Scale With Purpose

Scaling a social enterprise can feel like the only way to prove you are “serious”, but that pressure can quietly push brilliant organisations into growth they are not ready for. I’m joined by Clodagh O’Reilly, an Irish social enterprise practitioner turned researcher, to unpack what scaling really involves and why slowing down can be the most strategic move you make. We get into the reality behind the headline numbers: the messy middle where your mission, your income model, your capacity, and your leadership all collide. 

Clodagh shares what she learned from years of practice and her PhD research into social enterprise scaling, including the questions too many teams skip while they rush into staffing, operations, and financing. We talk about proving your concept, pulling your model apart to find the critical success factors, and avoiding the trap of “scaling on shaky ground”. We also challenge the idea that every organisation must expand sites or turnover, exploring alternative scaling pathways such as sharing your model, influencing policy, changing behaviours, partnering well, and even considering mergers where it strengthens long-term impact. 

We also zoom out to the social enterprise ecosystem in Ireland: what is improving, where support is still thin for later-stage growth, and how social procurement and public sector tenders are evolving. You’ll hear why consortium bids are becoming more common, what readiness really looks like for public contracts, and how EU funding could play a bigger role. If you care about social impact, impact measurement, sustainable growth, and practical strategy for mission-led organisations, you’ll leave with clearer thinking and sharper questions. 

Subscribe, leave a review, and share the show with someone building social change, then tell us what smart scaling looks like in your work.

Find out more about Clodagh's work at: https://www.socialenterprisesolutions.ie/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Make Impact Podcast, where we dive deep into the stories, strategies, and solutions that drive real change. I'm Heidi Fisher and I work with organisations on a mission to tackle poverty, reduce health inequalities, and create lasting social impact. In each episode, I bring you inspiring conversations with change makers, social entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who are making a difference.

Whether you're looking to boost your impact measurement, learn from innovative projects, or find fresh ideas to transform your work, you're in the right place. Welcome to today's episode of the Make an Impact podcast. Today I'm joined by Clodagh. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself, please? Sure. Thanks Heidi for inviting me along. My name's Clodagh, as you can probably tell from my accent, I'm from Ireland, and I am a social enterprise practitioner, turned researcher.

I suppose. I now work, running a social enterprise consultancy. [00:01:00] Yeah. So I've seen you, via LinkedIn 'cause you are always posting lots about your research into social enterprise. Do you want to just share a little bit more about that aspect of your work, if that's all right? Sure. Yeah. So I worked as a practitioner for many years and could see how challenging it was for social enterprises to scale.

And so one day a friend of mine sent me an email about a PhD or in the topic of social enterprise scaling. And all of a sudden I thought that is exactly what I wanna do. And so I've just completed now, but my focus of the research was on social enterprise scaling, so understanding how they scale and how we can support social enterprises to scale better.

I think that's probably the mystery question that everybody wants the answer to. So please tell us more. How do social enterprises scale? Yeah, although I have learned a lot [00:02:00] about it, I would say that there's no, one size.

Unfortunately, I did learn, I suppose I, I spent time looking at what are the different factors that social enterprises should consider when they're scaling. And what I found was that social enterprises jump to the operational quite quickly. So when they start to scale, they spend a lot of time thinking about.

Practical things like, staffing and operations and financing and all that kind of stuff, which is of course hugely important, but perhaps not enough time thinking about why they're scaling, how they're gonna scale, are there other ways that they should scale? And so I developed a framework, of six factors that social enterprises need to scale to consider when they're scaling.

So what's driving them? To scale? Is it that there's an external, drive forward or to create more social impact or is it leadership? And I think we don't consider that enough that actually social enterprise practitioners are really [00:03:00] ambitious. We think that they are just altruistic and not ambitious career driven people.

And of course they are. And that has an impact on their scaling. And so beyond drivers to scale, what form of scaling? What are the supports that you're going to need and so forth. So looking at how all those interconnect and how they influence each other is what I spent the last four and a half years of my life looking at.

It sounds fascinating, but it also sounds like a lot of hard work to spend four and a half years doing that. It was, yeah, definitely. But good. It made a lot of sense to me and I think coming in to do research, having been a practitioner was really helpful because it was helpful and unhelpful a lot of the time.

I was trying to make my research constantly very practical and applicable. That's not always what academic research is about. And so there was a balance with that, that my supervisors were constantly keeping me in check with. But also having the time. As a [00:04:00] social enterprise practitioner, you never have any time.

It's just go. And so being able to step out and reflect on things and have time to read felt like an aorist privilege to have. I think, the idea of reading for four and a half years is, music to my ears. I'd be like, yes, please, just let me just relax. It's go zen and sit under a tree with a book.

Yeah. And it wasn't quite like that but at times it was definitely moments when I was pulling my hair out. But for the most part, there definitely was I suppose that time to reflect on things and to mu things over. See how things evolve and that was something that I'd never had the time to do as a practitioner.

Now, 'cause I've jumped in, we've talked about your research, which is your more recent bit of work. Let's go back further in history and how did you get started in the world of social enterprise? Yeah, I guess when I look back on my career trajectory, I always think, oh, it made perfect sense.

But like most [00:05:00] people, there were factors. That just drove me and drifted me into different places. But I trained as an accountant originally with a large Irish retail store, and they pulled out of Ireland. When I had just finished and qualified as an accountant, I took that opportunity to move to Vancouver in Canada.

And when I was there, I picked up a temporary job at the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. And just as an accountant, and I lost my mom when I was very young to breast cancer. And so all of a sudden the world of impact work opened up to me. And the fact that I could apply my skills to do something that was really meaningful, was life changing.

And so I was hooked on that type of work. And so I worked there for a number of years and then moved back. To Ireland, and when I moved back to Ireland, continued to work in the charity sector, in international development and community development, and a good friend of mine had started a community development charity in Dublin, eight, very close to the city centre.

And [00:06:00] she asked me to join the board, which I did, and we were working to tackle youth disadvantage and one of the things we were tackling was youth crime. And so we developed, what we didn't know at the time was a social enterprise, called the Yard at Solas project.

And that suddenly opened a lot of eyes, or the whole world to me because I'd always been really interested in business. My dad had a very successful business and I'd always grown up around that. And so have been really interested in the world of business. So the idea of being able to combine a business with a social impact.

Was something that was quite transformational to me and really made sense. And so I moved from Solas Project to be the CEO of a social enterprise called Recreate Ireland. That was working to improve sustainability, reuse materials, and also inspire curiosity and creativity. And it was there. From there that I made the transition to the PhD.

So when I look back, it looks like it was all kind of logical steps edging me [00:07:00] towards it, but I don't think it was quite that, quite that linear. Wow. It sounds like a fascinating career journey really. I love how you started out very, and it's very similar to mine, and I started out as an accountant, and then my first.

Venture into the world of charity and social enterprise was setting up a youth organisation to work with young people that were, involved in gang and gun crime. Okay. Very similar. It's weird, isn't it? Yes. All the best people are accountants originally I think. Yeah.

I don't know that I do much accounting these days, but, yeah it's somewhere in the back of my head is always the numbers. I dunno about you, you are always processing the numbers. Totally. It's really helpful. It's a really helpful skill to have. I'm really grateful that I am an accountant.

What would you say is your, the biggest learning out of that journey in terms of do working in social enterprises? What do you think is the biggest [00:08:00] thing that you've learned through that process? I think that when you're in a social enterprise, the most important thing is to create space for yourself to think about things.

It's so busy, being a social enterprise practitioner, and I think that we need to, as the ecosystem actor, like now consider myself to be part of the ecosystem as a consultant. And I think one of the most important things is to be able to lessen the pressure that's on practitioners and to be able to resource them.

In a way that they need to be resourced and allow them space to create broader social impact. I think that's probably something that I've learned that we need to slow down scaling and too many social enterprises are trying to scale too quickly. One of the things I now call myself is like a bubble burster in, as a consultant.

I talk to a lot of social enterprises that are looking to scale and I would say they're not ready. They're still not, haven't proven [00:09:00] their concept. And as a social enterprise, I've done it many times in social enterprises that I've worked. You're trying to present this. Image that you have everything together as a social enterprise and that you're bigger and more ambitious, but you don't have the foundations and the fundamentals in place.

And I think that became very apparent when I was doing the research that actually we need to ensure that social enterprises are very sustainable and that they have a really good social enterprise model. Whatever that model is, whether it's your fully traded income or you are more of a hybrid and you're combined with grant income, but something that is sustainable.

I think too many social enterprises are scaling on very shaky ground. What I learned was that a lot of. Social enterprises, they're attracting employees that maybe have stepped out of the commercial world for whatever reason. And a lot of social enterprises would say to me, oh, it's great. We have this amazing person in marketing who used to be a director of marketing in a large multinational.

And that's amazing, but that's not sustainable because the next person. [00:10:00] Isn't going to be a director of marketing from a multinational because you can't pay those salaries. So I think there's a lot to think about the model. I would really encourage social enterprises to pull apart your model and see what is working, what's the core to it, what are the critical success factors, and build on those and really understand your model before you scale.

Yeah. Do you think there's also a pressure for social enterprises to scale where perhaps. They should never even consider it. It seems to be that, there's a lot of talk that the goal of every social enterprise should be to grow and scale. Yeah, hugely. And there's so many social enterprises that they should not scale and that doesn't undermine the social impact that they are delivering in any capacity.

They're doing phenomenal things at a very local level, and that's really important. But I think the ecosystem are probably the ones that are driving a lot of scaling, funders that are setting out funding [00:11:00] applications that you have to be scaling to deliver the funding.

That's what social enterprises are often chasing funding. And so there's this perception. We talk about how important outcomes are and that it's not all about the numbers, but we don't really mean that, I don't think, because success is measured by outputs and how many people you were supporting. And I think that is a real difficulty. And also the integration of social and economic commercial models for social enterprises. They tend not to be well enough integrated, and enough understood. So social enterprises aren't understanding how does my commercial market work in relation to the social impact that I'm delivering. And so one is always easier to scale than the other depending on if you are an integrated social enterprise or a differentiated social enterprise. But one is probably easier to scale. Normally it's the social. And trying to grow everything in the right timeframe in the same timeframe is very difficult.

And that takes time. It's not rocket science, but it does take a lot of time to understand. And I think the pressures that are coming on social enterprises in order to be [00:12:00] bigger and bolder and scale internationally is fracturing them in some ways. Yeah, I think I'd agree with you.

You know that some are better just keeping it small and local and never going for it. And maybe their scaling plan is sharing their model with other organisations so that in another town or another village where someone else is starting a social enterprise, they can pick up a model at work.

It doesn't always mean, scaling out. We've got lots of different types of scaling and I think we have to approach each of those types of scaling in a different way. I think that's a very good reminder for everyone that's listening that, scale in your own way and not necessarily just doubling turnover.

Like it's scaling can be influencing policy or changing behaviors, but you can't do that until you have a proven model, and that, that's really ground zero, like making sure you've got that in place. The other thing I'm curious about is, obviously you are in Ireland, as we [00:13:00] know I am.

What's the social enterprise world like there? Yeah, it's great. It's a really special sector to work in. I really love it. You meet so many inspiring people. There's difficulties. It's new and it's growing and so that can mean that things can be a little bit all over the place in the ecosystem.

I think we're really good and there's some really good programs out there in terms of supporting Starship social enterprises. We're probably not so good at the later supporting scaling social enterprises, and I think that is. Probably because of where social enterprise is at. We only have our second social enterprise policy now in Ireland.

And so it's still very new and things are changing all the time, and that, has an impact on how the ecosystem relates to each other. So that's, Ireland, I suppose it's grown outta the charity sector the social enterprise space. And that is. Brilliant, but also brings challenges as well in that [00:14:00] understanding that you are trading, and that can make you a social enterprise.

I think the perception of what a social enterprise is from the general public is still not quite there. I think everybody knows what a social enterprise is and I realized when I had handed in my PhD, I went home to visit my family and my dad was like, and what's a social enterprise again?

I was like, surely, at this point. But you're constantly explaining to people and I think as we see, different types of social enterprises. People have different perceptions about what is a social enterprise and what isn't. And we've a lot of work in Ireland to do, to provide some understanding about how that works.

I think every, everyone's been there where there's a lot of people dunno what a social enterprise is and Yeah. Is it a charity? And even people that work in social enterprises will call themselves not-for-profits and things. And I think that's an add to the, yeah.

The understanding out, out there in the world really does it. Yeah. Yeah. So the other thing I'm curious about, obviously [00:15:00] we have a lot of, legislation in England around, social value and all the, procurement stuff. It. Is this the similar in Ireland? And forgive my ignorance for not knowing, but No, as I've got you on here, I may as well ask you.

It's growing significantly. There's been a lot of training around social procurement, which is great. There's some really good trainers in the space that are helping and training social enterprises to be dealing with tenders and public procurement and dealing with the social procurement element of that.

There's two sides I suppose, that, commercial organisations are considering social enterprises as part of their procurement process and bringing them into that procurement process. That's one, and that I think that's growing in success.

There's a lot more organisations, obviously, we've got lots of b corps exploding over here and I think in the general commercial world. There's an appetite to deal with social enterprises and to have them as partners from a commercial aspect. But on the other side, there's a readiness piece that for social enterprises, if they are [00:16:00] relatively small, their capacity to deliver on the entire requirements for a very large government contract.

Is quite small or they may not be feasible. And so we're starting to see consortium of social enterprises coming together to deliver and to apply for tenders. And that's really exciting. I think, that will be, there's been some really successful, examples of that, and I think that's only gonna grow and grow over the next coming years.

And I think to be fair, the ecosystem is investing really heavily in providing insights and training on that so that social enterprises are ready and also preparing commercial organisations, in how to deal with that. That sounds amazing. And I think there's always benefit of being consortia if you can get the, agreements between all the members sorted.

Yes. Yeah. And I guess a lot of social enterprises may have been involved in European projects, which is a great training ground for learning about how consortiums work. And obviously you haven't got [00:17:00] the Brexit issue that we have. No, we don't, thankfully, yes. So you've still got all your, the, access to EU funding. Yes. And I think social enterprises don't take enough advantage of that in Ireland, seeing themselves as. As being able to draw down European funding. There's a great opportunity there, in terms of supporting social enterprises to scale.

So that's another avenue that's yet to be fully exposed, I think. Yeah, amazing. I think, like you say, it sounds like there's a lot of opportunities and a lot of things improving and growing in Ireland, so it sounds really positive. Yes, hugely and there's so many more examples of social enterprises that are.

Becoming brand recognized, and that's only a positive thing. Yeah, definitely. So out of all of your years of experience, if you had to, share a piece of wisdom with another social entrepreneur or a founder of a social enterprise, what would be your piece of wisdom that you would share with [00:18:00] them?

I think it would be to know what you want to do, what is your purpose for going into this? And to be open to feedback, but be discerning about where you're getting that feedback and expertise from, there's a lot of advice out there. When you start a social enterprise, you're looking for any bit of advice and any bit of insight, and I think to be selective about, who you bring in to your inner circle to get advice from and to make sure that they're the right people and to know that.

A lot of the time advice is just opinions. And I think it's important to know, to always remember why you set up your social enterprise, what was your goal, and constantly interrogating that like you, not to be ri too rigid to it, that you can change, you can learn and you can pivot.

But to have an overarching goal that you're moving towards. I see a lot when social enterprises aren't quite sure. Maybe they've started something up and now they're not really sure where to go with it, and so they're banding between different. Programs, [00:19:00] different advice, different avenues. I think that's quite, that can be quite difficult.

So taking the time to set your strategy and then giving it a go, you can always amend, you can always change, you can pivot. It's easy to do that. So being flexible enough that you do that, but giving it time, it doesn't, it doesn't happen. Overnight, that is for sure, in terms of building a sustainable social enterprise.

But I think learning as you go, and certainly then also for social enterprises, if you're scaling, when you start to get into scaling, you need to become a subject matter in the social impact that you're trying to deliver. If you may have started up a social enterprise because you were affected by a certain social issue or you were exposed to it and you can.

Grow it to a certain length or a certain size with external expertise coming in. But I think when you start to get scaling, you need to bring that expertise. In house and you, so either through yourself getting, building up expertise or [00:20:00] external factors, but I think that's important that you then become, versed in the social issue because you can't do damage, if you're, a lot of social issues we're trying to tackle are very complex.

They're very multifaceted. There's not a singular easy response to it. And so you have to know and be quite singular minded in okay. I'm doing this to reduce homelessness, but you're not gonna be able to re eliminate homelessness, mental health challenges, all that kind of stuff in one. You have to know who to partner with and I think that's very important that you have a good idea of the landscape as you scale.

That sounds like very wise advice rather than trying to do it all on your own. Yes. Yeah, I think. Partnership is so important as you scale. I think we are really good at collaborating. We're really good at collaborating in delivering projects and programs and things like that. I'm not convinced that social enterprises are amazing at partnering in terms of.[00:21:00] 

Coming together and saying, I'm gonna give away a bit of mine and you give away a bit of yours so that we can work together. I think there's still a lot of road to be done on that in terms of building long-term partnerships that are really effective. There are some examples and you can see how they're delivering much greater social impact beyond their remit.

And I always thought there would be more, mergers and acquisitions in the social enterprise world, but it seems that it doesn't happen very often. No. And that's actually something that I work on, as a consultant that I have this process called a black box, where I approach social enterprises that are doing similar work to say, would you like to work confidentially during this process?

And to see, can you merge as an organization? Because I think that make them so much stronger. So there's a couple that have worked, or are and are in process, but it's definitely not, there's not a huge appetite for it. That sounds like a brilliant service. It was like there's like thousands of social enterprises should be taking up that [00:22:00] service.

Yeah, it sounds fantastic. So alongside the service that's trying to get more social enterprises to merge what other services do you offer? Yeah, so I have a consultancy, social enterprise solutions and I work with social enterprises that are scaling to bring them through a process of evaluating where they are and where they want to go, and helping them to develop a strategy within that.

A lot of bursting bubbles in that process. Doing a deep dive into where they are. I think the fact that I have been a practitioner, and I still consider, I run my consultancy as a social enterprise. So it's affordable and it's inclusive, and I think the fact that I have been a practitioner, I know the challenges.

I think that means that I can be quite relatable and quite practical in my approach, and that also having the finance approach as well is very helpful to be like, okay, this is what we want to do.

But what can we financially do? So looking at that really, honing in on what is your [00:23:00] social enterprise model from a commercial and a social delivery approach, and how can that be scaled and challenging in Ireland? I know in the UK there's a lot more, but there's very few social franchises in Ireland.

In fact, I think there are two that I know of. And I think that we, when social enterprises look to scale, they tend to default to branching. That would just open up in another location, but yet there's so many other ways of, of scaling.

And so sometimes it's challenging social enterprises to think about, are there different ways that you could scale than what's your natural default or the way that you want to do it? And so presenting alternatives, helping evaluate that, and then setting out the strategy going forward. Sounds fascinating.

You, you don't just work in Ireland though, do you? No, I don't just work in Ireland, no, but probably primarily at the moment I've been working mostly in Ireland. 'cause there's lots to do. Where could people find out more if they wanted to get in touch with you about potentially working with you? Yeah, so I have a [00:24:00] website, Social Enterprise Solutions. And I have a blog there that I try to write a little bit, about what I'm working on or interesting research that I think might be relatable to social enterprises.

As you've mentioned, I'm constantly on LinkedIn, too much, but you can find me there, under Clodagh O'Reilly as well. Perfect. And is there anything else as a final comment that you want to share or anything that I haven't touched on that you want to share with the listeners? I think, I suppose that it's a real privilege to work in the social enterprise sector and it's a really important place to work.

And so if there are people that are listening that aren't sure about working in the social enterprise sector, I would encourage them to do that. It's a really. Fulfilling space. It can be frustrating because progress isn't quick enough and then when you're working in the space, you get exposed to how significant the social issues are, and that can be quite tiring and morally tiring when already there's so much going on in the world.

To be able to spend your days moving the dial on a social issue. Even if you're only moving it a tiny [00:25:00] bit, you're making a difference. And sometimes I would think you have to step back and look at that. Okay, I've made a bit of a difference today. But I think if you're thinking about getting into the social enterprise space, it is a great space to work in.

It's, you meet so many. Inspirational, incredible people that are doing things all the time. And that's just something that I love and what keeps me in the space. So I think, stepping out, if you have an idea that you want around a social enterprise or if you're in an organization and you think there could be a socialized enterprise element to it, I would say go for it and, you won't look back.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Make an Impact podcast. I hope you found today's conversation as inspiring and thought provoking as I did. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others who want to create positive change. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and learn more about my work at Make an impact cic.co.uk.[00:26:00] 

Until next time, let's keep making an impact in the world.