Having felt pretty overwhelmed, fraudulent, time-wasting and all the other imposter-related feelings following the SEWF last week, I decided that I had to make time to properly digest.
At the time I had nothing to say, such was the scale of ambition, breadth of enterprise represented and scope of what they were doing.
It can be easy to discard and move on. Putting things in the ‘too hard’ box can be an easy way of dismissing them with justification.
My five takeaways definitely belong in the too hard box. They also belong in the strategic planning box – which I find less and less time to delve into. But here they are in no particular order:
- Data and impact. The importance of recording everything, but more importantly, understanding what it tells you, how this relates to impact and sharing it (see number 5 below).
- Stick to your guns. I’m passionate about our values. In the quest to get things done, scale, recruit, manage budgets and people it can be easy to lose sight of our values. Never!
- Trade. Become sustainable through trading. What else can we sell?
- Innovate. Keep talking to new, interesting and global enterprises and keep learning.
- Inform policy. Use all that data, impact and learning to inform local and national policy relating both to social enterprise and working with young people.
So that’s the list. I’ll have that done by Christmas…
