Welcome to Professionals with Purpose

If you are wondering how you can have a more positive impact while you run a business or earn a living, you’re in the right place. Read on for examples of people who have done this or are achieving it, and often at pace.

It’s possible whether you run a business or work for one. Each week we’ll feature inspiring people from a variety of backgrounds - for-profit businesses, charities, social enterprises, government organisations, and startups.

In addition we’ll share opportunities, tools, events and resources to help you in your aims to work with social impact or to find a social impact role or employer.

Howard Lake
Editor
[email protected]

Patrick Nash: social entrepreneur extraordinaire

With 12 social enterprises under his belt, Patrick Nash has learnt a thing or two about what makes for a success story and what doesn’t.

A quick potted history of his 40 or so years as a social entrepreneur starts with loathing meat as a child and becoming a passionate vegetarian both in his eating habits and politically. This led him towards activism at university during the height of 80s anti-nuclearism and the rise of CND, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, all of which left him wanting to do something with meaning.

Sowing the social enterprise seeds

Inspiration struck during a year-long walk around North and Central Africa after graduation.

There he met a man in Southern Sudan who had been part of a workers’ cooperative focused on vegetarian wholesale. This stuck in his mind, and following his return to the UK he decided to head to Bristol where he’d studied, and open something similar, focused on wholefoods wholesale.

Patrick picks up the story:

“On the first day I went round all the shops in the area that sold rice and beans and found someone in the process of starting up a wholesale business. The next day we were working together. We built Nova Wholefoods from the ground up to a £3 million turnover business in two years, which was very, very fast and intense, and I discovered I loved it. I love the business of doing business.”

But it was more than just a business, as he goes on to explain:

“We were very passionate about what we did. We started to learn about the impact of what we eat on the climate crisis and distributed these little pamphlets about the politics, and the health and climate benefits. So we were really activist entrepreneurs and I just got the bug that led me to my next thing, which was building an ecovillage up at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland.”

Aligning values & commercial interests

Building up Nova Wholefoods (since merged with Bath Wholefood Co into Essential Trading) was an experience that taught him his first lessons about successful social entrepreneurship – one of which was the importance of focusing on the finances as much as on your values.

And this has been re-emphasised with every social enterprise Patrick has worked on – including the Findhorn Ecovillage.

“Your values underpin everything,” he says. “If you’re clear on these, and align them with your commercial interests, you won’t fail, but the moment they’re out of alignment, that’s when the problems start. A lot of emerging social enterprisers get stuck on this – thinking ‘we’re not making any profit but that’s okay because we’re having really great impact’.”

Striving for ‘good enough’ over perfection

Another lesson was the importance of being decisive. It’s not unusual to strive for perfection but this can slow progress down, he says. Better instead to get a ‘good enough’ idea off the ground and then adapt it as necessary.

“Perfection is the enemy of the good. That’s one of my absolute top learnings in life. Not every decision you make will be right and that’s part of being an entrepreneur but you have to be decisive. If you make a decision and it doesn’t go as well as you hoped, you pivot. I made a lot of mistakes in my 20s and 30s, and continued to make them but I got better at avoiding them, and at spotting them earlier on and pivoting.”

It was at the Findhorn Foundation that Patrick learned much about the complexities of running organisations, including raising funds, creating corporate structures and leading teams. Travelling there for an introduction to the community in 1984, he discovered how it was structured and organised, and heard about their ambition to build an ecovillage.

It didn’t take him long to decide he wanted to be involved and within weeks he had returned, to eventually (once the ecovillage’s development was underway) manage the project’s finances. It’s a compelling story that can be read about in detail in Patrick’s book, Creating Social Enterprise, along with more on some of his other biggest ventures.

A focus on changing the world

Following that, 1999 saw him set up Teacherline: a counselling service for school teachers, which led to establishing Connect Assist, the UK’s largest outsourcer of charity helplines, in the Welsh Valleys. In 2017, he established a small consultancy and coaching company, Enterprise Values, which has helped various social enterprises and charities with everything from launching new initiatives, to mergers, finance raising and more. In addition, Patrick has set up a host of other social enterprises, been a charity Chief Executive, worked for the Dalai Lama, and more besides.

The question Patrick always asks himself, whatever he does, is how it contributes.

“That’s the core of it for me,” he says. “I see purpose as being about changing the world the way I can best. So every enterprise has had that focus – on how we do that, on what good looks like when we’re doing it, and how we’re going to do more of it. That was at the heart of our strategies.”

Building an enabling, supportive environment

Of course, there’s more to successful social entrepreneurship besides keeping values, purpose and finances front and centre. Something that makes the biggest difference, Patrick again learned early on, is building a great team – and letting them do what they do best.

“I really like working with people who are way better at what they do than I could ever be,” Patrick explains. “But I learned that the hard way in my first job where I thought I could do everything better than everybody else. Leadership is often about setting the conditions and then getting out of the way.”

Success also demands the right people dynamics. For Patrick, it’s been very clear over the years that the most successful enterprises have been those where the relationship with his business partners has been strong.

“I’ve always had really good business partners and a very close relationship with them. And I realised after a while that the success of the enterprise was in direct relation to the quality of the working relationship and those partnerships. Looking at normal business indicators like revenue, profit, profitability, and numbers of staff, as well as impact on society, the ones where the relationship was really strong and honest are the businesses that performed best.”

‘Empathy is a leadership superpower’

But good relationships also have to filter down throughout the organisation. As a leader, Patrick has learned, compassion and empathy are essential – mixed with clear boundaries.

This way, everyone – from staff to customers to partners – feels supported and knows where they stand, which is essential for getting the best out of people, but also for when hard decisions inevitably have to be made.

“Empathy is a leadership superpower,” he says. “But you’ve got to be able to be ruthless when things go wrong. Losing customers for example is one of the most challenging things –in terms of risk of redundancies, emotionally, and confidence-wise. And the only way I found to get around a difficult time was to be really honest with everyone in the company about it. Including about how I felt. And what happened is everyone would rally round and try to work it out.”

Learning from criticism

Of course, no matter how hard you work at your relationships, or how good the idea behind your social enterprise is, not everyone will like what you’re doing, or how you’re doing it.

But what Patrick has found is that the resulting criticism can be useful, so another key learning he shares is to look for the truth in every criticism of yourself or your project, and address it. Quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, he says: “’Know your enemy, know yourself’ – I came across this at a very important time where the organisation I was working for was under public criticism on a sustained, chronic basis. I deployed it to my advantage, and made friends with the biggest critic. And it was an absolutely amazing learning.”

He continues:

“Even when criticism is outrageous, there is a grain of truth in what's being said so find that, acknowledge it, and put it in the room. That’s the one of the most transformative things you can do.”

Personal development matters

Helping him develop further as a leader over the years, Patrick has found coaching and therapy invaluable. Both for really understanding himself, and for working out where he wants to take his professional life.

“You don’t make a lot of change in the world if you don’t understand yourself,” he says. “I see counselling and mental health work as about more than just getting better; I see it as becoming a fuller person. I’ve been in therapy since I was 35 and had a coach since I was 40.

“They really work for me so I always say: if you haven’t got a coach, get one. You need a space to explore stuff that isn’t with your partner at home, or a member of your family, or anyone else in the business.”

Knowing when to move on

40 years on from when he started out, the social enterprises he had a hand in starting are still going strong: a fact Patrick is immensely proud of. Sharing his learnings in his book, he talks about how one of the great skills of entrepreneurship is knowing when it’s time to move on. Founders, he says, including himself, are often quite addicted to starting things up, but for a social enterprise to really grow requires getting out of that comfort zone and for people with the skills to take it forward to be at the helm – again, it’s about being able to step back and empower others to do what they do best.

“You’ve got to know when to leave it to someone else,” he says. “I like founding things, I like scaling them up, and then it’s best if I leave, because they get to a point where they need to be a bit more corporate. And that’s when I have to look in the mirror and acknowledge that isn’t me. The person who took over Connect Assist for example doubled staff numbers in four years, which is incredible. He was the right person for the job.

“A couple of times I went past my sell by date, which I think was problematic for the organisation. So now when I’m in situations where I’m on the Board with the founder, a conversation I bring up is ‘so when are you going to leave, how are you going to leave it in a great position, and what’s your legacy going to be?”

What’s your legacy going to be? Food for thought indeed.

You can order Creating Social Enterprise here.

(Normally we link books mentioned here to Bookshop.org.uk or B Corp World of Books, but if a book isn’t listed there we shall, as above, link to it on Amazon).

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Resources

Looking to move into the social impact sector, to set up or grow your own purpose-driven company, or want to gain skills and knowledge in this area? Here are some events and opportunities that might help.

Paid internships at GOSH

Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity is offering another round of paid internships in the fundraising (mass participation/special events/committed giving/partnerships/community), social media and impact teams.

They are looking for people from a range of backgrounds with a keen interest in joining the charity sector. No experience or qualifications are needed.

The charity states: “We believe that Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity should be representative of the communities we work with and for and that we should all be striving for a more diverse and inclusive charity sector.”

Santander X Global Award 2023

The winners of this year’s international university entrepreneurship competition from Santander were announced recently. Over 40 universities from eight countries entered their most successful startup, in the two categories of launch and accelerate.

The Santander X Global Award saw 20 finalists from around the world travel to Valencia, Spain to pitch. The next day the winners were announced.

Over the past 26 years the bank has allocated more than 2,200 million euros and has supported more than 1 million people and companies through agreements with more than 1,300 universities.

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"I can’t believe I’ve not come across this before now – it’s a great read."
Liz Rigby
UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub
27 June 2023