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And I'll start with my full disclosure,

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which I always do obliterate the term social entrepreneurship from the vocabulary and just focus on entrepreneurship,

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because all entrepreneurship should have, as we're finding out, social, environmental and governance components if it's going to be sustainable.

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Let's talk a little bit about future proofing.

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If I say. How can you futureproof your house?

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What would you think I was talking about? How would you futureproof your house?

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Anybody? Yes.

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Open windows and vinyl Saturday. And don't.

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Did everybody hear that don't big loud loud open windows and vinyl siding.

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I used to sell them door to door and that was our pitch. So your future proofing your house?

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Why was that future proofing your house? The windows, they are very strong.

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Supposedly, they were related to something that was used on a NASCAR shuttle.

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And boy, you're a great salesman. I would buy everything on a vinyl siding.

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It protected the wood from sun and wood. Okay.

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How else? How else would you futureproof your house?

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Yes. Ensure it. Okay.

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Good point. Hopefully your insurance won't be around so that it pays back.

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Anything else? So if you're going to futureproof your house,

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you're really looking at what could happen eventually in terms of something that would threaten your house.

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Maybe you live in an earthquake friendly zone, let's put it that way, or a flood friendly zone or whatever.

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And you would be looking at that? Well, we talk about future proofing business.

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What I really want to do tonight is give you a sense of where we're going with business today,

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what are the trends that I see, and then give you some very concrete tools.

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If you are going about building a business,

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how do you actually incorporate what seems to be very complicated aspects into thinking about how would I future proof my business?

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And let me let me just start with this and hopefully you're going to have to put up with my absolutely horrible technique.

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Okay. What's the new normal? The new normal is this.

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We know that we are going to be living in a hotter,

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much more re and we are already much more resource scarce world and a much more

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transparent world so that everybody knows whatever is out there in terms of,

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you know, disclosure around corporate, you know, misbehaviour or government misbehaviour,

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anybody misbehaviour, it's out there, whether it's true or not, it's out there.

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And then the other aspect is, of course, everything is unpredictable.

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We can no longer predict the patterns of the future by looking at what happened in the past.

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Things are accelerating at such a rapid pace that this is really something that, you know, if you look at CEOs,

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which I often deal with, they're scrambling to figure out what is what does this mean for a company?

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Where should we be going? And so that really is a completely different way of looking at things.

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And so they're beginning to think about what how should we be reacting to this?

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How should we be preparing our business so that it is future proof?

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Okay. And some of those aspects are very challenging because business has been used to thinking about the short term.

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And anybody who has ever run a business knows that cash flow is very important.

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Your financial health is very important, so you tend to focus on that.

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But all of a sudden they're going actually the short term. I need to start thinking for a longer term because a lot of these other issues that

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I've never had to deal with are going to be affecting my shorter term bottom line.

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So that's the first main challenge is a total way of looking at the world in a different way, or at least in business.

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And this is where it really is tough.

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You know, business has really been used to and we've all been used to something that Steven Green has has talked about.

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Steven Green was the former chair of HSBC.

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He's an Anglican priest, which many not very many people know about.

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And now he is a minister in government, in charge of trade or some very fancy British name.

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And what he but he basically he wrote this book called Good Value.

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That's really very it's very philosophical.

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Of course, he went to Oxford and he basically looks at the history of business and he looks at how things have been done.

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And he says today our biggest ill is that we divide where how we live our lives.

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This is my work person and this is my family person and this is my church person and this is my volunteer person.

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And a lot of times those things don't come together. They don't resonate, and that is one of the great he says.

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This is one of the great ills of of life. And so it really allows us to make that clear, which are well,

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that's why you have people who are just wonderful community members and wonderful church goers, and yet,

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you know, they may be part of the Mafia, etc., etc., you know,

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so we tend to be able to compartmentalise the idea of future proofing businesses, how do we bring this together?

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And it's not just about business, it's about our lives.

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How do we actually end up pursuing what we really want to do with our lives and what we really value with,

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you know, with our time, the time that we're here, you know, on on earth.

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So put it rather cynically. So business as usual is this is where I make my money and this is where I do good and never the twain shall meet.

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That's a little bit exaggerated, but that's often been the case.

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And what we're looking at when we talk about when we when businesses begin to say, you know, we really need to look at this in a different way,

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it really is moving from CSR, which stands for Corporate Social Responsibility, which is kind, sort of what you do to tick the boxes.

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In the most cynical viewpoint, some CSR programs are much more integrated,

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but basically people who run CSR units, etc. are like a little wart on their corporate.

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I mean, that's a horrible thing to say, isn't it? But anyway, the point is, they're kind of like a little satellite hovering around there,

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and everybody else is like it's like, you know, it's like the person who's in charge of diversity.

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Oh, yes, you shall have diversity or you shall have gender mainstreaming.

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And then there's some poor women trying to change the entire way that the company works.

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So CSR is very much like that. It's a tipping of the hat without and in general that is the case.

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But now more and more CEOs are realising that that doesn't work.

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And I'm going to give you a couple of ideas in terms.

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But first of all, even the most, you know, radical activists like McKinsey and MIT are basically doing, you know,

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some studies that are actually proving that you want to know what future proofing your business actually pays.

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And these are some of the major studies of the major publications that have come out.

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And as you can see, they're pretty recognisable in terms of saying this actually pays off and this is what we know.

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Goldman Sachs in their study has found that companies that futureproof their business and by this we're

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going to get into get away from the jargon of future proofing business and tell you exactly what that means,

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that they actually have 25% higher stock value than their counterparts that haven't gotten that rapid.

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So basically what's happening is more and more, although I don't want to tell you that this is a pandemic, it's very slow.

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It's very slow. But more and more, we're seeing companies that are beginning to really take a hard look at this,

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a hard look at their supply chains and how they do business, a hard look at who do they work with, how do those people work and under what conditions.

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And really putting it out there in terms of knowing that because the world is more transparent, they can get into trouble like that if they're not.

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If anything, it's great that they're running scared because they are being forced to do some of the right things.

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And these are some of the key components to improve short and long term profitability.

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And we're going to get into each one of those and I'm going to be giving you

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tools for how do you incorporate this so you don't need to be taking notes,

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I think. Isn't it like that? Aren't these all going to be up on. Yeah.

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And I'm going to give you some links so that you can begin to think about this,

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because I know that after this of starting your business comes building your business.

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And this session actually I'd want to say bridges both of those both of those sessions because as you begin to think about starting your business,

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you'll find some of these issues will make you reflect.

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And then as you build your business, you will find that you will actually have tools to be able to incorporate.

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So governance immediately, when people say governance, people think of boards, don't you?

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It's so much more than boards. And you'll find out exactly what that means.

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Workers. These both things to workers and community are part of the social component.

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How do you treat your workers?

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If you look at a company like Wal-Mart that I find absolutely fascinating and this is the schizophrenia of business, Walmart, huge company,

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employs millions of people and basically is doing all of these campaigns around,

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you know, helping women in developing countries get employment, etc., etc.

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And meanwhile, how does it treat its workers? Not real well.

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So there is this schizophrenia in that in a sense that still needs to be worked out.

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And community, how do you how do you actually support the community?

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We're going to show you a couple of little film clips of what companies are doing around that.

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And then finally, of course, the obvious one environment. What is your environmental footprint?

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Even if you are a financial institution, even if you are have you'd say, oh, I have nothing to do with environment.

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You actually do. So those are the big four components.

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Now, why would why would people want to do this?

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Why would you know? This is a lot of work.

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But the interesting thing is that many of the CEOs I talked to today are saying and if you really in the financial institutions,

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they're going, nobody wants to work for us anymore.

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What do we do? How do we motivate people to come?

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People want to work for organisations, for companies that are basically fundamentally innovative, philosophically positive and morally compelling.

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That's what everybody wants.

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And that is a tough act to follow or a tough, you know, a tough thing to do if you are not really honest about what you're doing.

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So the CEO wants to attract and retain the best talent.

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How do you do that? Many ceos go when our h.r.

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People go out to actually interview many of the mbas or the post grads or whatever.

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What we're finding is they're interviewing us and saying, so what do you do about x, y or Z?

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And they're finding that a very interesting flip of the coin or the CFO wants to attract investors and save money.

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That's another reason why they're interested in doing this or h.r.

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And we get this all the time. Human resources goes. How do we motivate our employees to do fun?

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You know, it's kind of a sad thing that people go to work and they don't feel motivated by

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what they're doing and have to go out and do something totally different to,

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you know, get them excited. But this is one of the big things that we get all the time from big companies.

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We want to engage because we want to motivate our employees, want to give them a reason for working here.

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And the sales team wants to increase consumer trust.

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Some very interesting lessons learned there that I could go into in terms of some of the ways that big companies have done that.

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Operations managers want to save on on on efficiencies, etc.

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And then, you know, there's always the marketing team goes, hey, a good opportunity for us.

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You know, anyway, these are some of the motivations why people are beginning to think about how

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do we actually show that we are good citizens in this world and not just,

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you know, wanting to save. So one of the things that questions that I get and all the time and and I was working with Goldman Sachs in an initiative

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that they did here in the UK called 10,000 small businesses where basically went to about five of of UK's big urban hubs,

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Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, etc. and looked at and and they selected entrepreneurs who were just starting.

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And when we would talk about this, they'd go, hey, come on, you know, I'm just a start up.

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I can't afford to do this kind of stuff. This stuff is for the big guys.

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It's not for little ones like me. I'm just trying to make you know, I'm trying to make ends meet.

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I'm trying to pay my workers. I'm trying.

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And in fact, what I'm going to show you is that across the board, this isn't something that you do from one day to the other.

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This is a progressive, a progressive process that I will give you some tools to be able to follow through.