Category Archives: Entrepreneur

Mar 10

What’s so Social about Social Enterprise?

Posted on by

I know this is "internal only", I'm waiting for a public version I can replace it with.

I’m increasingly unconvinced by the “social enterprise” label as a distinct business model. Of the legal forms of incorporation only one has distinct “social features” (the CIC) but that’s not suitable for everyone. There are certainly many businesses trading for social improvement or with a strong social ethic running through them, just as there are businesses with strong design ethic, or engineering excellence, or any number of coherent passionate shared values.

As a branding mechanism I can see a value in being recognised as a “social enterprise”. It catches a very strong Zeitgeist and clearly flags your tribe, enabling people to make purchasing decisions.

Anyhow, on with the day. This was part of the ESRC‘s Festival of Science.

Session 1

The first session was with Katie Alcott (Frank Water), a great example of a social enterprise, and based in Bristol. It was refreshing that despite the obvious social aims and largely philanthropic ambitions, Katie had been quite level headed in starting Frank. She’d pulled together a team of 5 to launch the product, identified different legal forms of incorporation and decided that a trading company was the best way to achieve her aims.

Unfortunately there was still a bit of confusion between a Limited Company and Social Enterprise. Katie seemed to be suggesting that they were somehow different, when its actually down to the purpose and operation of the business. There are specific legal forms of incorporation that you can use (such as the CIC which was talked about in the break out session) but Frank are a Ltd with a Charitable arm.

What set them apart was their ethic and business focus. The main alternative Katie and Tom looked at was a charity but felt that this was akin to “begging” for money. Yes everyone got a warm fuzzy feeling at helping the less well off, but it wasn’t as sustainable as a business receiving revenue for a valued product or service.

Having launched the business, Katie has demonstrated very acute business development initative with their 1:200 campaign (something the other bottle water companies are following, always a good sign). They obviously have a good sense of marketing, a great design, a solid and building a tribe of followers, and are increasingly delivering the social change projects Katie wanted to.

Break Out

The break out session was to discuss what a Social Enterprise was. There isn’t a ‘template’ presented to us, we were given some examples from the Ashoka Foundation and asked to consider them. We felt that there had to be a business, rather than a charity or volunteer group, and that the principle purpose had to be some social benefit. But beyond that we struggled to come up with a binding definition, which was a recurring theme.

Session 2

The second sessions tried to ask “How do we know, as consumers & citizens, that we a dealing with a social enterprise?” and was led by June Burrough (Pierian Centre). June was very proud of her Social Enterprise Mark as it represented a line in the sand, a recognition but didn’t require her to change what she was doing. The Pierian Centre provide training & conference space in the middle of St Pauls. When she set up the centre, June was advised to take St Pauls off her address as “no on would go there for training”.

That was just buying into the prevailing social attitudes to the St Pauls area. June stuck to her guns and now has a thriving centre with executive training, homoeopathy and counselling (and a whole load more) all making use of her building. A large part of the social in her enterprise is the use of local providers for catering, training, etc. She also runs a sliding price scale so that those will less resource to pay make a smaller contribution.

The Centre is set up as a CIC so that the assets (the Grade 1 listed building) are returned to the community should the company cease trading.

Break Out

We came up with a long list of things you might want to know about in deciding if the company you were dealing with was a ‘social enteprise’ but were hampered by know really knowing enough about the Social Enterprise Mark. It also became clear that while some companies (like Frank Water) are happy to have their photos on the web and to be very ‘out there’, some other very valid social enterprises were less comfortable with that.

Session 3

Last up was Sam Robinson (eaga) asking about “What might we want to know about the human side of the benefits & changes that social enterprise promises to bring?”. eaga is quite an interesting business story outside any social enterprise context. Set up to disburse Government grants to improve home heating efficiency they quickly grew to be a large business, set up as a partnership (a la John Lewis Partnership) then floated retaining a controlling share within the Partnership Trust. With over 4,000 employees across half a dozen countries they’re not your usual little social.

It might have been Sam’s title (CSR Manager) that struck a slight discord but to me it was the disconnect between the core purpose of eaga, managing grants and installing energy efficiency systems, and the social aspects being discussed which were mainly in the sub-continent and around sanitation and education.

The far stronger story was the simple operation of eaga in efficiently using Government funds to implement energy efficiency and heating insulation in the less well of parts of the UK.

Sam acknowledged that they were using their muscle to encourage their supply chain to be more charitable. He also recognised the challeneges of just being a ‘CSR Ticket’ and integrating social enterprise into ethic of business. Whether you can do that as a plc I’m not sure. Interestingly they floated in June 2007 at a share price of 227.75 and steadily fell to 94.75 almost exactly a year later, they’re now back up around 130-140. There must be a lot of pressure on the senior management team to make up that loss in value.

Wrap up

There wasn’t really a wrap up session or final discussion. This is clearly an ongoing series of discussions and debates.

The evolving Social Enterprise Mark piloted in the South West by RISE seems like a clear encapsulation of “social enterprise” in an easy to present format that most people will agree with. The challenge will be to communicate this quickly enough, to a large enough audience that it gains currency, without exceeding expectations on what social enterprises can do.

Feb 19

London Triiibes

Posted on by

What do you do for a living; do you set out to change everything?

We may all be in sales & marketing now, but I still consider myself an engineer that does business development; so I felt a little out of place at first. I’m also still digesting much of the talk, so this may be a little fragmented.

When Seth began I felt there was something traceable to the work of Richard Dawkins‘ “The Selfish Gene“. Seth puts the meme concept to a very practical application.

Ideas that spread win.

Seth began with a quick history lesson on marketing. He related the story of Josiah Wedgwood and the many business and manufacturing decisions that he took, leading to the greatest marketing success of the era. When Josiah died he was the richest man on the planet. He was also Darwin‘s grandfather and the wealth he passed on allowed Darwin to spend his days exploring and ultimately funded the research that produced “On the Origin of Species“.

Josiah was living through a time of profound change, he succeeded because he transformed a craft activity into an industrial business. That was the first of 3 industrial revolutions and Seth contends that we’re in the middle of a forth. I have to agree with him.

And it fundamentally isn’t about ‘black hat SEO‘ or clever ways to interrupt people.

Seth’s opening stance was that nobody listens to advertising any more. There’s too much clutter; everyone’s buying everything from everywhere, and you can’t interrupt them any more. As soon as you launch a product or feature, there are a hundred competitors and if you’re only competing on how loud your marketing can shout then you’ve already lost.

Seth went on to talk very briefly about the 14 trends, extrapolated from Meatball Sundae. Aligning the whole business, or organisation, around some of these trends would provide the conditions for it to flourish. Wouldn’t guarantee success but would provide the conditions for success.

Direct communication & commerce between consumers & producers Amplification of the voice of the consumer & indie authority
Need for authenticity as clutter increases Short attention span due to clutter
Long Tail Outsourcing
Google & the dicing of everything Infinite channels of communication
Direct communication & commerce between consumers & consumers Shifts in scarcity & abundance
Triumph of Big Ideas Shift from “How Many” to “Who”
The wealthy are like us New Gatekeepers, No Gatekeepers

Which is great to get the message flowing but how do you get the first customer to talk about your product/service if you can’t interrupt them any more? To a certain extent, Seth offered a simplistic solution, make your product/service remarkable. If its worth making a remark about, it stops being spam and becomes one human being talking to another human being. Word of mouth marketing.

There’s an obvious parallel with Hugh’s Global Microbrand concept. Being fantastically good at what you do, and building your business inseparably from new technologies in a way that simply wasn’t possible pre-internet.

An interesting proposition was that, in fact, we all need to be in the fashion business. Fashion is all about getting talked about. And as Oscar Wilde said:

the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about

And on the internet, someone’s talking about you; even if you’re not part of that conversation. And if you’re not being talked about and you can’t interrupt people with advertising any more, you really are in trouble.

Seth wasn’t proposing that we’d all stop buying ‘regular stuff’ just because it wasn’t sexy. But if you want to launch a new product, or grow an existing market, or break into a new territory, the old rules don’t apply any more.

So what did I take away from the 4 hrs?

Well a head ache, which was pretty much what Seth promised. But also a very different approach to thinking about business/market development and the support that jbsh can offer.

  • Helping companies to identify the key memes that their product/service represents
  • Helping companies work through the 14 trends and identify the ones most important to them
  • Building a business model that can generate revenue from those important trends

How are you building your business for the future?

Feb 03

Of gifts and giving

Posted on by
Uploaded on June 1, 2006 by Poo Bar

Uploaded on June 1, 2006 by Poo Bar

Name a bizarre gift you received. Who gave it to you? What was the occasion? Did you regift it?

Blogging, twittering, and the immensely low barrier to communications that these technologies provide is the bizarre gift I’d like to mention in this Plinky prompt.

They’ve revolutionised the world of business development. The photo on the right was one of the first that I took with my HTC Universal and blogged from my phone. It was more to see what I could do from a mobile platform than any great social commentary on the redevelopment of Bristol.

Around the same time I mucked about on del.icio.us, flicker and set up a MySpace profile. I was trying to work out how I could use these technologies and how they would inform the business models for innovations in educational technology.

I’d had a website since mid-1997 when I was working on an European funded research project on business process change and we used some clunky (even by late-90′s standards) html to navigate the various options. I merrily coded lots of roll-overs, image maps but did have the good sense to steer clear of animated gif’s. This isn’t a history lesson so I’ll gloss over the rise of the freemium internet, suffice to say it was of interest but not a serious tool I was using.

Fast forward to June 2007 and the formation of jbsh LLP. Having always tried to link people up and join networks from within whichever organisation I worked for at the time, I now had the opportunity to let rip and make that a larger part of what I was about. This blog, LinkedIn and Twitter have been immense gifts to undertaking this as is GReader‘s shared items feature. I haven’t quite leapt into Friendfeed in the same way but might do if it proves valuable to what I do.

So I hope I’ve re-gifted by reaching out and connecting interesting people that want to grow the Bristol entrepreneurial ecosystem.  This has partly been through relaunching OpenCoffee Bristol (using Twitter, Upcoming, LinkedIn, Facebook, and most recently it’s own website).

I’m an engineer, I build things. At the moment I’m building businesses, networks and partnerships.

What are you gifting back?

Uploaded on February 3, 2009 by Poo Bar

Uploaded on February 3, 2009 by Poo Bar

And the office block being dismantled in June 2006? Its due to reopen as a Radisson SAS hotel “early” 2009.

Jan 07

Serendipity engineering

Posted on by
Atticus Finch Uploaded on August 21, 2006 by Dunechaser

Atticus Finch - Uploaded on August 21, 2006 by Dunechaser

How valuable is engineered serendipity to your business? On my way back from a meeting in the Watershed I thought I’d stick my head into UWE’s new business incubator facility in Bush House. Only opened just before Christmas they already have a good selection of tenants including the usual scattering of graduate start-ups (such as Carolyn Newton from Whale Bags, a business plan competition winner).

I also bumped into Chris, Dave, and Toby from Evans & Finch. I’d spoke to Dave & Chris last year at OpenCoffee before they’d settled so it’s great to see them finding their feet so quickly. For one thing the holding page they had back in November is now funky showcase of their work.

Chris, Toby and I threw a couple ideas around for some funding they’re thinking about applying for. They had a very strong feature set (not unusual for a software / tech company) and a pretty compelling description of the benefits, which is nice to see. The challenge we were kicking around was how to bring that to bare upon the funding call.

We took a step back from the application itself and looked at the funders as clients. This lead to some great new directions for the proposal. We’ll find out how they get on in a couple of weeks.

So how does that help jbsh? Well in the short term it doesn’t. It does build the relationship with Chris, Dave & Toby (especially if they land the funding :) ) which may lead to some consultancy in the future. More likely, they’ll bump into someone that needs some business planning support and think of me.

Serendipity works like that, so long as the opportunity cost doesn’t outweigh the benefit its always a good investment.

I was in town, I could have gone straight home and sorted a couple emails or helped Chris & Dave and lay the opportunity. I think helping out Chris & Dave was a better use of my time and the emails will get answered in due course.

Nov 11

Meet the Dragons

Posted on by
Uploaded on September 27, 2008 by Steve Wampler

Uploaded on September 27, 2008 by Steve Wampler

…after you’ve crossed my palm with silver.

There’s always been a healthy market in one group of people selling access to a small second group of people that a third, larger group of people value. In many circumstances this is entirely right and proper.

I was recently at the 31st International Conference on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, this was a massive gathering of academics researching the world of the small business and entrepreneur (slightly devalued by the lack of small businesses and entrepreneurs but that’s another story). Part of the value was the stellar network of UK and International academics interested in supporting and developing businesses. It was certainly cheaper than schlepping my way around the UK and most folk were already in an ‘open mindset’ to making new connections. For the academics, part of the value was in presenting their research to other academics.

On the other hand, there are plenty of networks and the like that will provide access to potential investors (for a fee). It could just be coincidental timing but I’m seeing more of these networks and events pushing themselves harder than before.

I’ve nothing against introducing people to potential investors (something I try and do in a small way around Bristol), nor have I anything against events to get people networking for business benefit (e.g. OpenCoffee). It’s the bit where you fork out hard cash for the opportunity, to possibly, meet someone that might be interested in your business. And lets face it, no one sensible is going to hand over a wedge of used £20′s on the basis of a 1 minute pitch over lukewarm coffee and limp biscuit.

I can see a valid business case for someone that can introduce me to a sizeable chunk of funding receiving a suitable fee for that service, but a fixed fee rather than an arbitrary % and that should be no-win-no-fee.

As a business development professional, I would expect to get paid for adding value to a business. Sorting out a business strategy, or identifying new markets and executing an exploitation plan, or implementing an efficiency plan following some process mapping, etc.

I can see that with the profile of Kliner Perkins / Sequia / etc comes a great deal of attention and that access might need to be managed. On the other hand, folks like Fred Wilson, Rick Segal and others are openly out there sharing their stories of how to approach them (and how not to)! So why pay someone else good money to preview your business plan and then mailshot their contact list?

So get out there and have confidence in your business. If you feel you need support with the business of building a business, have clear deliverables contractually agreed before you hand over the cash. It’s a sales channel just like any other, the only difference is that you’re selling a stake in the business (or buying entry to a particular market) rather than a website or set of APIs.