>> He didn't hit the ground running right away.
He first had to figure out how to finance the business.
And he did it, a fairly simple way.
He remortgaged his house.
Which, it's a simple way, it's a frightening way, I think.
I mean it, it reveals, also that he has a certain tolerance for risk.
Because if this business doesn't go well,
he has trouble keeping his house, where his family lives.
So you can imagine this was fairly, strongly felt.
He began looking for people to hire.
They also had to work out how this business works because there had
never been a business like this before.
Uh, one of the things they had to be able to do is, assess
people with autism.
Not everyone who has autism is the same.
We're different.
People who are neurotipical, as, as they like to put it within Specialisterne.
We're all different, so are people with autism.
So, not everybody on the autism spectrum, not every person is well-suited
to what Thorkil would have them do, as part of his social enterprise.
So, they needed a very good process for assessing.
They needed a very good process for
training, and all of that had to be developed, um, basically,
using the funds that he had available from remortgaging his house at first.
Eventually he got a contract with his former employer, and
that was very important to beginning to provide some revenues.
But this was a bootstrap model, he did not immediately go find venture capitalists,
or some outside fund.
He also very strongly felt, when I first talking,
started talking with him, that it was important that this was a
for-profit business that, that allowed the people
with autism to demonstrate that they were being paid because they were valuable.
Not because it was some form of charity, and so he felt very strongly, that for
full alignment, to do the best for the people involved, but
also to make the business a sustainable business, that it had to deliver more
value than it cost, and the proposition, the proposition for
customers in this business, has always been, as far as I understand, not:
Do a favor for society or do a favor for us. It's always been: We deliver
a lot of value, we deliver more value than anyone else in this segment so, choose us.
Do you have any suggestions for
the students of this MOOC who want to start their own social enterprises,
how to go about identifying on the one hand the social need and after,
on the other hand to see the business opportunities, the business models?
>> Well that's a, I think it's
a hard question, how one should go about spotting opportunities.
There are more systematic versions of that.
I used to be the dean of a business school in Canada.
And we had entrepreneurship programs.
And we had a course called Market Opportunity Identification.
And you always hear the story of Jeff Bezos where he started with,
I don't know how many, 130 ideas.
And successively analyzed and
worked through them until he had one left, which became Amazon.
The story of Specialisterne is not like that.