Living Goods believes that good business is good development. That’s why our long-term goal is to establish a thriving double bottom-line business. But to create a commercially viable venture, we must first achieve three levels of sustainability. The first, and most important, is at the sales agent level. This means ensuring that the lion’s share of our franchisees can make an adequate living on the modest margin from their sales. The second is at the branch level: generating enough contribution margin to cover the direct branch level costs. Each branch supports 20-40 agents, employs 1-2 Branch Managers and has a budget of approximately $6,500 per year. The third, and fullest, level of sustainability is at the country level: realizing enough contribution margin from the wholesaling of commodities to our agents to cover the network level costs of core administration, finance, training, and marketing. Achieving sustainability at any one of these levels would create a system that generates exceptional social return on investment. Nonetheless, our aim is to build a fully self-funded enterprise that fights poverty and disease with profitability.

Key strategies to achieve sustainability include:

• Leveraging existing resources, assets, and partnerships wherever possible;
• Creating buying power at the retail level and building significant scale economies;
• Bypassing middlemen in the existing distribution chain;
• Maintaining rigorous cost discipline;
• Focusing obsessively on the productivity and livelihoods of our sales agents