So this year, Re-emerging World shared its expertise on financial modeling for social enterprises, accrued by working for over 8 years with social enterprises across the globe. How? We conducted a workshop on the same, in collaboration with CIIE, Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship  (from IIM Ahmedabad), and GiZ – Aarohan Ventures. This workshop was organized at XLRI, for the young and bright students there, with the help of champion of the cause of social enterprising, Professor Madhukar Shukla (check him out on Facebook, LinkedIn, XLRI and his own blog).

Here is the story of our day in pictures:

At 9 in the morning, we started with a packed class:

Avik captivated attention with the granularities of what differentiates a typical enterprise from a social enterprise, and how this would reflect in the financial model. Despite a number of consecutive sleepless nights owing to different project submission deadlines for a number of people in the audience, I don’t think I saw any yawns…

We then also introduced the lean business model, making it an interactive process. The result was a very intense and pleasant discourse on the key drivers for the case at hand

We asked the students to visualize their unit models, and describe their growth plans for the case at hand at different points in time during the workshop, and got very encouraging responses. Some of us stuck to numbers, while the others got really visually creative (look at the drawings!)

We asked the students to come up and present their take on their growth plans and unit models, and they did, using impressive, nifty little calculations that made us really happy

And at the end of it, we had a before, and after thing to share –

Post lunch, we slid into the science of financial modelling, pulling out our excel workbooks, and all the works

Our financial modelling expert, Somatish then took matters into his owns hands –

We got an overall positive feedback despite the fact that some of the students present already had some experience in making basic financial models, and therefore found that our detailed modules on the different financial worksheets slowed down the pace of the workshop.

But anyhow, at the end of a grueling session of about 13 continuous hours, we still managed to look like one big happy bunch!