[Music] so thank you so much for having me this is so interesting to be my first real life um event it feels really great and even speaking to some of you guys earlier and you know it's so inspiring to have that energy i've done a lot of virtual events over the past 16 months we were talking about it um but i think nothing beats being in person particularly with what we're going to talk about today and so what i want to focus this talk on and i'll keep it kind of really informal maybe the first 10 to 15 minutes then open up questions is really about purpose-driven and business for good something that i'm so so passionate about and i'll talk a bit about my experience then i'll also talk about the current startup that i work at and a few other case studies um of kind of local business who are kind of driving change and so yeah i hope it will be informative i've got a worksheet after that i'll send round with loads of great kind of networks everything from you know a rise of massive kind of um funding firms sorry that are really now kind of looking to kind of grassroot community businesses to slack channels to find like-minded individuals and i really hope i can offer some kind of practical resource to that but yeah as i said i'm going to open books so any questions after this or call me after i'm very happy to answer so i think i'd like to probably start with a bit of hope there's a lot of doom and gloom right now you know if we look at kind of the climate crisis social injustice so many inequalities but i think there's a lot of hope in how we see businesses tackling those issues um you know whether it's kind of grassroots in the community or the bigger companies top down with that being said there's a lot of confusion when it comes to good business i'm sure you can all recognize all the adverts that are on tv at the moment of every kind of massive corporate saying they're going to sell climate change social inequality and i think it can really leave people thinking well where and how do i even begin which is really how i kind of started out so the only new year's resolution i've ever stuck to was in 2017 when i decided to quit fast fashion and so i'd noticed that i was just over consuming like crazy i was working at a time for a massive fast-moving consumer goods company which essentially is a massive corporate that owns loads of businesses and with you know growth and sales as the key attribute so i found myself kind of there my day-to-day forcing people to buy more plastic and craft and whatnot you know if i was there for so long that the next year a new product would be out and the old product that i pitched last year and so on and so on part of this vicious cycle and then my day-to-day as well you know i'd get my salary in and pay for my student loan and then i'd hit up zara and top shop and that was my void that i was kind of feeling and at the fact that i always felt that my passion in terms of pursuing like purpose and my action kind of on the side almost it's like an extracurricular right as an adult i never thought it was something that i could profit on so when i set up my business model before um it was called the closet it was all about tackling and you know the massive issue with the fact that no students seem to be shopping kind of second hand and the fact that we're all broke and student loans can afford to get first session parcels delivered to us every now and again and nobody was really talking about that so i set up a shop to kind of challenge the notions of what it means to shop second hand but at the time i was like oh you know what it's a purpose-driven business i can't begin to profit on that so as we were graduating and my friends around me were frantically applying to jobs and whatnot i was like let me jump in this hype and hence how i came to work at an fmcg but yeah as i was there and as i was saying i became so disillusioned and i took a step back and i thought oh my goodness like this is spiraling out of control now so my new year's resolution was to not buy any new fast fashion so i naively thought you could simply google how do i be more sustainable and this is back in what 2015 so not that long ago but at the time was a very different landscape which again gets a lot of hope for how much has shifted in five years um times i was like right i'm just going to google how do i be more sustainable and like this amazing list of like brands is going to come up and they're going to tell me like what i need to do obviously i was naive to do that and as i googled and found out there's nothing out there i need to define for myself what sustainability means and i need to do a lot of research to find out now that i know my values and how i guide my sustainability and what i look for in a good business to these uh businesses that i was finding so there wasn't much out there so hence i set up a platform called sustainable hustle at the time the name has since changed and it was called forever wanting more than hemp trousers how to find sustainable fashion without breaking the bank so there i began a platform where i decided to talk about all these businesses that i was found finding and it was amazing because at the time like again only five years ago there weren't many people there so when i was engaging and not even purchasing but engaging i just was brought into this amazing supportive open transparent community of businesses um and then an opportunity came out probably the best thing that happened to me and i was made redundant from the fast moving consumer goods company which came at a time where you know sad at the time but actually was the kick that i needed i would have stayed in that rut so there i looked to kind of pursue what i was doing in the sustainable fashion front and i realized at the time as i was connecting with these amazing brands that none of them knew what they were doing to communicate all this amazing effort they didn't have the capacity they didn't have the budget so i started working with a lot of those businesses translating all the kind of marketing sales work i'd done before in the world of plastic fantastic to these amazing businesses and along the way i became really passionate about social enterprise and putting purpose before profit the two can still go together we don't need to sacrifice profit people are allowed to get paid and allowed to make money and allowed to be successful but it's how the two intersect together i then became really involved with the all parliamentary group fashion tech stars which is where a lot of my frustration grew in the industry and hence while i get onto what i do today i was really hopeful with the all parliamentary group fashion textiles in terms of how legislation from the top down government could change some of the issues we were seeing in the fashion industry everything from taking away taxes when you go get close repair to encourage people to get close repaired as opposed to it being the same price to get the said item again from h m to um making companies such as the big fast fashion giants like boohoo a pretty little little thing have to publish all of their um garment workers history on their website so everything from the supply chain right down to the people who are on their shop floor here in the uk um and i was in that group for a long time and i was full of amazing passionate people but nothing was ever going through the fashion industry in the uk is worth 32 billion pounds the fishing industry for example i think is like a few million but yet like people are obsessed and that was being debated because nobody really saw the fashion industry as something of interest and something that was a global and social economic issue right on our doorstep but also more globally so from there i kind of started to look at what i was doing and thought kind of fashion kind of isn't really enough and this isn't really accessible and at that time there are a lot of people starting to talk about sustainable fashion but it became this kind of like echo chamber of you need to buy a 120 pound organic white cotton t-shirt or shot from sterling mccartney and sacrifice xyz it became this kind of consumption thing again and i became frustrated the fact that you know if we want to change the system it has to be accessible in so many ways so along came a little tech startup called coco short for connecting good um and kogo was born out of the idea that sadly and they're important and we will still push and we will still protest legislation does not change overnight unfortunately so what can we do as businesses and consumers to remodel this system so coco is an app that essentially takes 120 accreditations and puts them into 12 easy badges and it's born out of the idea that people want to be sustainable but they don't know where to begin on the other hand all these amazing businesses who are doing great things can't communicate what they're doing and aren't getting the recognition and consumer purchasing power they deserve so our ambition is to connect that and create that remodeling to truly bring the idea of voting with your money to life so we take 120 accreditations and we put them into 12 easy badges we then accredit businesses we invite businesses to start with one badge because we understand that no business is going to be 100 sustainable or good business we also understand on the consumer side that what you care about doesn't actually translate to everybody else you may really care about living wage you may really care about social enterprise and that's okay and that's really where we need to meet people in this conversation where they are as a starter um so yeah it's been a very interesting um three years we started off it was a kiwi company which i think is probably really interesting um to this conversation new zealand in terms of how their society kind of navigates business and day-to-day was super insightful so we started off a very very small team of three people in the uk we had five developers back in new zealand so very interesting time zone that still continues today and we were frantically part of this amazing startup community with a few others on the kind of the first wave i mean it's always been there there's been people in the business who have been fighting a good fight for years um who were really trying to push sustainability in an accessible way we came an interesting time we had extinction rebellion you know at the forefront a lot of our team are quite involved in that however we choose to kind of separate again going back to the balance of access when we kind of talk about some of the biggest issues that are facing us right now and we've also got you know team members who have been at the u.n who have worked for the new zealand treasury and so we have since evolved from then and our ambition now we've got 20 000 businesses listed on the app and we're really passionate at the moment in terms of our focus is making sure very relevant for this conversation that people have the ability to support independence and community focused businesses as well so that is our big focus in addition to that we also have a feature that allows people to track their real-time carbon footprint we think at the moment one of the biggest issues we want to start with is the climate conversation is being talked at great detail but nobody knows what on earth is happening and how they can have impact so that's where we're starting and our ambition you know in 10 years time is for everybody to be able to download coco select what values matter to them and be matched with those businesses at the moment we've started kind of a product level so everything from kind of organics um right down to um that's another good example my mind's gone blank reducing waste for example plastic free and then on the other side you've got kind of services people part of the community which we want to build further so that's social enterprise living wage and and so on so that is kogo i think what i can kind of talk about now is navigating purpose in business so we spend a lot of time at cogo making sure that we are true to our purpose and whatever we do we've got a massive massive ambition to reach scale the only way our proposition will work in terms of remodeling the system and to have impact in our communities is if we attract the masses on board to do that so we really have to negotiate as we grow how we stay true to that core and the conversations and sacrifices we make for example in a situation who would we work with may not potentially be seen as a good business quote unquote good business that can provide us access to loads of people who would otherwise not enter into that conversation so i think i really encourage no matter who you are whether you're a small business owner an individual in an organization and or you know just kind of as yourself day-to-day or thinking about starting with a business to find out what that purpose is to start with a really good example is a good friend of mine who is a real kind of community business advocate called charlie blair and she set up something called the blair academy and it's really interesting what she's doing too in terms of in the dance realm so she has a dance academy that aims to stop isolation and loneliness through dance and i think it's a really interesting case study to think about in terms of purpose dance obviously is really great dance classes in our community kids siblings whatever kind of may go there adult dance classes but we don't really think about isolation and loneliness and she's connected that through there as a medium and that is our main goal and that is what guides her and i think that is really exciting and shows the possibility of setting up businesses that have other things at their core and translating that so i think some of my kind of key advice that i would give is that being a good business being sustainable doesn't happen overnight it's also personal to you start doing one thing well and communicate that and find your community and to help you further that one i think that is the most exciting part and i think so current in this room tonight in this conversation that there is so many amazing people out there who want to support and want to back small businesses but it's finding those forums and allowing small businesses to have the amplification that they deserve against the others who have massive marketing budgets um and whatnot and everything else in between so for example if you're a food business one of the key things we say is what do you really care about if you're kind of a food business in the community is it food waste or perhaps you're really passionate about the fact that in hospitality there's a huge issue with people being paid unfairly and the london living wage is a really important part of that so what do you want to focus on that if it's living wage why not engage with the living wage foundation become accredited talk about that promote that talk about that to your customers and then talk about that to other businesses in the community as well and promote that maybe it's not like food waste that you want to tackle and it could be as easy as creating that kind of intervention kind of as your customers come in or you might want to join an organization such as the sustainable restaurant association who help you to look into ways and areas that you can measure reducing food waste and that is our big next step for coco and what i'm working on because we feel that there is so much information out there and we want small businesses to be a part of this movement because that is so crucial to creating that change and showing those big businesses the lessons can be learned from doing that so we've created something called the good impact framework which is a free resource that we're going to be rolling out that allows businesses to navigate and choose that it's still very much a journey we are still very much evolving in what we do and i'm open to feedback and open to criticism and welcome that and but i'm excited and we're excited to be working on something that we think can truly create that access and pragmatic change so that's everything from me a kind of whistle stop tour of like my past what i'm doing at coco um but essentially i think i'd like to end with the fact that i think there is a lot of hope working with so many amazing kind of businesses day to day from you know local coffee shops in the area right up to kind of tech solutions that are trying to um mobilize kind of mental health by creating a bot in whatsapp for example all these world ideas that are so so important to the challenges facing society that yeah there is a lot out there and business has the power to remodel the system again legislation is still needed but it's that shifting in the system that i think is kind of really inspiring as we look ahead so yeah any questions we're obviously a tech company so a lot of us a lot all of our work right is how we use tech to ease this conversation to create this access however the one part that will never be replaced by tech is our accreditation right like that can never be possible so we have an in-house accreditation team some stuff is like pretty simple you either sign up to the living wage foundation or you're not other stuff is more complex for example if we were to look at your business and food waste it's completely um yeah individual to the said business so there we'd have a conversation we call up where it's a small business we really try and work them there there's a few kind of accreditations coming through but one of the biggest challenges and hence why i wanted to go to kogo's because a lot of small businesses are doing great things but they often can't afford the accreditations right which is a real barrier to entry and so yeah that is how we create businesses you start with one badge um on the app obviously it's great if you have more and we also get people which i think is really important when you think about navigating navigating what we do talk to what they're doing in the future as well and it has to be a tangible goal so for example another badge that you hope to achieve in a year or two's time and we want them to communicate that publicly so pogo uses something called open banking technology which has been really interesting to explore so basically open banking was an eu legislation which meant that banks obviously own the right to all of our transaction data and can sell it on and do x y and seven of it eu came along i was still in it in 2017 and said hey you know this is ridiculous there's all this rich information about our spending you know most of us are the same bank accounts from when we're like teenagers and whatnot and all these big milestones happen throughout our lives and so let's open it up to approve financial contact authority approved third parties um like ourselves we have that authority to um for consumers if they wish to to consent to use that said transaction data for good so it's all encrypted and you can just see the vendor and so on so there's some apps out there like uh plum for example some people might be familiar with and like when a coffee is 2 pound 90 they take the 10 p and they put it into a savings account for you there's some really great kind of charity their businesses have approved in it so that said tempe you then donate to a chosen charity and so on but yeah to your point it's been a real kind of challenge for us and again goes back to our purpose in terms of what we're really trying to do is shift that power shift that consumer spend show the movement show the big corpse that hey people are spending with said business because they're doing x so a lot of what we're trying to do at the moment on the marketing front is really to kind of educate and get people comfortable in that and show the power of democratizing um data we're constantly doing interviews with our community so we do um two a week to make people aware of their challenges and understand as a business that we are part of the the need to educate on that in terms of the security and the benefit of that technology and from that user that kind of community feedback it's also about okay there's that apprehension there we want to make sure that our product is accessible so let's start to think about in the future actually how we allow people to use our technology without doing that part to get them comfortable to ensure again that access is there councils are really interesting in community so obviously we're a startup team ourselves there's only so many of us but our ambition is like we know like one of our biggest challenges at the moment is if you were to open the app in birmingham there might not be any businesses on there i'm like from walthamstow right i open up i'm like i know this really amazing business that i go through like every day and it's not on there just because again going back to your question in terms of like how we get as many businesses on as possible is no kind of easy task so one of the routes we were looking to explore a while ago that we hope to pick up again is working with kind of councils and local communities and starting obviously we had to kind of launch for critical mass so we kind of went to living wage and work with them on like their businesses but starting to be community focused so that's one side of it and then our good impact framework will be a free resource that we give out coco started as a charity and they still own a lot of the business and we always want to remain true to that core so that is a part of the business that we will never kind of commercialize on and will be an open resource for community groups and we're really making sure and i should definitely send it to you that all the wording in that is simple digestible doesn't need people thinking oh my goodness where do i begin or like another thing i've got to pay for in the accreditation front because [Music] i think if it's done right through the business network we'll gain the support we'll be able to gain support from the council thinking down the line you know if you can show that you're you're moving in this direction then obviously it counts a lot of it's geared to supporting that sort of thing yeah no absolutely like it's we're expanding our team and a lot of that is focused on that so i'll definitely be reaching out if you're willing and share that that way because we want to as we grow and whatnot we want to remain true to our core and have that balance there we need big businesses to be part of our app as well they need to be communicating they need to see what everybody else is doing but we can't forget the power of that grassroots we started in london for critical mass and then we went out to the uk so at the moment we haven't had like the opportunity to kind of go to the community so that's the big step for us we've got some great businesses and there's a lot happening in liverpool i would say there's a big concentration there and that's happened through working with the likes of living wage foundation for example but that's our big next step and something that we want to integrate into the app as well in the future how if people walk past the business like my example they could be like how in a minute like you and that is the next step in terms of like how we make our tech that kind of open source and ensure that we get businesses uploaded as quickly as possible and you would say that liverpool is actually sort of sort of a more an interesting community no so it's kind of coming naturally for us in terms of like when we look at like our back end and we see like who from our community is there and it's come about because we we did a lot of work with the living wage foundation so when we first kind of launched into the uk we worked with them we got all of their businesses listed on our app with a living wage badge social enterprise uk as well we worked with them sustainable restaurant association and there was just this massive kind of concentration manchester and liverpool interestingly particularly in hospitality and living wage so that's come from that but to be honest couldn't really be kind of guaranteed because it's just more from the social community side that's where it seems to be in terms of the first question so let's let's like where a lot of our kind of debate comes from in terms of our accreditation and how far we push right in terms of our mission at the moment is access and for people to be involved and not feel dissolution subject so for example one of the features we launched was a carbon footprint tracker the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is cutting out red meat intake immediately or to become a vegan but when we're never going to say that hey like basically you can't footprint's huge if you just become vegan overnight like it will sold all your issues it's not the answer and that's not why we meet people so a lot of that is constantly being negotiated so for example at the moment the steps to reduce your carbon footprint for your diet is reducing waste vegetarian pescetarian and then adopting a vegan diet that adopting being a kiki language and that's what we're hiring for most at the moment it's both our kind of devs to build the tech and then also on the other side our accreditation team as well and ensuring that as the world and the industry changes we're constantly checking ourselves and renewing that so definitely a challenge in terms of our business model so this is a key thing for us when it comes back to small businesses and independence we truly believe that you know they are the ones who are doing the most not necessarily reaping the rewards for that and thus should be on the coco app for free or next to nothing for their service and we're still scaling at the moment so we're still growing our community base obviously the benefit of being listed on the app is that you get access to our community and that exposure so we're completely negotiating at the moment um in terms of what that looks like we're inviting our kind of um business community to feedback on that we see the economic modelling as the kind of bigger businesses will be listed on our app who need to talk about what they're doing you need to learn from your small businesses that is where the weighting of the commercialization um comes from so yeah something we're trying to negotiate as you know a for-profit business ourselves but remaining true to our core and ensuring that nobody is isolated and it's that balance it's always ongoing that's why we went with like living wage foundation and sra because they've got the data set so we can immediately kind of pull that give them a free profile and but it comes to point like other smaller businesses who aren't part of that and it takes time to do accreditation and get them on board but we need them there they're so important and why in terms of feedback from our community why a lot of people download coco um so it needs to be there and we need to meet them there thank you so much for joining us um yes and helping um start thinking differently about our businesses which i really appreciate um found this thursday is the point of doing these are to kind of connect um great speakers thinkers business leaders and wonderful artists [Applause] um [Music] oh [Music] the best of to the them of my life and treat me right cause i am no better [Music] letting go [Music] i'll take you to the place where love is [Music] i we need to treat us right and i am no better [Music] of man and my eyes [Music] is [Music] is sick and tired [Music] is [Music] no me i am i know to play today it was really nice listening to talk about um your business and and the idea of purpose and profit i feel like as an artist it's that as well [Music] like i need to eat you know [Music] thought process and so this next song is called anything [Music] you stand to clouds [Music] dream about [Music] maybe you'll cry maybe i'll cry [Music] yes [Music] you have to leave [Music] that everything and anything can happen [Music] that everything will happen [Music] finally something inviting someone else i'll wear the skies [Music] oh [Music] if do you believe that everything anything can happen do you [Music] that everything that everything is that everything and anything can happen [Applause] thank you um and i'm just thinking i've changed my mind now that was my life okay um i'll play something in between hopefully so this is called shelter mysteries at night [Music] lights are shiny [Music] when i'm dead [Music] me [Music] we live our lives each day [Music] the magic helps [Music] your us [Music] the ghost of times [Music] i will never ever [Music] ever [Music] we live our lives each day [Music] the magic helps us 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2021-07-20