Purves Ali – Boost Lancashire
Over the past 40 years I’ve always found working with community and business goes hand in hand.
I’ve helped businesses to work with local communities, whether it’s a boxing club, cricket club or a football club. Swimming clubs as well.
It is important. I’m involved in the Accrington Stanley Sports Hub Trust. What was an open field has been turned into a £3.5m development, a brilliant asset to the town and where all the community comes to use the place. We’ve also got a business
network going within the hub.
When comes to procurement, more companies are looking for support, they are taking the subject more seriously.
When it comes to recruitment and retention, I visited an engineering company last week. It was 7.30 and freezing and the door was wide open. I asked if everyone was at work and was told they were. I said how do you keep them with no heating? The answer was ‘We feed them, they don’t pay for breakfast or for dinner.’
It was a simple thing, ‘feed everybody’, but the impact on the company was unbelievable in terms of people wanting to work for them. I like benefits.
Sharon Plunkett – Rush Hey Consultancy
The ‘S’ should almost be a ‘C’ for community. When I go into a networking group and say I’m a fundraiser I can see in their eyes they’re thinking, ‘She’ll want money from me’.
However, if you talk to businesses that get involved in the community, who have been doing this before you ‘had to’ and because they wanted to, it is actually a massive benefit to them.
I can give the example of one business giving back to the community during the pandemic. While it was shut it did what it could for the community. And when we came out of Covid, its
profile was so high that the work started rolling in. So, it isn’t just about giving, it is about getting as well. That is what the ‘S’ seems to be to me.
Also, it is not always about profile raising, there is also that trust element. People trust your business because of what you do. They see what you’re doing for the community and how you’re putting back and how you’re supporting it.
Communication is also a massive part of this. It is about talking and listening to your employees and to the community.
Stuart Rogan – HML Recycling
More thought needs to be put into what the ‘S’ is and what your community needs and, for me, it’s not about raising the profile of the business and it’s not about, ‘if I do this charitable work, what will I get back?’
It is about giving back to your community and I would describe myself as a socially responsible conservative. I believe in the creation of welfare.
After the pandemic we took a conscious decision to change the business model we operate slightly to give a set percentage of our profits to charitable and good causes.
And that’s going to continue past my ownership, because we plan an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) in 2026 and in the letter of wishes will be the creation of a charitable foundation.
As soon as I looked at EOTs I thought, ‘this is it’, a way we can give back to the community, the employees can take ownership and hopefully the company can endure way past my time and be putting back into the community in 50 years’ time.
The corporate social responsibility that is demonstrated by businesses is becoming more important. We deal largely with private businesses and don’t tender for much work.
However, our customers are telling me that they like what we do, they’re dealing us because of what we do. They recognise that you’re doing the right thing and they want to do business because of that.
They want to be seen to be associated with businesses that do the right thing. It’s not all about the money. It’s deeper than that.
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