Assets’ Great Social Enterprise Pitch guides entrepreneurs toward ‘triple bottom line’

“Less words,” Lisa Weaver-Gonzalez said. “More pictures.”

Weaver-Gonzalez was offering advice on a presentation during a recent training workshop for the 2024 Great Social Enterprise Pitch. Your slides can’t be too busy, she explained. You can say more in your script but that, too, has to be tight and focused.

“Just remember,” she said, “You only have five minutes.”

The other participants chimed with their own suggestions. The atmosphere in the Southern Market Center conference room was enthusiastic and collaborative.

Weaver-Gonzalez is director of programs at Assets, a Lancaster nonprofit that promotes entrepreneurship and economic development in underserved communities. She is helping candidates prepare for Assets’ business plan competition, which is returning after a two-year hiatus.

The Great Social Enterprise Pitch offers a cohort of central Pennsylvania entrepreneurs the opportunity to receive training and mentorship. They then go head-to-head in a Shark Tank-style event, touting their business to a team of judges and making their case for seed funding.

A social enterprise is a business that aims to make a positive impact, earning revenue through its goods and services while enhancing the welfare of the community, the environment or both.

That’s the “triple bottom line,” Assets CEO Jaime Arroyo said: People, planet and profit.

This year’s Pitch will be the first one to take place live and in person since 2019. The 2020 edition had to be canceled due to the pandemic. Assets hosted a virtual version in 2021, then hit the “pause” button for two years while it focused on a leadership transition and the move of its offices to Southern Market Center.

This time around, Arroyo said, Assets encouraged applicants to incorporate a focus on Science Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics, or STEAM. The hope is that it will lead to ideas that are more scalable and offer more economic opportunity.

While not required, strictly speaking, STEAM will be a factor in the judges’ scoring, Arroyo said.

Things got under way in June with the selection of 10 candidate enterprises. Nine are individual entrepreneurs; one is a duo, Tabitha Benitez and Alex Colon, who hope to launch a membership -based hub for local artists called The Ripple Effect.

Arroyo described the nine-week incubator program the participants go through as “Entrepreneurship 101.” It covers the basics of market research, business planning and how to incorporate social impact.

Rather than shoot for the moon right away, Assets encourages participants to develop a “minimum viable product,” or MVP: A low risk starting point that can serve as proof of concept and lay the groundwork for sustainable expansion.

This year’s contenders are enthusiastic. Brooklyn Smith-Jones, who wants to start a make-your-own-candle company, said the incubator is helping her develop her vision into “a formalized plan that is actually achievable,” breaking down a daunting journey into manageable steps.

“I’m getting tons of valuable information,” said nurse Aracelis Rittenburg, whose Arcarea Adult Day Care would provide innovative programming to older adults and those with disabilities. Benitez, of The Ripple Effect, agreed, saying the Pitch has reshaped her ideas and helped her pivot in many ways.

It’s valuable to have a program that lifts up women and minority entrepreneurs, said Lily Meng, who is developing CoCarting.com, an e-commerce platform for friends and family members to shop online together. “This is a great program for all of us,” she said.

The group will make their first-round pitches on Aug. 21 to an internal committee at Assets, who will whittle the 10 candidates down to five finalists. They will go through additional coaching to prepare them for the showcase event.

That will take place at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 12, at Mickey’s Black Box on the Rock Lititz campus, and will include live performances. Tickets are $50.

The top prize is $10,000; the second and third place winners will receive $5,000 and $2,500. The in-kind goods and services that were part of the prize packages in previous years have been phased out, Arroyo said: Too often they went unused because they didn’t align with what recipients needed.

Crowdfunding was a requirement for contestants in previous Pitches, but not this year. Assets needed to simplify and streamline the event to keep it manageable, Arroyo said.

This year’s anchor sponsors for the event are the Lancaster County Community Foundation and the Lancaster STEM Alliance.

The first Great Social Enterprise Pitch took place in 2014. It was won by the Common Wheel, a nonprofit bicycle co-op that recently opened its third location. (United Way of Lancaster County has supported the Common Wheel with Level Up & Launch grants in 2023-24 and 2024-25.) Other past winners include The Stroopie Co. on North Duke Street (2015); and Uni-Vision Childcare Center (2019), which White House Senior Advisor Tony Perez visited last month.

Arroyo said he thinks the Pitch has done a good job of raising awareness and understanding of social enterprises in Lancaster County, which was one of the main objectives when it was launched. Back then, “social enterprise” wasn’t a common term; now it is.

“Now it’s just built into the DNA of Assets,” he said. “Entrepreneurs are coming in, and the reason they want to start a business is, they see a problem that they want to solve. … There’s a bigger purpose. It’s cool to see that.”