The managing director of Greenwich Leisure Limited on how social enterprise has developed over the past two decades. Our story began in 1993 when severe local authority funding pressures appeared to be about to devastate the ability of the London Borough of Greenwich to operate its leisure centres. The solution, devised in collaboration with the local authority, was to set up an autonomous not-for-profit enterprise that would take over running the centres from the borough's own in-house team. We wanted to create a new model that had charitable benefits but still kept the public sector ethos with private sector business freedoms.
Mark Sesnan
Twenty years ago, we were simply known as a "leisure trust". However, customers and councils quickly realised that this was a good and imaginative way of protecting leisure services. We went from operating a handful of leisure centres situated within Greenwich to managing 30 leisure facilities by 2000, while today we operate more than 130 facilities across England and employ more than 5,000 staff.
We never envisaged in 1993 that the business would grow to where it is today. We started off by simply trying to save the service jobs in Greenwich; that was our initial objective. However, we always knew we could do more because we had great people from day one, most of whom are still with us 20 years on.
Good people are undoubtedly the secret to business success. Being a social enterprise gives individuals the freedom to act in a commercial manner, a "must-succeed" mentality, and responsibility for their own decisions. As a manager, you have to free people to be innovative and creative. The public sector is full of good people. Recruitment is of a high standard, but once they're in the job the bureaucracy destroys their will to live. Of course there are employment challenges we face too. For example, how do you motivate people without being able to offer super salaries or shares? But we think that by developing staff and by growing the business, we can provide better career opportunities for our people.
Back in the early days, being the first leisure "mutual spin out" meant that we literally had to write the rulebook ourselves and invent the model. Each issue was a new challenge and we had to develop a solution and then ensure it worked and was legal. This was particularly difficult in the then very hostile environment of Compulsory Competitive Tendering.
Today things couldn't be more different. Social enterprise is part of the lexicon even if it's not a term that everyone fully understands. In our core market of public leisure centres there is now a mature, mixed economy and social enterprise organisations such as Greenwich Leisure Ltd (GLL) are a major part of that landscape. However, there remain many other business sectors where the social enterprise model has yet to make inroads and is barely recognised.
The way I see it, councils can privatise by selecting a commercial contractor, they can stick their heads in the sand and continue to try to run a facility themselves, or they can work with a social enterprise partner in a "win–win" not-for-profit relationship.
Of course our friends in procurement don't see it like this, they prefer to focus on driving down cost. But, by going down the lowest cost route, you inevitably take the value out of our industry and end up with low wages and poor investment in staff.
More recently we've started to diversify our business, most notably into library management. We now operate all Greenwich and Wandsworth libraries including three prison library services and a mobile facility.
Libraries are part of local authorities' cultural block. You'd want your library to be open seven days a week, to be accessible, to have a crèche, a café, a car park and be friendly and bright – the same specification as a leisure centre.
The 2012 Olympic Games also had a huge impact. Not only were we involved in staffing the Aquatic Centre and hosting numerous national and international teams at our leisure centres, we were also awarded legacy contracts to run the Aquatic Centre and Copper Box Arena. The Copper Box Arena reopens to the public this month – coinciding with our business's 20th anniversary. To have these venues is a coming of age for us and changes us from a local to a national player. It ups the ante and increases the challenge. We'd like to work with Rio 2016 too. We met the Brazilians during the 2012 Games when they were based at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, which we operate. Working on an international stage would be an exciting next step.
Whereas once we were seen as the rank outsiders, our journey and those of many other social enterprises has proven that combining a public sector ethos with private sector freedoms really does work. It's not just a model suitable for small businesses either, but one that can successfully "upscale" to tackle larger challenges and deliver at a national and potentially international level too. (
http://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2013/aug/19/evolution-of-social-enterprise?CMP=twt_gu)
Mark Sesnan is the managing director of Greenwich Leisure Limited
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