year off the way I did, they will find ways to stretch themselves and contribute to the greater good in a more sustainable and equitable way.
That’s really the energy we’ve been harnessing at MovingWorlds; we’re finding these incredible experts (many of which who are very senior in their careers), and matching them with social innovators around the world.
Innovators still need accounting systems. They’re expanding into new geographies, need market connections, investors, coaches, and mentors. You would know this having recorded over 500 episodes of this podcast: entrepreneurs need all types of support. We’re always chasing capital to find that support, but in many cases, the capital just isn’t there. When that capital isn’t there, MovingWorlds is, and we’re there to plug in that support gap.
As co-founder and CEO of MovingWorlds, can you share a bit more about the platform and how it’s scaling the social innovation movement through education, connection, and capacity building?
Our platform is designed for social entrepreneurs. We go to them and ask, “What help do you need?” Some social entrepreneurs know exactly what they need. They might say, “I’m looking for this type of buyer at this company, can you help me build connections?” Other entrepreneurs might have much broader needs and say things like, “I’m thinking about expanding into new geographies—maybe the UK, the US, Europe, or APAC. I don’t know yet. Help me figure it out.”
In both of these cases, entrepreneurs enter our platform and can take what we call our Scale-Up Assessment. It’s a tool that helps them think through their biggest growth opportunities. If they already know what they want, they can skip ahead and say, “I need an expert with these skills to help my team do this.” Then we facilitate connections to those experts through what we call ‘experteering’ engagements, essentially professionals volunteering their expertise.
On the other side, we partner with companies like SAP, Microsoft, EY, Reckitt, and others who sponsor their employees to volunteer their skills with these social innovators.
What we emphasise is that yes, it’s great to volunteer your skills, and this is a fantastic platform for that. But, we also ask for one more thing when your project finishes: find a market opportunity for the social entrepreneurs you’ve helped.
We ask, “What can you do when you go back to your day job to introduce them into commercial networks or new market opportunities? What can you change within your company to embed social innovation into your role?” This is so that as you spend money, you’re directing it to social entrepreneurs, not just profit-driven organisations. That’s probably the pillar we’re most well known for.
What we’ve seen over time is that when you have a great network of social entrepreneurs sharing their biggest needs and making progress, they also become great supporters of other entrepreneurs. On our platform, social entrepreneurs can connect with one another when they need peer support. Because of our corporate participants, we also help social entrepreneurs access market connections, introductions into different supply chains, investors, and accelerators.
Something we’ve been experimenting with this year is bringing in well-researched, well-known, award-winning authors to run live workshops with our entrepreneurs. These sessions go beyond lectures; they’re interactive coaching moments for entrepreneurs who need specific support, but which also serve as learning opportunities for everyone.
It’s capacity building, but really it’s capacity building and execution. We don’t just want to give you a lecture on what to do. We want to give you the support to do it, and then connect you to a market, investor, or commercial pathway so you can turn that work into sustainable revenue and keep growing your enterprise.
You’ve worked with and provided wraparound support to social enterprises from over 110 countries. What have been some of your biggest learnings from supporting such a diverse range of social enterprises, and have you integrated any of those insights into the work at MovingWorlds?
We’ve learned a ton, so it was a fun question to reflect on. I’ll summarise it into one central theme, which is that I think that we social entrepreneurs are a little bit crazy. We say, “Hey, we’re going to do something that creates sustainable, long-term good using the power of the market. We’re going to use a business model to drive change, and we’re going to compete in the open market,” especially when it comes to entering corporate supply chains.
If you’re a grower of some agricultural product, you’re already competing against other growers. But as a social entrepreneur, you’re saying, “I’m going to make it harder on myself.” You’re going to ensure you’re managing your negative externalities like your carbon footprint, deeply care about fair pay and wealth generation opportunities for your employees; things that your purely profit-driven peers might not prioritise. That means your cost structure is going to be higher.
You’re imposing costs on yourself around caring for the environment, people, and the community. These are all things your for-profit competitors don’t need to do. You’re essentially choosing a harder business model, not only in terms of costs, but also in mental share.
If you care about these things, then what’s keeping you up at night isn’t, “How do I make my venture capital partner rich?” It’s more likely, “One of my employees is having a really hard time, and I need to support them in a humane way,” or “We just found a new innovation or market opportunity, but I’m worried about what it will do to our carbon footprint and I don’t yet have a solution.”
That’s why I say we’re a little bit crazy. We impose these extra challenges on ourselves and still compete against others who don’t, and that’s hard. It’s mentally taxing, strategically challenging, and managing the financial side of things in that context becomes even more difficult.
The continuation of that “we’re a little bit crazy” idea (and this is now more directly answering your question about common themes) is that the most common thing we see entrepreneurs do to try and overcome that hardship is go out and ask for money.
We even joke at MovingWorlds that if you ask a social entrepreneur what help they need, the answer is either “nothing” or “everything”, and while you’re at it, please send money! Social entrepreneurs are always fundraising, and I think there’s a missed opportunity in this.
When we direct so much energy towards fundraising, that’s energy we’re not putting into talking to customers. When we care deeply about our employees, the environment, and our communities, we often take such a principled stance that we start to impose those principles onto others. If you’re a buyer or a customer and you don’t already hold those same standards, the entrepreneur is saying, “I need you to understand if we want a sustainable planet, these values need to be true.” While that’s absolutely the right thing to advocate for, it can actually create a barrier between social entrepreneurs and their customers.
They’re always chasing money, entrenched in their values, morals, and a highly ethical way of doing business, which is admirable. But, at the end of the day, it’s customers who pull out their credit cards and make purchases.
If we don’t spend enough time understanding those customers and what will get them to choose this more holistic model over a purely for-profit one, we miss critical opportunities to gain market traction.
A lot of what we do at MovingWorlds is to help entrepreneurs build market traction. This involves strengthening marketing, sales, customer discovery skills, and product development capabilities. It all stems from these challenges. Social entrepreneurs aren’t the only ones struggling to talk to customers, this is a widespread start-up issue.
While I have some personal reservations about Y Combinator and Paul Graham due to the profit-maximisation mindset that often comes from that sector, there’s one piece of advice from Paul Graham that really sticks: half of the advice he gives to start-up founders is, “Go talk to customers.”
I just think it’s a little bit harder for social entrepreneurs to do that because of all the extra burdens we place upon ourselves.
What recommendations would you make to social entrepreneurs building sustainable and scalable business models?
Building off this idea of talking to customers, I really do believe that the more intimately we get to know our customers the more we can start to see how the costs we’ve imposed on ourselves can actually become competitive advantages. They can help grow sales and increase revenue, but maybe not in the ways we initially expect.
The typical pitch from entrepreneurs goes something like, “Our product saves the ocean. You have to save the ocean!” Then we try to sell something and say, “Help us save the ocean.” The buyer, who’s just a human operating within a broader commercial context, might say, “Even if I care about this, I’m sorry, I just can’t help you out.”
That buyer is working in a system where their manager and their manager’s manager is focused on margins. Even if they care, they may not have the agency to act. But if we get to know them as people, we might discover they have a family, and they probably care about the future through that lens. Or they may have passions, maybe not for oceans, but perhaps recreation, travel, or something else. They almost certainly care about their careers; they want to grow, avoid being laid off, and get promoted.
If we can understand their key drivers, especially from that career growth perspective, we can say, “Right now, your performance is measured by short-term margins. But in the long term, you’ll be measured on your ability to help your company innovate into a future where sustainability and equity are embedded into business models.”
That’s true regardless of today’s political environment. We’ve seen some businesses back off from publicly talking about social inclusion or environmental concerns, but that’s a surface-level communications shift.
If you look at the annual reports of companies, they’re still tracking and reporting on carbon footprints. When the political winds change again (and they always do) those companies that have been leading in these areas are going to be the ones accelerating out in front.
These potential customers might not care in the short term about doing business with you. But in the long term, at a personal level and in terms of their careers, if you can help equip them with the tools to lead in a future where sustainability and social equity are integrated into business models, you’ll get their attention.
The first step is go talk to your customers. The second is to get creative about understanding their leverage points. It might not be what you assume: they might not care about the oceans in the same way you do. But they might care deeply about their family or future career path. Maybe they want to start a start-up themselves someday, or get into investing. They’re looking for exposure and experience, and if you can tap into those personal drivers, you can help them see the long-term benefits of partnering with you.
Once you identify these long-term benefits, you’ll find your buyer is balancing it against short-term requirements. They’re thinking, “I want to do this, but I’m under pressure right now to prioritise margins.” That’s where the third step comes in: experiment.
Your first idea to move the needle probably won’t work. You have to keep testing. Frame up a problem statement like, “If I do this, then something like this will happen.” Then, test it. If this doesn’t work, try a different message, new positioning, or even tweak your product or service to better align with your customers needs. Keep experimenting.
I have a lot of empathy for entrepreneurs going through this process. Experimenting and talking to customers when you’re under-resourced is incredibly tough. But it’s what it takes to build sustainable revenue streams. Once you have sustainable revenue, everything elese unlocks. Finding investors becomes easier, paying market wages becomes possible, and attracting top talent is within reach.
It’s a really hard phase, but if you can keep listening, stay curious, and run rapid experiments, that’s where the growth lies.
Why is cross-sector collaboration crucial for creating broader systems change and how can we see the roles of corporates and more mainstream for-profit organisations shift within this impact movement?
I’ll use a tangible example here, and then we can extrapolate it across essentially all industries.
Imagine walking into a convenience store. You’re thirsty and need something to pick you up for the day. You probably grab a beverage in a plastic bottle. More often than not, it’s in plastic. I can tell you, those companies don’t want to use plastic. They would love to figure out how to stop using it, or at the very least, get it all back so it doesn’t end up in the oceans.
From a business perspective, every plastic bottle that ends up in landfill or in the ocean is lost margin. It’s waste. But right now, plastic remains their most cost-effective option. It gives them the best margins, so they keep using it. They’re trying to find alternatives by asking, “Can we use something else? Can we go non-plastic?” But for many of them, that’s just not currently viable if they want to stay afloat and keep people employed.
So what can they do?
Well, if they could partner with local municipalities to improve recycling systems, that would be one step. I live in Seattle, which is a very progressive city when it comes to things like recycling. But even here, our recycling system is pretty terrible.
For years, we’ve been exporting the bulk of our recyclables to be incinerated in places like China, often in waste-burning plants. That’s not something we like to talk about, but it’s been the reality.
For a big beverage company to reclaim their plastic and reuse it, they need municipalities to have proper sorting mechanisms. Many places, especially outside the US, are far more advanced in this regard. But still, without the right infrastructure in place, even companies that want to be more sustainable are blocked.
We’re not exactly a shining example when it comes to reusability, but that example shows why we need genuine cross-sector partnerships. If a company wants to recover its plastic bottles for reuse (and many of them really do), they need support from government to make that possible.
They also need the ability to clean and process those bottles so they can be reused. That means working with other commercial partners to build out that infrastructure. But that’s a risky venture, and it’s not a validated business model yet. So they need investors willing to co-invest alongside corporates to develop those solutions.
At the same time, they don’t want to use virgin plastic. It’s expensive and environmentally destructive. It requires drilling deep into the earth or oceans, extracting limited resources, and running energy and chemically-intensive processes. But there’s already so much plastic in circulation. Can we reuse it?
That’s where we need innovators who are figuring out how to creatively upcycle used plastics into food-grade materials. That’s still a missing ingredient in the system. There are cool innovators working on these solutions, but to scale them, we need every stakeholder playing their role.
We need municipalities and governments doing their part. We need investors coming in to fund early-stage solutions. We need accelerators and ecosystem builders to provide the capacity-building support. If we want a beverage company to stop using plastic bottles, even one that genuinely wants to change, it won’t happen through pressure alone, not even through regulation. It will take cross-sector collaboration.
As much as I’d love to wave a magic wand and just fix it, that hasn’t worked for the past 30 years. I don’t think it’s going to start working now.
That’s why convening corporates is so important. Companies know their issues, and they’re reporting on them to investors. Many are even being pressured by investors, even in today’s complex political environment. That’s telling. You can take that same example and apply it to other industries like tech. How do we ensure AI is accessible and that content creators are compensated for training these models? This will require government intervention, investor commitment, innovation, and the support of accelerators and capacity-builders.
That’s how we see it: we have to bring all these forces together. And just as importantly, we need to share insights across sectors more effectively and efficiently than ever before.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive change?
The one I want to shout out the most is actually something we’re experimenting with at MovingWorlds. One of the phrases we use all the time is, “Start at the social enterprise and work backwards.” We’re constantly running experiments based on that philosophy.
If you jump onto our platform right now, you’ll see a new initiative we’re testing called the Business Needs Analyser. It’s essentially a tool that asks, “What do you need?” We’re trying to figure that out with as little input from you as possible. We don’t want to waste your time.
We’re mobilising and customising our own technology to support this as efficiently as possible, and then using the results to connect entrepreneurs with the right expertise as quickly as we can. It’s been a really fun experiment for our team.
The reason I’m choosing this one to highlight is because, if you’re a social entrepreneur listening to this, please come onto the platform and try it out. If you don’t like it or if you have ideas to make it better, please shoot me an email at mark@movingworlds.org, or just send a message to our support team. We’d love to keep iterating on this platform until we get it right.
To finish off, Mark, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?
I’m definitely influenced by recency here, but I’d love to recommend two resources.
The first is not something we created, it’s a book called Demand-Side Sales by Bob Moesta. I don’t love the title, but it is the best book, guide, toolkit, and set of templates I’ve ever come across to help entrepreneurs understand how to talk to customers and truly grasp what moves them.
It’s loaded with excellent examples that really help shift the mindset from trying to convince people to buy things, to instead understanding how humans are already trying to solve problems, and how we can fit into that process. It introduces the concept of thinking in terms of what customers are “hiring” to solve their problems. What tools, resources, and money are they already spending? This mindset, and the book itself, communicates that better than anything else I’ve seen. I’ve read The Lean Startup and other popular start-up guides, but this one is my favourite.
The second is a six-part series we just finished with Dan Ariely, a behavioural psychologist, award-winning author, and researcher. In this series, we explored the gap between what we rationally say we’ll do, like, “Next month I’ll eat healthier,” or, “I’m going to exercise more”, and what we actually do.
It’s incredibly relevant for entrepreneurs because it helps us better understand and empathise with the people we’re serving. The series also gives tactical tools for action. One of the best concepts from it is building what we call “friction maps,” to understand your user journey and identifying every point of emotional or cognitive friction.
Whether it’s, “I don’t understand these words,” or, “If I do this, I’ll have to talk to my manager, and that’s uncomfortable,” these friction points become opportunities for innovation and experimentation.
