Posts Tagged ‘social enterprise’

Uday Thakkar shares his social enterprise experience at Red Ochre

Red Ochre and I

The Logo of Red Ochre

Uday Thakkar of Red Ochre

I have had quite a varied career. I studied zoology at university, which I loved, but this did not lead to any career. In desperation, and at the prompting of my bank manager

who wanted me to repay a small overdraft, I decided to train as an accountant. This was initially a very miserable few years for me. I didn’t really want to be an accountant and

I floundered around. It was however in retrospect the best training I had for what I do now. A lesson I learned was that whatever you do can be put to good use for you if you keep a positive attitude to life.

I worked in a number of small and large accountancy practices undertaking work for huge commercial organisations and helping to raise millions of pounds. The work however financially rewarding was soulless. I then worked for a management consultancy. This was much more fun. I worked in Africa on a big project to help improve the textile industry of Tanzania. I worked on charity fraud investigations that involved standing in court and battling lawyers. I worked with the police in trying to find stolen funds. I also worked with a lot of people who wanted to start new businesses or people with great ideas that needed help to realise them.

I went on to start my own consultancy again working with passionate people who wanted to get things done better if not improve or change the world. I too got caught up in this process and worked on a project to bring resources to very small charities by connecting them via the web to the employees of very large businesses. The project became a charity, Smartchange, at the insistence of the person who gave us the initial funding. What I discovered later was that what we had started was not only a charity but a social enterprise. That is we were trading to make a profit with a social purpose.

In 2002 I left Smartchange to start Red Ochre. The idea was to bring my commercial knowledge and experience and use this to help improve the performance of the voluntary and community sector something I was now very familiar with.

in the UK. We work across all sectors. We work with those that need our help. We only work with those that are ethical or have themselves plans to improve society in some way.

Much of our work is to help individuals to perform better and also to get organisations access to funding as well as ensuring that they are sustainable in the long term. We are also very successful with our training delivery and workshops. We now speak all over the UK and over 10,000 people have attended our workshops, seminars and presentations. We are consistently given good reviews by our participants though every now and again some people don’t agree.

We have been working with schools and colleges to improve the understanding of enterprise and in particular social enterprise. We have worked with the long term unemployed to get them into work and also where appropriate to start businesses. We work with refuges, the disabled and the minority groups.

We try and make the understanding of running organisations easier and fun and through the use of games and audience participation. We try not to take ourselves too seriously but what we do is very serious indeed. Our motto is “Creating change through supporting change”. We have been successful in helping many people and we have numerous testimonials telling us that we have helped change peoples lives for the better. In recognition of the work we do and how we do it I was awarded the “Social Enterprise Mentor of the Year” award in 2008.

Why we are a success

Red Ochre’s approach to everything we do is to do it with passion. We really want to work with the changemakers. We help a lot of people at the early stages of their organisational career free because we believe that this is when the need the greatest help and are least likely to receive it. We really enjoy what we do and we want to make a difference. I hope that this comes across to the people we work with and that is why they keep coming back to us for more support and also why they refer other people to us.

The passion is supported by professionalism and quality. What we do we try and do to our best ability and always in the interest of our clients without loosing an element of fun for all of us. Where we can’t do something we tell them and will refer them to someone we think can help them. We invest a lot in training ourselves and keeping ourselves informed and fully briefed so that we can in turn transfer this knowledge to our clients.

We are also keen on keeping things simple – life is complex enough. If what we learn can be made easier for our clients we will do it. We are also keen our clients enjoy working with us as much as we do working with them.

What are our big challenges?

We face two major challenges. The first is in finding more people to join our team. We are always looking for people who share our values and can bring value to our clients. Unfortunately working in this sector means that the financial rewards are not that great and so it is hard to attract people with the skills and the empathy to the sector. There is a growing demand for our services and support and we have to turn work away rather than do it badly or to use people not properly suited to help the client. So anyone out there who feels they fit the bill please get in touch.

The next challenge is the financial uncertainty that the economy is facing. It is likely that the voluntary and community sector will face cash problems as central, regional and local government trim their budgets. This will ultimately affect the organisations being able to pay for our services.

What is the significant learning that we have had?

Every day is a new experience and a new learning. However significant learning points are as follows:
•    The capacity of people to do good is always surprising us
•    Never dismiss the capability of an inspired person to perform the impossible
•    You can never simplify information enough
•    However expert you are at something there is always something that you don’t know, so we need to keep learning

Advice to a social entrepreneur starting up

Running a social enterprise is:

•    hard work but rewarding
•    exhilarating but frustrating
•    innovative but at the same time bureaucratic
•    lonely yet inclusive.
Before you start ask yourself the following:
•    Are you cut out to be an entrepreneur?
•    Are you self-motivated?
•    Have you got the vision to convince others to join you or support you?
•    Do you have the fire in your belly, the passion to start something against great odds and see it through to a successful outcome?
•    Are you able to spot opportunities and make something out of them?
•    Are you adaptable to cope with changes in the external environment?
•    Are you prepared to work long hours?
•    Are you prepared to work for long periods where there may be no income for you?
•    Will you be able to take setbacks and negative responses without taking it personally?
•    Are you able to work with others and get the best out of them, despite having little to offer them in return, at least at first?
Finally:
•    Be patient
•    Be obstinate
•    Don’t give up
•    Don’t compromise
•    Do it because you enjoy it.

A bright idea that doesn’t cost a bucket of money that would kick start the social enterprise model.

A great idea would be to have community composting. So much food is thrown away and goes into landfill. If food was deposited in community composting bins it would stop landfill waste and create greater community involvement. The compost could then be used to grow vegetables, hopefully involving children in the growing and tending. The vegetables could be distributed within the community or to the elderly or sold.

This need not cost too much and should be good for the environment and have a community impact and save money and may even generate an income. There is always the possibility of having people who are unemployed working on this so that it can also create jobs.

My favourite book as a child

My favourite book as a child was Tintin in Tibet. In fact I still have a copy that I regularly pull out and read and I have read to both my children.

Tintin is young and brave and gets to the most exotic places in the world. He makes friends everywhere and is loyal to them. He stands up to the baddies and has a collection of eccentric cronies. They opened up my imagination and I really related to the character. The books are beautifully illustrated and the stories are great.

The Tibet story in particular fired my imagination. I think it was for the first time that I came to realise that a “monster”, in this case the yeti, may not be bad just our reaction to the unfamiliar makes them appear so. The yeti was gentle and saved the life of Tintin’s friend Chang. Yet he is reviled by everyone else. It got me questioning many of my firmly held beliefs and those of my peer group. It made me realise how blindly we accept other peoples’ prejudices without question.