This man

who developed to the point where he saw this social entrepreneur idea and world, and you know, on maybe at least one level you became a prototype for that sort of person. You didn't know it, you weren't, maybe unknowing it, because the term perhaps wasn't popularized then. It is now. So before we go into this, so can you just define what a social entrepreneur is for me? I think I know what an entrepreneur is, I think I know what a socialist is or being sociable is. What is a social entrepreneur?

So for me, a social entrepreneur is someone who brings the same ability to mobilize capital, energy, create sustainable business models, but explicitly to address the social or environmental challenge. So all of the businesses I've been, I've either led, invested in or created, have been not created to primarily, let's make some money, let's create a brand, that's never been the driver. Well those things are important. It has been how do we solve this particular social problem?

So how is that different from any company that identifies a social need? I'm not talking about Rolls Royce's, but it might be just cheaper trainers or jeans or more ethically sourced food. is it any different from…? If

you'd asked me this question when I was in my 20s and 30s, I would have been very dogmatic about, well actually, you know, there are the goodies and the baddies. There are the goodies, us, who are called social entrepreneurs who do all this great stuff, and then there are the baddies over there in these businesses. Today I'm much more agnostic, well I'm totally agnostic about all of that and the people I mentor, the companies I work with, the ownership model, the business model are irrelevant. For me it's about the impact that they have. And one of the most exciting things that I've seen, I don't know, the last 10 years, certainly the last 20 years, have been more and more people in what you might call mainstream businesses thinking actually we need to think about how we do our business, has a reduces its impact to the world and actually increases the social good in the world too. And so I have left behind all that sort of, that dogma really. And in the book and in the work that I do, what you call yourself, I'm not interested in anymore. What I'm interested in is the degree to which you and also the business that you have is going to make the world better or not. And that's really urgent now.

So that could be with or without a profit motive. That could be as a charity. a... Yes, my mentor,

our first guest next week, Math Potts, he has always worked in the non-profit and public sector, he wouldn't know one end of a business from another. But I think he's doing some amazing stuff in the world. I also mentor the chief of staff of Jaguar Land Rover who has decided that his career is in this shift to a decarbon economy and believes that he can have a bigger impact at the top of a big company than he could in an NGO or a smaller social enterprise. So I think I think the challenge facing us. is why I'm interested in the whole massive small thing is, is how we connect the dots between all of those different sort of actors in different sectors and industries and in different sorts of organisations.

So we could look back to this period in your life where there were lots of social problems and there were resources available to solve them and as you just hinted that's still true today and I dare say will be true to some extent forever because society is always changing and change throws up new sets of problems for people. So is this question and the link to Massif Small for you one about what's the best way to affect social change? Or are there particular elements of social change that you would see yourself or your philosophy focusing in on? So is this a conversation around how do I do social change or how do I do, you know, better healthcare?

I think for me overall it's the first one, how do we do social change? And I, the funds that I'm involved in, investing in purpose driven businesses and the people I mentor cover a huge range of activities. I personally am interested in now at this stage in my life, some particular things. I'm particularly interested in mental health. So one of the companies that I have been deeply involved in is a business called Together All, which is about enabling peer to peer health at a population level become mainstream. I'm particularly interested in that. If we talk to me in my 20s when I was in Liverpool it was about employment and it's about a labelling those who are alienated from there or kept out of the labour market getting back in. So again I I've never been driven by, here's the one issue I'm going to solve in the world. It's been more about the business models and being of use wherever I am at that particular point in my journey.

So let's then say I am one of these people that's interested in one issue. I could come and people do come to you to get advice in terms of how to deal with that issue and again as I think I've understood what you mean by social entrepreneurs, it's a social problem that I can create a solution around. That's the social entrepreneurism and as you said the economic model is less important than actually just the solution happening so that makes sense to me. And you've had a career now in working in enterprise, you've written about it, you've talked about it extensively, you're well known for it. So I come to you now as a young person, imagine. Imagine.

My imagination is really good. So I'm seeing you full head hair. Our

producer here as a young person, so perhaps address yourself. So you come to me or the producer comes to you and you say, this is a problem I want to solve. What's your first step in helping somebody to understand that problem? Maybe give an example or maybe talk generically what it is easy. Well I

think that the...that's not how I do it. So the way I do it. It's a great question but I'm gonna... but it's a really... it an interesting question. So I now, in the mentoring I do, I don't give sector-specific advice. So Chris at Jaguar Land's Rover, he doesn't come to me and say, we're opening this big electric battery factory in Somerset, Liam, which they have, and they're working a few years. How do I do that? That's, I don't know. You can need a lot of money and batteries. And somebody who knows about batteries. So the mentor I'm going to do these days is much more about, so with Chris, it would, and he's talked publicly with me about this, so I'm not breaking any promises here. With him it wouldn't be industry specific question. It would be I find myself in this senior leadership position and I'm struggling with it or how do I do it properly or how do I deal with all of these people around me who don't share the same values that I have. So the mentoring I do these days is much more about to be a leader successfully or an entrepreneur successfully, regardless of what context that you're in. Because I think there's some things that apply across the board. What I do do though in my mentoring is I may then know someone who knows about electric batteries very, very well and I will connect you to that person. So the mentoring I do is both about sort of personal leadership stuff as well as championing you and connecting you to capital or the expertise that you might need in order to be as good as possible at what you're doing. So don't come to me for specific sector advice or industry advice, but you can come to me for insight into leadership and support around that.

So there are lots of business coaches and business leaders and business writers. They're sort of, every magazine has three. Yeah, look on LinkedIn. There's plenty of them. But I think the thing that, to me, distinguishes you is this social enterprise piece where you've spent a career in that. I suppose what I was asking is, is, you know, when somebody comes to you for help, when you conceive of an idea, or you see somebody can see an idea, it's obviously rooted in a social problem. So they're seeing something they don't like in society and something that they want to fix. So I'm just trying to get to that point, a bit like with the massive small stuff that we talked about with Kelvin in the last episode, you identify a big problem and then you start to solve it, break it down. What would be so when you've when you've when you've worked with social entrepreneurs, and they're in that formulation phase or how do you operate them?

Let me give you a practical example. So had a young man come to see me, he bought the book, got in touch with me, he's 25 or 6, he's had some personal experience himself of mental health struggles, has seen that and is an AI specialist and had seen that I'm have invested in and sit on the board of a fairly well-known digital mental health business. Together all, he came to see me and said, what should I do? So there was a very practical industry specific thing I could do with him, which is, well, where do you want to be on the spectrum of what's available to people when they're struggling with their mental health from very light touch therapy all the way through to urine hospital, you know, in a padded cell on heavy duty drugs. Where do you think you want to be? Because a lot of the problems I see with failed attempts in that world particularly, are people who want to solve everything. So I spent two hours with this guy deciding, okay, where on that from here to here do you want to be? And once we've just once you've decided that's where you want to be. Is it relevant what you've got to bring? I think it really is. He's in AI and he's got some really, really, really great ideas. And then from there, we'll then talk about what investors are out there that could be interested in investing in your business and also who are the specialists out there that you should be talking to now to not repeat mistakes other people have made and find champions and allies for you to scale your business quickly.

So you're helping them to at this stage focus in on a specific area of work and then get the backing financial and non-financial to help them develop. I'd also encourage them to not

to both be very shrewd and smart about what they're doing but also not to overthink it too much because I'm a big believer in you know a decent plan executed now is much better than a perfect plan that you sit around worrying about for six months and then you launch and it's it's too late and it's One of these I'm interested in the massive small thing what Kelvin is talking about is this idea of how you combine massive ambition And this guy has massive ambition. I want to bring AI to help people in their mental health struggles massive ambition, but with starting small and then building from there, that relentless incrementalism that Kelvin talks about. One of the reasons I'm interested in doing this podcast with him is that some of that language is, I find, really helpful, actually. I've already started nicking some of it in the mentoring and the investing that I do. Yeah, Yeah, it's kind of, you know, creative relocation. So that's what I do is both help people identify care. Where could you have the biggest effect in a very complicated world full of people trying to solve this problem? Where are you best starting? Where can you get some money? And where do you get some allies from?

So I'm hearing the same thing, a common theme between you and Kelvin in this idea that there are big problems, but you start somewhere and you solve them incrementally. And I'm thinking that a lot of your work in your history borders or sits right bang in the middle of political agendas, whether it's educational health events, what it might be, you're going to always sit close to political agendas, which many businesses don't, you know. Yeah,

and shy away from them.

Or shy away. But then the politician is expected to solve these big problems. And typically with a big simple policy statement and slogan. So when you think about how politicians seem to address these things with big ideas from the top to you advising a social entrepreneur, wannabe or working with people who have been doing it for years who are dealing with, you know, incremental change. You can see how it's hard for a politician to say I'm going to do this little thing and things are going to get better because the public doesn't buy that. But you can see why it's practical for somebody whose action, the ground to start with something little and build it up. So how do you marry that relationship between the public, the publicist and the reality?

And Kevin and I have talked a lot about this and I think one of the things that I want to make clear through the conversations we're going to have with people who are, we think, actually doing this massive small approach to organisation and movement building is it's not a sort of binary either or thing and it's not saying unless you start with incremental growth and you trial something you see it works you scale it doesn't mean that there's no room for policymakers absolutely not I mean I was I spoke earlier about when Blair was elected in 97 and the whole narrative started to change about third way and social entrepreneurship and all of that. I was very involved in that. Frank Field, who had been appointed as the Minister to think the unthinkable by Tony Blair, came to Liverpool to look at what we were doing in trying to build companies that put regeneration of cities like Liverpool at the heart of their activity. So we got all the way into the Cabinet office to talk about how we could do this, only to be told actually we didn't mean that unthinkable. So we didn't get anywhere. But I think that, what I hope that in our way, by creating a platform for some of the people that will be sitting across the table from us is to help politicians see that actually it is a fault choice. It's not either we're going to level up the entire north of England in the next five to ten years. Well, you're not, are you? And what does that mean? And it's not simply, well, although we'll have loads of these unconnected little projects all over the place that don't amount to anything. It's, you achieve big things by saying, okay, we look at the stuff that you're doing there, let's do 20 of those. Let's make those 20 work rather than failing to do 200,000, which is so often what happens with with policy. And I think that one of the interesting developments that we need to see in politics is that space between the incrementalist and the kind of grand visionary. Because we need people in politics to make things happen and they need to happen at scale, if particularly climate changes to be dealt with. So there's a tension there and there's a sort of, there's some contradictions in some way. But I have seen so often big grand schemes, not work. And I have seen great small things, not scale. and all the other things that I try and do, is how do you bring this together? And hopefully, by platforming some of the stories of people who have got things to quite big scale,

by taking a massive small approach to things, can influence. social change. Politicians are law makers in this country, they make our laws. They also develop rules, legislation, policies, procedures that we must fulfill in terms of enacting those laws. So when you think about the things you've wanted to do, has the law, has the policy helped those things? Or does it feel like you're dealing with, and I'm not feeding you here, because I don't know your point of view, does it feel like it's a lot of red tape to do something you would do sensibly anyway? So I'm just trying to understand how much does the political legal framework and by legal I mean the broadest sense of all the rules and regulations. How much does that help versus hinder these social entrepreneurs?

I think the part of the tension is when you make a law it applies to everything and often doesn't cover as much as it should. The entrepreneur comes on and spots an uncovered need and then starts to do something and then finds that actually the law that was put in place or the regulation or the funding stream or whatever it is, gets in the way because that particular case hasn't been considered. And so I think often social entrepreneurs that are trying to deal with issues that haven't been solved by the public sector or the mainstream private sector inevitably run up against systems that are swimming against the tide, I guess. And I've had that a lot. I mean, an example, when we're in Liverpool, we used to spend millions of European social fund money. Merseyside was an objective one area in the European Union and there was lots of money coming in. The way it was structured was you got the money in arrears, you got it months after you'd spent it. you had to do the most unbelievably, anally retentive floppy disks. Do you remember floppy disks? It had to fill in literally piles of them in an environment where speed, creativity, innovation was what was called for. And so you had a system built and you understand why it was built like that to stop fraud, although it didn't really stop a lot of fraud, to stop fraud. But it also unintentionally stopped innovation and creativity and left the field often to large organisations that were able to handle the cash flow hit of not getting your money back for six months. And so I spent a lot of time with policymakers sort of saying, well, how can we create regeneration funding, for example, that can be as nimble and quick as entrepreneurs are able to be in addressing problems, but there's always going to be a lag, I think. And that's why social entrepreneurs as well as any sort of innovator needs to combine patience with you know urgency getting pissed off with things but also understanding that you know it's going to take a while for these large state institutions to catch up. Health service being one of them and involved in a couple of businesses that are selling services into the NHS that's a very real thing every day of the week for us.

So would you say in balance that the checks that our laws provide for us and the entrepreneurial spirit that you want people to operate, it feels about right in most of the business you've worked with? I

think it's it's it's made I think entrepreneurs and innovators are good at making whatever system they've got work for them and then you become used to well it's it's a bit shit but we can make it work for us and I wish it was a bit better but there are things like EIS for example the you know to the break to encourage people to invest money. I think that's a good example of how the government did listen to how you can get behind entrepreneurs rather than constantly fighting the system, as it were. I think the balance will never be completely right. But I think that we need whatever side of the table you sit on, we've got to stay engaged in that discussion to get it ever more right.

So again, I want to go back now to your sort of 19, 20, 21 year old self, this sort of, I'm sort of seeing as this sort of, you know, almost evangelical Christian socialist. A zealot. A zealot. No doubt about it. change the world for all the right reasons. And during the whole conversation, you still haven't talked about whether this whole thing is enriched you or whether that's a good thing or not. But I want to go from that person to you today. Would you just let little Liam, I'm sure you were six foot three then. So what would little Liam, would you just say, you don't need my advice, off you go, let's see where this takes you, or would you have things that you would now say to him based upon having worked for a long time in this world, solved a bunch of problems, failed I'm sure to solve other problems. Would you have anything different to say to him? Would you say just gonna be a lawyer? You

got, I used to, accountant. Or accountant, that's right. I get asked this a lot. This is the kind of question you always get asked on panels isn't it? If you could advise your younger self what would you say? Well I know what my younger self would say to you know I'll ball grandad to her. It would be like piss off you know I know what I'm doing because I was quite a zealot in my 20s and I think people in their 20s should be zealots and should be driven and really wanting to make a change in the world. I've kept a journal since I was 20. Little Liam has been writing down his shallow thoughts in a pile of books. For hundreds of years. For hundreds of years. I have to blow this, it's like parchment. So it's like the Dead Sea Scrolls looking back at my own journals. And when I look back at that, there's a couple of things that really, really strike me. One of them was a sanctimonious little twerp I was a lot of the time, without a doubt. But the other thing was that often the things that seemed so important at the time, oh my God, this is really, really important, actually weren't. And so I would say to my younger self, and I say this to young entrepreneurs, you know, try not to get too anxious about what's going on in front of you right now, because actually it's probably not the most important thing and you won't know that until you look back. I wish that I had more deliberately created time for my mental health and my relationship. I think I behaved as if those things weren't the most important things and they are. I was a reasonable husband. I was a brilliant husband in my 20s. I was a kid. I married Maggie. But that would be the advice I would give to my younger self. And I think the other thing would be about people. The biggest mistakes I've made in my career, which have cost untold amounts of money with compromise agreements, NDAs, all of that, is the organisations that I was in when there were people that I knew in my heart of hearts I should have got rid of and thought I can love them, train them, support them, coach them when actually I should have been a bit more ruthless in that regard.