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Four social entrepreneurs growing their venture and their impact
Four social entrepreneurs growing their venture and their impact
Written by
UnLtd employee
UnLtd position
Four social entrepreneurs growing their venture and their impact
Written by
UnLtd employee
UnLtd position
Choosing to scale your idea can be one of the toughest decisions for social entrepreneur to make. You know you have a model that you know works, but expanding it to reach new markets and beneficiaries can be risky. There are no guarantees it’s going to work and you run the risk of stretching your resources too far. We’ve helped a range of social entrepreneurs reach scale, growing their ventures so that they can have a greater impact on the world. Here are the stories of four social entrepreneurs we’ve helped to grow and their advice to others looking to scale their venture.
Ben Allen started Oomph in March 2011 with an ambition to improve the quality of life for people living in care. He started out developing Oomph’s workshops and model while working with a handful of care homes in Scarborough. In 2012 they expanded to cover the North of England, before growing across the UK. To date they’ve worked with more than 1,200 care homes, delivering sessions to over 530,000 participants a year, who report an average of 13% improvement in quality of life. If you’re a social entrepreneur thinking of growing your venture, Ben is keen to reinforce how important measuring and demonstrating social impact is. ‘Social entrepreneurs often see the data and the impact as something to do on a rainy day. They’re busy and it’s not something that’s core to their business. Actually, if you’re a social enterprise it should be core to your business - it’s the best way to define the value of your business. It’s the best way to sell your business to all stakeholders.’
Kate and Laura started Memory Matters to turn the experience of people living with dementia into a positive one. They run day clubs, care home visits, training and one-to-one sessions. This activity all aims to encourage people to interact with their community. A challenge for Kate and Laura has been managing growth. They believe that their social venture has the potential to scale locally and nationally, but they don’t want to rush things. ‘We don’t want to lose the quality of what we do,’ Kate explained, ‘We have to hold back a bit, make sure we get the right staff and take our time.’ They identify their next stage of growth as cementing their place in Plymouth and providing them with another sustainable stream of money. They’re currently developing a cafe – open to everyone, but designed for people living with dementia. A critical element that has helped them to grow has been understanding other local services and how they fit into the picture. Kate argues that if you want to succeed recognising the challenges others in the sector face is important. ‘As a social enterprise you have to work with other stakeholders so that they understand that you’re actually there to support them, not just a business trying to make money out of it. You have to be open. Then you can create relationships with everybody that are non-threatening, but quite supportive of both.’
Trudy Thompson and Josh Taylor started Bricks and Bread to help build the economic resilience of local people in Tywardreath, Cornwall. They teach local people the skills to set up micro-enterprises to help them top up their wages and counter the difficulties of seasonal employment. This training is free, supplemented by training people from large corporations. Earlier this year they decided to grow their venture. They ran a successful crowdfunding campaign raising more than £200,000 to buy their local shop and B&B. It allows them to deepen their impact in Tywardreath by helping local people sustain their businesses. ‘Taking over these enterprises lets us build on our other work. It gives us a place to incubate local businesses. There’ll be shelf space available and we’ll be able to help them in a guided way, giving feedback on things like setting the right price point.’ Trudy, like Kate of Memory Matters, views building relationships as a key part of growing a successful venture. For her it’s not just about building relationships with other organisations in the sector, but also the local community. ‘I see it as an absolutely fundamental strategy of a business these days; if you don’t engage with your community you’re going to struggle. If we had upset the community our social venture would be dead on its feet. You’ve got to be open to sharing knowledge to help others come up as quickly as you do.’
In an economic climate where the education market is increasingly competitive with shrinking school budgets, now>press>play’s has scaled up impressively. In April 2014 they were working in seven schools where an estimated 1,750 pupils had access to their products, now they work across the UK in 75 schools with 25,000 children Initially Alice Lacey and her co-founders spent most of their time running workshops in schools themselves. They soon realised in order to grow their impact, they would need a change of business model. ‘We realised that we had a very powerful learning tool and that its impact could be huge, but that the current business model just didn’t work, or at least wouldn’t work at scale. We started developing a subscription model, which is way more exciting – you have teachers delivering sessions and it offers better value for schools.’. For Alice the key to success has been ‘learning to focus and not getting distracted.’ That has meant not taking on too many ideas at once. ‘When we started we had hugely grand plans of what we wanted’, says Alice, ‘We were going to be in secondary schools and SEN schools and primary schools and do community work. It became clear that primary schools was a big enough market and a big enough challenge.’ Focusing your approach will lead to better results and sustainability. This is especially relevant given Alice’s final piece of advice for any education startups out there – ‘assume everything is going to take at least six months longer than you think.’