Here, we introduce you to the anchoring framework, the Edge Business Board, and a process for how to use it to build a resilient, impactful business through strategic self-limitation.

This board works as your anchor throughout the process of working with your business edge. It gives you an overview of how your business operates as a system, and helps you see how components (inside and outside the company) affect each other. It enables you to test better for coherence, and to see how by changing one little thing "here", everything could be different "over there".

The process is based on a collaborative and iterative approach, we have applied in our own businesses for more than 6 years.

In this lesson, we introduce you to a new language with different criteria for success and assumptions about how the world works, to help you see how small can be successful, ambitious, and impactful.

Today, there is only one story of business success. The idea that "bigger is always better" dominates. But nothing could be further from the truth. Strategic self-limitation can be an incredible source of strength for a business. 

For example, 99% of businesses are small, accounting for approximately ⅔ of employment and generating half of total turnover in the EU. Another example is that small farmers feed the world, not the large ones. Learn about these and more surprising stories in this lesson.

In this lesson, you learn how to scale your impact better by choosing the right mix of the eight scaling strategies. You learn how to work with the Impact Scaling Framework.

In a nutshell, to be great instead of big, we must separate growth from scaling impact. Scaling impact is the overarching frame, and within that, growth can be one strategy. But at some point, you can scale your impact much better by applying some of the other 7 scaling-impact-strategies. The real task is to make a strong mix of those strategies.

This is a prerequisite for lesson 6 and 7, where you will apply this when working on your business plan and theory of change to find your edge.

In this lesson, we introduce you to the three step process of defining your company's appropriate size - its edge: Define your edge, develop a theory of change around your business model, and make a business plan.

First, you will learn how to evaluate your company's size factors. This lesson is a prerequisite for lessons six and seven. When forced to do a gut test on size, we bring untold assumptions about size, competencies, purpose and impact out in the open, which is helpful in the next two steps.

In this lesson, you will learn how to formulate a theory of change that integrates your business model. You learn how to work with the Theory of Change Framework.

A theory of change is non-negotiable if you want your business to drive change. Yet, having a theory of change is rare in for-profits, but foundational in NGOs, associations, and not-for-profit companies. Most businesses stop too early. They assume that as a by-product of selling their products, they will have a positive impact. And some will, but usually it's not that simple.

Here you will learn how to formulate a theory of change that places your business within a larger context of external pressures and conditions, separating strategies from effects, goals, and ambitions, to help you validate and evaluate whether your business drives the change you want it to.

In this lesson, you will learn how to define and plan for your company to reach a growth-independent state. A state where your company is profitable in the short run, resilient in the long run, and well-positioned to scale your impact by pursuing your theory of change.

Here, you take your gut feel tests on size factors, and the theory of change, and you then go into spreadsheet-mode to explore what different growth-independent sizes might work for you, and under what conditions they might work. 

You learn how to work with the Wave Business Planner. Named after the idea that in a growth-independent state, your company is set up to thrive while its size may go up and down, like waves.

In this lesson, you learn about how different ownership and governance models affect who makes the decisions and who benefits from the decisions.

This includes understanding the differences between being privately owned, cooperatively owned, publicly traded, and steward-owned. And, understanding the impact of governance mechanisms, such as CEO/Employee wage ratios, board representation, whistleblower programs, and democratic decision-making processes.

In this lesson, you learn about different types of finance models, their upsides and downsides, and under what conditions they may work for you. You learn to see finance's impact on timeline and pace, independence and your ability to stop - when it makes sense to stop growing.

We will cover bootstrapping, loans from commercial banks, crowdinvesting, crowdfunding, crowdlending, cooperative funding, capital fund investment for exit, and redeemable equity (cash flow buyback).

In this lesson, you learn about alternative KPIs that help you steer towards priorities other than growth because there is more to life and more to business. 

Many great things can increase as your company's size remains stable. At some points, they may even have a greater chance at increasing when your company can thrive without growth.

In this lesson, you learn about the three phases of a transition (shrinking, growth, and maintenance), and how to use that in a sufficiency perspective, meaning how your company can serve real needs with as little material and energy use as possible.

In this lesson, you learn how to match your size with your ambition. To find the balance, your edge, between the economies of small and large scale. And, to match your organizing principles to your size. Because size matters at both ends of the scale. If you are small, you must organize to leverage all the economies of small. And the other way around.

You will learn how to use the Economies of Scale Continuum, where you can place yourself and your company between:

Flexibility vs standardization

Accountability vs control


Tangibility vs reach

Resilience vs efficiency

In this lesson, we look back and recap the key insights from The Edge Masterclass, and share a challenge with you that we hope can initiate you to take the first steps towards making radical change with others in this community.