Business Mentoring to Scale Cardano Use Cases on the Ground

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Scott Poynton

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

12

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Provide support with community-based, business building mentoring from someone with a long-term, proven record for growing impactful and successful enterprises.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

Yes

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

The mentoring community runs on a web-based software platform developed and managed by Circle Inc. adifferentway community pays a subscription to exist on the platform.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

No

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

Within adifferentway community, all the information will be open-source. For the public and the Cardano community, some information and insights will be shared outside adifferentway to demonstrate the utility and the progress of the project. No licence is required as there is no software being built or offered as part of the project.

[METADATA] SDG rating

The project will support SDG17: Strengthening the means of implementation through Global Partnerships.

Yet, all other SDGs come into play because the project will support Cardano entrepreneurs to implement their projects and achieve real, on ground impact. Their projects focus on achieving a whole range of SDGs. For example, if their project focuses on regenerative agriculture, then this project will indirectly support the achievement of SDG 15: Life on Land. If their project tackles poverty alleviation, then this project indirectly supports the achievement of SDG1, and so on.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

The Cardano community is packed with amazing people who are excited about the impact the Cardano blockchain can have in the world. These are wonderful, impact-driven people who are full of ideas about how blockchain technology can support the transition to a just, regenerative world. These are budding social entrepreneurs who, every day, burst with a new insight about how technology could do this, that, or even how to get funded for it.

They apply to Project Catalyst and, if they’re fortunate enough to secure funding, they set about building their solution with great passion and vigour. Often, they do build an amazing piece of tech and this is, and of itself, a contribution to the world. It contributes to the body of knowledge and it stretches human boundaries of what’s possible. All good, but sometimes, a great idea can fail or limit the success of it because a good entrepreneur can also be a bad manager or businessman.

Project Catalyst team and community recognise those challenges and currently ongoing series of community working groups that support the mentorship needs of catalyst funded proposals. More info can be found here: https://projectcatalyst.io/blog/catalyst-working-groups-roadmap. This proposal is fully inline with these objectives. With the growing number of funded proposals and especially ones dealing with ReFI and RWA use cases the mentorship support is becoming a growing need.  

This is a terrible shame. The world is in something of a dark place and we need these amazing people and their ideas to flourish. We need these ideas to flourish as social impact businesses that not only broaden our technological boundaries, but bring positive change and real, on-ground impact, everywhere in the world. We need them to flourish as great examples of what’s possible so that we inspire new people, with new ideas to come to the Cardano community that ignites new creativity to tackle even harder problems.

Bottom line – we need these ideas to become thriving, profitable, social impact businesses.

And right now, that’s not happening enough because having a good tech idea, having passion, and having funding to build something, does not, on its own, make for a successful, impactful business. The Cardano community is missing opportunities, at some scale it seems, to transform the world and create an incredible buzz around what it’s doing.

Cardano community aspiring business leaders need mentoring from someone:

• Who has built social enterprises from the ground up,
• Who has been a founder.
• Who has struggled and suffered and almost disappeared under the weight of cash-flow crisis.
• Who has translated passionate ideas into big social and environmental impacts.
• Who believes in the power of technology but who also understands its limitations.
• Who can be compassionate but hard-nosed; kind but firm. 
• Whose values are aligned with the Cardano community. 
• Who has shown dedication to the Cardano community cause.

The solution, to provide hard-nosed business mentoring to Cardano community social entrepreneurs, is built on a belief and track record, that Scott Poynton fits the bill of the business mentor that the community needs. The project approaches the problem in this way because it is a direct response – mentoring from an experienced business leader with aligned values is needed.

Scott has already built an online business mentoring community called adiffererentway, that helps existing and budding social entrepreneurs to find their way and grapple with real business challenges.The platform provides: 

• Open spaces within the community -> community members can post, ask questions and attend events.
• Direct messaging facility -> people can communicate with each other and with Scott.
• Host and participate in live chats -> mentoring sessions, community events and webinars. 
• Private spaces for specified groups -> a private Cardano Deep Dive community space will be created for this project.

adifferentway is a subscription-based community. It is not free to join mainly to incentivize the community to engage more and so to bring value to its members. The base membership – which is set at CHF64 - ADA155/month or CHF640- ADA1550 /year - brings people into the community where they can engage as everyone else. The Deep Dive membership – set at CHF1,200 - ADA2903/quarter, CHF4,800- ADA11,612/year - is for people, generally though not exclusively leaders, who want more one-on-one mentoring and support.

The project proposes that 5 x Deep Dive subscriptions be made available to Cardano community members. These will be Cardano community social entrepreneurs who are also up and running with their businesses. Scott Poynton will establish a space within adifferentway where the ‘Cardano Five’ can join, interact and benefit from mentoring and support.

 

Beyond the Cardano Five, quarterly newsletters about the mentoring journey will be shared with the entire Cardano community. That engagement will be indirect, but it will nonetheless create opportunities for the entire Cardano community to benefit from the support being offered to the five.

 

It is proposed that funds from Project Catalyst cover 75% of the subscription rather than 100%. It’s critical that Cardano community Adifferentway members have skin in the game, and if the subscriptions are 100% covered by Project Catalyst, there’s a risk that people will join, not engage and thus secure no value from the experience. Ultimately, the objective is that their businesses flourish. They’re coming to adifferentway to get support, but if they then don’t engage, we’re again wasting everyone’s time.

Impact measurement will be more qualitative rather than quantitative. It’s difficult to analyse the quantitative impact of mentoring in a short timespan, but the mentees will know – they’ll feel – if the mentoring is of value and we will collect evidence from them about what the program means to them.

 

adifferentway will survey the Cardano Five every quarter to secure feedback as to how they’re finding the experience, whether it’s helping, what more could be done etc. Survey results will help frame the work going forward so rather than wait until the end of the project, there will be opportunities for in-project learning and recalibration to ensure the Cardano community members get maximum benefit possible.

The project’s uniqueness generates from the unique background and experience of its proponent, Scott Poynton. Scott has three decades experience running projects and delivering strong, credible, real world impacts on the ground. For the past twenty-five years, he’s been founding, surviving, growing and flourishing as a social entrepreneur. Scott founded his first social enterprise, The Forest Trust (TFT), in 1999. When he stepped aside as CEO at the end of 2015, TFT had an annual turnover of CHF18 million, 265 staff working in 48 counties, and impacted the environmental and social credentials of more than USD1 trillion in annual supply chain transactions for some of the biggest companies in the world. He transitioned in a new leadership before leaving TFT, now called Earthworm Foundation, in 2019. Earthworm Foundation continues to flourish and now has an annual income of CHF28 million that it continues to use to create positive environmental and social impact. During his time at TFT, Scott negotiated major real-world breakthroughs across numerous industries. He's about action and impact; he gets things done, on the ground.

Scott launched two new social enterprises – a different way Limited (in 2019) and Pond Foundation (in 2021) and both continue to grow and grapple with real world challenges. He isn’t a tech expert, but he has been involved in the Cardano community, particularly Cardano for Climate, since early 2022. He presented on the main stage at the Cardano Foundation Summit in Lausanne in 2022 and has delivered successful outcomes on two Project Catalyst projects. He gets how tech can create amazing real world benefits. He has great compassion for business leaders and has been coaching and mentoring them for decades. 

Scott’s coaching and mentoring is now more accessible than ever thanks to the online adifferentway Circle platform. It also provides opportunities for participants to learn from and support each other, not just from Scott.

Cardano has made great efforts to be sustainable and to position itself, based on the values of its founder and leadership team, to strive to create as much value and benefit for the world as possible. Unless Cardano-based social enterprises flourish and grow their impact, there’s a risk that Cardano’s unique offering to the world will underachieve what’s possible. The project strives to supercharge Cardano’s global impact by pumping up the tyres of Cardano-based social enterprises, giving Cardano a unique and powerful story as the world’s most impactful blockchain technology.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

The project will bring hard-nosed, compassionate business mentoring to a focused group within the Cardano community that, through its success, will inspire the wider Cardano community to believe and know that setting up a thriving business and creating real on the ground impact is possible. It will inspire a ‘can-do’ belief based on real-life cases rather than dreams of what could be.

Beyond that, the project will share insights from the focused group proceedings in regular updates and newsletters throughout the year. 

The project will also seek to work closely with the Cardano Foundation which itself strives to support Cardano community members to thrive and create impact.

In short, there will be much sharing with the wider Cardano community to help with real world problems and to bring inspiration to those working to bring change.

Impact measurement will be determined through online surveys as well as direct testimonials from people within the focused groups and the wider community. It will mostly be qualitative measurements but the surveys will also generate quantitative results through questions that rank the project’s services on a scale of 1-10. There will be ‘before’ and ‘after’ surveys that will capture the project’s impact. These results will be shared – even if they reveal no impact – with the wider Cardano community.

Impact stories, outputs and opportunities will be captured in quarterly newsletters. There will be case studies that will share the participants’ journeys as well as qualitative and quantitative metrics from the surveys.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Scott has a wealth of experience founding, surviving and growing social enterprises and delivering unprecedented, on-ground impacts, gained through a long, challenging journey since founding TFT in March 1999. He has reached an age and stage in his career where he knows it’s time to share and to that end, set up his first online community in 2020. That helped many people deal with the challenges of pandemic but he closed it in June 2021 because he felt that it wasn’t delivering the impact he sought. He wanted people to engage and take action as a result of their community experience, as opposed to just feeling supported, so in September 2022, he launched adifferentway, based on much research in the intervening period to better understand how to make online communities thrive.It’s a challenging task and not as straightforward as might be imagined, but after a period of exploration, he started to promote the community in January 2024, and adifferentway is now running with 32 members already creating a positive impact, based on the results of a first survey- Scott is here to give and create impact and devotes many hours to supporting adifferentway community members.

In terms of being trusted to manage funds, Scott Poynton grew TFT to an annual turnover over more than CHF18 million and through that period, the enterprise’s annual accounts were audited, without non-compliance issues, by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He managed the budgets of large, multi-million Euro European Commission projects and other donor funded projects that each required extensive auditing. Again, there were never any non-compliance issues raised. TFT’s income was 95% generated from its member companies who demanded strong, credible outcomes and he led his team to do that consistently, year-on-year, so, under Scott’s watch, TFT grew its income 30-40% each year. This wouldn’t have been possible with mis-managed funds.

He continues to run Pond Foundation which submits its annual accounts to the Autorité cantonale de surveillance des fondations et des institutions de prévoyance (ASFIP). Neither Pnd Foundation or a different way Sàrl have had their accounts formally audited yet because neither business is at the scale where that is mandatory, but again, both continue to serve members and clients who continue to partner with the organisations, in part, based on strong delivery and a sense that their payments are properly spent and attributed.

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1:

• Presenting the opportunity to Catalyst funded proposals and selecting 5 best fit projects
• 5 x Deep Dive membership subscriptions have been qualified into adifferentway. Cardano community participants will be qualified via an online survey that will assess their intent, passion and prospective capacity to engage and benefit once accepted. 

Acceptance criteria 

• 5 people have paid their base and Deep Dive membership subscriptions respectively, with support from Project Catalyst funding and have joined adifferentway.

Milestone output(s)

• Cardano Deep Dive space is established and all Cardano Five have joined and been given a tour of adifferentway to understand how it works.

Acceptance criteria 

• All Cardano Five members have joined the Cardano Deep Dive space and have joined a Live event to be guided around adifferentway.

Milestone output(s)

• Three, six and nine month feedback surveys have been completed.

Acceptance criteria 

• Reports of each feedback survey are shared with Project Catalyst and the Cardano community.

Milestone output(s)

• Final twelve month report which includes qualitative reviews of progress and quantitative metrics based on survey results.

Acceptance criteria 

• Final twelve month report published and shared with the Cardano community.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Scott Poynton, Founder and Chief Inspiration Officer, adifferentway Sàrl

https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-poynton/

Scott will lead all aspects of the project. He is the mentor and guide for adifferentway and will establish the Cardano community space within the community. He will post regularly and set up fortnightly events to support the 5 Cardano entrepreneurs. He will conduct one-on-one mentoring sessions with Deep Dive members on a regular basis.

Scott will recruit a community administrator to support him to manage the community and organise events and other engagements e.g., one-on-one meetings, with the members. Scott has already identified a suitably qualified person. They have great communications and design skills and will be great organisers. 

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

BUDGET:

1 Total Project Cost:

Deep Dive membership subscription:

Deep Dive membership subscriptions are CHF1,200 - ADA2903/quarter or CHF4,800 - ADA11612/year

5 x CHF4,800 = CHF24,000 = ADA58,060

Project monitoring and reporting costs:

CHF2,000 (ADA4,838) is required to cover all reporting and communication costs.

TOTAL PROJECT BUDGET = CHF26,000 = ADA62,894

2 Project Catalyst Budget:

The Project Catalyst budget comprises 75% of the Deep Dive membership cost and the Project monitoring and reporting costs:

= ADA58,060 x 0.75% + ADA4,838

= ADA48,383

TOTAL PROJECT CATALYST BUDGET = ADA48,383

3 Cardano members’ budget

The remaining 25% of the Deep Dive membership must be paid by the Cardano community participants. 

5 x Deep Dive membership subscriptions x 0.25% = ADA14,515

Or, ADA2,903/participant.

* ADA is calculated based on 0.4133 CHF. If ADA value will go up, we will consider additional services. If it will go down, we will still offer the base service.

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Scott’s current mentoring charge-out rate is CHF200/hour. As such, a Deep Dive membership, at CHF4,800/year effectively buys 24 hours of his time (2 hours/month/participant) for one-on-one mentoring and participation in the entire community with events etc. Current Deep Dive members get significantly more than 2 hours/month of Scott’s time. That’s why the Deep Dive membership represents great value.

The subscription does represent great value for the length of mentoring time and engagement with someone as experienced as Scott. That’s the beauty of having an online community and forming groups so that group mentoring is possible, beyond the one-on-ones.

But does it represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Scott argues that it does because there will be sharing, in the quarterly newsletters, news of what’s been discussed in adifferentway. The aim will be to share as many insights as possible without breaching confidentiality.

More broadly, if Cadano community entrepreneurs are more successful at founding, surviving and growing their social enterprises, this is a huge boost for the community and the Cardano brand. At a total Project Catalyst cost of ADA48,383, these funds will support deep mentoring for 5 qualified Cardano community members. That represents a mentoring cost of ADA9,676 per member to receive 12 months mentoring from a super-experienced social enterprise business mentor.