Are you really running a social enterprise?
You know it’s not just students who want to change the world. Entrepreneurs are also often motivated by a desire to change things for the better. Of course you rarely see be-suited business men and women chaining themselves to railings, haranguing politicians or waving placards, but many are activist all the same. Those who are almost totally motivated by an altruistic urge the improve things are usually called social entrepreneurs. In my view, this is too often a label attached to the more well meaning businesses by those seeking to help them. Those inspired by action more than wealth rarely seem to use the term to describe themselves. Let me introduce to you someone I was privileged to meet recently, whose passion and focus on some of society’s most mistreated members makes her a social entrepreneur of almost angelic proportion. When I heard her story, I simply wanted to give her a great big hug.
Janet Tutty worked for most of her life as a carer, based in a hospital for people with learning difficulties and challenging behaviour. This group of people were for many years kept out of mainstream society, supposedly for their own safety. The reality was more often isolation, deprivation from contact with the outside world and usually a drug regime that inhibited any independent thought or action. When care in the community came into being and changes in public sector funding threatened her role she joined Social Services as a day service worker, through Social Services workshops she found aromatherapy thinking that this was her way forward to helping more people come to feel better about themselves and experience positive human contact, sometimes for the first time. She then went to work at a college for autism and challenging behaviour and during her time here she qualified as an Aromatherapist, and after setting up a programme at the college became self-employed, being offered work by word of mouth from other establishments. Janet’s motivation was to help others, not to make a fortune. In fact the wealth that Janet planned to accumulate would result from the positive impact she would bring to her clients. Money after all, is only for paying the bills.
Janet started her business Sensory Therapies (www.sensorytherapies.co.uk) and offered her services to all residential care providers specialising in the learning disabled and socially challenging. One example she shared with me particularly illustrated the enormous benefit she brings. She told me about one client, a man, who had been sectioned and detained in a high security institution for offenders with severe mental health issues. Because he was liable to bite, his teeth were removed. Because he was violent, he was treated with little love and over the years he came to be considered a wholly unpleasant man.
Then he met Janet. This was years after he’d been ill-treated although his mind remained badly scarred. Janet became the one of the very few people in this man’s life who was gentle, kind and helpful. There just was not the time for his care team to devote to doing much more than keeping him fed and comfortable. Janet’s massage and aromatherapy oils soon made their mark and he now has two half hour sessions a week of massage, which has improved his circulation and seems to have improved the quality of his life.
Now if this does not make Janet’s business a social enterprise, I don’t know what does. She is not a registered charity, nor does she really see herself as an entrepreneur of any kind. Her vision is simply to provide the care she knows makes a difference and be paid fairly for her labour.
As Janet found as her business grew and she began to employ people to work alongside her, she needed to charge more to cover her overheads and what had simply been a vocation was growing into a business. It is at this point she sought advice from her local Business Link in Lincoln and they encouraged her to join an ‘Entrepreneur’s boot camp’ I was running in the area. In common with any business that was starting to grow, it was also starting to change and rather like her clients, it was behaving in a way that meant she needed help to take it over the hurdles that kept popping up in her path. In that respect too, a social enterprise is no different to any other business.
As well as the usual sources of advice, such as Business Link or perhaps an Enterprise Agency there are more specialist sources of support available. It is true to say that sometimes, the passion to change the world actually over-rides common sense to the extent that making a profit (vital to sustain the venture) can be viewed by business and customers as somehow wrong.
One of the best known specialist support organisations is the School for Social Entrepreneurs, based in London’s East End but with a growing network of outlets around the UK. The School was set up by Lord Young of Dartington in 1997 who had previously launched both the Consumer’s Association and the Open University. You can see that he is a man who thinks big! Their mission is to ‘enable people to use their creativity and entrepreneurial abilities more fully for social benefit’. Their use of words here intentionally recognises the fact that every business is capable of delivering social benefit, not just those established purely for this purpose.
This visionary organisation offers a range of programmes that enable ‘learning by doing’ rather than simply ‘teaching’ the theory. They attract as their students people from all backgrounds. Some are as young as 20 and others in the 70s, as well as every age in between. Last year I was invited to spend some time with participants on a two day residential in Cornwall. Talking with them I realised that they shared many of the fears and anxieties that all businesses face. The enterprises they were developing impacted on every facet of human existence; organic food, alternative therapies, social housing, fair-trade and much, much more. You can find out more about this exciting organisation and their work by visiting www.sse.org.uk
Having said that not all activists are students; let me mention one recent graduate who is determined to build a social enterprise rather than follow the herd into corporate life. Jack Butler graduated from Cambridge in 2004. Conscious that at a time when most people graduate with debt, Jack could see that for many, reconciling the desire to apply their knowledge for the common good with the need for income was a challenge. He set up Future Foundations (website www.future-foundations.co.uk) to develop and deliver packages of help, advice and guidance to these people as they found their feet in the world, and for those who were not sure what they wanted to do. Jack’s business is slowly taking shape and evolving as word spreads and people attend the workshops and seminars he stages. Jack could be earning a huge salary in the city, but in common with so many social entrepreneurs, his desire to make a difference overrides any simply material goals.
If you’re thinking that actually, your business is a social enterprise, or should be, here in my usual style is a ten point checklist of things I think you should be thinking about right now.
1. WHO CARES? Or more importantly, will your business give more value than the cost of what you’re going to do?
2. WHO PAYS? Will your consumers pay, or do you also need a relationship with funders and charitable Trusts?
3. WHO SAYS? Are you delivering what your target market needs or the people funding you want you to deliver?
4. WHO NEXT? Does your enterprise face a long future, or will the need quickly be met leaving you high and dry?
5. WHO ELSE? Competition is often severe between social enterprises. Make sure you’re offering something different and ideally better.
6. WHO KNOWS? However good you are, your customers or clients need to know where you are. Don’t neglect marketing.
7. WHO SAVES? If you work with people, your good work might stop them being bad. If you’re reducing vandalism for example, ask the Council to share the money your work saves them.
8. WHO WRITES? Remember that the more altruistic your motives, the more newsworthy your enterprise. Journalists love publicising nice things. Make sure you get lots of positive PR.
9. WHO’S BIG? Celebrity endorsement and patronage delivers credibility and countless benefits to the social enterprise. Find someone with an interest in your area of work and get them on board.
10. WHO AM I? Keep asking yourself that question. Do not let your enterprise drag you away from your values or your vision. Above all else, to be successful at helping others, you must be successfully caring for yourself.
© Robert Ashton
