Taking into account the intense focus and dedication required to get a startup off the ground, entrepreneurs occasionally get “business tunnel vision,” focusing too heavily on the business logistics of their ventures. While it’s obvious a healthy amount of business sense is required to run a successful company, it’s not all that is needed.

Promoting a positive corporate culture can provide fledgling businesses with a bevy of oblique advantages, from providing a moral hook that attracts talented employees to offering incalculable exposure through word-of-mouth praise.  One of the simplest ways for startups to avail themselves of these benefits is by participating in social entrepreneurship, which enables businesses to give back to the communities that helped create them; social entrepreneurs donate a share of their profits, equity and time to philanthropic foundations and causes.

“it’s important to define your corporate culture, and your company’s commitment to philanthropy is part of that,” said Lateef Johnson, whose experience with social entrepreneurship began with SalesForce.com out in San Francisco, but now hopes to apply the same model to his Lincoln startup Deckerton. “You want that to be communicated and replicated throughout your company, and the best way is to make it a priority from the very beginning. Startups have a unique opportunity to define their culture very early in terms of their commitment to the community.”

SaleForce.com adheres to a straightforward strategy called the 1/1/1 model. That is, the company has pledged to donate 1 percent of its employees’ time to volunteer at charitable organizations, 1 percent of its product to non-profits and 1 percent of its equity toward philanthropic causes. The company also launched a web site called The Power of Us with the goal of educating and inspiring new entrepreneurs to follow in the corporation’s charitable footsteps.

That 1 percent of employee’s time netted an average of six days worth of charity work per person, which provided SaleForce.com with plenty of positive promotion.  The charity work became an incentive for recent college graduates to seek employment at the company.

“As a (SaleForce.com) recruiter, I experienced a lot of those benefits firsthand,” Johnson said. “Young people coming out of college were really excited about the company. Yeah, we were growing quickly and those sorts of things, but what really enthused those kids was our commitment to philanthropy. My being able to say with all honesty that employees were able to use company time for taking trips to give food to the poor or to clean up beaches really appealed to them.”

Here in Lincoln, Johnson is upping the ante with his own twist on the SaleForce.com philanthropic paradigm, a self-explanatory improvement he calls the 2/2/2 model. Currently, 2 percent of his company’s outstanding shares have been set aside for a Deckerton Foundation. Once those shares increase in value, Johnson hopes to put them toward helping Lincoln children.

“The best advice I can give to startups interested in engaging in corporate philanthropy  is to collaborate,” he said, encouraging entrepreneurs to check out The Power of Us web site. “One thing about people who are interested in philanthropy or non-profits is that they love to work together. They want to share their stories, or help you or talk about their model; they’re really interested in sharing their experience.”

And oftentimes, working toward the greater good can be a business model in and of itself. Mission Bean Coffee, a non-profit launched in 2008 as an extension of and source of financing for People’s City Mission, has been incredibly successful, mostly due to the vibrant connection the company generates between purchasing coffee and helping the less fortunate.

“We change the meaning of consumption, turn it into an experience that has spiritual value added,” said Pastor Tom Barber, People City Mission’s executive director. “But the fact remains we’re solving social problems through entrepreneurship, and the dynamics of that are the same as running a business. We’re using the exact same business principles — there’s no difference in the process. The end result is different, but I consider myself as much of an entrepreneur as any business owner out there.”

“If you have a great real estate agent that you really like, and one of your friends wants to buy a house or is looking to sell theirs, then Deckerton makes it really easy to connect the two,” Johnson said. “Deckerton uses a modern social network user interface to accomplish this objective — portals like Facebook and Twitter are great for meeting and communicating with friends, but they’re not designed for business applications.”

Although created with small businesses in mind, Johnson hopes Deckerton will allow both nascent entrepreneurs and startup veterans to more easily traverse the troubled waters of commercial promotion. While it may take as long as half a year for the results of an advertising campaign to be digested in full, Deckerton provides much quicker returns; theoretically, the same day a request is made.

Lateef Johnson - Photo credit Three Pillars Media

“Let’s say you request a referral from a customer, they use the Deckerton system and the referred prospect requests more information about your business from you — that’s something that could happen within minutes versus the 3 to 6 months you’d wait on an advertising campaign,” Johnson said. “Plus, it’s recordable. You can see how many of your customers are using the service, and whether they’re referring you or not. And that’s all free.”

In the future, Johnson hopes to bedeck Deckerton with additional features for a price, but the crux of the service will always remain free of charge. A smart phone application to refer friends on the fly is also in the works.  Meanwhile, Johnson is promoting Deckerton via Deckerton. In essence, his startup is literally selling itself.

“We’ve been able to promote Deckerton with the idea that the software is its own best promotion,” Johnson said. “We think the new methods of communication are making things like advertising somewhat obsolete for a lot of different types of businesses.”

Deckerton’s been entirely self-funded up to this point, according to Johnson, but he remains optimistic the state’s shifting angel investor bedrock could be indicative of a change in the way startups are funded in Nebraska.

Lateef Johnson explaining the advertising industry - Photo credit Three Pillars Media

“Deckerton’s adopted the bootstrapping model to finance, though we’re also looking for investment,” Johnson said. “The angel investment landscape in Nebraska is really starting to mature. There’s been a few organized angel deals over the past two or three years and those investors are starting to get smarter about how they investment, so I think there’s an opportunity for rapid-growth companies to leverage angel investing locally.”

“There’s a broader theme of companies developing here in this state in a way they haven’t been able to before,” he added. “Part of the reason for that is tech and part of it is the people we have here who are able to compete on a global scale. That’s what exciting about working in Nebraska.”

More about Deckerton and a video interview can be found on Silicon Prairie News

A business branching out into multiple locations is hardly a new concept. Corporations setting up offices in cities around the world is both the driving force behind and a natural consequence of globalization. But as technology affords people all over Earth a means of getting to know someone on the far side of the planet just as well as (if not better than) their next door neighbor, the concept of opening business outposts is trickling down to startups. As a matter of fact, it’s becoming more and more common for small businesses to spring up and prosper without their architects ever physically shaking hands.

Wade Sikkink is in charge of sales and marketing for Collaborative Health Solutions, LLC, a company building a social network for chronically ill patients called Medizzle. Sikkink works out of Lincoln. But CHS’s analytics expert is stationed in Ames, Iowa. The chief information officer and the IT staff live in D.C. And the company’s software vendor is based out of India.

Sikkink has never had a face-to-face conversation with half of his coworkers.

“Employees are going to be a lot happier if they’re where they want to be,” Sikkink said, adding that he’ll have his first in-person interaction with most of the Collaborative Health Solutions staff members when they all meet up for a TechCrunch event in New York later this month. “I think this trend is one of the big things that traditional, bigger companies don’t have. Those places have a mindset of  ’if you’re not here, you’re not working.’ But tech companies are more along the lines of ‘if you’re getting done what you need to do, we don’t care where you are.’”

Jake Stutzman, owner of web design firm Elevate, acknowledges the positive impact of remote employees. People working from home or some other location of their choosing will more than likely experience greater job satisfaction; a happier worker is a more productive worker.

“With Skype and email and Basecamp and all the other tools that are out there, we find it just as easy to work with somebody from far away than in person,” Stutzman said. “Obviously, as an owner, I’d prefer that everyone was in-house, collaborating in person all the time. But you don’t want to force people to move somewhere that they might not want to live, or someplace that’s pulling them away from family. Plus, I think people are more production when they’re alone. Office environments are fun and engaging and stimulating, but there has to be a point where that gets capped and you go off and get some work done.”

However, not everyone is sold on this new business paradigm. Lateef Johnson, CEO of online referral service Deckerton, is a bit apprehensive about his employees literally phoning it in. Although he does outsource his company’s exigencies to freelancers, they all reside in the same city as he does.

“If you’re far away from each other, if you haven’t worked with them before, if they don’t directly know your customers, if you can’t meet with them face-to-face on a regular basis, there are a lot of risks to that,” said Johnson, who managed outsourcing at the company where he worked prior to Deckerton. “Unless you have a professional relationship with the person in question, or your company is at a very large scale, this just isn’t the sort of thing I would suggest, and I personally would not recommend any of this for a startup.”

In that regard, Sikkink concedes Johnson may have a point. But in the end, he feels the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

“You do create more of a bond and build camaraderie with your team when you get to see them in person,” he said. “But doing things remotely, you have the ability to recruit people regardless of where they live. If you had to have everybody in the same place, then you’re limited to the local talent pool. In Austin (where Collaborative Health Solutions, LLC is based) , that wouldn’t be such a big deal. But trying to start a tech company in Lincoln might be hard if you said everyone has to be here.”