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It's a starter for ten budding businesses
Bosses run rule over new firms
BY NIGEL SCOTT
BUSINESS EDITOR
WHEN is a dragon not a dragon?
The answer, in business terms at least, is when it's more likely to give you helpful advice than to bite your head off.
In the hit BBC2 show Dragon's Den, hopeful entrepreneurs often get their fingers burned when their dreams fail to impress a hard-nosed panel of prospective backers.
But at a Dragon's Den-style event in Leeds yesterday the aim was not to destroy people's hopes but to encourage them.
Ten people with business ideas that they believe can benefit their community were given a helping hand from around a dozen entrepreneurs, investors and bankers, including businessman Richard Richardson, one of the men responsible for the worldwide expansion of legendary Yorkshire "chippie" Harry Ramsden's.
One of the businesses, Angels Housekeeping, provides cleaning and shopping services to elderly people in the South Leeds area.
It was set up by 34-year-old Gill Coupland of Bramham, Leeds, whose "day job" is manager of the South Leeds Live at Home Scheme, from which she is currently on maternity leave.
The business employs three full time and three part time staff and provides around 70 hours a week help to elderly people in Beeston, Hunslet and Cottingley. The aim is to increase this to around 250 hours a week in the near future.
Gill explained: "Elderly people living at home cannot get help from social services with shopping and cleaning unless it is part of a wider care arrangement and yet it is the little things, like shopping and cleaning, which are key to their being able to live at home and, therefore, retain some of their independence.
"Our business helps them to do just that and, because we are a social enterprise company, the profits we make can be ploughed back into services which benefit the elderly of Leeds. It's a case of everybody wins."
Yesterday's event – dubbed Launch Pad – was conceived by Social Business Consulting, a Leeds firm which specialises in helping people to develop social enterprises. Each entrepreneur pitched their idea to a panel of people chosen by SBC.
Rob Greenland, from Social Business Consulting, explained: "We've been running a course called Starter for Ten, where we get ten people together over ten weeks to help them to write a social business plan.
"We developed Launch Pad to give people experience of pitching their idea to a panel of investors. The idea is that they'll get good feedback on their proposed business, and hopefully make some new contacts.
"It's also a practice-run for them – as they'll probably have to do something similar to get investment in the future."
Rob describes social enterprises as businesses "that try to do two things at once" – they aim to do good and to do well.
He added: "If they do good socially, and well financially, then they'll have a real chance of making a big difference in their community."
Experience
Several of the entrepreneurs on the course had developed services for older people while other business ideas included a printing firm which will employ people with disabilities, and a study support service.
Moira Halliday, Rob's partner at Social Business Consulting, added: "We invited a wide range of people to be on the panels, including an accountant, a shop owner, a solicitor and a couple of people with experience of managing a social enterprise.
"Hopefully people find the feedback useful and, as a result, they'll have a much better chance of making their social enterprise a success."
nigel.scott@ypn.co.uk
Factfile
A social partnership
• Moira Halliday and Rob Greenland set up Social Business Consulting in January 2005.
• They say they fell in to social enterprise "a little bit by accident", having met in 1999 on the board of a fairtrade co-operative in Leeds.
• Rob then worked for Trade for Change, a local fairtrade business, before supporting social enterprises at Social Enterprise Leeds.
• In 2003, he joined West Yorkshire Social Enterprise School to run the Start-Up Scholarship Scheme, offering six months of support for new social businesses.
• Moira has been an organisational consultant since 1989, working in the voluntary sector as part of a network of consultants called Framework.
• Before that she he was a HIV counsellor and a Health Visitor/Fieldwork Teacher in Bradford.
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