I wrote recently on the Guardian Leeds blog about our local shop closing.

It’s literally next door to our office in the centre of Leeds. We’re a few minutes away from the main shopping centre so it’s a bit of a pain to have to walk that bit further for your milk or your sandwich. And it’s just not nice to see shutters where there was once a nice little shop.

So I sounded people out about a public meeting to discuss the idea of a community owned shop. It’s all the rage – at least on the Archers – and I was keen to see if there would be interest amongst local businesses and residents.

Twenty-five people came to the meeting. We had some good discussion – helped by the fact that the landlord who owns the property came along too. Ian Adderley from Co-operatives Yorkshire and Humber came along to chat about other community owned shops, such as this one in Leeds and this bakery and grocers in Slaithwaite.

I put together a quick survey – which more than 20 people who were there have completed. You can read a summary of the survey’s findings here.

I haven’t studied them in detail yet myself – I haven’t had the time – but I just want to make a few points related to this idea in particular, and the bigger picture, which includes Big Society.

I think it’s interesting how there appear to be two main camps – one interested in a shop (ideally community owned) in the premises vacated by Simpsons – whilst another camp is interested in the broader idea of a “more interesting kind of shop”. There was talk of local suppliers, slow food, a decent bakery, that kind of thing. All made possible by a different form of ownership.

I asked people to define what they were interested in because I think it’s important, from the start, to be clear about people’s self-interest. That sounds like a dirty word, very un-Big Society. It can easily be confused with selfishness. But I think identifying self-interest is key, if people are to find time to make things happen. It’s why I wrote this post – Big Society – or People Like Us?

Whilst I think self-interest needn’t be a bad thing, I think there is a danger that the most capable people end up looking after themselves, whilst those who may need help more take time to get their act together. (If you want confirmation of this, just check out the answers to Question 4 for the list of skills and resources from our bunch of city-livers/workers in the survey).

There may be two sets of self-interest here – one in a local shop in those premises – and another in a shop, somewhere in Leeds, that does things differently. They might overlap, but they may not.

So, here are the survey results. Primarily, I’d be interested in the responses of the people who were at the meeting, or who are interested in this idea – just leave a comment below. But I’d also be keen to hear from other people – with your thoughts on any issues this raises, and what you think we should do next.

I’ve had a bit of a moan on Twitter this morning about some poor service we recently received from a third sector organisation. We booked a room for an event – and to cut a long story short they offered friendly but poor service. We did most of the running round to confirm the booking details, and then on the day they gave the projector we’d hired to someone else. Then, to round things off, they didn’t put enough postage on the invoice, so we ended up paying £1.14 for the privilege of collecting our invoice from the sorting office!

I’m interested in understanding the root causes of the poor service we received. I think there’s an issue about diversification and the need to generate income. I imagine the organisation in question started off years ago as a community development organisation, renting a room in a tatty corner of a council building in the neighbourhood where they grew up. And along came European millions to enable them to build a multi-purpose venue, which housed the work that they do and also gave them the opportunity to rent rooms to other people.

There’s no problem with that necessarily. And you can’t really argue that much with organisations which look to diversify in order to bring in various sources of income. But what if you don’t have the skills to compete in your new marketplace? Venue hire is a massively competitive market, and customers are very demanding.  To compete, you need to be good at what you do.

There’s a good argument to say that you should stick to your knitting. It’s tough though, particularly at the moment as funding streams dry up. It can be tempting to come up with bright ideas which will supposedly generate “free” money to keep you going.

The one that I’ve been asked to help with most is the community cafe which wants to expand into outside catering. The argument goes: “We can charge £5 per head for the kind of stuff we sell in the cafe for £1.50.”  True – to an extent. But it’s a whole different market – with different customers and competitors. That’s not to say that you can’t make it work. But it’s not necessarily the case that a community cafe can sustain itself through a Robin Hood strategy of selling paninis to office wallahs whilst offering cheese baps to the urban poor.

So what do I do about this? I work with people to help them to assess their ideas. Nothing particularly clever, and no scientific formulae to help us to understand whether a particular idea offers a chance to generate income. But we start by considering:

1. Does this idea involve selling more of our existing services to existing customers?
2. Does it involve selling existing services to new customers?
3. Does it involve selling new services to existing customers?
4. Does it involve selling new services to new customers?

The theory there is that there’s likely to be greater risk in developing a new service, and selling it to a customer group that you know nothing about. It may also require more resources in terms of time and money. That’s not to say not to do it – but grouping ideas like this at least gets people talking about risk – and their ability to take on new business ideas.

It’s hard to work out whether your idea is likely to generate income.  And unfortunately, the more outlandish the idea, the harder it can be to argue against it.  You can be accused of lacking vision.  But with money so tight, we have to try to find ways to help people choose the right way forward, instead of digging a deeper hole.

I had an interesting day in Derbyshire on Saturday at an event run by the East Midlands School for Social Entrepreneurs and members of the Transition movement.

I was there to make the case for good marketing. My basic argument is that many of us who think that the world – and business – need to be run differently are pretty sceptical (or even hostile) towards marketing. We also think that it can only be done by big brands with loads of cash, who push unwanted products onto an unsuspecting public. My argument is that it doesn’t have to be like that – and that proper marketing – building relationships with people – can come naturally to social businesses if they just think it through.

The premise of the day was to explore whether a next step for some Transition initiatives could be to set up social enterprises. Let me be clear from the start, I have the kind of knowledge of Transition that you get from reading about it in magazine articles – so I don’t pretend to be an expert. But it does seem to make sense that, after following the twelve steps of Transition, some communities may go on to set up social businesses to help to build a different type of economy.

I’ve written a fair bit in the past about what I see as the differences between social activists and social entrepreneurs. I’d say that the majority of people who were there on Saturday were activists – and I’d guess that that’s pretty typical of the Transition movement.

I’m not saying that activism is not important. It’s vital, and there’s clearly some inspiring stuff happening in Transition initiatives around the country. It’s an idea which has clearly captured people’s imagination. But I would argue that making the next step – if that is to be settting up social enterprises – requires a different mindset.

I’m not suggesting that you need to be some kind of socially enterprising Del-Boy, or have an MBA, to set up a social enterprise. Far from it. But making changes to your own lifestyle – and teaming up with others to do the same – is quite different to setting up businesses which need to sustain themselves through the money they make.

I look at my own background for evidence of this. I never thought I’d get involved in business – not even social business – because I thought business was for fat-cat capitalists. I couldn’t understand how anyone who wanted to change the world could also find motivation in making money. Even if that money was ultimately used to do more good.

I was hostile towards business. There was a lot of that hostility – understandably – in Belper on Saturday. But to run a social enterprise I think you have to accept that things aren’t so black and white. That sometimes you have to compromise, or be pragmatic, or take decisions which might not sit totally comfortably with your value base. You might have to do deals with other businesses which traditionally you’ve seen as the enemy. This might mean you fall out with those who believe in the simple rights and wrongs of capitalism.

On a practical level it also involves different skills. And I believe that these skills can be learnt, but it takes time. This is a point relevant to the whole debate about Big Society. Phillip Blond wrote a letter to the Observer on Sunday expressing how he is puzzled by the hostility of people like me towards Big Society. (By the way, I’d be grateful if anyone can point me to the evidence for Blond’s assertion that volunteering has doubled in the last few months.)

One reason I’m sceptical is that I believe that it will take time for communities to develop the skills and build up the experience to run lots of services themselves. I do believe that, in the long term, it’s the right direction to be travelling in. But I have done this work for long enough to know that the road to better services is littered with painful, expensive examples of initiatives which haven’t worked. Because, sometimes, people got it wrong, because they were still learning how to run things themselves. And, I would suggest, the people who need better services most are the ones who may take a bit longer to get organised and get things right. Blond and Cameron will suggest I’m being patronising. I think I’m being realistic.

It may be that the Transition entrepreneurs were busy doing other things on Saturday – like traveling to the course on how to set up your own community supported bakery, run by the inspiring Handmade Bakery in the Transition hotspot of Slaithwaite. Either way, I think it’s worth us reflecting on the differences between what it takes to form a movement for change, and to run a business, so that we can continue to do the former, whilst also doing more of the latter.

It's always interesting to confront people with their worst nightmare early on a Saturday morning.  

I ran a marketing workshop on Saturday on behalf of the Soil Association, for a group of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects.  I'm a big fan of the CSA approach – the main idea being that local people share some of the risk with the grower by paying up front, in return for a regular share of the harvest over that year.  I was a member of a CSA at Swillington Farm – and they've also recently set up a CSA arrangement (to rear a pig) with Salvo's –  a local Italian restaurant which you may recently have seen on Gordon Ramsey's F Word.  There are plenty more businesses which have adopted the model – including a Community Supported Bakery which I wrote about here.

The marketing workshop was themed around the title – Grow it – and they might not come.  This in turn was inspired by the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams – in which rookie farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice which tells him to build a baseball pitch in his field.  The voice tells him "If you build it, he will come" – and sure enough the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven other Chicago White Sox players turn up to play on his field.

As you can imagine people thought Ray was nuts.  People who want to set up CSAs sometimes meet with a similar response.  Getting people to pay up front to buy veg from you – when all that currently exists is a sketch of your planting plan and a seed catalogue – can be a challenge.  That's where an effective marketing plan can help.

A do-able marketing plan for your CSA

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I talk about marketing as building relationships with customers.  This concept sits well with CSAs.  You need to build relationships if people are to trust that you will grow food for them.  I take people through my step-by-step plan – which requires you to think carefully about your business – and in particular your customers – but doesn't require you to have any formal marketing background.  

During the workshop we split into groups and each group creates a plan – using an innovation which, even if I say so myself, I'm very proud of – upcycled wallpaper – used in place of flipchart paper.  £2 spent in Oxfam has to be better than £10 spent in Staples, surely?

Aside from the eco-benefits (which won me early greenie points with my organic audience), I'm a big believer in thinking sideways along a page, rather than down a page.  There is something about a portrait flipchart which makes you anxious – you get to the bottom of a page and you start losing the will to live – because the stuff at the bottom feels weighed down by what's gone before (and you're now kneeling on the floor, writing like a four year old).  You're also wondering whether to squeeze a few more words on – or start a new page.   Whereas, with a roll of Upcycled Wallpaper  Flipchart ^TM you can keep on writing – and keep referring back, drawing lines where there are connections, etc etc.

The risk I take with this workshop is that I spend very little time talking about the things that some people expect me to talk about.  Some people want clear guidance – a top ten of the best ways to market your business – that kind of thing.  I don't believe in that stuff.  As my Iced Tea slide suggests, what works in one place doesn't necessarily work in another.  That's why I talk people through what they need to think about – so that they can then make their best judgement about what it's best to do.  That way, you also start thinking about ways to market your business which don't cost a great deal of money.

My four year old son was a bit confused on Saturday morning, given that I was going to work.  He asked me what I was doing.  I told him I was running a workshop.  

"Is it like Santa's workshop?"  he asked.   

"Son", I said, "Today I will give people a gift greater than any that Santa could give.  A do-able marketing plan."  He looked at me a bit confused, and carried on eating his breakfast.    

I've just seen the following at my local Tesco:

I defy you not to panic just a little bit when faced with bare shelves in a supermarket.  

It reminded me to blog about a programme I heard on the radio the other day.  The Food Programme focused on bread, and featured a number of small-scale bakers.  I found it really inspiring.  They talked to:

• The Handmade Bakery – a Community Supported Bakery in Slaithwaite, where people buy bread weekly on a subscription basis – similar to the Community Supported Agriculture scheme I've blogged about at Swillington.
• A guy who knocked on his neighbours' doors and asked them if he could bake bread for them.  He now has a nice little business.
• A woman who is using small-scale breadmaking as a way to encourage young people to develop a few entrepreneurial skills.

It's easy to dismiss this kind of thing as self-obsessed middle-class food snobbery, and in some cases I'm sure it is just that.  But there is something quite profound in the desire of increasing numbers of people to take more control of where their food comes from.  It's got something to do with the empty shelves above, or perhaps more importantly, whose shelves they are. 

I really need fairtrade to work.  There are times that it feels like I need it more than coffee farmers or tea plantation workers.

I know that sounds ridiculous, and it clearly is ridiculous.  But my point is that a belief in what fairtrade means forms an important part of my vision of the world, and my daily struggle to try to make sense of an obscenely unjust society.

I do what I can to make things better, bit by bit, day by day.  I do that by working with social entrepreneurs.  By writing about social business.  And by drinking fairtrade tea, and eating fairtrade chocolate.  Every little helps, I tell myself.

And I more or less handed over my life to fairtrade for seven years, working at a fairtrade shop in Leeds.  That's where I learnt most of what I know about social business.   We went from small basement premises to the high street, doubling our turnover and introducing loads of people in Leeds to fairtrade.  But eventually, we closed, unable to make the sums add up.  

Every year we hosted a fairtrade producer during Fairtrade Fortnight – cocoa farmers from Ghana and Belize, tea plantation workers from Tanzania.  The questions changed as the fairtrade sector expanded.  In the early days the question was "Should I buy my Cafedirect from the supermarket or from Trade for Change?"  In later years the question became "Should I buy Traidcraft's [fairtrade product of choice] or the [Pick Your Own Big Multinational's] equivalent product?  The debate would develop, and would inevitably focus on whether we should spend our money with the big multinational, and whether they should have the Fairtrade Mark in the first place.

Generally, the producers were pretty bemused by these arguments.  Their message was consistent and clear – just sell more of our stuff.  If a big multinational was to approach them with an offer to buy tonnes more of their cocoa on fairtrade terms, then there will only be one answer.  And it's an answer that we'd no doubt give ourselves if we were in the same position.

Lots of people aren't happy about the Fairtrade Foundation's decision to award Nestle the Fairtrade Mark for Kit Kats (the four finger ones, and only in the UK and Ireland).  Lots of the concern centres on Nestle as a business –  and understandably so – they're probably the most boycotted business in the world.  You can read an excellent argument against the decision here.

I'll be honest, I don't like Nestle.  Nor am I a natural supporter of big multinational companies.  But I don't believe that monday was a black day for fairtrade, as Joe puts it in the piece I've linked to above.  I think the Fairtrade Foundation have done the right thing.  As uncomfortable as it makes me feel, I think it's progress if Nestle start buying fairtrade cocoa and sugar for four finger Kit Kats.  Only time will tell whether this turns out to be the beginning or the end of their commitment to fairtrade cocoa.  I accept that their history with their Partners Blend coffee suggests that we shouldn't hold our breath.

But fundamentally I believe that one of the great successes of the fairtrade movement is that it has engaged big businesses, helping some of them, some of the time, to trade in a a more just way.  And I think it gives us opportunities to point out just how ridiculous it is that companies like Nestle continue to buy the majority of their cocoa on non-fairtrade terms.  So for me it's progress, uncomfortable progress, but definitely progress.  

It was great to see Gip from Salvo’s winning on the F Word last night in their neighbourhood restaurants competition.

I went to Salvo’s a few weeks ago for their zero food miles menu. They had a special menu for three days in their salumeria, with all the produce grown and reared in Leeds. We really enjoyed it – and at £19.50 for a six course menu it was great value too.

I’d gone along because I know the people who run Swillington Organic Farm – and they’d provided much of the produce for the menu. I went back again last Friday to interview Gip about how it went. I took my flip camcorder but unfortunately I didn’t get him in shot – he moved when we started talking and, still being a bit new to this stuff, I didn’t realise – so you can only see half his head. So I’ll just have to tell you what he said instead.

Basically he was really pleased with how it went – and customers loved it – they were sold out each night. He’s keen to do more – with the next step being to buy a pig on a Community Supported Agriculture basis – where you pay up front to share a bit of the risk with the farmer. You can imagine that there’ll be plenty of scope for publicising this arrangement with Salvo’s customers, which is great for the farm.

I’m really keen on this kind of thing – where local businesses get together and work with each other. I wrote a while back about how I was feeling a bit unenthusiastic about a lot of the funded local food projects that I’d heard about at a conference. They were great – but so many of them relied on funding – which won’t be around for ever. If you can get businesses trading locally with each other because it makes sense – and because it fits with who they are – in this case a neighbourhood restaurant – then that’s got a much better chance of being sustainable and making a big difference long term.

It was great to see Gip from Salvo's winning on the F Word last night in their neighbourhood restaurants competition.  

I went to Salvo's a few weeks ago for their zero food miles menu.  They had a special menu for three days in their salumeria, with all the produce grown and reared in Leeds.  We really enjoyed it – and at £19.50 for a six course menu it was great value too.

I'd gone along because I know the people who run Swillington Organic Farm – and they'd provided much of the produce for the menu.  I went back again last Friday to interview Gip about how it went.  I took my flip camcorder but unfortunately I didn't get him in shot – he moved when we started talking and, still being a bit new to this stuff, I didn't realise – so you can only see half his head.  So I'll just have to tell you what he said instead.

Basically he was really pleased with how it went – and customers loved it – they were sold out each night.  He's keen to do more – with the next step being to buy a pig on a Community Supported Agriculture basis – where you pay up front to share a bit of the risk with the farmer.  You can imagine that there'll be plenty of scope for publicising this arrangement with Salvo's customers, which is great for the farm.

I'm really keen on this kind of thing – where local businesses get together and work with each other.  I wrote a while back about how I was feeling a bit unenthusiastic about a lot of the funded local food projects that I'd heard about at a conference.  They were great – but so many of them relied on funding – which won't be around for ever.  If you can get businesses trading locally with each other because it makes sense – and because it fits with who they are – in this case a neighbourhood restaurant – then that's got a much better chance of being sustainable and making a big difference long term.  

I leave some conferences inspired. Others angered. This one I leave troubled.

I went to Plunkett’s Making Local Food Work conference because I do some work on local food and it’s something that interests me a lot.

As always I met some interesting people and it is valuable to have the opportunity to stop and think about one area of work for a couple of days.

I am troubled because I felt that the challenges we face regarding the future of food were made abundantly clear. Yet I wasn’t so sure that the solutions were in the room.

It was a room packed with early adopters. A sell-out conference. Anyone and everyone with a local food related job seemed to be there.

But as I’ve said before I don’t think early adopters are the best people to take an idea to the mass market. I didn’t need to travel all the way to Bristol to learn that our food culture is problematic. That we don’t spend enough on food. That supermarkets make life difficult for us local fooders. That Italian mamas know best.

I needed to hear what we’re going to do about it. I heard about lots of activity. Good activity. But on the whole grant-funded activity. As some speakers acknowledged, a lot of what they do will need continued subsidy.

But it bothers me that we get excited about a local producer of school meals, when that producer is not viable without external funding or subsidy. Maybe they deserve that subsidy. And perhaps society needs them. But as we enter a period of austerity do we really think those subsidies will be there? What will we do if they’re not there?

I don’t have a solution, other than to invent a time machine and go back to the time before the Industrial Revolution when more of us had a direct connection to the land and what we grew on it. If there is a solution it may come, as one of the speakers suggested, out of a crisis.

Sent from my iPhone

Rob Greenland
Social Business Consulting
07905 800 710
rob@socialbusinessconsulting.co.uk

Here's an interview I did recently with Kirstin Glendinning from Swillington Organic Farm, about their Community Supported Agriculture Scheme.  Kirstin also works for the Soil Association, supporting the development of other CSA's.

CSA is interesting in the context of yesterday's UK Food Security Assessment.   It's pretty clear that we need to produce food in ways that is less reliant on fossil fuels.  Community Supported Agriculture schemes, which by their nature are usually local, and often look to produce food in less intensive ways, can be an important part of that future.  

The Swillington CSA is popular but there are still shares available – if you want to know more you can contact them.  They also have a pig and chicken CSA, run in association with Headingley Development Trust.