#SocEnt

21 days ago we completed ‘The Business Activist Entrepreneurs Bootcamp’, a 21-day learning experience that we have very much enjoyed.

Short daily videos followed by useful exercises and accompanied by a funbook.

The aim? Learn how to develop a business idea, secure money to get started and launch!

The hosts? Brandon and Amanda Neely, two business activist entrepreneurs themselves. They that have run a coffee bar for nearly 10 years with the mission to ‘inspire a genuine and local community of people who change the world with their purchasing power, time, and talents’.

Light bulb - what we have learnt

1. We don’t need a huge amount of time to improve our venture day by day... as long as we’ve got a good guide!  

2. Key ingredients for success: a vision, consistency, good prep… and a plan B and C. On this, see also last week’s post in case you’ve missed it!  

3. Oh wow… there are so many more learning learning points. Ok, a good one is that we can all be super-heroes  as long as we know what our super-power is. A simple test can help. 

Heart - what we have loved

4. It was short and to the point. 1 theme a week. Three weeks altogether. No more than 20 minutes a day to spend on videos or exercises.   

5. The exercises. Learning for a purpose.

6. The forum. Great to share thoughts and ideas with other bootcampers and to receive useful insights from the facilitators.

Smile - what made us laugh

7. Diligently spending our lunch break in August with the tablet and the headphones on the landing, just out of our office door :)

8. Some of the comments in the forum space   

9. Talking about consistency with a creative person who hates planning and deadlines!

Pointing finger - what we take away

10. An Instagram page with a consistent picture every Weds… prepping for our trip start!    

11. A revised concept of triple bottom line which is very much in line with ABCity.org’s philosophy - measuring results through money, social impact and fun!     

Shaking hands - what connections we have made

12. The first fans of our Facebook page were participants in the bootcamp!     

13. We discovered the Smart Passive Income podcast and through it... The Bakers!     

14. So much inspiration and good examples from another bootcamper, Sabine @ From Scratch

Rooted foot - what we knew already and was important to remember

15. #small matters. From selling coffee beans to setting up an amazing learning & business activist community :)

16. One thing is to have a story to tell, another thing is to be able to tell it in a way that it’s engaging, inspiring and meaningful for other people

17. There’s need to really understand what customers want, expect and think like.     

Bin - what we’d kick away (didn’t like that much…)

18. Having 2 platforms to share comments and learning - the bootcamp forum and the Facebook page. 1 would have been sufficient or having the 2 talking to each other.

19. A $1,000 worth bonus randomly allocated to a bootcamp participant - mainly because the winner was not super-engaged and we still don’t know what they won!  

20. The impossibility to join the next step… the BUSINESS ACTIVIST BREAKTHROUGH! Mainly due to logistical reasons as ABCity.org will soon be travelling :)

If you’d like to know more about any of the above, leave a comment below!

If you’d like to know more about other learning opportunities that Brandon and Amanda can provide, this is the link for you http://overflowyourpossibility.com/bootcamp.

And if you want to receive regular inspiration pills, sign up for Overflow Your Possibility newsletter or follow Amanda on Twitter.

Quoting Amanda would say: “Keep overflowing”!

Food is one of the 3 areas we are exploring and researching on, along with urban innovation and movement sports.

Why food? Food is something that everybody needs but nearly 800 million people in the world are in hunger and around 1.3 billion tonnes of food go wasted every year.

This means that there is a lot to do about how food is produced, distributed and consumed!

At the Profit with Purpose event we attended last Wednesday at the Business and IP Centre in London, four social enterprises that work with food shared their stories and their advice @HarrySpecters @rubiesinrubble @ChangePlease @TooGoodToGo_UK

Here are some of our thoughts.

4 things to have to set up a business that makes profit with a purpose:

1. A good idea and a strong message to go with it

2. Passion for what you do and why you are doing it

3. A product or a service that you will test, improve, refine and make it love by your customers

4. A supportive network including family members to give you good recipes or smart ideas for a name, your friends to test your products and provide feedback, partners with different expertise, mentors to help you build your skills and have a sounding board, etc.

4 things to remember in the journey to social entrepreneurship

1. Start small, dream big. You can start from your backyard room and dream you’ll become a franchise all across the UK (and beyond) .like

2. Know your customers and your competitors. The market will lead or hinder your growth. Apps like Smaply and Experience Fellow can be really helpful for this.

3. Work step by step. Don’t over-think what you're doing in a way that puts you off. Try, test, fail, learn and make it better. Then move to the next step.

4. Be prepared to work hard but do look after yourself!

4 things we really liked from the four social enterprises

1. Coherence. Prices on Too Good to Go app are capped. This way businesses are discouraged to produce food with the aim to end up in the platform. The aim is to reduce food excess, not to provide another food delivery app.

2. Closing the loop. Rubies in the Rubble collects apples and bananas that would be thrown away each week from Virgin train’s catering service, turns them into jam or ketchup and sells the end product back to the company.

3. Onward-thinking. Please Change provides homeless with training and an opportunity to work as baristas at London living wage - which is already commendable. They also provide housing, a bank account and support to access further employment after their six-month programme.

4. Social Investment. Harry Specters invests 60 per cent of their profit to further the social aims of the business, and to provide social activities and opportunities for personal development for their young employees with Autism.

1 conclusion

Profit with a purpose makes economic and social impact, can go to scale and can be fun :)

How beautiful is this?

If you run a social enterprise that works with food, we'd love to learn from you!

If you run a social enterprise that works with food in Russia, Mongolia, China, Nepal or Myanmar, we'd love to visit you :)

PS: the two bottles that you see in the picture were super kindly offered to us by Julian, Managing Director at Lemonaid Beverages Ltd, another socially-minded business that we had the chance to meet at the event. Thanks, Julian :)