Past episodes

Can purpose and profit coexist?

Short answer yes. The longer answer is about what it costs you and over what timescale.

Emily’s starting position is that the tension is largely inherited. We treat profit as the business and purpose as a thing bolted on, when the businesses doing it well have the two feeding each other. She points to structures that give leaders permission to think longer term, family businesses and employee-owned businesses among them.

Nada Matti-Leighton and Emily worked together over a decade ago, back when they were both in-house marketers at purpose-driven businesses before anyone called them that. Nada’s frustration is that we’re still asking the question at all. She borrows a term for it: bothism. It isn’t profit or purpose, brand or performance, short term or long term. It’s and.

What makes her insight useful rather than just encouraging is her honesty about the cost. She won’t tell clients that being purposeful will make them more money, because she doesn’t think the evidence supports it. What she will say is that it costs something now and returns something later, and then she’s specific: the workload of B Corp certification, the price of changing to a better supplier, and once, saying no to a partnership that would have put a brand in front of thirty million people.

Ed offers a reframe worth stealing. Businesses happily write off a machine over decades but book purpose as a cost this quarter. Amortise it over the same period and the number looks very different.

Our guest:Nada Matti-Leighton is an independent consultant, previously head of marketing at Alastair Sawday’s and Canopy & Stars.

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Leading with purpose in uncertain times

What leadership actually feels like when everything is moving, from people who’ve done it badly and better.

This is the most personal conversation we’ve had. Ed took over his father’s business at 23 after his dad had to step away for his health. Two weekends in, at one in the morning, his most important team member rang him in pieces because her husband had left. He got in a taxi and turned up on her doorstep, and he’s honest that he felt completely unequipped. His instinct then, and for years afterwards, was to go inward and try to solve everything himself.

He’s equally honest about the rest. Errors big enough to have changed the business. Redundancies that he says destroyed him for a year.

Emily’s addition is about the long tail. Leadership teams focus mainly on executing redundancies, and feel relief when it’s over. But for everyone who stays that’s the beginning, and the tremors can last for years.

Sarah David has been on the other side of this. She restructured after the 2008 collapse, closing offices and making people redundant, and it’s still one of her proudest moments, because of how they went about it. Her advice on leading through uncertainty is to build an options culture and to judge yourself on the quality of your decision-making process rather than on outcomes you couldn’t have predicted.

Our guest:Sarah David is a board chair, executive coach and management consultant to leadership teams. .

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Building communities

When a community is real, and when it’s just a customer list with better branding.

Emily kept noticing brands announcing communities and wanting to ask them a question: do your customers know they’re in one, and would they use that word? Her suspicion is that a lot of what gets called community is customer segmentation with a nicer name.

Ed had a version of this in his own business. They tried to bring watch collectors together and found the brands themselves didn’t want to sit alongside each other, and the customers who loved one brand had no interest in a room full of the others. Turnout was poor and it took him a while to understand why.

ROM has built communities that work, several times. Raising the Glass came out of her own experience of walking into drinks industry meeting rooms and being assumed to be the most junior person there. It’s now a network of over 2,300 women and allies. Before that she set up the Apiary at Co-op, an incubator deliberately aimed at underrepresented founders with purpose-led businesses.

Her advice for anyone daunted by the idea is that it takes a community to build a community. She started with five people she respected and asked whether it needed to exist. And the warning worth heeding: if you set out to construct a community from a brand strategy, a bit of scratching underneath will reveal it, and a fabricated community switches people off faster than almost anything else.

Our guest:Rebecca Oliver-Mooney, known as ROM, founder of Raising the Glass. She, Ed and Emily are all part of *May Contain Nuts, which supports food, drink and ingredients founders.

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The highs and lows of solopreneurship

The loneliness nobody warns you about, and how to find people you can actually trust.

When Emily went out on her own, everyone told her how brave she was. At first she saw this as praise, but then and she started to hear it as a warning. She talks honestly about how it really feels to start and grow a buisness, and how she’s lost count of the advice she’s been given.

Ed’s answer is grounded and practical: Treat it like an investment rather than a purchase and date the person first. Make a list of ten people who’ve built the thing you’re trying to build, ask each of them for a coffee, and pay attention to whether they turn up with a proposal. Only once you trust them should you work out how to work together, and that needn’t start with a fee.

Zee Ahmed started a travel company that COVID destroyed, then a coffee shop in South Manchester that didn’t work either. Raju came third. He’s now stocked in around a hundred independents and on Ocado, and he’s building a collective to connect food and drink founders across the north.

Our guest:Zee Ahmed, founder of Raju Sauces.

Also worth reading: this episode is where our guide to finding a business adviser you can trust came from.)

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Employee ownership

What it actually involves, and whether it would work for your business.

Bella Lewis-Smith founded Salad Creative, a brand and digital agency on the south coast, and ran it for around nineteen years on a conventional trajectory towards a trade sale. The turning point was a board meeting in 2019 where her co-director asked how much they really wanted it. She describes it as a gut punch, because they knew they were scaling for growth but had forgotten why.

The detail she gives on the mechanics is the clearest we’ve heard. An employee ownership trust has to be at least 51% trust-owned. Salad is 100%. Nobody buys in, no contracts change, the shares are sold to a trust that exists for current and future employees. She’s equally good on what she’d do differently. She told the team over pizza on the beach in early COVID, and learned that announcing an intention without the full picture sends people straight to their most anxious questions. A detailed presentation followed quickly.

Four years on, her verdict is that she’s enjoyed leading Salad more in the last four years than in the twenty before. Not because everyone became an entrepreneur overnight, but because the load is shared.

Our guest:Arabella Lewis-Smith is founder and managing director of Salad Creative. We’ve since worked with Bella and her wonderful team.

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Nature in business

What regenerative business means in plain English, and where to start if it’s new to you.

This is the topic Emily feels strongly about! She first came to it through a sense that business wasn’t working, and through years of walking meetings and outdoor team workshops, she knew there was another way.

Ed brings the other perspective. He came from jewellery. His industry pulled things out of the ground, and finding precious metals and stones that had been extracted responsibly was extremely difficult. They moved to recycled metals, and he’s honest that it still troubled him.

Jannine Barron is refreshingly anti-jargon and gives the plain version. She traces the argument back to 1972 and forward to doughnut economics, and uses farming as the example that makes it concrete: soil degrading fast enough that farmers had to change or stop being in business.

She’s also clear about what not to do: nature on the board is a real governance route with real legal obligations, and she wouldn’t recommend it to a business under about ten people. There are lighter entry points, and if you want the simplest one, take people outside. She reckons a day in nature can do the work of a six-week Zoom workshop.

Our guest:Jannine Barron is a pioneering regenerative business mentor. She’s been Emily’s own mentor, which Emily talks about in the episode.

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The role of business

Why the way we structure companies in the UK is a choice, not a law of nature.

Ed spent his career inside a business that ran on quarterly reporting, and he never quite made peace with it. What changed his thinking was standing in a presentation at a watch fair listening to Rolex talk about a fifty-year plan. No shareholders to answer to, so nothing forcing them to think in three-month blocks.

Emily’s frustration is different. She’s watched founder after founder assume there’s only one route: grow, raise, sweat, exit, burn out. The assumption underneath is that success means making a small number of already wealthy people wealthier. Her question is what happens if you decide at the outset who you actually want to benefit.

Our guest had a moment that made all of this concrete. Patrick Andrews was working as a corporate lawyer, opening stores in China in 1999, when a colleague pointed at the family businesses lining the street and said “these are the people we’re going to put out of business”. He’s spent twenty-five years since asking why we organise this way.

He shows us lots of real alternatives. Like in Denmark, where a large share of companies are owned by trusts that exist to serve the community. Steward ownership, the model behind Bosch and Novo Nordisk. Haier in China, which has around 100,000 employees but no unit larger than fifty. And his blunt view of the two mistakes founders make most: giving away control too early, or holding onto it too long.

Our guest: Patrick Andrews is a lawyer, author of The Incomplete Circle and co-founder of the non-profit Yoak. Emily met him on a regenerative governance retreat.

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Managing change and getting ideas off the ground

Why most internal change projects stall, and what actually unblocks them.

Emily’s framing is that we treat change as one thing when it’s three: generating ideas, choosing the right ones, and implementing them. Each is hard, most organisations are only good at one, and the wasted energy across all three is enormous. She’s also sceptical of the search for a repeatable formula, having spent years watching organisations look for one.

Ed’s contribution is about team composition. He describes a company where four of the five people were dreamers. Brilliant ideas pouring out, nobody to make any of them happen.

Kat Thackray does this work for a living and her diagnosis is sharper than ours. Most organisations put a group of people who’ve never worked together into a room, with roles undefined, and expect a difficult problem to solve itself. She talks about psychological safety, about the fact that colleagues may have genuinely different views, and about boundary spanners - the people who translate between the part of an organisation that wants to change things and the part whose job is to keep things stable.

Our guest:Kat Thackray, founder of People Equals Purpose.

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Building a purpose-led business

Why businesses built by people who’ve lived the problem tend to do surprising things.

Emily’s example comes from her time at Cafedirect, a social enterprise that reinvests profits with the smallholder growers who supply it. The big brands were running purpose campaigns built around schools and hospitals, the things that photograph well. When you actually asked the coffee growers what they needed, the answers were flood defences, education and help with bookkeeping. Unglamorous, and completely invisible from a marketing department.

She’s also realistic about the limits. The research says consumers prefer purpose-driven brands. Standing in a supermarket aisle, knackered, trying to get the shop done, almost nobody turns the packet over.

Our guest has proved it can be done anyway. Wycliffe Sande grew up in Uganda and started working in coffee at eight years old. He’s spent years championing specialty robusta, which makes up roughly 40% of world coffee production and around 80% of Uganda’s, and which the industry has historically treated as a filler and never talked about. When he told farmers he wanted to take their coffee international, one of them told him it wasn’t possible, because nobody like him had ever done it.

He’s now in Waitrose, Tesco, Ocado and Co-op. Every pack funds two school meals, which comes from walking eight to ten kilometres each way to a school under a mango tree and sitting in class worrying about lunch. And on storytelling, his observation from standing in the coffee aisle with his eleven-year-old son: people aren’t reading anything.

Our guest:Wycliffe Sande is founder of Blue Turaco Coffee.

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Do you need social media?

Whether you actually need to be there, and what it’s costing you if you do.

Ed has an expensive story to tell. In one single December, his business spent close to a million pounds on Google and Meta advertising. Revenue went through the roof. Profit didn’t move, because the customers it brought in were buying on price and never came back. The following year the spend came down to around £100,000, then to somewhere near £10,000 to £15,000. Lower revenue, considerably better profit, and a business that had decided to be an educator in its industry instead of an advertiser.

Emily’s issue is the contradiction most marketers live with: we all know social media makes us feel worse as individuals, then put a work hat on and build strategies that depend on it. She also thinks most businesses start in the wrong place, asking which channels to be on before working out what they have to say.

Elliot Morrow runs a content agency, he used to be the social media person people were referred to, and he now turns those referrals down. His position is that we’re at late-stage social media, where the original mission has been squeezed out and attention is the product. On going viral he’s unequivocal: nobody can predict it, anyone claiming they can engineer it is lying, and a few hundred thousand views from people who have no interest in your business converts to almost nothing.

ANd get this: his agency has never won a single client through social media in three and a half years of trading.

Our guest: Elliot Morrow is founder of Bon Creative and co-host of the excellent Bon Sauce podcast.

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