Why business leaders should help create joy and unity in our local communities - Olivia Sibony, SeedTribe

In part two of our chat with Olivia Sibony she shares why businesses shouldn't rush in to help their local communities like ill-informed knights in shining armour, but rather listen carefully in order to deliver value and not just impose what we think is the best thing to do. She also discusses her work trying to create other incentive structures, to better align investors and corporates and other stakeholders to the long-term value of a business, particularly when looking at delivering impact to society and the planet.

Olivia Sibony is an award-winning entrepreneur (Making the Top 10 UK Women Entrepreneurs 2019, in the WISE 100 Top Women in Social Business), a trailblazing ethical investment champion who left a career at Goldman Sachs to launch her foodtech startup, GrubClub, which she sold to Eat With in 2017. 

She went on to launch SeedTribe, a platform focused specifically on connecting “impactful” businesses marrying profit and purpose, with investors.

She is a Board member of UCL's Fast Forward 2030, which aims to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs to launch businesses that address the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, as well as being Vicechair of the Mayor of London's Women in Cleantech Taskforce. 

She is also an advisor for the UK Department for International Trade, enabling more impactful entrepreneurs from around the world to scale their businesses, relocating to the UK. 

Liv is driven by the desire to see a world where all businesses marry profit and purpose; she feels that entrepreneurship and meaningful collaboration play a key part in achieving this goal.

Transcript

Yiuwin: 0:00

I'm your host, Yiuwin Tsang. This episode, I'm joined by Olivia Sibony. Olivia is an award-winning entrepreneur making the top 10 UK women entrepreneurs 2019 in the WISE 100 Top Women in Social Business, a trail blazing ethical investment champion who left a career at Goldman Sachs to launch her food tech up Grub Club, which she sold to Eat With in 2017. She went on to launch SeedTribe, a platform focused specifically on connecting impactful businesses, marrying profit and purpose with investors. She's a Board Member of UCL's Fast Forward 2030, which aims to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs to launch businesses that address the UN's Sustainable Development Goals as well as being Vice Chair of the Mayor of London's Women in Clean Tech task force. She's also an advisor to the UK Department for International Trade, enabling more impactful entrepreneurs from around the world to scale their businesses, relocate to the UK. Liv is driven by the desire to see a world where all businesses marry profit and purpose. She feels that entrepreneurship and meaningful collaboration play a key part in achieving this goal. Welcome Liv.

Olivia: 1:08

Thanks for having me. It's really great to be here and I'm really happy to be having this conversation, which I think is extremely timely and very important.

Yiuwin: 1:16

Why do you think entrepreneurs and founders are becoming more conscious and want to contribute and do good?

Olivia: 1:22

I would say, if we go back to the basics of when businesses first started growing in the industrial age, you had the likes of you know, Bourneville and Cabury and all of these companies and Rowntree. And they actually looked at business in a very different way, which was to form an integral part of the community and to really contribute to it and, and, be a part of it, not how it's developed in terms of just purely looking at growing your profit and just accounting to your shareholders and not worrying about anything else. And I think in a way, this sort of perfect storm of the world of COVID, COP, fires floods, Black Lives Matter, all of these really big crises that have come to the fore and bubbled all around the same time have amplified the cracks in society that were already existing. And I think in a way, painful as they have been in particular for those who are the hardest hit in the first place, at the same time, it sort of brought this inevitability of the fact that we need to do business differently. And honestly, out of all of the impacts socially and environmentally in the world, business has driven the worst cracks in social and environmental challenges, whether it's regards to pollution or slave labor, um, just to kind of name a few obvious ones. So I think they've served as a never let a good crisis go to waste. They served as a very good catalyst to help people realise why we should do business differently. So I think there's both a business imperative as well as quite simply a sort of wonderful, existentialist questioning of thinking, why are we here? Why not do business in a way that actually brings joy and unity and contributes to the world in a way that is holistic rather than just caring about the bottom line with no concern about anything else.

Yiuwin: 3:19

You're absolutely right. And even now, the metrics that we use are out of kilter and are almost perverse in many ways. I mean, we look at how pharma, for example, there's no incentive for them to produce drugs, cheaply, or to produce drugs that, you know, just make people well. So they no longer have to use the drugs anymore. The commercial model around that just does not work, but to bring it back towards our community part. And this is a bit that certainly rings home with me and something you just mentioned there around making people happy. I watched TV program the other day, 'After Life' it was called. And there's a quote'Happiness is so amazing. It doesn't matter if it's yours.' And it's such a lovely quote. And I think that brings it back to what you were saying around COVID and the impact that it's had on people, in our businesses as well, in the sense it has brought communities a bit closer together and with businesses and business owners as well. Being able to see the good that you can make is not the right thing to motivate you, you know, but it feels good. It feels good to be able to see that difference in your local community and things are all that bit closer to home as well. What do you think are the key challenges that founders face who want to seek and engage with their local community? Where do you think of difficulties might be?

Olivia: 4:31

I would urge people to firstly, embrace the difficulties because I think it's in understanding the messiness and I think actually to be honest, part of the problems we have in the world stem from the fact that we are increasingly simplifying everything and working in silos. If you look at nature and people starting to look at nature based solutions, it's actually understanding the intricacies of how everything is closely linked. And if you bring that metaphor to the idea of a community, I think, you know, rather than shying away from any of the challenges. Firstly, I would urge people to lean into them because that is partly where the excitement happens, the magic happens, but that's where the real difference happens. So yes, it can be challenging because part of the challenge is that you might come in with a particular perspective and you don't know what image you might have within the local community, and people might be cynical or have their own challenges in the first place that could be a barrier. So I think it's important when working with the local community, firstly, not to assume that we are gonna go in there as the knight in shining armor and just rescue people. And so quite simply, one of the basic things would just be to open a dialogue with the community and really understand what it's like in the community and what their needs are, what their concerns are and have open, transparent, honest dialogues without hiding anything or sugarcoating anything because for me, you know, a business has a physical location, even though, there's potentially nuance to that since Covid, but ultimately there is a place based element to a business. And that's our workplace that also includes if people working from home, that's also being involved in that local community as well, while also wearing part of a business hat in there. So actually, really just delving deep, taking the time to listen carefully, I think is extremely important in order to not impose onto a community what we think is the best thing to do. Another thing I would say is understanding what the business does and thinking, is there some kind of value that they could add with the specialty that they are bringing themselves? And is there something that the local community could benefit from? So, I think bringing them along on the journey with you, helping them understand who you are and where you could add value in the most constructive possible way. In my previous life I worked at financial services company, oh, you can see on my LinkedIn, but I won't name it and we used to do these local community days. And I thought they were such a waste because we would go and funny as it was getting away from our desks we would spend the day painting a wall. or planting flowers or something like that. And I actually thought, you know, we were extremely highly skilled workers who could have actually added so much more value in the community if we'd actually used those same skills to support people in charities and local enterprises, or even in small local businesses. So, I think rather than shying away from one specialty, bringing these skills into the community, where they're most needed is extremely valuable.

Yiuwin: 7:39

Such good points to make there, Liv, definitely. And that point about listening as well. Founders, generally speaking, they're probably quite confident or at least they come across that way. And you know, certainly the appetite for risk is slightly different to other people and things like this. And I think you're right, there needs to be certainly the degree of confidence in the persona because you're taking a bit of risk and you gotta go for it. And it's how do you temper that when we're working with local community and your point about listening carefully, I think is so key and so critical towards doing that. I remember reading somewhere. I think it was in one of the Scandinavian countries. So they're obviously always amazing at everything and one of the towns where the local businesses realised that collectively all of them were spending, 2 million or something, whatever it might be on energy costs every year. So they created an energy cooperative, like an energy wholesaler and they kept the money local. In that way, they're able to maintain some of the value that they created they kept it within that local community. And another really wonderful story, we were asked to do a workshop over in Serbia, a few years ago with British Council and we were doing it this place called Mokrin House. And Mokrin House is this amazing space. It's like a few buildings put together, very modern, super fast internet, got their own, you know, organic garden and things and the guy who set it up, I won't even try and pronounce his name, cuz it's really tricky West Balkans name. But he left this little village and at the time it was like 16,000 population or something like that. He set up the first paid for TV station in Slovenia, sold it, came back again and the town had gone from 16,000 to 6,000 and so his philosophy was that, you know, you don't need to move away. You don't need to leave these rural settings in order to make a living or be part of the modern kind of economies and stuff. And that's why he set up Mokrin House. And I think this is the thing, they have village people, they come in and they're not just giving them a job, but also, you know, in terms of the skills. So they have like digital nomads that come along and they have like teaching days and then, so I think you're absolutely right it's about, how you engage with the local community be that schools or, hospices or whatever it might be. And to your point about not being, you know, the shining knight riding in on their horse, I think this is it. You hear that phrase being used quite a lot, don't you, and that approach is not particularly useful in the sense that it can create almost like an animosity with the local community, especially if it's like an outsider coming in, right?

Olivia: 9:53

Yeah. I mean, it almost screams of sort of repeat, you know, microcosmic, repeat of colonialism. They just gonna come and save someone, actually just coming in on their level and just realising that we are another part of the community and how can we integrate it? I think creates much better value and support and actually much better long-term support as well.

Yiuwin: 10:16

Yeah. Peter and Paul who were working with on Beautiful Business, they have lovely turn of phrase by the way, but one of their favorite phrases, 'and we don't want throw a tissue paper on the fire, you know, where it burns brightly, but then it's gone.' and I think this is another consideration that we have to make is what we do as founders we are going to make a positive difference. It can't be a flash in the pan, you know, we need to think in that longer term piece.

Olivia: 10:36

Yeah. And that really exemplifies the whole perspective on how I personally see business needing to change, which is having that long term view and really actually taking things, you know, more slowly and it's interesting as I work in the startup investment world with. one of my hats, SeedTribe and it's interesting because there's this sort of slightly uncomfortable dichotomy and jarring of values and goals, I guess, because actually you have a startup world is modeled on Silicon Valley and everyone looks to grow the next unicorn and , investors won't look at an entrepreneur unless they have that attractive, unfeasible looking hockey, stick growth curve and actually for me that's a very boom, or bust culture and it's based around go big or go home and there's nothing in the middle and unless you are gonna be a unicorn, you're essentially a failure. And for me, that is very much at odds with a lot of the way that I feel business should work and I'm working hard to create other incentive structures, to better align investors and corporates and other stakeholders to the long-term value of a business. because I think the more impactful you are, the more by definition, you have to look at that slow and deep embedding into the entire system, whether we're talking about community or environment or society. So community is a perfect example of why it's so important to think long term, but it does require a slight reframing of how we culturally been led to recently believe that businesses should grow.

Yiuwin: 12:17

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And there's so much that we could go really deep into. It's almost like a consumerist attitude towards investment, and they just chuck the investments out there and it's just, you know, one that comes away, the rest of them is a cost of sale and there's more to that, you know, there's more to that. Even on that level, the time effort, the energy, blood, sweat, and tears that a founder puts into their business to be cast aside like that doesn't work, but to your point about communities and having a lasting impact, I think, the danger that founders are gonna have is just, as you said, with the financial institution that you used to work for, almost ever the easy box, tick exercise, let's go paint a room for them. Let's do a bake sale or, you know, whatever it might be. Whilst they look nice and they feel nice at the time, the question is gonna be, what is that lasting impact? You know, are we creating that systemic change that's needed to really move things in the right direction for local communities? If it's a particularly deprived area, then, thinking about that whole concept of, do we give them a fish or you give them a fishing rod, you know, and we have to go towards enabling that movement and as entrepreneurs and as founders, you know, we're in a unique position to do that sort of thing. I've got a question about company culture, actually and given, you mention SeedTribe, and you mention some of the founders you work with and you mention some of the organisations that you worked with as well. What part do you see founders playing in terms of creating that culture, those kind of values within their organisations? What are your thoughts in terms of the people side of things?

Olivia: 13:38

Mm. I mean, I come from an HR background historically, so probably probably quite biased in this answer, but to me that is the key that underpins everything. And I read a quote recently, which I'm gonna slightly, paraphrase, but it was say something like, 'culture laughs in the face of strategy' and what that meant was really that you can strategise all you like, but unless you're gonna embed it into the culture, then actually none of it is going to transpire. So I thought that was a good representation of this in particular and ultimately I sort of, you were mentioned the systemic change earlier, and I really think that is absolutely key and for me, the change that we need to see in society that we all have a duty, a delightful duty actually, to, take a part in changing. It needs to come from every level. So from this perspective, in terms of culture, I believe that the leader is there to set the tone for the culture and that then transpires through the whole organisation. But at the same time, hopefully that becomes a, you know, circular process of inspiring your employees, who therefore also build it from the bottom up. So I think the culture is extremely important because it enables you to empower your employees and to have a voice and therefore be able to contribute along the way as well and then that should not just translate into your people, but into all of the processes and in terms of how you work with your suppliers. So it really has a sort of trickle down effect all around and. It comes from the leader, but I believe that the leader is the catalyst and then it should follow and feedback from every direction. Thank you so much, Olivia, for joining us for this Beautiful Business podcast, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. And it's always so inspiring to hear your story and what you are doing to create a positive impact in the world.