Two Heller Social Impact MBAs have been helping Boston-area entrepreneurs access the resources they need to succeed.
By Sarah C. Baldwin
Ten years ago, armed with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Zack Neville Young, MBA’19, went to work for the Boston office of a private equity consulting firm. There he saw “how the sausage gets made” in the financial sector.
“I learned a ton,” he says, “but I became disillusioned pretty quickly.”
That job was followed by stints in two nonprofits as Young plotted his next move. “I wanted to get into mission-driven work,” he says, “because I knew that would energize me. I desperately wanted to feel I was making the world better.”
Motivated by the idea of being surrounded by like-minded people, he enrolled in the Heller School’s Social Impact MBA program. One day in his Triple Bottom Line class, Senior Lecturer Michael Appell, MA’79, (now assistant director of the program) invited Deborah Frieze to be a guest speaker. Frieze is the co-founder, with Michael Frieze, of Boston Impact Initiative (BII), a place-based nonprofit impact investing fund focused on economic and racial justice. Established in 2013, the fund seeks to empower entrepreneurs of color financially, socially, and politically.
Listening to Frieze “opened up a whole new world for me,” Young recalls. “It showed there were people out there using financial tools of investment to pursue a better society, a better world, a better place locally. From that moment on, I knew this was the work I should be doing.”
As part of his MBA, Young completed an internship at BII. After earning his degree, he was hired by BII as an impact investing associate; by the time he left five years later to continue his career in impact investing, he was director of integrated capital solutions. In that time the team had doubled in size to 12, BII Fund I had completed deploying $6.9 million into 50 impactful businesses, cooperatives, and nonprofits in Eastern Massachusetts, and BII Fund II, a $20 million integrated capital fund investing in social enterprises and community-controlled real estate, launched and established itself.
To do his job — “helping people who know how to solve problems access capital to solve them” — Young drew on the wealth of skills and knowledge he’d acquired in Heller’s MBA program, such as how to interpret a financial statement, how to assess social impact, and how to know what works and what doesn’t when making a philanthropic or investment ask.
“A big part of the reason I’ve focused on the economic [and] racial justice space is the belief that the people who have systematically not gotten access to resources and capital understand exactly what they need and can build the world they want to see. It’s just a matter of filling capital needs in communities that we haven’t been investing equally in,” he says.
One of the success stories he is especially proud of is that of Roundhead Brewing Company, the Bay State’s first Latino-owned craft brewery. The co-founders approached BII in 2020 with their idea for a family-friendly taproom that would be “authentically of and for the Roxbury area,” Young says. BII’s term loan enabled them to acquire brewing equipment and expensive HVAC systems even as they navigated substantial roadblocks, including shipping delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They caught a ton of bad breaks,” Young recalls, “but figured their way around it every time.” Having a compelling vision and knowing how to tell their story helped, he adds.
When BII’s board pushed back on the idea of a tipped wage, Young and colleagues worked alongside the co-founders to figure out a different financial model that would enable them to implement a Fair Wage Fee, eliminating tipping and offering their staff a living wage.
Located in Hyde Park, the brewery aims to add value to its community — indeed, its motto is Cerveza Que Réune, or “beer brings people together.” Turns out it was a sound investment: Roundhead recently bought the building it’s in and paid off the BII loan. In 2023 it was named Best Brewery by Boston Magazine.
“If your only goal is profit maximization, it’s a pretty simple formula,” Young says. “What was exciting about Heller’s program was that in every class, we were embracing the complexity of impact in decision making: How can we maximize impact returns and meet financial objectives instead of the other way around?”
Frustrated by the systems in place
In addition to win-wins like the Roundhead case, Young contributed a strong asset to the organization: Paulina Apone, MBA’22. After encouraging her to apply as a portfolio management intern at BII, Young oversaw her internship, providing technical support as well as “helping me fit in and find opportunities to grow,” she says. In January 2023 Apone was hired as an impact investing associate at BII, where she now works to foster community growth, mitigate displacement, and support environmental justice.
Before coming to Heller, Apone had extensive experience in both banking and community development. She had worked as a personal banker for a large financial services company and for a community bank focused on historically red-lined areas. She had served in the Peace Corps supporting microentrepreneurs in Nicaragua and advocated for affordable housing in New Orleans. What drew her to social impact investing, though, was personal.
“My mom is a small business owner who immigrated from Thailand,” she says, “so part of my story is watching her struggle trying to start a new business, the barriers she faced. That was the catalyst pushing me into working with and supporting Black and brown entrepreneurs, underserved community members who typically don’t get the resources and opportunities their white counterparts do.”
Underserved entrepreneurs often can’t provide the financial metrics traditionally used by lenders, such as a solid banking history, good credit, or even a desirable zip code, she explains; others might fear revealing their status as immigrants. “These entrepreneurs are very smart. They’re very resourceful. They get a lot of support on the back end,” Apone says. “But they’re not getting that initial capital.”
Being able to help people overcome such exclusionary metrics motivated her to go to grad school. “I chose Heller’s Social Impact MBA program because it aligned with my beliefs,” she says. “A traditional MBA has more of an emphasis on high growth, high value, building that high-earning career, and I think we need people like that in our society. I think there are also people who have a more community-oriented lens. Heller was geared toward preparing me to be in that role.”
Apone appreciates that the MBA program gave her important “hard skills” that complemented the softer ones she already had. An English major, she was adept at helping business owners write good business plans, but she didn’t know how to analyze a financial statement, she says: “I could create a narrative with words, but I was missing how to create a narrative with numbers that would be compelling to investors as to why they should consider this business.”
Classes in financial and managerial accounting and statistical and financial analytics gave her those capabilities. Now, when she looks at a financial spreadsheet, “all the numbers tell a story,” she says. “If a company has a social impact commitment that aligns with our investment thesis, we’re not going to say no. Based on the story their financials are telling, we’re going to say, How do we strengthen this and get it to a “yes”?
Currently, Apone is providing due diligence and financial analysis as she and her portfolio management team work with a Black- and woman-owned organization focused on bringing hydroponic growing towers to Boston’s food deserts. For now, it’s a “maybe”: the operation needs to grow if it is going to succeed. Apone’s team is working with the founder to put together financials and performance projections of what it would look like to bring on another person. But they’re also connecting her to potential partners, such as fractional CFOs, who can support her organization as it grows.
“We’re trying to introduce her to a strong ecosystem of partners to help grow this into a community-oriented and sustainable business,” Apone says. This kind of support recalls her work in Nicaragua, where the priority of many small businesses is to strengthen their community, focusing more on relationships than on financial return. “To me, that is how our economy should be,” she says.
Apone also sensed that communitarian spirit at Heller. Crediting Young’s ongoing mentorship, guidance, and friendship with contributing to her growth and development over the years, Apone adds that the fact that her cohort matriculated during the pandemic might have created even stronger bonds than in other years. She is still in regular touch with most of her class, and says that even as students, they favored collective support over competition.
“When we were looking for jobs and someone would get an offer letter, we’d all sit in a room and coach each other on how to respond,” she recalls. “The Heller program is much more about supporting each other than creating more inequities. Being a part of the greater Heller community means we’re kindred spirits seeking to disrupt existing power dynamics.”