Social enterprise video transcript

Transcript

Our PwC Social Entrepreneurs Club brings together ambitious and likeminded social enterprise leaders from across the UK.

Having, you know, someone like PwC get involved in the early days where it was just me in a shed in my mum's garden, trying to change the world one pair of socks at a time to kind of where we are now. The support and backing of an organisation like PwC, has kind of allowed us not only go on and prove that we’re not crazy, but also scale it, you know, and give us that confidence.

When the pandemic arrived, all our income generating projects came to a standstill and that, I think, was the pivotal moment if I ever needed a mentor, it was then. With his support, we came through really well. We’re putting together a budget to pitch for a really large contract. That contract would be taking us from thousands to millions.

We went from being a small agency to being able to tell people that we’re working for a global corporate. All of a sudden we can say, don’t worry, we can do it. It just changed everything.

We’re absolutely looking to grow and scale and being able to use PwC’s knowledge to help us navigate that growth is a fantastic opportunity.

We’ve won a Building Public Trust Award, which has been really useful and it’s enabled us to get new customers, new partners and new funders as well. This has helped me to be a better lived experience leader.

As an ambitious social enterprise, we come across a number of business problems on a day to day basis. Anything from GDPR through to challenges around how we finance and scale our business and what the Social Entrepreneurs Club does is give us access to a range of PwC expertise that helps us solve those problems.

The skills our people have and use every day in their day to day roles are exactly the same as those required by a social entrepreneur as they grow their venture.

It’s brilliant being part of the team at PwC that’s responsible for matching our people with our social entrepreneurs. Being able to use the skills of the business to support those businesses that align their profit with a greater social and environmental purpose is something that I absolutely love about my day to day job.

I’ve been volunteering for almost a year and I absolutely love it. It definitely gives me a lot of purpose in terms of being able to give back to our communities through supporting the social enterprises who are doing all this great work. But from a skills perspective, it’s helped me to network with people from across the country at PwC.

I got involved with the club as a volunteer for a coaching session, went along to that and spent two hours with a social enterprise trying to solve their problem. I really loved it and ended up becoming a social enterprise champion. For me personally, I would say, I mean, it’s been great for me as a way of giving back, but I feel I’m much more comfortable now even in my own client meetings, in my own day to day work, just because working with a broader variety of people inevitably makes you better at listening and talking.

Now is a really exciting time to be involved in the social enterprise sector, particularly with the Social Value Act, which is ten years old along with our club. I think PwC can play a really huge part in increasing the capacity of social enterprises throughout the UK. It’s just getting the message across that social enterprises do good business.