Chid Liberty: The Juggler

Chid Liberty: Co-Founder, Sustainable Global Sourcing, Liberian Women’s Sewing Project

Chid Liberty is a juggler.  In addition to being a finance guru and an entrepreneur, he presides over a four-pronged hybrid social enterprise that does works on two continents—providing fair trade certified garments to retailers in the US and giving women good jobs in Liberia. Recently, Sustainable Global Sourcing, the for-profit company based in the US, received its first private label order from a major retailer.  Beyond Profit asked Liberty about the challenges of keeping everything moving.

Beyond Profit (BP): Your operation has four different arms.  What purpose does each serve and what are the advantages of setting up your enterprise this way?

Chid Liberty (Liberty): Our for-profit in San Francisco, SGS, is the key organization, a for-profit sourcing company.  We interact with major retailers here, and my partner Adam runs sales from East Coast.  We give the Gaps and Levis and Pranas of the world an easy way to buy sustainably sourced African cotton.

Our non-profit Made in Liberia, based in the US, supports our nonprofit in Liberia.  There we have a Community Development Fund, a non-profit that has three programs: capacity building (workforce development training, buying new equipment for the factory and for small cotton producers; business incubation (women-owned SMEs); and community reinvestment (women go through a three-day workshop; a group therapy session, ethnic sharing exercises; etc.).  Also in Liberia is a for profit factory, the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project.  The women own shares in this Liberian corporation.  It’s not a cooperative.  Women workers own 49% of the company, and I own 51%, but can’t take any economic gains from it.

BP: When you started Sustainable Global Sourcing, did you know that you wanted to be for profit or non-for-profit?

Liberty: Trust me, the legal structure issue is something we talk about daily.  The US legal system and the Liberian system are not ready for an organization like ours.  But, we’re able to offer all the retailers a good financial challenge to some of the worst factories in China.  On top of that, we are transparent.

I knew that I wanted to be for profit because that is my background.  As an entrepreneur, I knew how to get things up and running. I love the adventure—it gets my blood going.  I wasn’t familiar with the nonprofit space.  But, we would get challenges from a lot of people saying that we needed to be in a nonprofit space.  Some smart consultants that said, “There are obvious benefits to the for-profit side, but you are going to need to invest in things like workforce development and community development. And a lot of that work is done more effectively by a nonprofit.” So, we saw the scope for a for-profit and a not-for-profit that does capacity development.

BP: What are the challenges/risks of using this model?

Liberty: The risks are having a rogue entity and losing control, as we see happening in the US all the time.  To make it work, all of these entities have to be governed independently.  I have a presence on each board, but a lot of times I have to recuse myself from votes in order to be careful.  On the non-profit side, we can ‘t do anything that would create an advantage for our for-profit.  So we need to make sure everything is completely independent but yet aligned to the end goal.

BP: How do you manage branding—you have Sustainable global Sourcing as well as Made in Liberia…isn’t that confusing for customers?

Liberty: I don’t think it’s confusing for clients.  Our revenue generator is SGS and the businesses we work with understand immediately what we do. We brought a whole bunch of people to the table who believe in the mission, but the external customer is only concerned with their particular piece.  The customer wants to know that he is sourcing sustainably and not employing slaves.  Our donors are interested in what is happening on the ground.  Every entity needed a structure that they could interact with.  Some only made equity investments.  Some only made PRIs.

BP: What recommendations would you make to other entrepreneurs about structure?

Liberty: Every situation is different and you really need to start off with your mission.  Then generally, you have to be creative.  If the structure isn’t clear about where you’ll fall in today’s legal guidelines, you need to find out how to get your entities to work together and work within legal guidelines to achieve your mission better.