Transcript: Growing with Purpose

Music: Care by Roa

Athanasia Price: Thank you all for joining today's open learning session. It's fantastic to see so many people interested in this topic, Growing with Purpose. We're really looking forward to learning from Umbo's experience and your model of social enterprise focused on providing health services to rural and remote communities.

My name is Athanasia from Social Enterprise Australia. We host these sessions as part of the Social Enterprise Development Initiative, funded by the Federal Department of Social Services. The aim is to create a space for change-makers and supporters right across the social enterprise community to share knowledge and experiences that will help strengthen connection and collaboration across the sector. Learning from each other, we know, is one of the most important things.

Today's session is convened by Umbo. It's such a pleasure to be in the Zoom room with Francesca Pinzone, Jeannie McDonald and Samantha McDonnell. Thank you to all of you for your generosity and care in sharing your time and your experience.

Before I hand over to the Umbo crew, I'd like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands from which we're all joining today. I'm really thankful to be on beautiful Quandamooka country and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I recognise their continuing connection to the waters, the skies and the lands that we all have the privilege of living and working on. I'm working hard myself to get more connected and learn more about this place where I'm living and working.

I also pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants joining today or listening after, and recognise that your presence here holds over 65,000 years of systems thinking and relational care for people, place and planet. So thank you.

It's a pleasure to hand over to you, Francesca, to kick off this conversation.

Francesca Pinzone: Thank you so much, Athanasia.

Welcome. I'm really excited to be here today to present to you and to invite a conversation around Umbo's journey around Growing with Purpose. It's been such an incredible journey to see what social enterprises can do to have a great impact in different areas. 

I'd really like to welcome you all today to talk about how you can build a scalable social enterprise that stays true to its mission. We're not going to tell you all the answers that we believe are the way forward. We're going to talk about things that have not worked, but we're also going to talk about some of the things that have worked. We're going to take you through the learnings we have had in growing and building Umbo to be what it is.

Firstly, welcome. I'm on Gadigal land, and this is a beautiful artwork created by an Aboriginal artist in Sydney. It represents different areas around Gadigal land. I want to show that to you and acknowledge that the idea of systems change is so relevant here. We're all here for systems change and what we can learn from our First Nations people around systems change, as was said, they've been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. How can we learn from that? That's what's really important.

As we kick off, I'd love to ask a question: can you raise your virtual hand if you've ever worried that scaling your enterprise might compromise your social mission? It's certainly a question that we have had at Umbo. How do you scale but hold true to the mission that you are trying to achieve? I think it's a really challenging tension that we can have, but it's also something that we need to talk about and talk about really openly.

I have some awesome team members and colleagues who are here with us today. I'll allow them to provide a brief intro to their background. But I've also got a question for Sam and Jeannie that I'd love them to answer, and I'm going to answer it myself first.

The question is: What drew you into working in a social enterprise?

My background is in the health field, and I've spent a lot of time doing overseas aid work. When I came back to Australia, I started to question how the not-for-profit sector works and how we get to work within that charity space. I'd worked with Médecins Sans Frontières and also with UNICEF, very different kinds of organisations. When I came back to Australia, I was really trying to understand what that looked like here.

I then worked in the not-for-profit space for quite a while and kept coming back to this niggling question: but how do we know that what we're doing is actually having an impact and actually supporting people? That's when I started to get really interested in social impact measurement.

For me, what has drawn me into this social enterprise work and into building Umbo - and we very purposefully built it as a social enterprise - was definitely around how you can use business models and methods to build something for purpose and actually be able to scale something. I'll talk a little bit about scale as we go on, because for me, that is incredibly important. We tested right at the start: can you build a robust business that can have a great impact and be for purpose? That's what drew me in.

So now I'm going to ask Jeannie to answer that question and do a quick intro of herself.

Jeannie McDonald: Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having us.

My name is Jeannie McDonald, and I'm the Clinical Services Manager at Umbo. I came to Umbo more for a lifestyle choice than a social enterprise choice. I'm a speech pathologist, and four and a half years ago, I joined Umbo as a speechie. It was a point of transition in my family's life where I needed to be around a little bit more, and Umbo seemed to really fit that brief.

It was an added bonus for me that it was a social enterprise. I have quite a personal connection to it because I grew up in regional Australia and still have friends living in regional Australia who have that everyday experience of how difficult it is to access healthcare, including allied health services. That really drew me in. Once I arrived, I absolutely loved the social mission and was thrilled that I was in a business that was working as a robust business, but still providing fantastic support to regional and remote Australians and fulfilling its social mission. That's how I came here.

I'll hand over to Sam.

Samantha McDonnell: Thanks, Jeannie.

My name is Sam. I'm the Finance Manager at Umbo. I've been here about six months now. My background: I've been an accountant for a very long time and have worked in quite a few different types of organisations. For me, it's really critical to work somewhere where I love what we do. It can't just be counting widgets. It's got to be something where I'm really proud to tell my friends where I work and proud to say what the organisation I work for is doing for our community.

I would say it's not necessarily social enterprise itself that drew me there, but those feelings behind it. Another thing that's really important to me is working for a really solid company, a company that is financially strong, has strong governance, and doesn't cause me too many difficulties to work there. 

Francesca Pinzone: Thanks, Sam, and thanks, Jeannie.

I think we're all attracted to purpose. I heard an incredible quote yesterday: " How can our role align with our soul?” That, for me, has always been the type of work that has drawn me in. I really love that.

In terms of how we built Umbo and built it for purpose, I'll briefly talk you through the background, because I think one of the key things that is super important in developing and growing a social enterprise is the meeting of an unmet need. 

When I reflect on how Umbo has been able to scale, grow and support so many people, that need is important, and it is high. How do we solve the problem? For us, it was looking at the failure in the market. Umbo delivers allied health services to people in regional and rural Australia. You can see in this graph the gaps in NDIS provisions across Australia. There are high gaps in the central and regional parts of Australia. Because we are so dispersed, it can be really hard to deliver healthcare services.

When we first started Umbo, not only did we know that those communities were being underserviced, but the services that may have existed would often fly in and fly out every six, eight or twelve months. It took a long time for people to get services, and those services were quite inconsistent as well. So we had to think about how we bridge this gap and what is the type of way we can do it.

Back in 2017, nobody thought online therapy had any benefit. So we were a little bit innovative, a little bit early adopters. Obviously, COVID changed everything for Umbo and for many people, not just in terms of being able to access services, but in terms of opening communities up as well.

The key thing was: how did we find that unmet need that was so prevalent? This other graph tells you that in remote areas, only 36% of people who have an NDIS budget can actually spend any money on it. So this is the problem with the provision of what exists at the moment. We had that unmet need, we had a market failure, we had this idea of innovation, how can we solve the problem? Then this idea of: let's see how we can change the system, because the system is what's failing, and there are multiple different players within it. How do we try and change it?

We've gotten to a point where we've spent a lot of time in the building and doing, and now we're looking at how to change the system more in depth. How do we work in community? How do we deliver place-based support? These are the questions we're having now. We never stop asking questions, but I think that's a good thing.

When we built for purpose, we made some really deliberate choices that embedded purpose at the very setup. Our constitution talks about our mission. It talks about us being a social enterprise. It is locked in, sitting in our constitution. It was really important for us that the mission was embedded there.

We have a majority founder ownership, and we are all aligned with the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. Umbo started with three co-founders. We all have various roles within the business now, but the social outcome and the purpose we're trying to achieve has always been the North Star for all of us. We have really clear design principles; we don't compromise on team culture, and we will always have a client-first approach. We were clear on what we wanted to achieve, and we had some boundaries around growth and funding choices. I'm going to talk about those as well, because they're really impactful. There is a huge temptation when you are starting to just say yes to money, yes to that grant, yes to that funding, but sometimes it's actually not a great way to be, because you end up delivering programs and services that don't meet your mission. Umbo was in an incredibly fortunate position to secure investment from a very purpose-aligned investor, and we've had a great ongoing relationship with that investor. But we had to put some boundaries in around those choices.

The other thing is the culture of Umbo. We talk about culture a lot, and we have always worked from a value-driven approach to hiring our team. We currently have 45 therapists and about 20 head office staff. All of us are in alignment with our Umbo values, how we want to work and with the purpose. We always try to understand the why. The first question we ask in any interview is: Why Umbo? Why social enterprise? Why are you interested in what we do? Because it's really important for us to know that people are on the same page as us.

This is something that we need to continue to ask ourselves: how do we make sure that everybody knows they have a huge part to play in us achieving our mission? It's not just the Exec team, it's not just our head office team, it's every single person across the organisation.

On that note, I'd really like everyone to have a little think about how important it is to design a social enterprise around an unmet need and that purpose. These are some of the questions that we ask ourselves a lot. The unmet need for me is really crucial, and having that North Star and that purpose all the time is key.

I'm going to hand over to Jeannie now, who's going to talk about how we measure and maintain our purpose.

Jeannie McDonald: Thank you.

Hi, everyone. It's lovely to be here. I'm the Clinical Services Manager, and I'm going to chat a little bit today about how we measure and maintain our purpose and how important that measurement is to ensuring that we are aligned with our purpose, how far we've progressed in finessing that skill, and where we're sitting now and what we're looking to do next in terms of measurement.

This is a framework [see slide] for the way we measure. This was set up at the very beginning of Umbo, and there are bits and pieces that have changed and bits and pieces that perhaps we need to change now that we're at a point where we need to reflect back and update.

One of the key things we prioritise at Umbo, because it aligns with our mission, is that measuring outcomes is more important than measuring outputs. Yes, we measure our outputs. We want to know what the activity of the business is and how it's running. But to ensure that we're working towards or meeting our social mission, we measure outcomes, and we recognise and prioritise the measurement of those outcomes in our business.

What I would argue now is that there are some things we measure really, really well at Umbo. For example, we have therapy outcome measures. We use a tool called AusTOMS (Australian Therapy Outcomes Measures) that measures our clinical outcomes for our clients. That is really solid, robust data, and we use it to frame our decisions, support what we're doing, and identify where we are meeting the need. But overall, our outcome measures at this point in time are much more about individual outcomes; they're individualised. We haven't yet expanded our collective outcome measures, and I think we're now at the time where we really want to do that and have a broader understanding of the large impact that Umbo is potentially having and how we're serving our mission at a greater scale.

This is our Theory of Change [see slide], and one of the reasons we've included it is to show you how the business has changed: where we've started, how we're refining things, what we're developing, where we're heading, and how these ideas, particularly this Theory of Change, have served us well. It's not exactly as things are now.

It was constructed early in Umbo's journey, and a lot has changed because we've grown and developed significantly, even in the four and a half years since I've been here. When I started, I think there was one other speechie and two OTs and me. Now there are 40 clinicians and 20 head office crew. Things have changed quite rapidly.

Some elements on this Theory of Change are relevant, but some haven't developed in the way we initially anticipated. For example, we have on there "develop evidence-based training content." We do have some evidence-based training content that we use internally, but the idea of developing a broader range of external training content hasn't developed in the way we had initially thought. So this Theory of Change is up for review. It's a really good time at Umbo to sit back, reflect and ask the deep questions about measurement and change, then update our documentation to support that.

So, what do we measure and how do we measure our impact currently, and what do we know?

One of the things we do at Umbo is Access Pricing. To give you a little bit of background: Umbo reinvests 50% of its profits back into our Access Pricing scheme or fund, and we use that money to provide financially accessible or subsidised therapy and assessments for clients who could not access those services otherwise. It's usually not a 100% subsidy; it's a sliding scale. We take into account our clients' financial and geographical vulnerability, always holding that mission to our core being: to provide subsidies so that we can provide as much equitable access as possible.

I mentioned briefly that we measure client outcomes. I talked about AusTOMS, and our data from that shows that our clients are gaining significant improvement, and the longer the therapy duration, the more significant the improvement is. We also get feedback from our clients and have maintained a 4.9 out of 5 quality feedback rating, which is fabulous.

We also measure our geographical impact, 71% of our clients come from regional or rural areas, which is something we're incredibly proud of because it shows us we're really meeting that geographical need and reaching the people we set up to reach. The impact of doing that is that we're saving 33 hours of travel time per client, which is huge, not just in terms of NDIS funding, but also day-to-day living. Not having to travel two hours with all your children to access therapy and then two hours back again makes a huge difference to people's lives. We've delivered 117,666 direct therapy sessions, which is a fabulous figure. 

Francesca Pinzone: That may have gone up in the last couple of weeks. We deliver on average 2,000 therapy appointments each month. It's a huge impact.

The other thing I'd be really keen to understand and explore, I'd welcome guidance and advice from anyone who is across this area, is that we've calculated, from a certain point in our journey, how much money we have saved in NDIS funding by delivering our therapy online. As Jeannie said, we have saved in NDIS funding because travel charges are really high within NDIS funding, and they are often a barrier for people accessing support. The NDIS has most recently changed its price guide on how people can claim travel. It's capped now.

We've calculated that we've saved nearly $30 million that would otherwise have been spent from NDIS budgets, purely on travel rather than on therapy delivery. I want to shout this from the rooftops, but it can feel like shouting into a void sometimes. This is a great model that can not only support clients but also save money from a government scheme. I'm really open to any ideas and suggestions around how we can advocate for greater uptake of online therapy with this model across Australia, and how we promote it and support it, because $30 million is not something to be quiet about. Open to any ideas or connections that anyone might have. We want to use the data we're gathering to advocate further. Hit us up on LinkedIn if you've got some ideas.

Sorry to jump in there, Jeannie - back to you.

Jeannie McDonald: Thank you.

I touched on this a little at the beginning: we have some great ways of measuring our outcomes at the moment, but we're now at a point where we really need to step back and think about whether we're asking the right questions about the way we measure our impact. We do want to get a really good sense of our broader impact as well as our individual impact, and to understand the volume and depth of impact.

As Francesca mentioned, we now do 2,000 sessions per month. I think that's extraordinary. Is that having the impact we intended it to have on those communities and on those people? Are we making the depth of difference that we want to make as a social enterprise?

Now I'm going to hand over to Sam, who's going to talk to you about our journey from start-up to strategic business.

Samantha McDonnell: Thank you.

This graph on the left-hand side [see slide] is a really lovely way to express the start-up journey and just how lumpy it is. I love having an axis where it's your happiness curve, I think it's also your energy curve. Everything starts off, it's fantastic, you're all keen, and at some point, it becomes really tough. The depth of how tough it's going to be depends on what's happening for you, but sometimes it can be really tough, and it can be tough for quite a while. I think the transition to becoming a strategic business is about how you deal with those tough times. 

You'll see here we've talked about experimenting and pivoting. How many ups and downs you have will depend on your skill sets, your luck and the environment that you're in at the time. It's not always something that you can predict or manage. The idea is that you do have to persevere and keep at it, and eventually find out what works, what product you're providing and what market you're going to be operating in.

Definitely at Umbo, once we hit that match, things became big quickly. I'm sure some organisations find that match quite quickly, but I think it's good to see this and say: life never goes to plan the way you expect, because you obviously don't know what you're doing before you do it.

One thing with Umbo is that this whole transition we've been on, I can see everything was just so fast-paced and reactive at the start. It's that constant having to deal with things as they arise and not knowing what you're going to be dealing with until it pops up in front of you, saying, " This is the next thing you need to manage”. It definitely requires that experimental culture, because to find what works, you've got to be prepared to take a risk and have lots of different ideas about how to get to where you need to be.

Once you do have that great fit, you can move into a more structured and scalable organisation and then start looking to the future. I do think it's important to recognise that when you're experimenting, you're not necessarily looking at long-term success, but you do need to get there eventually if you're looking to be an organisation that continues to have impact.

So this slide [see slide] will talk about the different attributes of a start-up versus a strategic business. If you contemplate the difference, you might say it's quite hard to define. When you talk through some of these, you'll see that they're actually very different attributes. The first one is your organisational goal. To begin with, it's about finding what fit you've got. That can involve changing what your product is and what markets you work in. By the time you've moved into a strategic business, you've got scale, you've got your goal, and then it's about optimising that.

Same with revenue. At the beginning, you'd expect revenue to be unpredictable, unlikely to be making money, and often burning through whatever reserves of cash you've got. That obviously needs to change in the long-term; your revenue needs to be predictable. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same every month, but you've got to have a fair idea of what's going to happen, and it has to be sustainable.

With your structure, most start-ups are very informal. You'll have a couple of people on board, you're all decision makers, and it's a very open structure. As you grow and bring more people on board, you're going to have to have a defined hierarchy. When you bring many people on board, decisions change, the way that you do things changes, and it becomes a little bit more of a traditional structure.

With decision-making: at the start, whoever's involved is making decisions, and it's really about making them when you need to get on. As soon as you've got more people on board, your founders can't do everything. I like that idea of recognising when you've got to start delegating things, but you've still got to have confidence in who else is being involved. Can you have confidence that others are going to make the same decisions? At Umbo, a lot of our decisions are data-driven. That provides a lot of consistency, but it also helps us really understand how to make a decision without somebody telling you what to do.

One thing I've really noticed and been pleasantly surprised by at Umbo is that our processes are so strong. A lot of small organisations, to begin with, have pretty ad hoc processes and that's because you do need to change, and if you change every day, you can't be documenting things. Eventually, when you do want to grow, you have to have some standardisation around what you're doing. When you want to provide quality services and products, they've got to be consistent. You've got to be able to repeat them, you've got to be able to manage things like staff turnover, making sure that the next person can do a process to the same standard.

Francesca was talking a lot about culture, and I like the idea that you can almost have two elements to culture: the culture that remains the same and the culture that needs to change. With startups, you have that constant hustle; I can grab everything, I can do everything at once, I can pivot, the next half hour I’m doing something completely different to now. You've got to have that flexibility. Becoming a strategic business is about how you maintain the positives of that but make them larger, so that when you bring more staff on board, everybody's got accountability while still maintaining flexibility. You've got to lose some of the hustle if more people are sharing the tasks involved. But you do need to have that alignment, and it's really about sharing the feelings of your founders and having everybody on board with those feelings going forward.

And then the last thing to talk about: risk level, which is always a favourite of mine. When you have a start-up, you've got to have a high-risk environment. You don't know exactly what you're doing, and with that comes risk. You don't necessarily know how it's going to turn out, and some things won't work. You've really got to take the risk to work out what does work, otherwise you're going to get stuck in a grey zone where you're not achieving what you want to achieve or growing to where you want to grow.

But long-term risk needs to be managed. You're always going to take risks, risk is required to grow a business, but at some point, your risk attitude needs to minimise a little bit. It's really about having a better understanding of what your risks are, how you're managing them, so that the risks you do take are strategic. You're taking a risk in the environment that you want to, and you've got a better understanding of the potential outcomes. At the beginning, you won't necessarily know the outcomes of the risks you're taking. But as you grow bigger, you should have a fair idea, and then you can focus on the things that are important for you.

So, for Umbo, how do we know that we're more than a start-up now?

For our clear service market fit, we know how to support our clients, and we know that we do a great job. We've got consistent revenue and cash flow. That doesn't mean our revenues are the same every month, but it does mean that we can predict what our revenues are going to be and we can do it in a timely enough manner that if things change, we've got the ability to do something about it. Our cash flow is consistent enough that we know we can pay our bills, and we know if we've got something we want to do in 12 months, we've got a rough idea whether we've got the cash there.

I think that's one thing that's really important to focus on when you're growing an organisation: if you don't have cash, you're not going to make it. Sometimes these are really hard things to manage. But you have to know what you don't know, and you have to know the parameters of what's coming in and what's going out, particularly as you're growing. A lot of organisations will fail at that growth stage, not because they're not doing great work, but because they just run out of money in the short-term.

We've also got very defined roles and teams. Our structure is that our therapists are based in hubs; we've got five hubs at the moment. That means they can have tight-knit teams, even while we're all online. It gives them the ability to have colleagues they can talk to on a regular basis. And we know that our teams have their own autonomy and accountability.

The other side of things is our back-office roles. I think we're definitely in that in-between stage: we've developed more back-office roles, but we definitely don't have all of the expertise in-house that you'd find in a really large organisation. I think the process of creating roles is a really challenging one. When do you need HR? When do you need marketing? When do you need finance? When do you keep it external, when do you bring it in-house? We're constantly navigating those discussions.

Our systems and processes are very strong. Being an online organisation, we have a very high usage of systems, and with that comes the processes so that we're all using systems in the same way. Working within the NDIS, you have an awful lot of requirements about how you do things, and making sure we've got consistency in how we do them. I was incredibly impressed when I started at Umbo by the induction planning. For an organisation that still feels small, we've spent a lot of time making sure that everybody understands how we do things together, what we can do and have flexibility on, and what it's really important to have consistency on.

Francesca has talked a lot about the co-founders and the work that they've done. They did everything to begin with, and for a very long time, they were the leaders of the organisation. But to grow, you eventually need a larger leadership team. Three people can't do everything, and however many founders you've got, you're going to reach that critical point where you could work 20 hours a day, and you're still not going to be able to do everything. So at some point, you have to bring others in, particularly at that senior level, to help you with your journey.

Whatever the expertise of your founders is, you'll have areas that aren't covered. Initially, a lot of organisations look externally to bring that in, using consultants or sometimes volunteers when you can get them. But there's nothing quite the same as having your internal leadership. Jeannie and I will always know more about the organisation than an external person can, because we're living and breathing it all the time. That also means that the decisions we're making consider more aspects, because we're all bringing our professional backgrounds, and we're able to challenge each other as well. Which is always really lovely. You can say this is amazing, what we're doing, but my area of expertise means I can ask questions about what we're doing, and the outcome is going to be greater because we're all considering each other's skill sets.

Here at Umbo, we do still have quite a focus on long-term strategy. How do you know when you're getting bigger, and what does long-term look like? At the end of last year, we had a strategy day and developed a three-to-five-year plan. Now that's not going to give us the detail of what we're going to do next week, but it was looking at what we've achieved since the last strategy day, where we want to go, and having some really robust conversations about: Does this meet with our mission? Is this a variation to it? And making sure that everybody in your leadership team and on your board are on the same page about what your long-term looks like, and the reasons why. If there are any conversations to be had, you should be having them years before you actually do the thing. The conversations are not to be had when you've created a six-month budget and popped a new project in there when nobody's considered the long-term way of how to get there and how to continue on.

And then another one of my favourites in finance is governance, and accountability. I feel quite passionately about governance because that's how you deal with the things that you don't expect to come along. That's how you grow without taking unnecessary risks, that's how you don't compromise everybody's integrity around what you're doing, and it provides accountability for the outcomes of the decisions that we make.

We've got an NDIS audit coming up soon. I know that this is going to be a great audit. I'm sure there are organisations for whom that would be really stressful, but knowing that we've got all of this underlying governance means it's a process we follow. We've already dealt with the initial groundwork. It's not about dealing with it when you've got an audit and suddenly saying, oh my goodness, now we need to backtrack and cover everything we didn't consider. At Umbo, we're very strong on considering things before we do them, and then you can embed whatever you need to do as you go.

Francesca Pinzone: I'll touch briefly on this article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, which I found very helpful when we were discussing scale. It's a really good way to look at your organisation and think about what the elements are that you need in place before you start to scale your business. The image on the right, with "waterfall" and "promised land", you can almost place your organisation in an area and look at it and go, " Is this the right time or the right way to scale?” It's a reference if anyone is in that phase of looking at growth and asking how you build your organisation. It can be a really good way to ask yourself whether you're ready to scale and whether you've got that right to scale.

Now I'd like to share some thoughts on purpose-aligned growth. I put this aeroplane here because we talk about it all the time. When we were first in that start-up phase, we would have a daily stand-up every single day, with anyone in the exec team, and we would make decisions on the fly. It was very fast-paced. We talked about how we built the plane as we flew it. I would still say there's an element of that, but the key thing for me was: we built the plane as we flew it, but we always knew the destination. That's really key; we knew what we were trying to achieve, and we went through however many different routes. But at the end of the day, we could always come back and say, what we are trying to do is this.

So this idea of the hustle culture and the fast decision-making is super important in that phase, but what is the outcome you're trying to achieve? What are the really important questions you need to ask yourself when you're making those decisions?

Going back to what Sam said around culture and that transition away from hustle: it's a really hard transition for a lot of people. A lot of people love the start-up phase, and I can see why. I'm very process-oriented, so I was often the handbrake, asking, do you think we should do this? Do you think we should do that? That's why you need a really interesting team, so that you have all the different elements. That's always been really interesting.

I think within your organisation, having some really key questions for yourself when you're making these types of decisions is so important. The question we would often grapple with is: Does making this decision help us live our mission more deeply, or is it just going to help us grow? That's a question that comes up a lot around funding as well.

We received investment into Umbo, but we made a conscious decision to stop applying for grants for a very long time. We have received two grants over the last seven years, both within the last 18 months or so. That's because we felt that grants were almost a distraction for us. I'm probably preaching to the converted here. Lots of people would have done grant applications for $20,000 that take you 20,000 hours to complete, and then you're building a program that doesn't hit your mission. There's a lot of that, I know. They can obviously help fund a lot of organisations, but for us, being a social enterprise, we knew that the business could sustain us. So the question was: does this help us live our mission more deeply, or are we just going to grow faster? Are we aligned with the why we set Umbo up the way we did? Is saying yes to this going to compromise our trust with a community or team?

We put in for a grant that we didn't end up utilising for central western New South Wales very early on. It was a very short, intensive program. The question was: if we come in, run this assessment program and whatever else, but then cannot deliver a sustained outcome for that community, then the $20,000 is taken away, and we walk away - have we just broken the trust with that community? It's a really important question and something I think we have to be really conscious of all the time.

So what were we willing to walk away from, even if the money looked good? Here are some of the trade-offs that we went through. 

We get asked quite often: could we deliver therapy in person? Can you just come to my house and deliver that therapy? Could you send a team out here for this? We have made it very specific that we will only do online therapy, and there are a multitude of reasons for that. One of the largest is that all of our systems and processes are built around only doing things online. It would change our complete way of governing from a clinical governance perspective. But we also wanted to hold true to our purpose of serving communities in locations that are hard to reach.

We talked very early on and started to look at investing in a software platform. It was probably about two years of lots of discussions and lots of time, time that could have been spent on other things, looking at building our own software platform. Then we worked out that what was on the market was fine and that we could use it, and it had the requirements we needed.

We spent some time looking at Public Relations (PR). How do we grow the knowledge about Umbo? How do we grow the profile of our team and our founders? When we went back to it, we actually wanted to spend the money on client acquisition. If we could not directly link PR to acquiring clients, then at that point in time, it wasn't the right move. We were better spending our money on advertising, for example. I think now we're at a point where we could review that. We've got a lot more information, knowledge and story behind us, a story from our team, from our clients, and from the communities we work with. PR might be more important now.

I really wanted to spend money and make us a training provider, so that we could not only share the knowledge but also have a revenue stream when we first started. That was back when online therapy was a bit of a barrier for a lot of people, and a lot of therapists were asking for training. But the cost to set that up, and the impact on the focus of delivering a really good service. This was actually a really hard one for me to grapple with. Right at the start, when we had no money, we got offered a fairly decent amount of money by an organisation to deliver training. We couldn't achieve the outcomes we needed to achieve, and it was going to be a big distraction, so we had to say no. This is where I had one hat on, and everybody else had the other hat on. We had a lot of discussions about this. Our focus was on doing service delivery and doing it well. That was a hard decision for me.

No grant applications, too time-consuming, too little return, as I said. Until we got a grant from the Snow Foundation last year, which was only for Access Pricing. It was tied. It was $75,000 to help fund our clients in need. For me, that is the sweet spot of grant funding for us, because it meets our mission, it's in line with what we do, and it is supporting and creating a great community with a philanthropic organisation to help us support our clients. That was a type of grant we were really keen on. But grants to do things outside of our service delivery, it's not that we're completely opposed to it, but I would never want to start something purely for the purpose of meeting the need of a grant.

And then, speech and Occupational Therapy (OT), only at that point in time, one of the trade-offs was that we didn't have the capacity to add other disciplines. There were definitely some hard decisions and some ways forward that some of us may have loved and some may not have loved, but there are trade-offs involved in building the business to where we are. And you will spend money on things that later on you don't end up utilising. That's just the way it is.

I'm going to ask Jeannie and Sam to provide a quick reflection about where they've seen some of the biggest tensions. Because I think that the tension between mission and money in a social enterprise is really valid. You want to create more revenue, but you also want to meet your mission. Can there be a tension between those? I might throw to Jeannie first.

Jeannie McDonald: Yeah, thanks, Francesca.

We've talked a little bit about growth and how we went through quite a rapid growth period. That was a priority for us because we saw it as meeting our mission - it would expand our ability to reach the people we wanted to provide services to.

The way we scaled, or the way we grew, was by replicating the Hub. Sam talked a little bit about that. Our structure is made up of small clinical teams of about 10 to 14 clinicians, managed by a practice manager and a team leader, and we call them a Hub. Instead of making the Hubs bigger, we replicated them. We were going along beautifully, and our Hubs were doing a fantastic job providing great services, so we continued on. Got to Hub 5, and then launched into Hub 6, and it was a step too far.

We didn't have what we needed for that hub to be viable. At that point in time, we didn't have the client load coming in quickly enough. It was difficult to get the clinicians; it was difficult to get that hub sustainable. Then we realised that the cost of trying to acquire clients at that point was more than we had anticipated. It became almost a perfect storm. A few of these things started to happen all at once, and we went: this is just not viable. We can't do this at this point in time.

So we had to step back. At that time we had clinicians working in Hub 6, we had a Hub 6 team leader. We had to turn around and have conversations with people that we really valued. They brought so much to our organisation. What was this going to look like for them? What we could do and how we could support them, because we genuinely could not facilitate our sixth hub. Fortunately, as time progressed, we were able to reabsorb those people, which was great. They are in our business today, providing fantastic support to our clients and to our mission. 

It was a very difficult time. They were incredibly tough conversations and very personal conversations. We really value the people who work with us because they provide an incredible skill set, and they serve such great purpose, and we want people to feel connected and love where they work. To turn around and say to someone, we might not be able to have you work here in the way we'd originally said, or potentially not at all, that was really challenging and really difficult.

Samantha McDonnell: Thanks, Jeannie.

I find being in a social enterprise is like being in the sweet spot between mission and money. In a not-for-profit, mission often comes first, and if you're in a corporation, money comes first. I think we're in a nice space where we can say they're both important. At Umbo we've got such a strong culture around both of those things being important, and around knowing that your mission can't come at the expense of the bottom line. I love the clash that creates. 

As a finance person, I'm always quite conservative. It's always about having a bit more backup money and a bit more cash just in case, not taking too many risks, being really careful. So I love being able to have really strong conversations about what wins out today, what wins out next week, and what is a really good compromise where we prioritise mission but have some guardrails in place about how far we'll extend ourselves before things become risky. I like to be in that room, be part of those conversations, and I like it when people challenge some of my conservatism and say, that's great, but maybe that's a step too far. I think the tension creates better outcomes. If nobody's asking or challenging in the process, then you haven't considered everything.

For me, some of those decisions we’ve been talking about around how much we pay people, and having a real review of that. There have been some really honest and hard conversations. When you want to value everybody, you want to value your clients, you want to value your staff, you want to value your commitment to the mission, but where's the hierarchy? And that's hardest when push comes to shove, and you have to say: what is the hierarchy? But how does everybody still feel valued? I don't have the answer to all of that by any extent, but it shows just how challenging it is when you've got that internal and external conflict.

Francesca Pinzone: Thanks, Sam.

It's something that we just grapple with, I think, but I love that you love the tension, because I think that brings really robust conversations, and that's what we should be having, really robust conversations.

On reflection for us, some of those tensions, we just come back to some core principles: purpose-driven decisions, value-based decision-making, long-term impact over short-term gains.

Access Pricing for us is a bit of a trade-off. We know that we are consciously going to subsidise clients, and it's a deliberate choice. It's not just a budget line. Saying no to misaligned partnerships - making sure that if we have to, we can walk away from partnerships that don't align with us, because we don't want to compromise just to grow. Mission integrity feels non-negotiable to us.

So what we've set up are some guardrails. The structures, policies and processes that will protect the purpose, especially when things get tough or growth gets tempting.

Some of the things we have in place: we have a pricing cap aligned with the NDIS, and that means we charge our private clients the same price as our NDIS clients. We want to make sure that it's affordable, aligned with what the government considers affordable. This prevents mission drift. Mission drift and mission creep are always a challenge and something you've got to keep your eye on.

The Modified Monash Model (MMM2) is a way to measure regionality across Australia. For us, it's always about keeping our eye on the regional, rural and remote areas we are servicing and making sure that within those guardrails we've got underserved communities at the forefront.

We want to make sure we're an NDIS-registered provider. We actually don't have to be for the majority of our clients. We only have a very small number of clients that require NDIS registration in terms of the funding arrangement. But it's very important to us to maintain compliance, even though the audit process is very challenging and very expensive. Partly it's a sustainability question, and also a credibility question. As I tell myself while going through the audit, this is good for us as a business because it's good governance and good accountability. You've got to keep reminding yourself of that. But we will always make sure that we are NDIS-registered.

As we've talked about, we hire based on values alignment. The culture add is almost more important than the culture fit. We can have someone fit our culture, but actually, what are you going to bring to the table for us? What can we bring to the table for you? It's super important that our team members are not just driving performance, but really driving the purpose for us.

Reflecting on that, what are some of the guardrails you have introduced or could introduce in your organisation? Because they are important. It's important to name them so that everybody knows where you can bend and flex, and what are the things that make sure you're in the right parameters of decision making.

I hope that reflecting on the Umbo experience and how we've built Umbo has been useful. 

One of the things it triggers for me, and Sam mentioned it a little bit, is luck.

There’s a podcast I really love called How I Built This with Guy Raz, and his last question is always: how much do you think it was good luck and how much was it hard work? I often think about that question for Umbo. The majority of it was hard work, but there was some good luck, or maybe it was good timing, I'm not quite sure.

We were facing huge barriers around people understanding online therapy, and then there was a shift in social acceptance of delivering things online. We had some brilliant people come into Umbo at the right time who were there for the purpose of helping us grow and understand our business. We received investment that helped us at that very specific time, with those very specific people, to grow and expand. So the question of luck and hard work, I find it a really good one to sit and reflect on, and maybe the answer changes on a weekly or monthly basis. But it's a good one to keep coming back to.

I want to express a lot of gratitude to the Social Enterprise Australia team. We've really loved getting this presentation together and being able to share our experience and what we've learned. Immense gratitude to you for this.

So one of the questions that was asked pre-workshop was: Did Umbo ever consider a Work Integration Social Enterprise model? I think this is a really interesting question that leans right into what we were talking about today. I was thinking about this last night in relation to the question of mission. Our mission is to provide services to people who are underserved. A Work Integrated Social Enterprise's mission is to provide employment services to people. If we were to run a business like that, it would be outside of our mission and not what we're aiming for.

Reflecting on this question last night, our model, because all of our therapists work from home, supports quite a number of therapists who can't work outside of their home due to disability or other caring responsibilities. So we do support a lot of people in a different type of work environment, but we haven't set ourselves up specifically as a Work Integrated Social Enterprise because that's not what we're here for.

So it was an interesting question to sit with and think, oh yeah, oh no, let's go back to mission. What are we here for? This is our purpose. We actually have a byproduct of supporting people who are marginalised in their work environment and we can support them in that way.

Jeannie McDonald: There's a question in the chat about Access Pricing. 

Access Pricing works within the context of the business. When clients come to us, if anyone gets a sense that someone is going to find accessing our services difficult because of their financial situation, then everyone across the business has the right and the responsibility to flag that. When that happens, we put forward what we call an Access Pricing case. Then Francesca contacts the client and works through a framework with them, discussing what we can do to support them and to provide accessibility not just for one session, but for the sessions they would clinically need to serve their goals.

That access pricing decision is made, as I mentioned briefly before, on a sliding scale. It fits around financial vulnerability and also geographical vulnerability, so that we make sure we're prioritising our mission, prioritising serving people in regional and remote Australia.

We set up an initial understanding, perhaps we'll offer sessions for 50% of the price for X amount of time. And it's not that once that period is finished, that's the end of it. That is a period of review. If continuing those services is going to meet a client's clinical needs, then we absolutely will do it.

Francesca Pinzone: I might just add to that a tiny bit. One of the benefits of being able to provide subsidised services, I’m not sure how many people are aware, but at this point in time, in order to access NDIS funding and put an application in, it's a hugely costly process. Part of it is having what's called a functional capacity assessment, which typically takes about 15 hours of a therapist's time, which is around $3,000. If you are financially vulnerable, and you may have already had a paediatrician report and a whole lot of other information, and then you require a functional assessment. We see huge value in being able to subsidise that, because if we can get people to access the NDIS, then they have funding access and can get a much better service. So the long-term impact is really a lot higher. Just by being able to subsidise that one component, we can't subsidise much else, but if we can just get people over that financial hurdle.

We ask the question, about eight weeks after someone has had an assessment with us, how has this benefited them in their attempt to access the NDIS? Sometimes it has really supported people and was the missing piece. Sometimes it still comes back to the NDIS decision. But we know that what we've tried to do is have a far greater impact than just that one piece, and that's really important to us.

Samantha McDonnell: And I'd probably just add one other thing, because this is such an important part of our business, we looked at how we were going to measure it and keep up to date with what we were doing. I think it’s important when you have such an integral part of your business, you work out in advance how you're going to know how much money you've got in there, how much you've spent, and have some good discussions around what your internal resource is right now and what you're capable of. Then, come up with some really simple structures to answer the questions that you're going to be asking regularly. For us, we have our social impact fund in a separate bank account. I can open up the bank account and I know exactly what's in it. It takes me five seconds. It doesn't take away from doing the other work, knowing that's something that we're going to want to know all the time.

Francesca Pinzone: Thank you.

Sherryl Reddy: Francesca, we had one more quick question. It's 2030 - what does your impact slide say?

Jeannie McDonald: Fantastic question.

Francesca Pinzone: Oh my gosh. 2030 is not that far away either, that’s the scary part. When we went through our strategic planning recently, we really talked about how can we deepen that impact and what does it look like in communities? For us, it's really about how do we support families in community? One of the key things is not only expanding our services across different allied health disciplines, we're also looking at introducing psychology, because there's such a high need in that space, but also how do we deepen the impact for people in communities by promoting and supporting people working in that community?

Allied health assistants currently live and work in communities but need support from a therapist. How do we become that conduit into a community to widen that impact and build the capacity? For me, that's part of what hopefully 2030 will tell us. We've started to test the waters, and we've got some great partners in regional communities.

But really, the North Star in 2030 will still be the same for Umbo in supporting underserved and regional communities across Australia. That’s the key for us. That piece won't change. That's what's really important. Thank you

Athanasia Price: Wonderful. Francesca, Jeannie, Sam - thank you so much. This was a beautifully interactive, reflective, real, lived, genuine and useful session. A real learning session, really appreciate it. I was scribbling throughout.

I was really interested to see the deliberate choices at start-up to set a really good base. I loved your phrase: the outcomes more important than outputs. That focus on asking the right questions. What? Why? What are we trying to measure here and how does that link to our mission? And your decision-framing questions, because it's so easy to be taken down a path and go with it. And the real honesty around trade-offs, because we're all really passionate. It's hard to let go of the things that you love and feel are really important. I appreciated all of that.

I wanted to thank everyone else for joining and for your comments and interactions today. 

Huge thanks to the Department of Social Services for supporting the development of these learning communities as part of the Social Enterprise Development Initiative. Thanks also to the Social Enterprise Australia team, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to get them up and running.

Thank you again, everyone. Have a super day, super month whenever you’re listening and we look forward to seeing you again.