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.

Our purpose is to prove it is possible and preferable to build a career in which you can achieve both personal success and progressive benefit to the planet.

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.

This week we speak to Gerry Lianos, co-founder and CEO of digital raffle platform, Raffolux.

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]

Gerry Lianos, founder of digital raffle platform Raffolux

Founded in 2019, Raffolux recently celebrated the milestone of giving away over £10 million worth of prizes, while raising more than £600,000 for charity in the process.

Keeping charity at the heart of everything it does, Raffolux makes monthly donations to a not-for-profit of the player’s choice, supporting charities such as Alzheimer’s Society, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, and Mental Health UK, among many others.

The journey to purpose

As a teenager, I spent most of my evenings volunteering around my local town and helping out at the youth centre. I think it’s something that I did more and more of just because I liked it, I didn’t consciously think ‘I’m helping others out’ or ‘this is a great thing to do,’ it just felt right and really rewarding. I’m not sure exactly when or where the concept of purpose really hit home for me, or rather, when I decided that giving back was something that I really valued, I just liked being in situations where I happened to be helping people.

When I was a little younger, I had my heart set on becoming a lawyer and was focused on giving myself the best chance I could to get there. So, for me, that meant the usual slew of taking part in various vacation schemes and internships, and I was lucky enough to work for a number of brilliant firms in the process. Although I undoubtedly learned quite a lot from that process, I had the same feeling that a lot of entrepreneurs often have – where you just feel this urge to go your own way and do the right thing for yourself, regardless of whether it will work out or not. It’s just something that I felt that I had to do.

Of course, I’m still fond of the legal profession (and perhaps there’ll always be a bit of me thinking ‘what if’), but to be honest, I’m so happy doing what I’m doing and running Raffolux has been such an incredible experience. I’m loving every moment of it.

I love the concept of Raffolux and the charity twist we’ve managed to bring to it. In a nutshell, players of our raffles can select a charity of their choice to donate a portion of our proceeds towards every month. When we came up with the idea it just made sense, and I was so happy that we managed to bring a twist to the product that would support amazing causes.

Learnings along the way

When you decide to go your own way and start up your own company, it’s all very exciting and there’s so much to figure out. It can be amazingly positive and I’ve had some real highs from running Raffolux, but you also have to be prepared to deal with very regular challenges and issues on an almost daily basis. I think throughout my journey, my two main learnings have really been how to deal with failure, and the importance of remaining optimistic.

The idea of failure and how to react to it is something that your teachers might have pointed out in school – that you need to fail in order to get things right, and that it’s an important part of learning. In the past, I maybe brushed that advice off more than I should have, thinking that getting it right the first time around was the important thing, and the advice sounded more like an excuse than anything else.

When I started the business, however, I realised just how wrong I was. In the early stages of a startup, it’s crucial to try new ideas and iterate constantly. The very nature of that process means that you’re guaranteed to get it wrong a lot of the time, and the critical element to it is learning from the less optimal parts, and taking that understanding forward into your next ideas or iterations. That jagged line of experimentation is so crucial to getting it right, and in a start-up context, getting to the product-market fit that founders dream of.

Remaining optimistic is also a key learning. As I alluded to earlier, at the start, you will almost certainly go through some immensely trying times running a startup, unless you just get ferociously lucky throughout the whole thing. I think I always used to view optimism as some sort of personality trait; that some people generally got up on the right side of bed and others simply didn’t.

But, as the business has grown, I’ve definitely come to see that optimism is more of a life skill, and it is something that you only really develop when you’re in the bad times. From there, it’s so important to break down every bad situation into a set of positive options and maintain that approach as you move forward, however you’re feeling or whatever state the business is in. Sharing that attitude with your team is also so important – optimism and pessimism are both equally infectious in the office, and instilling the right mindset in the group is crucial.

Overcoming challenges

With every startup there are, of course, countless challenges you’ll have to go through where you’ll either be completely stumped in the beginning, or worn down by the process of overcoming it. One particular challenge I remember is raising our first round of funding. I think in general that most tech entrepreneurs look forward to that moment, but the road towards it can be very demoralising. In the absence of third-party validation from other investors, it’s often very difficult to raise that first round, and, of course, our experience at Raffolux was no different in that regard. I think we must have received about 20-30 ‘no’ responses from investors for every person that said they’d take a look at what we were doing.

So, getting through that definitely required a lot of resilience – it’s hard just ploughing through the constant rejections. It forces you to adopt a positive mindset, and it’s important to remember that making small steps towards the goal is just as important as actually getting there in the end.

As well as resilience, I think the two other main qualities that are crucial to success are empathy and adaptability. Obviously, it’s possible to be a successful but ruthless leader, but that’s not a trait I place any value on. I think it’s always best to first view a difficult situation with empathy and go into difficult conversations with that frame of mind, rather than a ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude. That’s not to say that you don’t want to build an A-team and it is occasionally necessary to let people go – both are equally true – but I’ve found an empathetic approach often encourages the best work from your team, rather than ruthlessness. Adaptability as a leader is also so important, especially for smaller companies where you spend half your time planning, and the other half dealing with issues that come up along the way. You need to be persistent and single-minded in where you want to be.

I’m still a work in progress on all of these counts, but going in with the right intentions always helps!

The power of purpose

This is almost definitely going to come across as a little bit cheesy, but to me, purpose is all about putting others first. I’m still really excited by my own goals and aspirations, but helping others is something that’s always made me both motivated and happy. I’m not entirely sure where it’s come from, but it’s something that’s always been with me. It’s hugely rewarding to help others achieve something and put them first, and it’s an approach that has helped me throughout my life.

For anyone looking to embed more purpose into their lives, my advice is, if it’s something that you feel in your heart and that you think will make you happy, then absolutely, go for it – what’s the point otherwise?

One thing that I’d advise is that there isn’t always the need to make a dramatic change to find your purpose or start your purpose journey – you don’t need to suddenly uproot your life, make a significant change to your career or start a business on a whim. My advice would be to consider taking small steps to make sure that any change is absolutely what you want to do – consider volunteering in your free time, or find other ways to dip your toe in the water. Our current surroundings, both inside and outside of work, often offer opportunities to make a real impact and, if you’ve given your all there and there’s still something inside of you that’s driving you to explore your purpose further, then maybe then it’s the time to consider taking the larger step.

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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.

What is the purpose of a mayor?

Paul Skinner, founder of MarketingKind, today interviews Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester, and explore the question ‘What is the purpose of a mayor?’

The online event is free for MarketingKind members “and there are a limited number of guest places available”.

Urgent Action Fund for Women's Human Rights

A $5,000 grant is available “to women and non-binary human rights defenders and organisations in Asia and the Pacific who – on their own or in collaboration with others – seek to implement an initiative, including unanticipated opportunity, that would contribute towards resourcing resilience for their activism”.

Applications close on 31 December 2023.

UK Boardroom Apprentice Programme is open

Boardroom Apprentice is a 12-month board learning, development and placement programme which enables those who would like to serve on a public or third sector board to learn and gain experience in a safe way before they take that step.

Good Bad Billionaire

In this new BBC podcast Simon Jack and Zing Tsjeng explore how the richest people on the planet made their billions, and then they judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

The first two episodes of Good Bad Billionaire feature Rihanna and Jeff Bezos.

African Union Youth Volunteer Corps 2023

Applications for the African Union Youth Volunteer Corps 2023 are open. The 12-month fully-funded programme aims to bring people from all 55 AU member states together “to build a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful Continent driven by its citizens”.

The closing date for applications is 19 September 2023.

Learn about social investment

If you want to learn more about social investment, this free online course runs four times a year.

It is designed for anybody who wants to be able to explain social investment to others and answer questions about it; such as infrastructure organisations, membership bodies and capacity building organisations.

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What we’ve been reading

Explore Social Founders for Inspirational stories about founders of social impact orgs.

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What readers say

"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