Seven Men came out of a desire to have the end product of our working days be more meaningful, and not just financially rewarding. An innocuous post by a favoured blogger (never met to this day!) led to the Q gathering which introduced us to Catherine, founder of Prison Entrepreneurship Programme, in a talk that explained how a person went from NYC Private Equity into a new venture transforming the lives of prisoners using existing skills and experience.
From there we (Kathy & Duncan) spent a year working out how to contextualise that. In mid 2008 (excellent timing in hindsight…), Duncan left his role as a Director with Bank of Scotland’s Joint Ventures team to launch Seven Men. Our vision was to create businesses to generate funds to fund good. Our plan was to launch 30-50 new for profit micro-businesses, have them throw of £5k-£10k profit each year that we could then use as a seed fund for our own ventures for good, and to fund ventures for others to create good. At this point we were joined for a year by Lincoln.
The name Seven Men comes from the bible, in Acts 6 v 3. This says (from the NIV translation):
1 In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. 2 So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. 3Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them 4and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.”
It’s almost the classic startup scaling issue – as you have success you find yourself dragged into issues that you shouldn’t be your priority, and you need assistance to get this done. We liked the idea of fair allocation of resources, of delegating this to a specific bunch of people to free the leadership up to work on other tasks. So Seven Men was the name.
We now describe Seven Men as being about creating and investing in business and projects for the common good.
Our first business we launched was called Paving Cleaning Ltd. This was a manual labour business and focused on delivering a fast and high-quality service of pressure cleaning driveways, shop fronts, playgrounds and car parking areas. The business had up 4 employees (part-time) including John and Billy and Craig and Luke and reached profitability but was closed in 2010.
Our second business was called Expediens Ltd. This was a virtual assistant / task outsourcing business for busy people and small businesses. We had around 20 people (mostly university students – Suzanne, Ally, Jaci, James, Charlotte, Amy, Kristian, Ian, Stephen, Magda, Paul and Alice) working in this business. Initially managed by Lincoln, with web development by Harrison, Lynne and Tom later developed this business further. The business stopped trading in mid 2011 and is currently dormant.
Our third business was Elixir Incubation Ltd. This came from an approach from the Finance Director of MWB Group PLC to launch a business incubator, with £0.5m of capital. With assistance from the marketing director and the CEO of Malmaison Hotels, we launched Elixir in August 2009. Elixir still exists and we still hold a 10% stake but it is not active and solely has the one investment it made in Chirange Technologies.
In 2011, we took on a consulting contract with Espirito Santo, an investment bank with operations in the UK, Iberia, Brazil, Angola, Hong Kong, New York and India.
We have had the privilege of working with lots of great people who have committed a lot to the business and the vision, we are deeply grateful to each person for the part they have played in this to date. We are looking forward to seeing where the next steps of this journey take us!