On May 14, 2024 our founder and Managing Partner, Meghan Wallace spoke at The Experience Philly, powered by Chase for Business. The full transcript is below.
Meghan shared her learnings and insights on growing a small business in today’s economic climate. Meghan highlighted the importance of bringing our company values with the work we do daily. These values drive not just why we do this work, but how we show up with clients and the community.
A huge thank you to Chase for Business, the other speakers, and participants for making this event a success. Let’s continue to build on these insights and work towards a prosperous future together!
Transcript
- Announcer: …It is about small business and big stories.
- So we’ve got our fellow business owners up on the stage to talk about their wins, how they made their move the business and how to thrive in the current economic environment.
- Joining our moderator, Kevin Hopkins, who’s the business banking manager, market manager here at Chase on our stage will be two of our local business owners, Meghan Wallace from Social Contract and Carlos Geraldo from Geraldo Real estate group.
- Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Kevin, Carlos, and Meghan.
- (applause)
- Kevin Hopkins: All right. Well, thank you, Tommy.
- And hello, Philly, I’m Kevin Hopkins, Chase Business Banking Market Manager, serving the Greater Pennsylvania region.
- And I’m delighted to be here today with these exceptional business leaders and to have a, a discussion for the panel.
- We’re also joined by Meghan Wallace, managing partner of Social Contract.
- Meghan is a policy adviser turned entrepreneur with a knack for government relations, public policy and problem solving.
- She currently leads an organization of social change champions, passionate leaders, designers, facilitators and experts intent on making lasting social change for their clients and the communities they serve.
- Can you share a little bit about the work that Social Contract does and why the community is so important.
- Meghan Wallace: Thanks, Kevin. So Social Contract is a firm that actually started in Wilmington, Delaware and opened our office in Philadelphia about a year and a half ago.
- It’s actually in our mission statement, we help community solve complex social problems.
- So community is actually part of what we do.
- And so it’s been it’s been a really great experience coming into Philadelphia.
- We don’t want to rattle the cage, so to speak.
- We want to really work with partners locally.
- And so it’s been a great experience coming into the city and it’s really home to the original social contract.
- And it’s our job as organizers to help make social change possible.
- Kevin Hopkins: So, Meghan, I think one of the things that I’ve admired about you and your business is, is frankly, I think you’re one of the best in the business at marrying together collaboration with the community support.
- And, you know, obviously for business owners, those two tend to be key drivers for success.
- So the two part question for you, the first is how does Social Contract help instill, in and foster a belief of community in [inaudible]?
- And then the second piece to that is, what role do you see collaboration play in the growth of local businesses?
- Meghan Wallace: Yeah, thanks Kevin.
- I, for us, it is like you said it’s kind of the DNA of the organization.
- But what is grounded us the most as we’ve grown as a firm has been our values.
- So, a couple of years ago, maybe even three or four years ago, now, we established company values and each year we’ve revisited them.
- And by the way, there’s a great Master Class talk by Coach K on values, values and leadership.
- And we revisit the values together every year.
- And as we’ve grown, we’ve added them as we needed to actually just this year, we and we entered Philadelphia as we’re entering Pittsburgh.
- We really sat back and thought, what is missing, what do we want to make sure the new hires that we have embody as we go into these big markets?
- And we added a value, we added generosity. And the way we talk about that value is being a good neighbor, right?
- So not only do we name the value, we want our staff to understand how we live that value at our firm.
- And so when we go into new markets in terms of community support, we’re bringing a spirit of being neighborly, right?
- What does it mean to be neighborly, how does that influence our pro-bono portfolio, the sort of clients we take on, the sort of investments we make locally?
- For us, the most important thing as we’ve grown into other spaces has been, I think being rooted in those values and then helping our staff understand how we live them out.
- So, I think that’s really enabled us to work better with those communities that we enter into.