In October careers coach and former firewoman Ann Mold set up a social enterprise for the first time. She talks Trina Wallace through the challenges she faced and lessons learnt. Mold also offers budding entrepreneurs honest and practical advice.

What’s the social enterprise you’ve established?
In October 2007 myself and my business partner Rachel Maycock registered Breaking Free From Stuffing and Starving as a social enterprise. We offer courses, support and one-to-one therapy for people who struggle with eating. Courses run once a week for 10 weeks and are led by myself. They’re targeted at people who might eat too much or too little. The initial aim is to find why they use food in the way they do and then to create strategies for managing that. I’m a psychotherapist and Rachel is trained by the Eating Disorders Association and is a part-time community development officer. I run the courses and she does the admin and project management.

How did you get the idea for the business?
Rachel and I had worked together on another mental health project. We were in the pub one day and started talking about what we could do together. We found we were both outraged by the diet industry. Every magazine you look at these days seems to feature some “expert” telling you what and when you should eat. But most of the time weight is a symptom of how you are feeling. There are psychological drivers behind people’s behaviour with food.

Ann Mold, careers coach and social entrepreneur

Why did you set up the business as a social enterprise?
We are based in North Devon which, over the last few years, has seen a big influx of well-off people from the South East. But the average wage here is between £12,000 and £14,000 and I think there’s beginning to be a social divide. We wanted to make our services affordable to help as many people as possible. But we decided not to set up a charity because we didn’t want to spend time having a committee. Neither did we want to rely on core funding. In short, being a social enterprise meant we could create something that’s really useful for people and that we could maximise the amount of time we spend doing rather than administrating.

We started off, in February, running the company as a community group. It was a good way to try out whether the idea would work as a social enterprise.

How easy was it to set up a social enterprise?
We didn’t have a clue had to go about doing it! I tried to read the Community Interest Companies (CIC) website when I got a chance in the summer but my work as a careers coach keeps me very busy. We went to one local organisation and they just told us to go away and fill out a business plan!

One of the main challenges was working out who knew enough about the different types of social enterprise so we could figure out a legal structure that didn’t tie ourselves up in legal knots.

In hindsight, we should have contacted CIC sooner because they were very helpful and we didn’t use their website enough early on.

Cooperatives-UK were very helpful and we paid them to figure out our legal structure. They gave us lots of free advice too but I think, looking back, we could have worked it out ourselves.

How is your social enterprise structured?
We’re a community interest company [a legal structure for social enterprises that use profits to benefit a wider community than just their members], a cooperative and a company limited by guarantee with small membership. All the members are directors and all the directors are members but we have a minimum of two member directors. This means Rachel and I have kept ownership of the company but in our memorandum one of our aims is to encourage stakeholder involvement.

What’ve you learnt from setting up the social enterprise?
I think we’ve played to our strengths. We’re good at networking on the ground, getting publicity and running the courses ourselves. We are not so good at doing the technical stuff. So, for example, we don’t have a website yet. We aren’t great planners. I hadn’t realised how many polices we’d need as a social enterprise. I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2000 and when you’re a sole trade, you just get your insurance sorted out and let the Inland Revenue know. As a social enterprise we need to think carefully about how our policies work. It’s all about transparency.

We still don’t know whether our structure is okay if we decide to go into contracting with the NHS but we’ll find that out in time.

What are your aims for the business in the next year?
1. We want to have our transparent organisation in place with policies, working agreements etc.
2. To set up a carers group for people who care for people with eating disorders.
3. To have an ongoing therapy group.
4. Introduce two or three more courses.
5. To involve our stakeholders in the company by having some kind of a gathering so people who’ve come on our courses and therapy groups can talk with local GPs, nutritionists and occupational therapists.
6. To track feedback of course users so we can prove what we do is a good thing should we need funding in the future.

Any regrets?
We’ve got no regrets about going down the social enterprise route. It suits both of us very much. We’re enjoying working with a local mental health charity, the North Devon Service Users Group. They let us have a room for free to run the courses and they subsidise people to go on the courses. We haven’t made lots of money but we haven’t lost any either. We’ve helped 20 people and done something we’re proud of. We know enough that we can make this business work and make a little bit of money.

Any other advice for people interested in setting up a social enterprise?
I’m not an official adviser on setting up social enterprises but I’d be happy to have a chat with any ethicalcareers.org readers about my experiences of setting up a social enterprise. Just get in touch.

Ann Mold’s website
www.changebychoice.co.uk

Eating Disorders Association
www.edauk.com

Community Interest Companies
www.cicregulator.gov.uk

HM Revenue & Customs
www.hmrc.gov.uk

Cooperatives-UK
www.cooperatives-uk.coop