Blog

Hopefully you had a good break like we did. I managed to spill orange juice over my keyboard on my first day back in the office and so am having the strange experience of the screen moving up and down every time I type, all in the fun of the first week back. A new decade as well. And yet in many ways, not much has changed at all - we’re just a couple of weeks further on from when we last worked. And with most businesses not trading much over Christmas, is it really that different? We tend to become more introspective at this time of year, and revisit our goals. With Seven Men, we suspect 2010 will be very much a make or break year (as every year of a startup is). Our immediate ambitions are to sort out the complications that have arisen in Elixir, to scale Expediens and to restart Paving Cleaning. We may launch a new company but this is subject to the other objectives. We are looking forward to a year of new challenges, new learning and new experiences.

Had our first ever Christmas party last night for Seven Men (including all the guys at Expediens too in that description!). Nice meal at Howies. Only downside was the menu had no turkey! But they did great food, and the service was excellent, as was the banter. Roll on next Christmas.

Perspective can be key. Many people are looking at climate change talks in Copenhagen from different viewpoints - it is a handout to my country to enable our technological development, it is a way of keeping our country above water, it is a way of my country’s government agreeing how to legislate for the changes necessary, it is a discussion where we will give away the least we can. Not too many participants are taking the view that Tom Friedman took (to an extent) in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, where the market was seen as a key participant in solutions to climate change. The language used around climate change is predominantly seen as a threat, and yet the technological, consumer behaviour and capital expenditure changes needed to drop 5-10bn tonnes of carbon in the next 11 years opens up massive opportunities for new companies, new products and new services. It’s all about the way you look at the problems!

Seven Men has looked at the recession of the last year as an opportunity - yes it hit our markets and customer demand, but it also meant easier hiring, better negotiation on costs and less competition. Looking forward, we see real opportunity in the social enterprise area to bring innovative solutions to bear. With Elixir we believe we will continue to see very strong propositions to invest into, and with Expediens we look forward to scaling the business. We have several other ideas in the pipeline behind the existing businesses, one of which we have already begun initial work on. Today we met our lawyers to begin considering how we finance the next stage and hopefully we can bring innovation to bear there also. Perspective, it’s key.

Just a heads up that we’ve rejigged the website to set out our new strategy and objectives. We’ll be doing a proper revamp over Christmas hopefully but in the meantime, we hope this is a bit fresher than in recent weeks. We’re a touch short on internal technical expertise at the moment, so bear with us while we fix the remaining errors.

We are in a position to fund entrepreneurial projects/people/causes that will bring change that results in good. We are on the lookout for who to put this funding behind, and so if you know anyone, or anything, please email me at duncan (AT) sevenmen.com. The funding base is small currently but is likely to increase in coming months. Some examples:

• Funding an individual who wants to launch a web programming class in an area of economic poverty; bringing skills, enabling development of new start-ups, greater employment and a more secure economic future.
• Funding a school exchange programme that will enable children to experience new cultures and attitudes in a way that brings a lasting impact on their personal values and ambitions.
• Funding the redevelopment of a polluted waste area and turning it into a playpark.
• Providing micro finance for start-ups in India that create employment.
• Providing funding for a person who wants to encourage greater use of bicycles and is offering free bikes to 100 people.
• Funding new school equipment for children in India to learn English and develop web programming skills.

We’ve had a couple of board meetings in recent days, really drilling down on our purpose and vision and trying to encapsulate our objective in one line. We’ve come up with “A social enterprise generating funds used in bringing change for good“.

We’re aiming for three sections to Seven Men going forward:

Seven Men Business:

• Creating, owning and developing a stream of new companies; trading profitably and generating surplus funds. These companies may, or may not, be operated by Seven Men. 
• Developing a sustainable income stream used to fund Seven Men PROJECTS and Seven Men INVESTING.
• Investing capital from third parties at microseed, seed, or angel funding levels for financial return – effectively acting as an angel fund manager.
• Simple Objective: Generating money. Funding projects. Investing.

Seven Men Projects (to be renamed)

• Launching, proving and scaling a number of social enterprise projects that will bring sustainable and measurable material change to those most in need in Edinburgh and India. Each project would aim to be self-sustaining within 24 months.
• Simple Objective: Bringing good through projects we launch and run. 

   Seven Men Investing

•  A fund used as social enterprise risk capital by getting behind social entrepreneurs and providing early stage funding to develop concepts, launch new projects, prove and scale these projects – with the end objective of bringing good through their output.
• A provider of funds with no strings attached. We find ideas, screen them, conduct analysis and quickly provide funds for those having the greatest potential impact. We keep in touch with projects we back but we do not require targets to be met or reporting to be submitted. We are a provider that challenges the handout mentality existing in Scotland by not simply covering operating costs and leaving the project in exactly the same financial state after a year.
• We will seek out ideas that offer disruptive, innovative or alternative solutions to long standing problems in society. We will focus initially on backing projects in Edinburgh and India.
• We will tell the stories of the projects we back and endeavour to create an ecosystem amongst the social entrepreneurs to help them as they scale.
• Simple Objective: Bringing good through backing entrepreneurial social projects.
• We aspire here to be something like Echoing Green, albeit a bit less procedural and a bit more liberating, but broadly along the same principals. I love the look of it and what it has done to date.

We’ve been ticking along nicely over the last month, in fact I spent half the time running the operations out of the US. Today we’re welcoming a new hire, Tom, who’s our new business developer. This should help with the scaling of operations as it increases capacity in the organisation. We’ve had some early success on Elixir, with a decent number of applications and some high quality business prospects applying to be part of the business incubator. We also have seen a good uptick in the number of people using Expediens as their lifestyle management provider. Looking forward to our next board meeting this Saturday, where we can discuss options for scaling, sustaining and giving.

We’ve been admiring a lot of the social entrepreneurial projects kicking off in the USA such as:

- One day’s wages

- Two futures project

- Plywood people

We’ve noticed that these can gain amazing traction in a really short period of time and that this is bringing funding and support. There’s still a query around sustainability - can you convert 800,000 Facebook fans into action? It does seem in some ways that the model is similar to Twitter - get a large amount of people to join/use and then rely on 1% of people to engage with funds or actual physical involvement. And so through one campaign you can end up with 8000 people, of which presumably 80 are massively committed for the long term.

But these are all US projects. Where are the UK equivalents?

Our business model is pretty straightforward - create businesses, generate profits, give the money away. But it’s also unusual in its purpose, and not easily categorisable (is that a word?) as a corporate or as a social enterprise due to specifics of the entity. So when I’m asked what it is I do, the best answers always involve stories and examples. Right now I’d say we created Seven Men to generate funds that we can give away to help people in need and those funds are generated by starting new businesses such as a pressure washing company, a lifestyle management business and a business incubator. I want to add to this the stories of the people that we’ve helped, similar to the way that Kiva tells its stories. Hopefully that will come over the next few months.

Nice to see some great press about Elixir over the last few days. Firstly in Business7 (on p7) and then in Scotland on Sunday at the weekend.