Loving the ideas and practice behind five ventures making a difference:
- Karbon, an Aussie film and documentary maker producing ideas and telling stories that change culture
- Envia Foundation, helping bring change to Costa Rica
- Red Button Design with its amazing water filtration product ROSS
In the start of Seth Godin’s book “The Dip”, he refers to the oft heard quote of “winners don’t quit” and rubbishes it, pointing out that winners are usually strategic quitters, knowing when to stick and when to fold. We’ve been through a period at the start of this year where we have reviewed where the business is at and where we want to get to and what the implications of that are.
Our initial focus was very much around how we could grow the business and scale it to a point where it had reached sustainability, could support the wage base and was providing sufficient sustainable funding for us to begin investing into our Seven Men projects and our Seven Men social investment fund. As we dug into the reality of the business, we felt that not only were we short of this, it looked as if there were very few prospects of this changing in the forseeable future. Our Paving Cleaning business was not trading, post the problems of late last year. Expediens was carrying on albeit not to the extent we had hoped, and Elixir had hit a few process problems.
At this point we are left with a choice - do we stick, quit or double up? We have decided to close Paving Cleaning Ltd. Our best prospects saw this business turning over £20,000 this year, with a likely profit margin of 10-20%. We felt that the management required, and the capital intensity of the business leading to higher “unexpected” costs meant that this was not a high enough return. It is hard to close a business that looks set to be profitable, but we need to focus our time and money on where we can do best. We had a long hard debate about Expediens but believe that this business has a great service, clear differentiating factors, is the right price, is well delivered and is inherently scalable and profitable. We are re-energising our focus on this business to deliver higher sales. Elixir required a conversation amongst the main parties and this has now occurred and we are all set to invest the funds available into high quality startups.
So it’s been a very quiet last quarter but we hope that looking forward things will be stronger.
Sometimes it makes sense to quit.
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:
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:
Seven Men Projects (to be renamed)
Seven Men Investing
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:
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?