Mentor Spotlight: Isaac Jeffries

As part of the Subak Australia Accelerator program, our cohort members and fellows have access to a wide range of experts that support and guide them throughout the nine-month program. These mentors not only provide great insights and knowledge to our cohort but also bolster our not-for-profit growth. 

 We are excited to kick off this Mentor Spotlight Series with one of our inaugural mentors, Isaac Jeffries. 

Isaac has worked with over 844 businesses in ten different countries, and particularly values working with social enterprises and not-for-profits. He went from a career in finance to one in social enterprise, and now helps entrepreneurs achieve growth and financial sustainability. 

1.What is your current work focus and how did you get there?

I was the first employee at a social enterprise called The Difference Incubator. I joined as the “junior minion”, working with the founder to actually set up the business, fill our first incubator programs, and work with our first investor deals. We had to “eat all of our cooking”, following the advice we give to our own startups and organisations that really want to grow and become financially sustainable.

So that’s how I got into this field. I had to live and breathe it for almost 10 years now. Before then, I worked in finance, I worked for non-profit groups like community housing but really the majority of my time has been working with social enterprise groups in Australia, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific.

2.With your expertise working with not-for-profits, what has been the most difficult hurdle to overcome?

Running a not-for-profit is extremely difficult. You have a lot of the same challenges as running a business and often a harder time with funding. My evidence to that: talk to anyone who runs a not-for-profit and see what they tell you. They all look exhausted, they all sound really drained and fatigued. And they’re doing incredible work!

The hard part for not-for-profits is sustainability, and there are a number of different types of sustainability you can look at. A big one is financial, so knowing that there are funds available to do the work that you want to do. Another one is finding the right people, that’s both in terms of their staff and in terms of business partners.

But then the other option is deciding how big they want to aim. That’s a very tough topic. You want to make sure that you’re making a meaningful dent in the problem that you’re trying to begin to address, but you also want to be realistic and want to be able to say, ‘Ok we reasonably expect that we can achieve this within the next 2-3 years. Those balances are so hard to get right. 

Everyone who is grant-dependent hates the fact they’re grant-dependent. I don’t know anyone who is proud of that. Grants are a great deal a lot of the time, but you get better sleep, and you have more certainty if you know your business is going to still be going in 12 months’ time.

3.Why are you particularly passionate about working and supporting not-for-profit start-ups rather than commercial businesses?

I used to work at ANZ, there one year when profit went from $5.1 billion to $5.3 billion over the last 12 months. And I remember struggling to get out of bed that day when that email came through. And I remember thinking, I honestly do not care. It means nothing to me that I have been part of a team that has earnt a record-breaking profit for the company.

I like people who have the initiative and drive to say, I want to go and do something different. And I know how hard it is to build a business that can do good and make money at the same time. I found that I just enjoyed being a helper. I enjoyed talking to people, I enjoyed hearing where they were, I enjoyed offering help wherever I could without trying to impose. And it’s just the most rewarding and engaging work. You get to be a part of things that are doing genuinely good things for the world.

I see that for a lot of our generation, we aren't content with the old model of making money as ruthlessly as possible for 30 years and then trying to give it away. I don’t think we’re happy to put off helping people for that long and then building libraries, parks, and things like that. I think our generation has seen that it’s possible to do good while making money. And I believe we’re no longer accepting trying to make money by any means possible.

There’s also an urgency for our generation too! We can see the problems clearer than we have before. And the idea that we would ignore that, doesn’t sit well with people anymore. They are also really hard to get right. The challenges we are facing are incredibly difficult and it’s going to take a lot of people working on a lot of initiatives, simultaneously to have some kind of fighting chance.

But I think a lot of good people are really drawn to that and I hopefully can be one of the people making some kind of small contribution. 

 4.You were a tremendous help to a few of our start-ups in consolidating their financial strategies, do you have any tips to share with other non-profit start-ups who are also starting to look for more funding?

The first one is every organisation needs financial clarity.

They might not all need a cash cow, they might not all need a philanthropist, and they might not need a golden goose. But everyone should have clarity over where their money comes in, where their money gets spent and how much money is left over at the end of the day. 

Now whether you’re a not-for-profit or for-profit it’s all the same. It’s about asking “are we making a surplus”?

You want to have an answer to that question. Once you have an answer, you can then start to ask really good questions along the lines of – 

Do we need to start treating our donors like they’re customers? 

Do we need to start applying for grants? 

Are we selling the product? 

Are we creating a membership base?

Then I think you want the ability to run hypotheticals and experiments. 

If we were to sell a product, what would it look like? 

If we were to apply for funding, what might our offer be?

There’s no one magical source of money out there. But if you have clarity over what your numbers look like today and you have a way of testing new ideas without committing to them, then you’ll be in a really good position to succeed. 

 5. Out of all your amazing accomplishments, from lecturing at Deakin Uni to working in accelerator and incubator programs, and then supporting business growth-building initiatives, What accomplishment are you most proud of?

In 2020, amidst all of the lockdowns, my colleague and I started offering free business coaching to all of our old clients in Australia and overseas. It started to go really well and we ended up taking the data we found from those coaching sessions and pitched that to a government client to launch a coaching pilot program. That coaching pilot program went really well and in 2021 we trained four local business coaches in PNG who in turn then were coaching and advising 100 SMEs over 2021. 

We had spoken for a long time about wanting to build a model that could be replicated and adapted by local coaches in their home market overseas. Lockdown gave us the excuse to try it out. I'm really proud of the women we trained as local business coaches over there- they are kicking ass today, helping so many businesses become more sustainable. 

 6.As one of our most valued mentors at Subak Australia, what is your advice and feedback when mentoring within the not-for-profit space?

Because these founders are doing such pioneering work, they’re not going to come to you for answers. They’re probably coming to you to find really good questions. There’s a quote by Joseph Joubert who said, “It is better to debate a problem without settling it, than to settle a problem without debating it.” I think that approach of trying not to give people advice but instead helping them work through the really tough questions is probably the most valuable contribution you can make.

I mean, what do I know about blue carbon sequestration? That’s such a new field, that’s such a new term. There are not going to be people who have 40 years of experience in that field. But the questions that these teams are facing are probably the same questions that a lot of groups before them have gone through.

If you can help changemakers spend a helpful amount of time understanding the questions they grapple with, you equip them to form their own great answers, rather than you trying to be the source of those great answers.

If anyone is seeking guidance or counsel from Isaac, he is available to help and can be contacted via https://isaacjeffries.com or follow him on Instagram: evander.strategy!