500+ Children Rescued From Human Trafficking By Kiwi Startup GravityLab

Could Kiwi businesses be doing more to fund positive change? Meet the kiwi business who has funded the rescue of 500+ children from human trafficking and is challenging other businesses to think differently about ‘impact’.

Over the past seven years, business process automation company GravityLab has funded the rescue of more than 500 children from sex trafficking through directly funding rescue and prosecution agents across Thailand and Cambodia. Three years ago, the company took a bold decision to sign full ownership over to a charitable trust and today, it’s on a mission to challenge the belief that businesses need to choose between ‘profit’ and ‘impact’.

“For GravityLab, giving 90% of its ownership to charity was the best thing that could have happened. It improved day to day satisfaction for the owner, purpose for the team and overall profitability. To us, ‘doing good’ is the fuel behind ‘doing well’. At our team meetings - we make it clear that doing your job well is the best way of making a difference in the world. We update every staff member monthly around how many children we’ve been able to rescue using the profit from their role. One member of staff has been with us for six years and as a result, he’s helped rescue 140 children. Our productivity and performance is supercharged by purpose,” explains Daniel Howell, founder and CEO of GravityLab.

Daniel

Fund impact; not a cause

Daniel is well known for encouraging businesses to fund impact; not a cause. “Today, a lot of companies will report that they’re ‘purpose’ or ‘mission driven’. They’ll even give away a percentage of their profit to aligned causes - however, those funds don’t always translate into tangible numbers in terms of impact,” he explains. Daniel believes that designing around maximum social return on investment means that businesses need to carefully consider how they can ensure their money is spent on outcomes.

Over the past 7 years, GravityLab has earned roughly $1 million for fighting human trafficking across Thailand and Cambodia. The company used to work with Child Rescue and Hagar New Zealand - both of whom Daniel describes as incredibly dedicated and effective - but recently took a decision to fund this type of work even more directly.

Today, it pays for the employment of 7 ‘agents’ who work to conduct rescue operations and prosecute the corrupt owners of trafficking rings and the pimps and officers who support them. This is done through their local partners at the Ronnasit Foundation. “A recent prosecution resulted in a 325 year jail sentence for a senior police member - an outcome that has a ripple effect which should prevent hundreds of children from entering sexual slavery in the first place. Whereas local law enforcement has struggled to prosecute; or people get off after three months; our agents have never lost a single case,” says Daniel.

How much should a company give?

Daniel believes that this isn’t quite the right question. Focusing on how much you are giving isn’t as important as how you are giving. That is, giving away a certain percentage of profit will never be as effective as focusing on outcomes. “Our first question should be: what do you care about? Our next one should be: what is a practical way of making a real difference? Our job is not to give away money; our job is to make a difference.”

At its core, this is what the GravityLab team enables for the companies it works with. As a consultant to high performance businesses, GravityLab helps automate systems and processes that make powerful customer experiences and free up humans to do what they do best - empathise, innovate and create. They have helped drive the success of many iconic NZ success stories from Cin7, to Halter, to Wellington Zoo and Panasonic. “What’s unique is that we have worked with 70+ charities in New Zealand and Australia. This means just doing our day job is fuelling impact via our charity partners; then when we make profit we can do even more good,” says Daniel.

GravityLab also believes that businesses complicate how much revenue they should utilise on impact. “It’s actually very simple. For us, profit is what’s left after we deduct staff and office costs from our consulting revenue. GravityLab is owned by the CharityLab Investment Trust. As such, we ‘pay’ our owner out in terms of profit and that owner has a 100% charitable purpose. We keep 50% of our profit in the Trust’s bank account to fund growth (or to weather rainy days) and we put the other 50% to work on making a difference. Any funds spent are used to fight human trafficking directly via our agents as opposed to giving them away to other organisations with additional overheads or less impactful approaches,” explains Daniel.

The best thing a business owner can do

Daniel believes that it’s time to redefine success in business:

“We don’t use the words ‘peaceful’ and ‘joyful’ enough when owners set business goals - but that’s what happens when you give back in ways that make a difference and have meaning. Starting, scaling and running a business is really hard work, but, when we know our business is involved in doing something far bigger than just making money, it changes the way we interact with customers and the team. Suddenly, we’re not only driven by monthly shareholder reports or profit. It shouldn't only be about a made up number, eg. profit; but rather - what sort of world we want to live in and how we are making that a reality,” he concludes.

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