If We Can, You Can

Author:

Kate Welch

Business:

Acumen

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

Acumen is a social enterprise that helps people back into work, start businesses or develop their skills by working with various government agencies to deliver contract work which makes that happen for people.

We started by using various contract funding to deliver the programmes. I was running the company as a volunteer director and a chair of trustees, and we were very enterprising in the way we tried to make things work as a business.

We found that we’d turned over £400,000 in the first year, with no full time management in the organisation. We were even doing the accounts on an Excel spreadsheet. We thought, we have to do something here.

I went to the Northern Rock Foundation who invested in us by putting £750,000 of funding into what we did for a three year period. It enabled me to run the organisation full time, without other organisations taking a cut from the programme, and the money would go to people in the local area. We would be based on a proper business model and that would allow us to get the best for people.

I suppose there was a frustration of not being able to control the programmes when other organisations were involved before. I wanted to make things happen myself and I thought, if I can do it all within one organisation, we could make a much better impact, and have a bigger affect on people.

Since then we’ve grown and grown. Our current size is of somewhere around £3.8m turnover and 80 staff. We’re now delivering lots of programmes across the whole of the North East, and helping people into work, developing their training, or starting their own businesses.