Welcome to Season 13 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Markey Culver, CEO of The Women’s Bakery, a social enterprise bakery in East Africa. They’re discovering the challenges and rewards that come with creating change through baking. Sponsored by Middleby Bakery Group.

In our second episode, Markey shares the challenges involved with building and scaling a bakery in Rwanda, the lessons learned along the way and what ROI looks like in a social enterprise.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi Markey, thanks so much for joining me again this week.

Markey Culver: Hi Joanie. I’m glad to be back.

Spencer: Last week was an amazing conversation, and we ended it with talking about the moment where you realized that it was a viable concept. Really, it was that first moment, the first ‘Aha!’ moment you knew it was something you couldn’t let go of. But, when you think about that moment that you said, “Okay, it’s going to cost $200 to start it, and if you can come up with the first $100, I’m going to put in the second $100” … that was just the beginning of a really long road, and it’s had a lot of curves; it’s had a lot of bumps, but it’s also been deeply rewarding.

I just want to start out, and it’s kind of a big question, but can you walk me through how the business model was developed initially?

Culver: There are several iterations of the business model, or what is now the business model. Initially, as I said, I have no idea how I came up with this, but I thought it would cost $200 to build a quote, unquote bakery. I finished my service with the Peace Corps in November of 2012 and I came back to the United States having made a promise to this group of women with whom I was baking in the rural Rwandan village. I said, “When you raise $100 let me know, and I’ll come back and help you build this bakery.”

I think, in hindsight, looking back on that, I left them in suspended animation, and probably should have just stayed in the Peace Corps and followed this through. There were several reasons I didn’t, but I do remember one. I’m sure this is probably just an excuse, but you can’t really start a business in the Peace Corps. But I also was ready … I missed my family. I was ready to come back to the United States and eat cheese. God, I couldn’t wait to eat cheese and drink bourbon.

So anyway, I came back to the United States, was here at the end of 2012, and I meant what I said. I had made a promise to these ladies, and I meant it. I just did not think that they would raise the money as quickly as they did. I got a phone call in March of 2013 saying, “Hey, we did it. Time for you to come back.” And I was like, “Oh God.” And this isn’t an insult to Rwanda, but my ‘Oh God’ is just because I was trying to find a job in the United States, trying to figure out what it was like to live back in the United States, etc. while still having this … and it’s not nagging, because that makes it sound negative, but just having this thought, having the business model for what became The Women’s Bakery germinating in my mind. So, when I got that call from the bakers, I had to announce to my family from St. Louis, MO. “Right. I’m going back to Rwanda.” And everybody’s like, “No, you’re not.”

I took some time and was trying to pitch this idea of what would become The Women’s Bakery to my family, and everyone thought I was insane, because they’re like, “You’re back. It’s fine, great. Let’s move forward.”

But the person who really grabbed onto it was my middle brother David. David said, “You know, this is really interesting. Can you tell me more about that?” And so I did, and I explained it as, “Okay, exactly what we are today. I think that this could be a way for women to earn irrevocable skills, skills that can never be taken away. It’s a way for women to earn sustainable income, and then it’s a way to feed kids. It’s not a meal, but it’s a snack. If we fortify the snack and make it really nutritious, it could just be a nutrient boost for these kiddos who don’t have a lot of access to that. And my brother David was really captivated by, particularly, that last point.

David helped me develop the business plan. I was working for an insurance company at the time in St Louis. I would do my work and then, on the side, I would be writing business plans and trying to figure out breaking points and stuff, which I didn’t understand what that was because this is pre-business school. I told the women when I got the call that David and I had come up with what we felt was a pretty solid business plan at the time. It was called The Bushoga Women’s Bakery because it was the name of the village in which I served. I said, “Okay, David, can you come with me and help me build this first bakery?” And he was like, “Nah.” And I said, “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go in Europe if you come and you build this.” So that was the deal.

Spencer: It’s a pretty good bribe.

Culver: It was; it worked. In, I think it was, June or July of 2013, David and I flew Rwanda. We went back to Bushoga, the village. I was communicating with women at this time, but it was joyous, because this was something that people were excited about. It felt really viable.

We rented a house, and for the umpteenth time, I am not a baker. I had no exposure, really, to a bakery, and so I thought, “Oh, this is great, if I just buy 80 pots and we have charcoal stoves, we can easily pump out lots of loaves of bread,” which is exactly what we did. We had charcoal stoves, and they’re small so they’re contained. I don’t know how to describe this to an audience that hasn’t experienced this, but the house was rough cement, and there were rooms. There was one larger room that we put things in. So, we had these rooms and an open area, kind of like a foyer, and that’s where we could light these charcoal stoves, and in one of the rooms, that’s where we were kneading bread. I’m sure a lot of your audience is going to be horrified hearing this, because the food code … was there a food code? Who knows?

Spencer: I mean, we’re talking about an East African village.

Culver: But still, Rwanda is militaristic about cleanliness. We really … I did my best, and the ladies were very clean. I’d read somewhere it’s good to use wood, so we made a bunch of wooden tables, and kneaded bread on wood. But was it the most sanitary? No, I thought, probably naively, I was like, “Well, whatever germs are on there, and they’ll bake off, right? It’s going into an oven.”

Spencer: That’s called the kill step.

Culver: Well, okay, perfect. See, I knew that. Right, exactly. It’s called the kill step. That’s what it’s called. I had developed with David a very rudimentary training plan, like a lesson plan with the steps. Now, we would call this production. Didn’t know that word. It’s just, “Here are the steps in making bread. Here’s the recipe for the bread. This is what you need to follow. Here’s the timing.” That’s how we got started.

It was a pretty big deal, because the house where we rented, we paid for water to be brought into the house. So, it’s a big deal. There was a buzz in the community. People were excited about the idea that we were going to be selling bread. We started probably … we made, what, 10 loaves a day, and the loaves we made in circular pots. We would roll, probably 100-gram rolls of dough and place them in a pot and bake it that way so kids could pull off a hunk of bread more easily than cutting it.

That’s what we did. We tried to sell in loaves. We learned quickly that loaves were expensive, too expensive for people to purchase in the community. So, then we started making dough balls, putting them on trays. We made the ovens. David and I had investigated like, “How do you build an oven?” There were some gentlemen in neighboring villages, and they helped us construct an oven, which now, in hindsight, is a little bit horrifying, because it was an old petrol can that we hollowed out and put metal bars in so we could put trays that we made by hand into that, and we put it in the earth. Extremely rudimentary, and I think now, with the foresight that I have, had I actually contacted someone in the baking industry, which I didn’t know existed, we would have started in a much better place than a hollowed-out petrol can in the earth and trying to bake in that.

But that’s how we started. It was a … success is probably not the right word … It was going. Going to the point where it was cute, because the rolls of bread that we were selling were affectionately called Obama bread in our village ad in the neighboring villages, because word got that there was an American making bread. At the time President Obama was our president, and therefore American, and everything was Obama. So, our bread was called Obama bread.

Spencer: That’s funny.

Culver: I know. David and I were there three months, and that’s what I thought. I was like, “Great. It’s only going to take three months. We’ll build this bakery. We’ll get women trained and set up, and then you figure it out.” That was the initial model, was that this would be a bakery that the women owned through a cooperative they worked at. They sold the bread, and they would take home the profits from the sale of the bread, and it didn’t work.

It felt nice, right? Having done this now, I’m always a little skeptical when I see people trying to build something that, one, they don’t know very much about, and two, they’re in a different country where I’m like, “Well, I’ve been there.”

Spencer: Okay, so that’s what I was going to ask you. What would you say was the biggest learning curve: starting a business in a country where you weren’t a citizen, starting a business with a product you really didn’t have much experience making or teaching and training women, especially in that type of culture where women didn’t typically start businesses.

Culver: I mean, it’s the trifecta; it’s all of that. ‘Yes’ is my answer. I think that, now being where I am, I think you need one aspect of crazy and then another aspect of knowledge to be able to get started. But I think that my crazy … and this is where I caution people, “Is it crazy good or is it like a crazy ego, where you think you can actually get this done?” Right? Not to say that sometimes it can’t be both, and I’m sure that I had both of those at some point, but I do think that it was particularly challenging.

Yes, I felt that I knew Rwanda because I had lived there for over two years, but I really didn’t, and I certainly didn’t know, from a business standpoint how to incorporate a business, what the food code laws are — because they do exist — how to employ people, what the regulations are around that. There was a lot of ego and naivete going into this, thinking I know how to do this because I Googled it.

So yes, I think that was challenging. Then the other aspects, the cultural aspect, was challenging, too, because from an American standpoint, time is not elastic, right? If you say, “Hey, our meeting starts at 1 p.m., I’m going to show up at 12:50 p.m.”, and that’s normal in the US. Promptness and being very timely. From my experience starting the first bakery in Rwanda, it was not that way. Time is more elastic and it’s not because people are lazy. It’s because they’ve got a lot of stuff that they’re doing; they’ve got a lot that they’re responsible for.

So, we started, I think, with 10 or 12 women in Bushoga, and we would say, “Right, you need to come at 8 a.m.” and some women would show up at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. But again, it’s not because they’re lazy or because they don’t know what time it is. It’s because they have a lot of other responsibilities. So, we’re just adding one more responsibility to this and expecting them to prioritize that over their other responsibilities. That is just straight up naivete.

From a product standpoint, I created … this is hilarious. We have a team member now … Well, we have many team members who are professional bakers but we have one in the United States who is going through a recipe book that I created early on, and she sent me a message saying, “Hey, is it okay if I just tweak this? Because I tried it, and I think it would be better this way.” And I was like, “Oh, it’s all garbage. I’m not a baker. Please, please update it. God, if somebody else is trying to follow this, please update it and make it something palatable.”

That’s why I say it’s the trifecta. It was a lot of naivete and bold optimism. I think that can get you in trouble sometimes, and then in other times, you can succeed. ‘Succeed’ might be a strong word. You can get to the next step.

Spencer: I mean, you could successfully get to the next step. I think succeeding … in order to have overall success, there has to be incremental wins along the way.

Culver: Yeah, exactly.

Spencer: So, what was the learning curve like for them? I’m thinking about it a different way than I initially intended, because I was thinking just of making bread without you there and making it their own, but culturally, when they live in an environment where time is elastic, that is diametrically opposed to the process of baking.

Culver: The regimented schedule of baking, right? Exactly.

Spencer: Right. So, what was that learning curve like for them?

Culver: For the women, I think it was quite steep, because, again, these women have so many other responsibilities outside of just trying to bake. My assumption was, “Oh, well, we will do this all day, five days a week, and this is your job. Now, this is a job, and it is a job for which you will be paid. Therefore, you need to be here eight hours a day.” That was a steep learning curve for them, too, not because they don’t know what work is. It’s like they have so much work. Which work takes precedence right now?

I found a person who baked in a town several hours away. So, I called in a professional baker, who is Rwandan, and he came to help with some of the training. I think there was a real … in addition to the learning curve, which was mainly around responsibility and time … and by responsibility, I mean they’re juggling so many different responsibilities. The learning curve, I think, was still exciting because they were making a product that they really wanted to make, and learn how to improve, and then learn how to sell.

I think that the other kind of steep learning curve for all of us was actually sales, trying to figure out, “Okay, how do we sell this?” That one … I mean, we’re still learning that in East Africa. We’re still learning what the best practices are, what the best methods are. But in a rural Rwandan village, how does one do that? Especially in Rwanda, which is so clean, and they value cleanliness so much, so you can’t just walk out holding a loaf of bread saying, “Hey, who wants to buy this loaf of bread?” And there’s no packaging. How does one package … just stuck it in a paper bag and said, “Do you want to try this? Also pay me money.” So that was a steep learning curve.

Then the steepest learning curve, and ultimately, what led to or was a primary factor in the demise of this original bakery was the rainy season. If we sell bread on foot, which is what we did, how do you do that when it rains? How do you protect bread? If the bread is in paper bags, which it was, and typically when it rains, that’s when people go inside. And then, if they’re inside, they can’t do very much, so they rest. They’ll either take a nap or, you know, whatever. It’s rest time.

That was something that everybody wanted to do, including the women bakers. Not only could we not physically go out and sell because of the rain, they too, wanted to go home and rest. So, if you’re expecting to sell 20 loaves of bread a day, but you sell zero, and you do that for a whole month of the rainy season, then you have no revenue. And how do you buy raw materials? So, that was the steepest learning curve, I think for all of us.

Spencer: That’s a hard one. How did you overcome that?

Culver: We didn’t. That’s why the bakery failed. We didn’t overcome that one.

Spencer: So, then what happened?

Culver: That original bakery failed, and it failed pretty quickly after it launched, and it was nothing wrong. It was just that we hadn’t designed it in a way that it would work for the women and for the village. I felt that I didn’t understand enough about business, that I had failed, actually, the women and I had failed the business because I wasn’t able … we would call it a lumpy season, right? Where sometimes you have revenue and other times you don’t. So, it creates a lumpy look if you were to chart it out, and I didn’t know that.

When you have working capital, that working capital comes from your revenue, that’s how you buy your raw materials. Well, when you don’t have that, how are you going to buy raw material? So, the women got spooked, and they came and because it was a cooperative, because this is something we all started communally, the women were like, “Well, this is going to fail, and I want my pot back.” So, they would come and take their pot. And I don’t blame them, honestly.

So yeah, the first bakery did not succeed, and there are many reasons for that. And I think that, when I look back on that, a lot of it was just me, as I didn’t know enough, and therefore I couldn’t have set this bakery, this company and the women up for success in the way that it would have lasted.

So, the first bakery closed, and I was pretty upset, and so were the women. What they ended up doing … We had a handful of women who still baked from home and would try and sell it from home, and there might still be one woman still doing that, but that original bakery in those 10 or 12 women … that does not exist anymore. That’s what I mean by failing forward. Because when that failed, it was devastating, and I couldn’t let go of the idea, and nor could my brother, because my brother had seen it work.

It was funny, too, because when he was there, I remember some gentlemen, some Rwandan gentlemen, coming into the bakery to talk to David, my brother, and they were asking for him to start a men’s bakery. They were like, “Excellent. Now that you’re here, it is time for you to start a men’s bakery, because we’re ready.” And it was so sweet, too, because David was like, “I’m so flattered. Thank you so much, but I want to stick with the women.” I really think that that was neat. And it was, obviously, very heartening for both, like, both men and the women in that village,

Anyway, so yes, that failed. It was sad, and then you have to pick up the pieces. And I had to decide whether or not I wanted to pick up the pieces. It was something I still really believed in. But in a way I felt like I hadn’t really restarted my life. It’s not to suggest that my life stopped during the Peace Corps, but I had already made a decision in the Peace Corps that I wasn’t going to live in Rwanda forever. I did want to go back to the United States, and I thought maybe I would like to go into banking with an ‘N’.

Spencer: You still have the ‘N’ on your radar?

Culver: Yes, exactly, because I thought that’s how I could do the most good. I thought … basically a social venture capital firm. That’s what I wanted to do. And for all intents and purposes, that’s what The Women’s Bakery is today, and that’s what I wanted to do. I thought, “Great, if I can channel money this way and get people who actually know what they’re doing and support them, then that’s the best of all worlds.”

So, I came back to the United States and couldn’t let go of this idea, neither could David. I just kept plugging away at the business model. Then I called a good friend of mine in the Peace Corps who had a very similar story to mine. She also started baking bread, a different type of bread, in her village. She was selling it also at a market. So, she had experience with this as well.

To make a very long story short, what ended up happening is I had a donor approach me who had heard about The Bushoga Women’s Bakery, and she said, “I really want you to start something like this again.” And I said, “Oh, no, thank you.” And she was like, “No, that’s the incorrect answer.” She wrote me a check for the startup capital to resurrect The Bushoga Women’s Bakery, which we then called The Rwanda Women’s Bakery. I called my friend from the Peace Corps, and I said, “Hey, I think this is viable. Would you like to work with me?” And she said yes.

That was the first iteration of The Rwanda Women’s Bakery, which was in 2014. I can go through that model too, but this is what I’m talking about. It’s just so many iterations of some successes and then also failures.

Spencer: Okay, I want to call something out, because you said, and I agree with you wholeheartedly, when you’re doing something like this, you have to have the right combination of like, experience and crazy, and it has to be the right type of crazy. And I get what you’re saying. There’s some crazy that comes from ego, like, “I can do this,” and crazy that comes from passion, like, “No matter what it takes, I know I believe in this.” I think when you fail, how you recover from that, the proportion of passion to ego is a huge determining factor in if you fall forward, or if you fall back.

Culver: I think that’s accurate. I don’t know if it’s passion or belief, because I think for me, the crazy was like, “No, I genuinely believe that this can work. I don’t know exactly how, but I genuinely believe that this can work.” ‘This’ being — and now I’m much more articulate about it, because I have done it for so long — I believe that we can build a women-powered bakery that can sell bread to a local community and be profitable and can sustain itself from that.

I genuinely believe that we can socially and economically empower women so there are wraparound services with this as well, but women have access to education and vocational training, women have earned their income like gainful employment, and then women are skillfully making and selling bread to the local community in a way that sustains that bakery, and that was something I’ve never been able to let go of. So, I think as much as I would like to say there was no ego in that, I’m sure there was, but the crazy there, maybe that’s passion, but it was more for me belief, like I truly believe that something like this could work.

Spencer: You are the first person who taught me the term ‘social enterprise’, and then another Baker in St. Louis said it. I was on a tour, and I heard it, and I was like, “I know someone! I know someone!” You coined that term for me. I know you didn’t invent it, but I learned what social enterprise means by learning about The Women’s Bakery.

Also, when you say belief — everything that you’ve been saying since we started the conversation last week — it’s a calling. Hearing you talk is just like … you hear about people having a calling, and this is very clearly … you were called to do this, and every time you tried to chase something that wasn’t this, you inevitably found your way back to it by your choice or someone else’s.

Culver: Yes, yes, that is accurate.100 percent.

Spencer: So, you just described social enterprise for me. How did it come together as a social enterprise when you re-started The Rwanda Women’s Bakery? And then as that model shifted … How did you keep that model of social enterprise as it shifted to the next iteration?

Culver: Yeah, I think there’s still an evolution right now, even with The Women’s Bakery and social enterprise. The way I’ll say I define social enterprise is that you have a charitable mission and a for-profit vehicle. Our charitable mission is we create access to social and economic empowerment opportunities for women, and we create access to nutritious bread that’s affordable for the community. The way that we drive that mission is through the sale of bread.

It’s interesting because our COO Pauline actually has a slightly different definition of social enterprise, and it’s one that I really like. She calls it a gap. So, we are an enterprise, in her mind, we are a commercial business, but we’re dedicated to the social aspects of that business. We’re dedicated to women; we’re dedicated to the wraparound services that we have for women, and those just quickly being we have on-site daycares for women, we provide various training programs like financial literacy training programs.

Those social wraparound services are costly, and they fall outside of the business context. Right now, The Women’s Bakery is a hybrid, where we have for-profit entities, but they’re not profitable yet, and so we subsidize that with donations. That’s the gap that Pauline identifies, and we’re still evolving. So, when we first started, I probably called it a social enterprise — The Bushoga Women’s Bakery — because I wanted to focus on women and I wanted to focus on children.

This is funny because I run a non-profit, but I didn’t believe in non-profits at the time. It’s not because I don’t believe in them in general, I think that I had seen so many failed non-profits abroad, that I really didn’t want to repeat that, because I think that oftentimes they can do more harm than good, and I didn’t want to repeat that. I wanted there to be an enterprise aspect, because that, in theory, makes it more sustainable where you perhaps need donations, or in this sense, investment, until you can be profitable, and then it will sustain itself.

That’s always been a driving force for me, because it alleviates dependency, right? You’re no longer dependent on funds over which you have no control, like the Rwandan women, right? Yeah, they’re not raising money in the United States. I’m raising money in the United States. So that’s what the social enterprise is. And I don’t think that we strayed that much from it, it’s just what has been challenging is the enterprise component. The evolution of the enterprise has been, “Okay, how do we expand our product offerings, where we can maintain our mission, but we can also generate revenue and enough revenue to actually cover our costs and ultimately, one day be profitable?”

Spencer: Well, how does that look from the women’s perspective? I’m thinking about it in context of the culture … like what we talked about earlier … that this was a community in rural East Africa, where you do enough to just stabilize yourself. So, is that a mindset shift for them, like we can be profitable, we can have a solid income and do good?

Culver: I will say, that was the learning curve for me, and I learned this launching the first iteration of The Women’s Bakery, because the original model was the women still own the bakery like, “You own this bakery. We as the corporation do not. You own it and you run it. We’ll train you how to run it, but you ultimately own it.”

Through a series of many trials and a lot of errors and failures, we learned that at least at that time, and I think still to a degree now, women did not want to own the bakeries. And it’s not because the interest wasn’t there. It was because the exposure wasn’t enough for them to see the possibilities. What I mean by that is, the women just wanted a job. They wanted stable income on which they could rely. Owning a business comes with great risk and the collateral that they have if something does go wrong, and we saw this with The Bushoga Women’s Bakery, you’re going to pick up your pots and go home. But, if you have a larger operation than that, what do you do?

I think that for them to understand, for our bakers and our team members to understand the social enterprise model, that’s why I say we’re still evolving. I think that it takes continuous communication, and it takes … we have a saying in Missouri, the ‘Show Me’ state, “You gotta see it to believe it.” It’s very similar in Rwanda, and I think as it should be, right? You can’t expect to just have it like, “Oh, great, this is profitable immediately and I understand how to make it profitable and what to do with the profits.” That’s a very naive approach to any type of business.

Spencer: If only it were that easy.

Culver: Yes, exactly, then there would be a lot more profitable businesses sooner, right?

Spencer: Exactly. Okay, I know we’ve only gotten to a few of the iterations, but like you said, it’s still evolving. But I want to talk about the benefits to the women and how these ‘Aha!’ moments grew and drove you through some of the ups and downs. Do you know, off the top of your head — I know it was one of the early statistics that I learned from you — what was the average income for a Rwandan woman, and how did that income … I know it was exponential, triple digit … increase?

Culver: I think what you’re remembering … I made a presentation to BEMA, and it’s funny that you bring this up, because I was just thinking about this the other night. We just did a survey of the women bakers, and our social impact program manager just sent out the survey. This is a way for us to track, “Are we actually doing what we say we’re doing?” When we say women’s empowerment, who’s defining it, what’s the definition, and is it real, you know? What is it?

So, I think that the statistic I used was for one of our bakeries, which we have three bakeries in Rwanda. This group is probably an average for the women at the other two bakeries. Prior to working for The Women’s Bakery, if you were to monetize what their annual income was, and I say monetize, because remember, if they’re subsistence farmers, if you sell their products, then you have money. If you don’t …

Spencer: There’s no actual income.

Culver: Right. We did an average of one of the bakeries, for the bakers, and I think it was $50 a year. That’s pretty low, again, monetized. So, I think that they could barter, they have other things, but still, we’re talking about poverty. Dare I say, extreme poverty. So now those women bakers, that same group, is earning, I think it’s like $120 or $150 a month.

Spencer: That’s amazing.

Culver: Yeah, it is amazing. I think that this is what Pauline would point out as the social enterprise. So, is that bakery profitable? No. Then people would say, “Well, why?” Okay, well, there’s one of the whys: We would love to increase those women’s salaries or maybe we have. That bakery has been open since 2017 and women have had a raise since then, even though that bakery is not and was never profitable. But we’ve done that because there are certain metrics by which we measure women’s empowerment, and income is one of them, right? Savings is another. So that bakery is not profitable, and we’re filling in that gap through donations because of that social mission.

Spencer: And I remember you saying once that with that income, you mentioned savings, but do I remember correctly that women would use their income to then educate their children? In the first episode last week, you said, if you’re lucky enough to get an education …

Culver: That’s exactly right.

Spencer: So now this is empowering women to be able to get education for their children.

Culver: That is 100 percent correct, Joanie. Women were able to save money to send their kids to school. And right now, according to our 2024 survey of our 30 women bakers, 74% report that, yes, they can afford school fees. Eight percent, and this may not add up completely to 100 because I’m rounding, 8% say no — and I can explain that — and 17.6% report non-applicable, meaning either their kids are too old for school, or they have babies. So short answer, yes, they were able to save money to send their kids to school, but not immediately. That was actually a big hurdle that we had, because women were not making enough money initially. Hence why we did raise salaries, hence why the bakeries had a longer horizon for profitability, because we did increase women’s salaries.

But I just learned for those women who report not being able to afford their children’s school fees, it’s either because they have one woman has nine children, that’s a lot of kids and a lot of school tuition to pay, and then a lot of these ladies are now trying to send their children to university. University is much more expensive than primary or secondary school. That is an interesting thing to learn and an interesting problem to begin to solve with these women.

Spencer: So, you’ve had successes, and sometimes wins lead to new challenges … As you’re growing and evolving, how hard is it? I guess this is where growing pains come from. So how have you been able to navigate the evolution of The Women’s Bakery?

Culver: For me, it is making sure that I am really listening and I’m really open to hearing what I may not want to hear, if that makes sense. I think that we say we empower women, and then making sure that the reports that we’re actually … when we are collecting data, are we asking the right questions? And if we are, the answers that we get, some we may not like.

I’ll give you an example. We have one woman who is a baker, and she’s an original, been with us since day one, and she has been our pinnacle, at least from a PR standpoint. And we’re not like sleazy PR. I’ve really tried to say, “This is real.” What we are reporting, what we’re projecting to the world that we do is real, and this is what women are saying.

So, our pinnacle woman that we have elevated and used on all of our things, a report came back that she was not sleeping on a bed, and it’s like, well, what the heck? You make a lot more money than you did, we’ve been through savings or financial literacy programs in which there are saving classes, classes about savings. So how is it possible that you’re reporting you don’t have enough money to buy a mattress? Well, what we learned is she’s sending her son to university. She’s able to pay for university, and all of her money is going towards that, where she’s not able to pay for herself for a mattress.

Spencer: Typical mother.

Culver: Yeah, exactly. So, I think managing that evolution, how do you do that, right? I think that it’s being able to, as leaders, hear the hard things and then work with it. And that’s new; that’s brand-new information as of last month.

I just want to point that out, because I think it takes people who are committed to the mission and people who are committed to sustainable change. Do we just give this woman money to buy a mattress? Yes, that’s one option. What are the other options, though, that would make it sustainable? That’s what we’re exploring. Now, I actually don’t have an answer for you, because we’re in it right now, but the management of that is making sure that you are, as a leader, listening, and that you are exploring things from multiple angles, with an eye on, for me and I think for Pauline, our COO, an eye on the sustainable. What is going to benefit this woman, and then what will also benefit the company?

Spencer: When you figure that out, I think you need to share it with the industry, because there are a lot of for-profit, straight for-profit, commercial bakery businesses who support their employees in similar ways. So, to know how you can support the employee who is in need, while having a solution that also isn’t just giving charity, but creating something that betters their life and betters the company … A lot of people are going to want to know and tap into that.

Culver: Yeah. Okay, cool. Honestly, it’s validating to hear that, because for me, it always comes back to agency. And this is again from having seen so many failed nonprofits or NGOs abroad, where it’s not that I don’t believe charity can’t work, but that’s a one-time thing. And if we give this, in this particular example, we give her money for a mattress, she’s going to save that money and send it to her kid in university; I would too.

So then how do you make something where you’re tapping into her agency and she’s choosing, like she’s the one driving those decisions and making those choices. That is part of the evolution, where maybe some problems are quote unquote solved, but it does open up bigger problems, right? She was able to send her kids to primary and secondary school, but, boy, we certainly hadn’t thought about university. That’s flipping amazing and expensive. So what does one do?

Spencer: And it also goes back to that autonomy.

Culver: Yes, exactly. I believe pretty strongly in autonomy, not to say that we’re not a community and we do work collectively, but in this particular scenario, how does she exercise her autonomy? If there is an avenue for us to assist her, how? What is it? How do we do it?

Spencer: You have to keep me posted on that, because I do want to know. I want to know what the solution is.

Culver: I will. I will see her in two weeks, and I will keep you posted.

Spencer: I’m going to hold you to that. Okay, I’m going to ask you one last question for this week, and it’s, you’re going to laugh at me, but I’m going to ask it anyway. You’re going to be like, “What are you even talking about?”

Okay, so, in American business culture, entrepreneurs are new businesses. We get about … and I’m saying ‘we’ because my business is an entrepreneurial business, and relatively new, so we always look at the five-year mark. A new business or an entrepreneur gets five years to sort of get it right before they move forward or stall out. How did that five-year rule apply to you?

Culver: I was going to say, girl we blew way past that. We failed all the way through. This is funny, because you’re bringing me back to presentations that I used to make in St Louis right around that five-year mark, and I called it affectionately “Death Valley.” Like, “Please help us, because we are currently in Death Valley, and I believe that we can make it to the other side, but it is going to take X dollars.”

 I think that for some businesses, yes, the five-year rule may apply. I think for us it does not. And I will say the person who opened my eyes the most to that is Pauline, our COO. She challenged me on our product lines, she challenged me on our pricing and she challenged me on the horizon for profitability … “Why do you have a two-year mark on this? Or, why do you have a three-year mark on this? And why the heck are you communicating it to the broader audience? And then, when you don’t meet it, you’re fine with that.”

So, for us being able to really, truly look at, “Okay, here’s our mission, here’s our model, and then here’s our long-term goal, and here are the metrics by which we will be measuring ourselves to see how close we are to achieving that goal.” Pauline has helped me shift some of those metrics, not just the goal post. The goal post is still there, so it’s like women’s empowerment, feeding babes, and then these bakeries being profitable by doing all of that, right? But what is that goal post and what is actually, not just reasonable, but doable in a place like Rwanda, in a region like East Africa?

One of the things we have at The Women’s Bakery is we say we’re not American culture. We’re not Rwandan culture. It’s a brand-new culture. It’s The Women’s Bakery culture. So, I had that also being American, where it’s like, “Oh God, we have to hit … we have to be in the black in five years. Like, that’s what we have to do.” There’s actually a lot of freedom if you alleviate yourself from those pressures, because I think you actually have a far more intentional model, and you create a better culture. When I first started The Women’s Bakery, and boy, if you talk to some people who used to work for us back then, it was hard. I was pushing people really hard, because I really wanted to hit that mark, and we didn’t. We weren’t even close, and we burned a lot of people out in the process.

So, I think that by setting your own trajectory, you also set your own tone, and that, at the end of the day, is very important.

Spencer: I think that that is really good advice and business in general, regardless of culture, and it’s good advice, especially for social enterprise.

Culver: We need a much longer runway. So, I have a hero named Jacqueline Novogratz. She wrote a book that I would recommend to anyone called The Blue Sweater, and she calls for social enterprises. So, a regular business would get an investment or a loan, right? And if you have an investor, the investor wants a return on their investment in three to five years.

For social enterprises, Jacqueline Novogratz, who runs a social venture capital firm, calls it patient capital, where that runway is much longer. So, whereas you have a strict for-profit business, your runway is three to five years for an ROI. For social enterprise, it might be 10 or more years. And I think that if you’re in this new field … and this is … it’s a brand-new field … it’s not straight charity, and it’s not straight business. You’re in the middle somewhere. So, because of that, you need a different financial structure. And I think that certainly applies, which is why The Women’s Bakery does. We have revenue from the bakeries, and then we have revenue from donations, and we use both to fuel our existing bakeries and our growth.

Spencer: Do you … this is kind of an out-of-left-field question. I know we’re supposed to end with that one, but just talking about how you fuel with the funds that you receive. Is there ever, and you know, the tone of evolving the business … Will the charitable donations ever become its own entity, where the funds from the bakery profits would fuel that?

Culver: Yes, okay, so this is where I get so pumped, because this is long term and what I see. So, our incorporation in the United States is a 501(c)(3) public charity. So, I think that actually becomes quite strategic, because you could still bring in donations. People still get their tax write offs, etc. Then if the bakeries, or should I say, when the bakeries are profitable, and we’re still getting donations, then we become what I ultimately think would be amazing: a social venture capital firm.

Donors basically become impact investors. Now you may not get a financial return. Your return is social, so we might need to make sure some donors feel comfortable with that. If others do not, then yes, they would stop donating. But I think it could be similar to, if you’ve heard of the organization, Kiva. Kiva lends money to people, and those people can start businesses, and that’s wonderful, and you don’t necessarily get that money back, right?

So, The Women’s Bakery could be something like that, where, if those bakeries are existing, bakeries are profitable, but we’re still getting donations, it allows us to reinvest in those existing bakeries, to grow them — which we desperately need because we’re feeding so many kids — to build new bakeries and feed more kids, empower more women. It allows us to expand in a way that I think would otherwise be a little bit more prohibitive if we were like a straight charity or a straight business.

Spencer: The reason why I asked is that there is a bakery here in the US that is a social enterprise, and I’m sure you know who I’m talking about, with an open hiring practice. They had a bakery and a foundation that were separate entities. So, the profits from the bakery funded the foundation, which put all of their life skill programs into place to help them gain employment outside of the bakery. And they, in the last two years I think, merged into one entity.

Culver: I think it makes a lot of sense to do that. And here’s the thing for us, because we have a parent company in the US that wholly owns a subsidiary in Rwanda… when we become profitable in Rwanda, and we’re thinking about expanding into Kenya, so when we become profitable in those two countries, the vision I have right now for this is actually that money stays there, because that was the whole intent to begin with.

So, it wouldn’t be like, matriculate the money back into the US and figure out what to do here. It would be there. And what economic programs could we do there that would … I use this word, and it’s not quite right … but like, build wealth or build income for existing women bakers? Pauline has this beautiful vision of micro-franchising opportunities, so entrepreneurial opportunities for women. There’s a lot that we can either reinvest into the bakeries or in new investment in East Africa that would drive a lot … economic empowerment, economic opportunities. Joanie, you know we want to grow wheat so these bakeries could feel that … there’s a lot that we could do.

Spencer: That’s amazing. Okay, I’m going to call it for this week. This was an incredible conversation. This was amazing, and just a lot of talking about the business side of it, and the ups and downs of the business, and I think that that is an important aspect of this story in general. But next week, we’re going to get back to the baking side, and we’re really going to look at how you created an actual operation and how machines started coming into play.

Culver: Okay, well, that’s new. The machines are new. But yes, okay, great.

Spencer: Okay, so we’re going to talk about just how it’s turned into an operation next week, and maybe not the way a large US commercial baker thinks of an operation, but an operational bakery, nonetheless. So, I’m excited to look at that side and the baking side for this week.

Thanks for all of these incredible lessons and all the hard work that you’ve done, and above all, Markey, thanks for sticking with it. You have created something truly special, and I also appreciate you taking this time with me today.

Culver: It’s team effort, though. It’s not just me, it’s our team. But thank you very much, and I’m delighted to be with you all.

Spencer: Okay, I will talk to you next week.