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SAAS NORTH NOW Blog

How To Make Every Business Purpose-Driven (And Make Tons Of Money, Too)

Keith Ippel, Co-CEO, Spring Impact Capital

SAAS NORTH NOW #66

Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,

Under the mantle of impact entrepreneurship is the fire of passionate individuals. However, passion alone is not enough; the greatest impact businesses are also financially healthy and leverage traditional go-to-market strategies where appropriate. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, co-founder of impact investment fund Spring, Keith Ippel, shared his view of how impact entrepreneurship can build better businesses.

Key takeaways:

  • The first principle of impact entrepreneurship is that you have to build a financially sustainable business to deliver lasting benefit.
  • Businesses become impact-focused when its founders have an explicit intention to deliver impact and orient the business toward daily actions that drive impact forward.
  • Impact entrepreneurs alike need space to connect so they can talk shop and identify ways to compound each others’ efforts.

Dave Tyldesley

Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW

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We as leaders have a choice about how we do business and what we use our businesses for—and Keith Ippel, the co-founder and CEO of impact investment fund Spring, hopes leaders choose to make the world a better place.

Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Keith shared more about building impact businesses that also make tons of money. 

Don’t go bankrupt

In all of Spring’s programming—from Activator for new entrepreneurs and Collective for training impact investors—one concept reigns supreme: you cannot build a successful impact business if you go bankrupt.

“The important part, first and foremost, is to build an organization that is financially sustainable and can grow to achieve the target outcomes and target impact outcomes that the founder envisions,” said Keith.

This mindset is not new to the impact space; for example, the B-corp designation acknowledges the for-profit nature of companies but remains a commitment to using that profit for impact. In fact, that’s kind of the point; impact businesses operate and look very similar to non-impact businesses. For instance, the exact same company, whether impact or not, can connect with buyers in multiple different ways. This means once an impact founder understands that they need to build a thriving business, they have a lot of choice.

“The next step in that process is to then help them to see the different types of go-to market strategies, revenue models and business models that apply universally across all types of business that they can then select and and take accordingly,” said Keith.

But all of this is underpinned by an imperative to “embrace the market opportunity” in front of them. Keith explained that many impact founders got into the space due to personal or community experience; while valuable, this can often end with people thinking fairly small. To see the whole opportunity, the key is to think about the bigger picture.

“It’s helping them to see to what extent this is a national or a North American or a global problem to solve, that helps them unlock the full potential of their startup,” said Keith.

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Additive by definition

The most successful impact businesses look like a typical business in many ways when it comes to financial sustainability or go-to-market maturity. But you can start with impact on your mind as a direction and still not be an impact entrepreneur until you do two things:

  1. Intention: Not just doing good by accident or as a benefit of your activity, but explicitly bringing the impact you want to make into the decision making process.
  2. Daily work: An impact business orients itself entirely toward the impact its leaders want to make; financial sustainability and returns are sought as a stepping stone toward impact. For that to work, every daily action must drive toward impact in some way.

“Every day is directional,” said Keith. “It means every day I’m continuing to push myself and my business to create more impact.”

From there, think about how you can accelerate your mission and your business with partnerships, if that makes sense for you. The larger the impact you want to make, the more you’ll need partnerships; for instance, an ecosystem player like Spring routinely partners with local, regional, and national organizations across multiple different communities.

But you can still have a big impact with a more defined scope—for example, a CPG startup can drive impact through its supply chain and GTM motion. That doesn’t require a lot of partners, but delivers significant benefit at scale. All of this wraps up into the concept of being additive—making the whole pie bigger so you can take the slice you need without harming others’ ability to eat.

“By definition, it needs to be additive,” said Keith.” Because everyone must win and the planet must win as we do what we do in order for the world to become a better place.”

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Compound your vision

A single entrepreneur can develop massive change in the world; we’ve seen this throughout history and it happens regularly today. Keith wants to see more impact entrepreneurs named among the global changemakers. For that to happen, he believes impact entrepreneurs need to connect with each other in two different ways.

The first connection is more literal—he wants more events where impact entrepreneurs can meet one another and entrepreneurs not yet committed to impact can see how successful they can get, both financially and for the world.

The second connection is more ethereal; when one person has an impact agenda, they should think about how it connects into someone else’s impact agenda as well. This not only opens doors to collaboration but also compounds efforts in service of similar goals.

For example, one of Keith’s goals is to bring the world to Vancouver and help Vancouver take its place on the list of the world’s greatest cities. He’s doing that by supporting the local ecosystem, but he’s also keen to lend his voice to other programs working to make either BC or Canada better—if either or both succeeds, it inches him closer to his goal and makes future work that much easier.

“It’s not only ‘how do we make business better, but how do we make better businesses?’” said Keith. “How do we do it in a way that is sustainable for this community, for the province, for the country, for the planet?”

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Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,

Under the mantle of impact entrepreneurship is the fire of passionate individuals. However, passion alone is not enough; the greatest impact businesses are also financially healthy and leverage traditional go-to-market strategies where appropriate. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, co-founder of impact investment fund Spring, Keith Ippel, shared his view of how impact entrepreneurship can build better businesses.

Key takeaways:

  • The first principle of impact entrepreneurship is that you have to build a financially sustainable business to deliver lasting benefit.
  • Businesses become impact-focused when its founders have an explicit intention to deliver impact and orient the business toward daily actions that drive impact forward.
  • Impact entrepreneurs alike need space to connect so they can talk shop and identify ways to compound each others’ efforts.

We as leaders have a choice about how we do business and what we use our businesses for—and Keith Ippel, the co-founder and CEO of impact investment fund Spring, hopes leaders choose to make the world a better place.

Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Keith shared more about building impact businesses that also make tons of money. 

Don’t go bankrupt

In all of Spring’s programming—from Activator for new entrepreneurs and Collective for training impact investors—one concept reigns supreme: you cannot build a successful impact business if you go bankrupt.

“The important part, first and foremost, is to build an organization that is financially sustainable and can grow to achieve the target outcomes and target impact outcomes that the founder envisions,” said Keith.

This mindset is not new to the impact space; for example, the B-corp designation acknowledges the for-profit nature of companies but remains a commitment to using that profit for impact. In fact, that’s kind of the point; impact businesses operate and look very similar to non-impact businesses. For instance, the exact same company, whether impact or not, can connect with buyers in multiple different ways. This means once an impact founder understands that they need to build a thriving business, they have a lot of choice.

“The next step in that process is to then help them to see the different types of go-to market strategies, revenue models and business models that apply universally across all types of business that they can then select and and take accordingly,” said Keith.

But all of this is underpinned by an imperative to “embrace the market opportunity” in front of them. Keith explained that many impact founders got into the space due to personal or community experience; while valuable, this can often end with people thinking fairly small. To see the whole opportunity, the key is to think about the bigger picture.

“It’s helping them to see to what extent this is a national or a North American or a global problem to solve, that helps them unlock the full potential of their startup,” said Keith.

Additive by definition

The most successful impact businesses look like a typical business in many ways when it comes to financial sustainability or go-to-market maturity. But you can start with impact on your mind as a direction and still not be an impact entrepreneur until you do two things:

  1. Intention: Not just doing good by accident or as a benefit of your activity, but explicitly bringing the impact you want to make into the decision making process.
  2. Daily work: An impact business orients itself entirely toward the impact its leaders want to make; financial sustainability and returns are sought as a stepping stone toward impact. For that to work, every daily action must drive toward impact in some way.

“Every day is directional,” said Keith. “It means every day I'm continuing to push myself and my business to create more impact.”

From there, think about how you can accelerate your mission and your business with partnerships, if that makes sense for you. The larger the impact you want to make, the more you’ll need partnerships; for instance, an ecosystem player like Spring routinely partners with local, regional, and national organizations across multiple different communities.

But you can still have a big impact with a more defined scope—for example, a CPG startup can drive impact through its supply chain and GTM motion. That doesn’t require a lot of partners, but delivers significant benefit at scale. All of this wraps up into the concept of being additive—making the whole pie bigger so you can take the slice you need without harming others’ ability to eat.

“By definition, it needs to be additive,” said Keith.” Because everyone must win and the planet must win as we do what we do in order for the world to become a better place.”

Compound your vision

A single entrepreneur can develop massive change in the world; we’ve seen this throughout history and it happens regularly today. Keith wants to see more impact entrepreneurs named among the global changemakers. For that to happen, he believes impact entrepreneurs need to connect with each other in two different ways.

The first connection is more literal—he wants more events where impact entrepreneurs can meet one another and entrepreneurs not yet committed to impact can see how successful they can get, both financially and for the world.

The second connection is more ethereal; when one person has an impact agenda, they should think about how it connects into someone else’s impact agenda as well. This not only opens doors to collaboration but also compounds efforts in service of similar goals.

For example, one of Keith’s goals is to bring the world to Vancouver and help Vancouver take its place on the list of the world’s greatest cities. He’s doing that by supporting the local ecosystem, but he’s also keen to lend his voice to other programs working to make either BC or Canada better—if either or both succeeds, it inches him closer to his goal and makes future work that much easier.

“It’s not only ‘how do we make business better, but how do we make better businesses?’” said Keith. “How do we do it in a way that is sustainable for this community, for the province, for the country, for the planet?”