A social entrepreneur helping social entrepreneurs
Podcast transcription - 16th october
Alan Cowley: Hello, I'm your host, Alan Cowley. This week, I'm thrilled to have Craig Dearden-Phillips join me. Craig is the founder of three organisations, each slightly different, but all focused as a, or helping social ventures. Craig is the author of two best-selling business books for social entrepreneurs. He's a social entrepreneur helping social entrepreneurs. So, Craig, what drew you to social entrepreneurship?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Well, Alan, thank you. Thank you for having me on. In my mid 20’s, I had left university, I'd experienced profound mental health problems and hadn't really worked, and my route into getting into sort of normal life again was doing voluntary work, and I accidentally stumbled upon my purpose in life, which was, basically, to help other people. What I found quite quickly was that a lot of the organisations set up for helping people weren't very good. So I started to think about setting up my own organisation to help people, and that became my first venture, which was called Speaking Up.
Alan Cowley: Okay. Did you have any experience, was it parents, entrepreneurs at all?
Craig Dearden-Philips: No, my family are sort of working-class type people who'd always had jobs, so I'd had no role models as such. I wasn't really learning at anybody's elbow, and I don't think I've conceived of myself as a social entrepreneur for quite a long time. I had a drive in me to create things. I think that was what it was. I wanted to create something which was ... I wanted to build something.
I've always wanted to build things, and the first venture really was ... It felt almost, weirdly, like a sort of personal mission to build something great that benefited society. That's what I felt I needed to do with my life at that time, having come out of quite a difficult period in my life as well, so it was all tied up with that.
I did get a job for a bit, but I realised really, quickly that this wasn't what I wanted out of life, just fulfilling a job that somebody else could do wasn't going to do it for me. I had to create something that wasn't there before. That was a really strong driver for me, otherwise, I thought, "What's the point of me, really?"
So that drive, that drive to make good of my life and also to make good in doing so, help other people was my sort of animating motivation at the time, as a young guy of 20, 25. I'm a lot older than that now, but that's where it all started.
Alan Cowley: You said, "Motivating," there, it does sound like a huge motivator for you to push forward on this.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yes.
Alan Cowley: Tell us a little bit about Speaking Up, which then became VoiceAbility, both about what the business is, and the challenges you faced towards the early years of that as a first- time entrepreneur?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Okay. What was Speaking Up, VoiceAbility all about? Basically, I found out that people who had a learning disability or mental health problem were often unable to create the lives that they wanted, often with ridiculous reason. And so, what I noticed as well was that the system for support around people to supposedly enable them to make good of their lives was pretty poor.
So, I set up VoiceAbility as a work around of that. The idea of it really simply was, we help you get control of your life. We help we get control of your money. That means you can control your housing. This means you can possibly find a job, possibly find a long-term relationship. For a lot of people with learning disabilities or mental health problems, that never happens. It just never happens despite the governments and charities and all the rest of it.
And we said, "Look, that's bullshit. That doesn't need to happen." So we created Speaking Up really with the view that we can help people to make all that stuff happen, mainly by relying on themselves and finding their own resources and supporting people in a kind of planned and structured way, make almost like a business plan for their life and move forward that way. That was the idea and that's what we did.
So, the first years of it were really, really, hard because nobody wanted to help me initially except the odd, kind of crazy person who maybe threw a little bit of money in our direction in the beginning. I was in Cambridge at the beginning, so there are lots of crazy people in Cambridge I found who were ultimately willing to support it, but we struggled for five years.
I gave up my job that I had, which was rubbish anyway, but I gave up my job. I worked for a year for no money whatsoever. I was living on housing benefit and basically donations from other people for a year before we got any kind of money at all to do the business. Then after that, we spent five years really figuring out just the best method we could find to help to optimise what we were trying to achieve with people.
That took a lot of trial and error. So we tried lots of things that were kind of wacky and exciting but didn't work. Over that five years, that first five years, we found a few things that really worked, and we could really prove to other people that worked. Then we were able to go to bigger players and say, "Look, this is what we think our idea is. This is what we've narrowed it down to. This is a sort of simple and repeatable process that we can do with people time and time again and do it at scale."
I'm really simplifying here, but that's the journey of the first five years. And at the end of that five years, we had a group of people who call themselves, social investors, who said, "Look Craig, we really like this. We've seen enough. We believe in this. We believe you've got the ambition and drive, and passion to scale it up. Let's do it." So that's how I got through those first few years, but yeah, really, really difficult years.
Alan Cowley: So just before we move on to these social investors, tell us about how you juggled building the idea out for the first five years with bootstrapping this kind of cashflow issue that you had, how did you juggle that? How would you teach other entrepreneurs to deal with that sort of thing?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yeah, I think we were a classic bootstrap job. I'd saved a tiny amount of money. I had a lifestyle at the time, you know, I was very young, I had no dependents and that helped me a lot. I had unlimited time and low financial requirements. I think that was very important at the time as well, and tonnes of youthful energy, and I think on an almost kind of commitment to get this done, to make this happen.
I did it as though my life depended on it a bit, which it kind of did in a weird kind of a way because I thought, "This is my first try at something like this and I've got to make it happen." I was still quite shaky on some levels in terms of my own sort of wellbeing, but somehow doing the business kind of helped on a weird level because I knew I was building something, and I knew it was completely aligned to what I was here to do, as it were.
Alan Cowley: Was that a kind of purpose?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yeah. And weirdly, having met loads of entrepreneurs since, whether it's the whatever kind of business you're in, if it's social or mainly commercial in its intention, altruists tend to be like incredibly passionate about their idea. That's really what drives them. There's this deep sense of alignment between what you're doing and who you are that actually feels very authentic and real for people.
I think if you've got that about your business, the rest of the stuff kind of works around it a bit. You'll make it happen, and you'll make it work. You know, I was completely in debt and I was barely able to pay my rent and all that sort of stuff, but I knew that it was worth it because I felt that sense of alignment to what I was doing.
If you don't feel like that about your start-up, you're probably not in the right start-up, I think. You know what I mean? If you're not sure about it, you're not going to put up with all the hardship, I don't think. So I would say my advice to entrepreneurs would be, if you don't feel sufficiently passionate about your idea, it's probably not the right idea for you to go with. And therefore, listen to your heart quite a lot as well.
In terms of practical tips ... weirdly I spent like part of Wednesday afternoon every week in my life being taught how to book keep, that bookkeeping experience was profoundly important because the cashflow in a small business is everything. And if you run out of cash, you're dead. You know, you can have everything else can be brilliant, you can even be profitable actually, but if you run out of cash, you're knackered. And that stayed with me actually, and I conserve cash. I have more cash in my business.
People can like, they'll say, "Why do you have all that cash in your business?" It's a kind of hangover from this time when I had no cash, because I tend to think, "Well the roof might fall into tomorrow-
Alan Cowley: Hoard it?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yeah. "And I need cash." I advise other businesses. I sometimes think, "How the hell are you running along with so little cash in your business?" Because cash is oxygen, and if you run out of cash you really are ... If you're very lucky people might come to your aid. But I've seen so many people with quite good businesses and good passion, run out of cash. It's like a really dumb reason to collapse actually.
So, I think if you're going to learn about anything, don't do an MBA or whatever, do some bookkeeping, make sure you're on top of your finances. Even though it's the last thing you want to think about when you're doing it, because I had that with me, and it sort of stayed with me in a big way. My accountant still thinks I'm nuts, but I'm not, and I'm right. So there we go.
Alan Cowley: That is some absolutely, brilliant advice for future entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs, at the, moment that probably need to go and have maybe a course in accountancy or something like that.
Craig Dearden-Philips: It just needs to be bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is like money in, money out, and keeping tabs on it. I check my bank balance every day, even today, even when I know it's good, I just do that because I kind of learned to do it at a relatively early time. So yeah, watch the cash.
Alan Cowley: Okay. So let's move on to after the five years, and you start getting some funding in. So you're obviously a social venture here, a non-for-profit, I believe?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yeah. We were set up as a company limited by guarantee, which is like a company without any proper shares. So it's quite different to what you would find in the commercial world, but that's what we did, and we're a registered charity as well.
Alan Cowley: Yeah. Okay. So how did you then bring in some funding into this circle? Because we haven't really heard about any of this before.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Sure, and it's all different. So the first bit was about getting these things called, charitable foundations. So grant making trusts, things you've heard of like Comic Relief and the Lottery, to chuck money into us. We became good at that. So you'd hear, "We're going to solve all the problems in the world." "Here, have a hundred thousand pounds." Three years later, go back, "We haven't quite solved all those problems but still give us money."
It's a dance of deceit really that that happens in the charitable world, and I quickly got tired of it. I felt that it wasn't really honest and it wasn't really sustainable because the music always stops. The money runs out, the grants stop. I was pretty exhausted as well because five years and you think, "Well actually, I don't want to keep going cap in hand."
So, my decision at that point, following lots of conversations with people I knew in business, was to try and recast my start-up from being a kind of a bit of a charity basket case, into what you might call a social business.
What that meant was that I had to find a market, and I had to find contracts, and I had to find business relationships. But to do that I had to reinvent the business from the beginning. That meant I had to productise what I was doing. I had to sell products and services at scale, and I had to do it in a way that didn't mean I had to be personally involved in every bit of delivery.
But to do that I needed help. I found the help in a very long and securitious way, I found my way to two former venture capitalists who'd just hung up their boots from their business and they said, "Look, we really think the approach we take as VCs to social enterprises could really work if we've got the right person. And we'd like to give it a try with you."
So, I made this kind of interesting deal with these two guys, which said, "Look, we're going to put in half a million into you over five years. The deal is, we want a really ambitious plan and we want to be working with you on this plan in the way that we would do in our old jobs. We want to help you build this," just in the way that an angel investor would get involved in a business really, or a more active venture capitalist. We fashioned an agreement and we went to work on turning my ramshackle spin-out
... half a million turn-over, to something that was getting towards 5 million turn-over, by the time I finally left. Which, in terms of some of the people listening to this, it is more money, but in the world I work in, that's chunky.
So, we made this deal, we got on with it, and our deal comprised three things. First of all, don't spend the money on, if you like, on the beneficiaries, because that's... It was, buy a team. Buy some executive education for yourself. Build yourself an infrastructure so that you're not running around doing the accounts. Get all that sourced out. So, buy a team. The second one was never lie to us. So if it's bad news, bad news delivered today is much better than bad news delivered in three weeks, time. So never, ever lie to us.
And, then the third one was, you will not leave. So, I had to say, "Look, for five years..." I didn't quite sign blood, but I felt like I was signing in blood, because these guys had quite good reputations. They were taking their plunge into this. They're to know, I wasn't an idiot who was going to leave and go, and get a job. There's a solid undertaking that they were backing me, and that I had to stick with the plan. I did give that undertaking to them. That was during the deal. That's what we did, and it was thankfully successful.
Alan Cowley: Was that a difficult choice at all?
Craig Dearden-Philips: No, it wasn't because again, like I said a bit earlier, I never really wanted a normal career. So, for me it felt a bit like my big opportunity. Life throws opportunities at everybody, I think. But, you either grab them, or you're dumped. I thought, "This is my opportunity here, because without these guys, I'm going round in circles. With these guys, heaven knows where it's going, but it could be somewhere quite exciting. Whatever happens, I'm going to learn a load from these people, because they know all about growing businesses, and they've got amazing networks." At the end of it all, I actually joined their board as part of their... I feel like their investment team, getting involved in other things.
It all ended happily, and both still friends, but you know, one of them is somebody I have a lot to do with now. It was a very successful engagement. Reading Peter's book, a lot of the people he's dealing with, he's known for years, and it gets like that. It gets quite close, it gets quite intense, and you do more together actually, oddly, as you go along, and that's how it's worked with us.
Alan Cowley: After five years, did you then step away and move on?
Craig Dearden-Philips: We did five years with Impetus, as they're now called. Then they got to a point where they wanted to build to sort of, show and exit, if you know what I mean. They wanted to show that they could step away from somebody, in order that they weren't seen as a kind of funder in perpetuity. So, we basically agreed, that we would stop at that point. But, they helped us to arrange... Feel like a success around... You'd call it, a new round of funding.
We went in with another group of funders who... On a very similar kind of deal. We didn't have quite the same relationship with them. It was more distant, and a bit like the transition from angels to venture capitalists, really, actually. I think, reading Peter's book. But, it was just different.
It was great, because we continued to be successful, but it wasn't sitting down in a cafe once, every couple of weeks, going through everything. It was a bit more long goal, which is fine by me. That enables us to do the next step, which for us was a big merger. So, we were kind of number three in our field, as it was. We did a deal with number two, to kind of knock out number one, which is quite nice.
Since then, we've become much bigger, and more dominant, than them. So, that was what we did. In that moment, actually, gave me my chance to move on, because we'd got about 300 people, by then. For about two or three years before that, the whole HR thing, and the whole managing the large organisation thing, was getting me down a bit. I realised that I wasn't the best at this sort of thing.
I had a great team, but I'd often be at management team meetings, and the people would realise I was drifting away a bit. I knew, I just knew that this was like, more than 10 years into this, it was time to move on. So, the merger was partly about bringing in a kind of... Not a younger, because he was a bit older than me, but a different, a more Chief Exec like, Chief Exec, to run the venture. That's been really successful, because although Jonathan is a very different character to me, he's a much, much more accomplished General Manager than I would ever be. He fulfils the role of the Chief Exec much more capably than I could have done, in this next stage. So, it was a great move. They thrive, they've doubled since I left, which is a great sign.
I don't think we'd have achieved that without him. For me it was about stepping away, and also new challenges because my life had changed. I'd had some kids, got married, done all that stuff. I was getting a little bit older, and just thinking, "Well, I can't run on adrenaline for the rest of my life. I have to have an impact, but in a slightly different way." So, that was the next chapter starting.
Alan Cowley: That's a really, interesting thing to hear from an entrepreneur, that you recognise that, you are able, to recognise that, and step away. Obviously, you then moved onto a new challenge, and that was...
Craig Dearden-Philips: That was a company called, Stepping Out, which I'll tell you a little bit about. During that last bit of my time there, my board were very kind and said, "Look, you know, have an explore, Craig. Find out what you might want to do next." I was given quite a long lead. I ran into, and started coaching somebody, who was trying to create a business out of the public sector. He worked for the NHS. He wanted to scoop his bit of the NHS out of it, and set it up as an independent company.
The government at the time were saying, in certain cases, we'll support this to happen, and we'll provide some of the start-up capital, as well. I was coaching this guy, and what I observed quite quickly, was that he was trying to do this on his own, really, and the help that he did have was completely inappropriate. He just had like, a lawyer and an accountant, and he was getting nothing else than that. There was no plan, there was nothing of what I knew to be necessary in setting up a new venture.
I thought, "Hang on, there might be an opportunity here." I said, "Look. Let's say I packaged up an offer that contained all the elements of what you needed to create this, as a business, and then move it on from there. What about we forget the lawyers and accountants, or at least wrap them into what I'm doing, and put them under our direction, because these people just running riot, doing what the hell they want to, charging what the hell they wanted. As lawyer and accountants do." And he said, "Yeah, let's do it."
So, we orchestrated our first spin-out from public sector. I used that as pure learning, because I thought, "Well, this could be a business model or it might not be, who knows?" It went very well. Subsequent to that, we did 30 more, and that became my business.
We'd started spinning things out in public sector. I started working with one of the Chief Execs, turning them into the MDs of their own businesses. These weren't for profit businesses. These were companies which were expressly set up for community benefit. But, they were often big. That first business has a turnover today of about 60 million. It's not a small business, and it's grown from 30 to 60 million, since it spun out. So, we've done lots of those in the NHS, and with councils. That has been my life for the good part of the last few years.
It's been great fun. It's very different, because we're not shareholders in the business. What I'd love to have done was to become a shareholder of these businesses, because some of them become really successful. But, the actual way these companies are set up, it's not easy to insert yourself into ownership in the way that an investor would.
For example, even if you're providing a lot of help... In some cases, I'd have happily foregone the fee for doing it for a fraction of the ownership because, they're great businesses. But, that isn't the model we've been able to go down, sadly. So, I've set up a fantastic business development company that doesn't own any businesses, but it does get paid well, in terms of advisory.
Alan Cowley: It sounds exactly as if you're an investor, and you had your entrepreneurial career with VoiceAbilility, and you've been following these journeys of these businesses, just without the equity, obviously.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Without the equity. We get good fees, but the business model for that business, is a consultancy model. It's been very successful, which is great, but it's not the same as owning part of a business. So, if that was business number two, I developed that as a smaller business, inherently, than the other one. But, it's provided the money, the space and the time, for me to live the life I've got now, which is a mix of parent... I've got into sport, in quite a big way. Also, at work, and writing, because I've written some books, as well. That all takes time. I teach, as well, at Cass Business School. I do more things now. But yeah, it's enabled that, which is great.
Alan Cowley: And, you also have The Social Club, UK?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yeah, Social Club... Which is my latest thing, really... Has grown outside of Stepping Out. The story there is that a lot of the Chief Execs that we worked with, and had been working with for a long time, basically said, "Look, we're a bit isolated. We're not particularly well networked. We don't get much chance to associate and learn with other leaders."
I heard it one too many times, I think, and I just said, "Right, if I create an environment where you guys can come together, and learn and grow and develop and collaborate, I will run that once, at my expense, and you can come and get an idea of whether you think this is good. If you like it then you can pay for it." So, I set up the first kind of incubus of Social Club, which is basically a bit of a mix up of... try to think what people are familiar with supper clubs.
We get a great speaker. We're a bit like Vistige, which is another model that some of the listeners might be familiar with. We have a really deep dive learning set type thing, where we look deeply at the heart, and the guts, of someone's problem in a business.
Then you get a board you can't afford, and the table. So, we do that, as well. We also just have some free association time. The social being, quite literally, that. So, we mix up these formats. We have the better part of a day together, and we do that anything between four and eight times a year, depending on how involved you want to be. It's a membership thing. So, people pay to be part of it, and then they get involved.
That started as 10 people. That's now got 125 people in it, and we've moved it into new locations, new groups, and it's going really well. I'm really excited by it. I'm now at the point where I want somebody else to lead it, you know? But, I'm still leading it, and it's still my passion project. What makes it magical, I think, initially, is that it's not that we just bring the narrow group of people together who've got one shared experience. It's got better, the more diverse it's got.
We have leaders from the public sector there, from the private sector, start-ups, longstanding Chief Execs, and you think, "Well, how does that work then?" It works really well because people are interested in each other. I think the environment we're creating, the ethos, which is one of high trust. We do create this atmosphere where you can bare your soul a bit. That really is positive, and people often say, "I go to lots of things, but there's nothing quite like Social Club."
That's exactly what we're trying to do, is to create an environment where people feel they're getting something that... They can go to, talks anywhere. You can go to networking meetings, anywhere. There's loads of it. What we've got here, I think, is quite a carefully curated environment that people really respond well to.
I think that's why it grows. People often bring people into it, which is the ultimate compliment, actually. We do really well with it. Haven't worked out, or made money out of it yet, but we'll manage. It's not a huge thing financially, but we're in some good conversations with quite a few people, so... excited.
Alan Cowley: We'll put a link in the show notes so people can have a look and find out.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Fantastic.
Alan Cowley: During this podcast, we've heard a lot about success. Let's talk about some failures that might have occurred during your years of running businesses, and helping businesses out. Just tell us about a couple of those, and what do you think you've learned from them?
Craig Dearden-Philips: Gosh, failure, as well. Yeah, there are failures. A few of the ventures we tried
... to create in the public sector didn't come off, which cuts quite deep because although it's not the same as your own venture failing, which is like really bad, something that you're trying to create, not coming off when you've put half a year into it, feels immense and we've had a couple of them. I think compared to a lot of entrepreneurs I've not had that experience of failing like 10 times and then succeeding. That isn't my story, partly because I can't afford to have that story. And I suppose I think there's a lot of mythmaking about failure. It's a bit of a California thing, where you've got all this failure. And then only by failing loads can you ever succeed. I don't think that's quite right. A lot of the entrepreneurs I know who are really successful are quite conservative in some ways with a small C. They're not reckless, and they're quite careful, if something starts to feel like it's failing, to take steps to avoid the worst version of failure.
So, for example, part of our work with Stepping Out, the weather has changed on public sector spin-outs since the days of David Cameron and all of that. And we have competitors which have fallen over because of that. I've been quite judicious about not throwing too much resource when I can see a change in the weather. And I think a good entrepreneur is quite conscious because failure is not just financially difficult. It's psychologically difficult. As a human being I'm not as mentally robust. If you put me on a continuum in between Philip Hammond, super stable, you could probably sort of throw anything out, and he wouldn't fall over. And somebody who's completely off the scale, I'm quite vulnerable. I've got to operate within limits of stress and anxiety and all that sort of stuff. I've got to create a business environment myself that isn't going to throw me into the worst place.
So, I've always actually been quite careful, if I may. Doesn't sound like from what I've said today that I am, but I'm quite cautious. So I've had opportunities to get involved in stuff that I've thought might come off, but actually I've pulled away from because I'm not really sure enough that it's right for me, including some things that have gone on to become successful. So when I think about my failures, I almost think more in terms of some stuff that I could have done and could have got involved in and didn't. That's more of my sense of I'm approaching 50, and when I think of my life in terms of success and failure, actually, if I've got regrets, sometimes it's regrets around some of my conservatism as much as the stuff I've done, which has gone awry.
I'll give you a good example. I was in Cambridge in the mid '90s when you could pick up a house for 50 grand. I had an opportunity to buy some houses with somebody else, that if I'd have done it, I wouldn't have had to worry about where I funded my social businesses. Right? I could have built a great business around that. I thought, oh, no, that's too risky for me and didn't do it and didn't get involved. All that I had to do was probably operationally help the business, and I didn't. So my regrets are more about the stuff I haven't done, the risks I haven't taken. And when I've done something in business, it's normally after quite an extended time of deliberation. My feeling when I look back on things normally is I wish I had done this a lot earlier, a lot earlier.
My wife who knows me well, she said, "Look, you take a long time to make decisions, a long time." And most of the good decisions I've made, I've probably taken too long to make them. So I think accelerated decision making is something which would have helped me quite a lot. And I think the other thing, which I've observed is that a lot of the successful entrepreneurs that I know have the backing they need when they're young to do it. So if you've got a family member or if you've got an ally with some resource early on, I think to get access to capital earlier in your business is good. I found it at about 30. If five of the people around me that I had when I was 30, when I was 25, I suspect I have gotten a lot more done a lot earlier, so I think that access to capital is important.
Interviewer: You'd be surprised that they actually the age of entrepreneurs and the average age of the successful entrepreneurs because a lot do often fail, and then they come through and they learn from those failures.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yes.
Interviewer: So the beginning, you might take a long time to make a decision, but I don't think you're that conservative. If you look at the general population, they wouldn't have done what you do and what you've achieved with Speaking Up and VoiceAbility and Stepping Out and Social Club, oh, give yourself a little bit of a break there.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Cut myself some slack.
Interviewer: Exactly. I don't think conservative. Let's just move on to some of your achievements and also your books. Just tell us a bit about them and why you wrote them.
Craig Dearden-Philips: I've done three books. The first one I wrote after VoiceAbility, which was like the no fibbing guide to a start-up in social business, which just kind of my best book, actually. It's the one I'm proudest of. And it's the one that's sold most. It's the one that I actually sort of put most heart and soul into. That's still in print. It's still does really well. Second book was called How to Step Out, which is all about that guy in the public sector and helping them to set up their business. That was my sort of "I need a book to build credibility" kind of book, and it's done really well, but I don't feel much about that book, if you know what I mean. It was a tool rather than a passion.
And my latest book around Social Club is called How to Change the World, and that's basically, it's a guide to social leadership for people who are leading social ventures who are trying to change the world with either their job or their business. I think it's a really, really good contribution to those that are trying to lead. There's 30 interviews with fantastic leaders from Social Club in it. Those speakers are members, so I did that book quite recently. I'm really proud of it, and it's doing okay. It's not quite as well as I hoped, but I think every author says that. When you compare the time on it and the sales, you think, "Oh, my God." But I think books are really important for me in terms of just capturing where I'm at and what I'm learning.
So that's my books. About the future, I think the thing I'm most excited about at the moment is you'll notice in this interview that one thing leads to another, and quite a few members of Social Club of start-ups, and quite a lot of them are in the place where socially investors are still quite cautious about them. They're relatively early in the game, and they're looking for kind of informed help about how to get to the next stage. So to that end, I've set up something called Social Rocket, which is basically about years kind of two to five with these ventures. So I'm not really interested in people who are just literally at the kitchen table because that's too early. They need to have been trading for a bit, and they need to have just got some proof of concept.
But once they've got that, they're often just lacking the means. And it's where I was, really, when I was two or three years into my thing, where you're looking for a range of help and connections and networks and funds, and Social Rocket's just about saying, "Look, we will help you for this period, but we're only going to help you if it's properly commercial." So we don't want to help you get good at getting grants because one day, the music will stop. We want to help you build a business. So whatever you doing has to have a commercial basis, and it's got to have a social business.
So, to give a good example, we're working with a guy at that moment, a younger guy. He's a former prisoner. He used to be in prison. He spent from 17 to 24 in jail, done some serious time. And since then he set up a food business, and the food business is really doing quite well as an early business, but he doesn't know anybody. He doesn't have any formal education, really. He was in care from being 16, 17, going to jail. So he lacks a lot of the kind of things you need to grow a business except the desire, except this amazing product and the fact that he's generated some sales.
So I'm helping this guy. I won't name him even because it's private at the moment. But we're helping this guy create a business plan, raise the money and grow this from being kind of a 100,000 pound a year thing, which isn't bad anyway, right through to early millions. That's what we want to do. But the deal is we're going to get 20% of that business because that's what we're going to do for him. We're going to do 20% worth of something for that time. And of course, anything can happen in start-ups.
So that's the deal. And I think there's quite a few people like this guy out there who are doing real businesses, but his goal is most of the people he's going to employ and does employ are also people come out of prison. So what we're looking for is a great business that employs former prison inmates, and he wants to do that. That's his passion. But he wants to go in business and he wants to earn some money in his life because he's got to 40 and doesn't have a financial life beyond what his business produces now.
So, there's a lot of alignment, there's social in it, there's commercial in it, and there is a need for the kind of expertise that myself and my network can bring to it. So that's why I'm really bouncing about that at the moment because Social Rocket is, I think, an idea that nobody's really had yet in that it's got deep social and deep commercial in its formation. There's lots of people helping charities grow. Good luck to them. There's lots of businesses grow. Good luck to them as well.
There's not many people putting it all together, and I think I'd like this to be pulling it all together really skilfully and really well and creating hundreds of jobs for people who are coming out of prison, but not just like here today, gone tomorrow that you get with charities. Getting sustainable jobs, good jobs, good high quality jobs for people who have left the prison gate. That excites me, and so does ultimately selling my shareholding and walking away with something as well, because that would be required, so...
Interviewer: There we go.
Craig Dearden-Philips: That's what I'm passionate about, at the moment.
Interviewer: That sounds hugely exciting, and we'll have to look out for that business once we know what the name of it is.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Yeah.
Interviewer: Craig, it's been insightful, but it's also been absolutely enjoyable...
Craig Dearden-Philips: Thank you.
Interviewer: ...to sort of chat to you today, so I thank you very much and all the best for the future.
Craig Dearden-Philips: Thanks, having me on. I hope for the listeners it's been of some value and, yeah, thank you.
Interviewer: Thank you.
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