What is the double bottom line?
It’s a simultaneous financial and social return. Financial returns are easier to measure. Social return is harder to measure and it should relate to an added social return that you achieve.

How do you become a viable social enterprise?
Identify a service or product that’s new and that solves a social problem, sell it and then protect it. Expand your customer base until you can survive changes in your market and still survive. But make money and invest it in new ideas.

So what is a not for profit organisation?
Not for profit is a descriptive term and should never be allowed to become a management culture. In the end there are only too types of enterprises - profitable or insolvent.Not for profit has become short hand for organisations that do not distribute earnings to owners. They do, of course, distribute earnings to stakeholders as employees and suppliers.

This all seems very numerical. We provide support that cannot easily be measured. How do we take that into account?
But you use time and money to provide that support so how can you be so sure that the money is well spent and that others couldn’t do more with it? You need to be able to make comparisons.

Why do people want to see five year projections in business plans? If you had put Neighbourhood Renewal Funding in a business plan three years ago they would have wondered what you were on about.
Good question. Business planning is a process not a document. And venture capitalists rely more on the idea and the management team than they do a spreadsheet full of numbers. Sometimes getting big returns just requires big risks.