Appearing on The Leaders Council Podcast, entrepreneur Matthew Farmer shares the story of how a volunteering experience back in 2001 culminated in a chain of events that would lead him to establish his own business, Emerging World, two years later.
At the time that his life-changing experience came around, Farmer did not plan to start his own venture. In reality, the opportunity grew out of a gap year that he had managed to carve out for himself. He had recently left a job in the sales and marketing department of a publishing company and was making the most of his free time prior to starting a Master of Business Administration degree at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. During this time, he found himself in Mexico where he was aiming to improve his mastery of the Spanish language. With a hunger to become involved in a worthwhile project while there, he found himself volunteering for an organisation working in microfinance, a form of banking that provides financial services to low-income individuals or groups who would otherwise have no access to finance.
“At the time, microfinance was very new to me,” Farmer told podcast host, Scott Challinor. “The group I was volunteering for was basically focused on loaning small amounts of money to groups of women who couldn't access any kind of credit from the formal financial system.
“For me, that experience totally changed the way that I saw the world. I'd always thought that business was about making money and then development work on the other hand was actually all about doing good for the world. They seemed to be two very separate things. Yet, here was this non-profit that I was working with, loaning out money like a bank with what seemed like high rates of interest. It did seem almost like a loan shark operation to begin with, but I came to realise at the end of the experience that these women did not have any kind of opportunity to put their plans for business and supporting their families into practice. So, what this access to credit did was really unleash the entrepreneur within them and enable them to support themselves, their families and their communities.
“As I reflected on that experience, I realised it challenged my take on the world and that maybe businesses out there could fulfil a strong social purpose as well as being a business. I remember being sat on a step outside this little office in a town called Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the wild dogs were barking around in the late afternoon sunset as they do in that part of the world, and I thought to myself that it would be great if people with up-to-date skills could go and help these small businesses and non-profits.”
It soon dawned on Farmer that he had found the baseline idea for what would become his future business. But, pondering further, he knew that there would already be challenges that he would have to find a way to overcome.
“The real challenge is that those skilled individuals who could help businesses and non-profits normally have jobs of their own. They weren’t people like me who happened to be between situations, as I was between leaving my old job and starting to study. So, I asked myself how we could possibly persuade people who are in jobs to be able to go off and do this sort of thing.
“At this point, I really thought about what the value proposition is for a company to let their people have these sorts of opportunities. As I reflected on that, the shift in my own thinking, that challenge to my worldview that I went through, I thought to myself that maybe there's some kind of learning experience that we could create, for these companies, that would enable them to send these individuals off to have these rich and fulfilling experiences; valuable learning experiences that they could bring back and use in their career. That was the seed of the idea behind my business.”
After leaving Mexico and commencing his MBA studies, Farmer was able to build his list of connections and develop his business plan. When he finished his degree in 2003, he was resolved to get his business set-up and that began his entrepreneurial journey.
Recalling the early days of developing the business that would eventually become Emerging World, Farmer candidly revealed that his sheer determination to succeed and his passion about what he wanted his company to achieve were the main factors which enabled him to surpass any obstacle.
Farmer said: “The key thing when you’re building your own business is finding something that you’re truly passionate about. If you indulge in that passion, you will find a way to make it work. Running your own business should not feel like work.
“I knew I’d found a real market opportunity but the challenge for me was to exploit it in a better way than anyone else who is out there trying to do something similar. Great entrepreneurship is often about not coming up with something entirely new but finding a way to do something that people are already doing significantly better. I felt many times during the first three or four years of setting up this business that I didn't have a better way of doing something that people already doing before. But I was passionate about what I did. So, while from a conventional business point of view, I may not have been running an attractive business to other people from the outside, for me it was enough to really keep me going until we were able to develop new ways of doing things that allowed for that sustainable and successful business to begin taking root.”
Having successfully managed to build the in-person immersive experiences that made Emerging World a success, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, Farmer told of how the company had to undergo a period of immense change once more.
“I would say that before the pandemic struck, 95 per cent of the experiences that we provided were in-person experiences. Since the pandemic, we've not really been able to do any. So, we have to find a way to create powerful virtual experiences. The story of our organisation in the last couple of years has been finding a way to do that.
“The process of really thinking about how we can create a virtual experience allowed us to tap into our creativity and find new ways of doing things and although it was an enforced challenge, I found it really enjoyable to undergo that creative process. Ultimately, it's been quite a fruitful experience. It has led to all sorts of positive lessons, and I am excited about bringing people back into the physical company again and balancing our old ways of doing things with these changes we made. The new virtual side of our business has a valuable place in our offering now.”
Listen to the full interview with Matthew Farmer on The Leaders Council Podcast below.
Photo by Jukka Aalho on Unsplash
