How Do You Start (and Maintain!) a Social Enterprise?

December 18, 2019
by Sally Quinn

As CEO for Green Collect, I was honoured to be the guest speaker at the awards ceremony for The Big Issue’s Big Ideas competition in November 2019. To encourage the budding social entrepreneurs, I shared my journey of starting a social enterprise, keeping it going through tough times, and how social enterprises are placed for success today. Here's part of my speech - perhaps it will help you if you need encouragement starting up (or sticking at!) your own social enterprise. 

 

20190904_WP_GREEN_FPL_13265 cropped"I'll start with a question, one that many of you would have recently asked: Is now the right time for me to start a social enterprise?

To help answer this I’m going to take you back to the year 2001 - the year that my partner Darren and I began to dream about starting Green Collect. Let me tell you a bit about my life at this point:

  • We were both 29 years old
  • We were both students
  • Darren was a full-time student 
  • I was a part-time student 
  • We had just had our first baby 
  • We were living payment-to-payment with no money behind us 
  • And neither of us had any training or experience in running a business

So perhaps this wasn’t the best time for us to start a social enterprise?

While it could be thought that these weren’t the perfect conditions for embarking on a high-risk, costly and demanding venture, maybe you can relate to some of these circumstances and would perhaps agree that there is actually no perfect time to start a social enterprise.

While there may not be a ‘best’ time to start a social enterprise, there are two characteristics that I think are necessary to possess in order to start and sustain a social enterprise. They are: passion and resilience.

When I look back on the journey since 2001, and some pretty challenging circumstances, I can see the importance of these two particular qualities in both the daily struggles and the bigger moments.

Maintaining Passion in Social Enterprise

This is the very strong WHY that comes from our personal stories and experiences, and drives our work. Being passionate means knowing, feeling and believing in the WHY of your enterprise. As we’ve guided Green Collect through the different phases of start-up, development, growth and scale, we have needed to be very sure of our WHY. This has been more important than believing in the WHAT or HOW of the enterprise, so I’m going to start with that.

Prior to Green Collect, I worked in youth and social work for around 7 years, supporting young people and women experiencing homelessness. Many of the women I worked with were homeless due to family violence, and experienced the huge challenges of maintaining community connections and well-being while facing insecure housing and the disruption to employment. I actively supported women to find secure housing and employment; two things critical to rebuilding confidence, community and well-being, particularly after a time of crisis.

I saw this first-hand as I worked with motivated, intelligent and skilled young women who were trying so hard to get a break and change their lives. 

So our WHY became: “To place people who would usually be at the end of the employment queue at the front of our queue”. 

We didn’t yet have a queue, so in the middle of our ‘no money-baby-student life’ Darren and I started talking about creating a company that would put people who were at the end of the queue at the front of the line for the jobs we would one-day create.

At times when we faced closure because we couldn't cover the enterprise expenses, we worked so hard to keep afloat to make sure that our staff would never find themselves back at the end of a queue again - waiting instead of working. Some of you may also be developing employment-based enterprises that create similar new opportunities for people who face barriers to high quality, meaningful employment. Everyday we get to see the immense value and transformation that comes from having a job, and it's this that motivates us to stay committed and focussed even when the demands of creating a sustainable social enterprise seem impossible.
  
This new visibility and identity as a worker was so significant that staff occasionally even wore their uniforms on days they had off! 

There are days when running a social enterprise just feels too much and too costly, from financial pressures to the complexities of support and caring for staff in the midst of busyness and stress. Again at these times the WHY is critical. We do this to see people rediscover their potential, skills and dignity through meaningful work and the ability to earn their own money. Green Collect staff have gone from living in squats to private rental, from no secure finances to building up super, from never dreaming of  a holiday to applying for leave to visit family interstate. Having a job makes a difference.

We're also deeply passionate about the additional WHY of Green Collect: environmental sustainability. The WHY we developed around this is: “To recapture the value in discarded resources and prevent further harm to the earth."

We put these two passions together to create Green Collect, and they are both expressed in the WHAT and the HOW of Green Collect:

Green Collect collects a wide range of discarded items from offices and households across Melbourne and delivers the best reuse, upcycling or recycling outcome for complex forms of waste. Basically we’re making it possible for all things that are thrown away to become resources again - creating tangible options for a circular economy and working for a world without waste.

On the ground this means we’re collecting items in our truck, van or pedestrian service from over 200 businesses each year. We bring everything back to our warehouse in Braybrook - deliberately locating ourselves in one of Melbourne’s most disadvantaged postcodes. 

Here, all items are hand-sorted for their best environmental outcome, prioritising reuse and upcycling, with recycling as a last resort. We have processes for almost 100 different items and our solutions are all local, transparent and create jobs for our community’s most disadvantaged job-seekers. Last year, we engaged 39 people in work and training - jobseekers who would normally go to the back of the queue due to barriers such as poor mental health, homelessness and refugee background. 

Our clients include local councils, Victorian State Government departments, businesses, infrastructure projects, utility companies, and companies such as PWC (where our event is hosted) - who we worked with in 2016 on their move across from Freshwater Place to this beautiful site. 

Building Resilience in Social Enterprise

I want to go back and give a bit of detail about the early days, because that’s where most of you are at, and it’s where many of our lessons were learned in how to come back from failures and recover from repeated set-backs.

In 2002, we ran a pilot project, funded by BP Australia, to test the idea of creating employment through a cork collection service in Melbourne’s CBD. From this, we developed a fairly ambitious business plan to collect all complex forms of office waste and this led to receiving seed funding from the Federal Government of $200,000.

We were on top of the world. In 2003, we held had fancy launch, with John Thwaites (then Minister for Environment and Water) and Tim Costello, (the CEO of Urban Seed, World Vision and Micah Australia). Things were looking great!

However, the highs of those early days were pretty short-lived, and after two years the funding had gone and we weren’t yet in a profitable position. We had expanded the collections to a wider range of items from offices, but we were only covering around 40% of our operating expenses. With funding running out, the auspicing charity decided against continuing its relationship with Green Collect beyond this time, and only three years after launching it looked like the enterprise would be wound up. Believing in the importance of our WHY was what made us scramble around, take out a $30,000 loan and do everything humanly possible to continue the enterprise. This enabled Green Collect to incorporate independently as a Company Limited by Guarantee and to continue its journey towards becoming a sustainable social enterprise.

The next few years were extremely hard. I remember, one day I needed to do a collection of items from a client in the city. You know when you’re in start-up mode and you have to do a bit of every job? (you will be doing that possibly for a long time!) The collection was from a government department, and as I drove into the loading bay at the back entrance, I can remember looking across to the nice foyer and front entrance where all of the ‘successful’ people were entering for work. And as I struggled with the trolley and did numerous trips back and forward in this underground dingy passageway I can remember thinking: “Is this really my work? I have two degrees. I should be going in the front door, not the loading bay!” There were many times when I doubted the use of my skills, and this was definitely one of them.

Anyway, as I drove off with a station-wagon load full of waste (electronic stuff, folders, stationery, batteries), I looked over my shoulder into the back of the car and thought to myself, I actually just saved all that stuff from landfill. That plastic that would never break down, those harmful metals and toxins that would have leached into earth. Then, I thought to myself: “You know what, this job is important, and this job it is worth it”.

Good News for Social Enterprises in Australia 

Research and mapping done recently by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Deutsche Bank has showed that social enterprises around the world are increasing in their size and impact, and have a significant role to play in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. 

And did you know that right now, Australia is the 2nd best place in the world to be a social entrepreneur?! They measured 45 of the world’s leading economies across 6 different measures to find out which countries are creating the best environment for social entrepreneurs. And Australia came up number 2 (behind only Canada). We’ve shown the biggest advancement of any country over the last 3 years, up from 26th place in 2016 when the research was first conducted.

More specifically, Australia is ranked number 1 in the ability for social entrepreneurs to make a living from their work. That’s good news! And we ranked 3rd in the ability to access debt or equity investment. Which is clearly critical in some form at all stages of enterprise growth.

So, it appears that now is actually the best time to start a social enterprise !!

I want to finish with the words of Ed, an employee of Green Collect, whose words make me feel really happy that we started Green Collect. He says:

“Green Collect has really been something special for me - it was a lucky opportunity to learn English, to meet people and experience Australian working culture. It’s been a great discovery for me - I call it my ‘bingo moment'. We're all together here in the same boat - a small team who work hard. I feel good here."