Evening Standard Business Awards: The good corporate citizens and entrepreneurs in the spotlight
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With just a week to go to the Evening Standard Business Awards, it’s time to assess companies that go the extra mile to do the right thing. Whether it’s volunteering, taking care of the environment or pushing diversity in business, these firms are ahead of the game.
We also look at the candidates for the Entrepreneur of the Year award. British business cannot thrive without entrepreneurs, the backbone of the economy and we profile some of the finest here.
Corporate citizen of the year
AllBright: This new fund has been set up by women to invest in start-ups founded by women. It is the brainchild of Debbie Wosskow, founder of home rental start-up Love Home Swap and Anna Jones, the former head of Hearst Magazines in the UK.
The fund says it wants to make the UK the best place in the world to be a female founder and believes that investing in women will deliver greater returns in the long-term as research has shown that companies where women have leadership positions make greater returns.
AllBright aims to raise £10 million through its crowdfunding platform and will begin investing shortly. With these committed founders, it’s likely to go far.
Costa Coffee: Owned by Whitbread, Costa now has more than 1200 stores across the UK. Often criticised for putting independent shops out of business, the coffee chain has been doggedly looking at its own sustainability and leading the sector in its environmental activity.
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It has cut energy consumption by 38% in recent years and in February Costa declared that it would launch a scheme to recycle paper cups nationwide. Customers can hand their cup in to be decontaminated correctly. The move means Costa’s rate for recycling cups has leapt from 1% to 14%.
Costa is also offering 25p off a hot or cold drink for customers that bring a reusable cup into stores.
The coffee chain is supporting community initiatives with more than 10,000 hours volunteered by staff. No grounds for complaint there.
PwC: The accountancy giant, which this year overtook Deloitte as the world’s largest financial service firm, has been putting corporate responsibility high up its agenda for a decade now. This year, more than a third of PwC’s UK workforce gave up their time for community projects — with 6000 people volunteering over 50,000 working hours, benefiting 16,000 people.
As befits a good auditor, PwC has been measuring the value of its investment in community work for many years and says its total community contribution reached £7.4 million this year including cash, time and in-kind support.
One initiative that really sets PwC apart is the social enterprise it set up at the Fire Station on Tooley Street, next door to its More London headquarters. Here, homeless people are given new skills to help them get jobs. Brigade has trained over 100 apprentices into jobs and given 1000 homeless people new skills.
Marks & Spencer: Year after year Marks & Spencer sets the bar high for sustainable business. It introduced Plan A — its commitment for driving a sustainable business a decade ago and has far exceeded its targets. M&S remains the only carbon-neutral retailer.
Despite the pressure of falling sales and a two-thirds decline in profits, the company has remained focused on its sustainability targets. The retailer was ranked second overall out of 98 global companies in a corporate human rights benchmark and number one in both clothing and food.
Energy efficiency has improved by 40% this year, against a 2007 baseline and 48% of the retailer’s cotton now comes from more sustainable sources, up from 42% last year.
Marks & Spencer may need drastic action to rescue its clothing sales, but when it comes to corporate social responsibility, the retailer is really in a class of its own.
Entrepreneur of the year
Aron Gelbard and Ben Stanway: Who doesn’t love the sound of a parcel dropping onto the doormat? Bloom & Wild was started by former management consultant Aron Gelbard and hedge fund manager Ben Stanway, who wanted to send beautiful buds easily through the post.
The company is now the top-rated flower company across all platforms. Bloom & Wild raised a fresh £3.75 million in investment earlier this year, taking total investment in the company to £7.25 million.
Gelbard has showed great skill at building a brand that has captured consumers’ imagination. The next big test will be if the company can translate that as it breaks into markets in France and Germany.
Alice Bentinck: Bentinck is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Entrepreneur First, one of the capital’s most successful accelerator programmes.
Bentinck founded Entrepreneur First in her mid-twenties and it is now the most successful early stage investment programme in Europe. With co-founder Matt Clifford, she pioneered a new model of start-up creation that focused on skilled science graduates and was repeatedly told the model wouldn’t work.
Yet since it was founded in 2011, EF has produced 75 companies that have gone on to raise $100 million (£70 million) in venture capital funding. Magic Pony, the visual processing start-up that was bought by Twitter in 2016 for £102 million, was one of EF’s first successes.
Bentinck says she is here to build Europe’s first Google. Given the decade she has had, you would put money on it.
Dumi Oburota: Oburota is the co-founder of the independent record label and entertainment company Disturbing London. As svengali to Tinie Tempah, he’s made his name in music and also managed Jessie J, Yungen and Wizkid.
Back in the early days, the business was funded through student loans and profits made from buying and selling cars. Under Oburota’s guidance, Disturbing London has amassed nine UK number ones, a host of awards including Brits, MOBOs, Ivor Novellos and a residency in Ibiza.
The 34 year-old has created a clothing label and is even designing a smart car for Mercedes. The plan is to make Disturbing London “a stamp of coolness for millennial, urban culture”.
Mike Lynch: Sometimes known as the British Bill Gates, Lynch founded FTSE 100 tech company Autonomy and then sold it to Hewlett Packard in 2011 for $11.1 billion.
Lynch, worth £469 million according to the Sunday Times Rich List, is now emerging as one of the most significant backers of the next generation of UK tech start-ups with his $1 billion Invoke Capital fund. Darktrace, the cyber-security company, is the best-known of the firms Invoke has invested in.
Lynch, still fighting a $5 billion legal battle against US tech giant Hewlett Packard related to the sale of Autonomy, is one of the British tech sector’s big heroes. If he has put money into something, the chances are it will be a success.
The Evening Standard Business Awards, in association with HSBC and supported by Ballymore, will be held at Banqueting House, Whitehall, on June 29.
For more information visit: standard.co.uk/businessawards #ESBusinessAwards