How do you define a ‘social business’?

You might have noticed by now that the Made with Joy website ends in .org. There is a reason for that: We are a social business.

We are social because of the type of websites we build (3rd sector: non profit, social enterprise and charity) AND because we provide work experience opportunities to NEETs in Oxfordshire (youth who are not in education, employment or training).

We are a business because, at the end of the day, I still have 4 mouths to feed and provide shelter for and those two reasons are as good as any in my book. If I’m lucky, in a year’s time, we’ll have a proper team of employees as well and so it won’t just be my family who is being fed and housed!

It wasn’t always this way…

Until very recently (April 2013), I built every single website for free, for fun and in my spare time. It all started in 2003 when I quit my job as an assistant trader at Schwab Capital Markets to train full time inarchery, setting my sights on the 2004 Athens Olympics. Back in 2003, no one in archery had a personal website, but I knew it would be the only way to get my story out there and so I set one up. I used to post weekly to the site to keep my followers up to date (remember this is pre-Twitter and Facebook!) and I even crowd funded my whole Olympic Trials journey, raising $20,000 from friends and family (they got T-Shirts and postcards from tournaments in exchange for their support).

I put myself out on a limb, I followed my dream.

Fast forward 5 years later and I found myself married, pregnant and without a job in Luzern, Switzerland (where they speak a very strong dialect of Swiss German). I had become a ‘trailing spouse’ — someone who follows their spouse to another country because of their work. Jacquelyn Else-Jack (now Godmother to my son), approached me and asked me to help her with a web project, because she had heard I built websites on the side.

Little did I know, I’d be devoting the next four years to building up a website which now regularly gets over 120,000 hits a year and has a steady following of about 4,000 real people. Although I’m no longer involved in the day to day (we have an outstanding MD, Charlie Hartmann, who has taken it over), I’m still very much involved with the technical developments of the site.

Just under a year ago, my husband and I made a decision to move to England. Tim is English and we knew that his reputation in the UK would help him grow his executive coaching business and I had taken a job in London working for a non-profit that connected founders to schools. It seemed like a safe move… we had a house to live in (my husband’s student house that he had bought 20 years earlier) and we had long term friends and family who supported our decision.

At a party last summer, I mentioned to a girlfriend of mine that I was thinking of starting up a digital marketing agency which worked specifically for the 3rd sector by employing unemployed youth. She was well connected with the COO of Bridges Ventures, Steve Morrison. I couldn’t wait to meet with Steve, who encouraged me to apply for an UnLtd grant. The very day that I had the meeting with Steve was the deadline for the grant application. I took a chance and applied.

On November 6th, 2014 (also my 35th birthday), I was awarded £5000 to launch my social business: Made with Joy. At the same time, though, I was struggling with the need to provide a steady income for my family and the desire to really go it alone and make Made with Joy happen. As fate would have it, less than one month after winning my UnLtd grant, I found myself being made redundant.

A blessing in disguise

As with anything that you pour your heart and soul into, the change in my employment status came as much as a relief as it did a shock. I spent the rest of December with my family, enjoying a proper couple of weeks off. Until that point, due to the nature of my previous work, I hadn’t so much as taken more than 24 hours off in nearly 2 years.

I had a new decision to make. Do I look for another part time job or do I really dive into Made with Joy and make it happen? To be honest, I wasn’t quite ready to make the plunge and so I applied for a couple of jobs but none of them panned out so I went back to the drawing board. After working with some of the UK’s most influential entrepreneurs for the previous 19 months, it would be a lie to say that there wasn’t a part of me that felt encouraged to go for it and really become what I knew in my heart to be true: I am a social entrepreneur.

Oxford

I’ve been extremely blessed to be in Oxford while going through this whole process. Oxford, is by default, a place that draws you into learning. You can’t help but live here and want to challenge your mind and broaden your horizons. I immediately joined Oxford Entrepreneurs (they have over 10,000 members) and began attending free evening sessions that they put together to help entrepreneurs get launched. I also started attending the OSEP events (Oxfordshire Social Entrepreneurship Partnership) and I’ve been lucky enough to have been accepted into the Founder Centric Startup Success course thanks to a grant from Oxfordshire Business Support.

Oxford has a hidden digital scene which is now beginning to reveal itself with the launch of DO: Digital Oxford. There are some fantastic meetup groups: UX Oxford and WordPress OX. My exposure to all of these networks has only strengthened my resolve that moving to Oxford was the right decision and my conviction that launching a social business is the only way forwards for me.

We

This post has mostly been about ‘me’ so, you might be asking, who is the ‘we’? This entire blog post was inspired by the very first Made with Joy Work Experience Youth… Declan Hunter. I’m incredibly lucky to be working with SOFEA in Didcot, who recommended Declan to me.

For the past 3 weeks (and the next 5 to come), Declan and I are meeting every Friday for 4 hours. I am teaching him how to build websites and he is teaching me just how talented our young minds in Britain are. After just 2 sessions together, Declan went home and built his own website. TOTALLY UNPROMPTED. In our 3rd session, I gave him a couple tips… and then today… I thought I’d just sneak onto his site and see if he’d made any progress and then I saw this…

I’m in total and complete awe. I’m thrilled and proud and stunned. What an incredible thing to work with someone who has untapped talent and help them discover what they are good at. So… yes… Made with Joy is now officially ‘we’ — it is me and Declan and in time, a number of other talented youth who we will no doubt attract because we have one goal: to build, manage and grow websites that make the world a better place — and we can do it at the right price because we do it with tomorrow’s talent: today’s youth.

This post is dedicated to Sherry Coutu, who helped me realize I am an entrepreneur, to Declan Hunter who has completely validated the reason why Made with Joy was ever a good idea in the first place, my husband and family who have always supported me in every decision I’ve ever made and Matt Mullenweg for giving the world WordPress which has given me a career that I love.

Of course the ultimate dedication is to God… with whom the impossible, becomes possible.

Both images are copyright of Declan Hunter Photography.

This post was originally published on www.madewithjoy.org.