When I first left working in IT in the city to start my own journey as a business owner, one thing that was always at the front of my mind was how can I use my skills with technology for a greater purpose, other than profit. I’m not saying that all profit is bad, but I feel we do live in a system where often profit comes before purpose, or more specifically before people, which is the complete anthesis of me and my personal values.
Philanthropy, and being able to have the opportunity to “give back” is one of the my key motivators when it comes to doing business. Since I first started out in business, I looked for opportunities to work with charities and not for profit organisation that were in need of skills that at that time in the early 2000’s were only available in the corporate space.
The key to this being able to build a business that could offer affordable services, not the £1200 a day that IBM used to charge me out to clients at in 1995! I wanted to build a business that could offer £1200 a day skills and assurances, but scaled price wise to match the budgets of charities.
At the heart of this was building a lean development process, concise technical strategy guidance and importantly a business-built cost effectively in terms of location, resources and overheads. A business that could make profit, but also be able to afford to distribute some of this profit across services that we were providing.
These core principles still are still are the heart of what I do today, and in fact even more so. In turn these have enabled me and my business to help great organisations over the past 20+ years deploy vital digital solutions to support their causes.
To date, we have supported charities and not-for-profit organisations with a vast array of digital solutions, from Intranets to fundraising systems, from sponsoring a child’s education to donating a chicken, each one of these solutions have in turn, made a difference, and this feels good.
If you are a charity or not-for-profit looking for some impartial advice and guidance on your digital strategy, then I would love to hear from you.