What actually is a social enterprise? (And could one be right for you?)
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
I'd love to know how many hours I've spent in conversations about this over the past 20 years. Late nights at conferences with other social enterprise professionals, talking about trading, grants, asset locks, triple bottom lines and social impact. It's why it's the very first thing we cover on CAP's Social Enterprise Start-Up course — because people really do come in with very different ideas about what a social enterprise is. And honestly? They're not wrong to be confused.
So let me try to clear it up, the way I'd do it over a cup of coffee.
The simple version
A social enterprise is a business that trades — sells something, generates income — but exists primarily to create social or environmental change rather than to make its owners wealthy.
That's it, really. It's not a charity (although some charities do trade). It's not a regular business (although it runs like one in many ways). It sits in the middle: commercial enough to sustain itself, purposeful enough to mean something beyond the bottom line.
The profit doesn't disappear — it gets reinvested into the mission, or distributed in ways that benefit the community rather than shareholders. That's what people mean when they talk about the "social dividend."
The three types I see most often
Here's something I've noticed after two decades in this sector. Social enterprises aren't all the same, and I've started thinking about them in three broad groups.
There are the reluctant traders — organisations, often rooted in the voluntary sector, who've realised they need to generate some income to survive and grow, but whose hearts are firmly in the mission. Trading is a means to an end for them, and they sometimes need a nudge to, not nessacarily take seriously but to get serious about it.
There are the social business minded— people who've built or want to build a genuinely commercial business, but who've realised they want it to stand for something. They're not reluctant about the trading at all; they're ambitious. They just want the profit to flow and for it to flow somewhere that matters, somewhere that makes a difference.
And then there are what I think of as the social enterprise superheroes — organisations where the business model and the social mission are so tightly woven together that you can't separate them. The trading is the impact. Think of a social enterprise that employs people with barriers to employment, or one that exists entirely to channel resources back into a community it serves.
Each of these is a valid social enterprise. But each one takes a slightly different approach to how it generates income and delivers impact — which means the advice, structure, and support that works for one won't always work for the others. It's why I find this world so genuinely interesting after all these years. It's not formulaic. It's not standardised. But despite that variety, every social enterprise is bound by one common goal:
To do good and make healthy change.
Is this sector actually growing?
Yes — and significantly.
There are now around 131,000 social enterprises in the UK, contributing approximately £78 billion to the economy. The sector has grown steadily, and in Kent and Medway we're seeing more people exploring this route than ever before — people who want their work to mean something, who've spotted a gap in their community, or who are thinking differently about what business is for.
It's worth saying clearly: this is a good time to be thinking about social enterprise. The model is increasingly well understood, there's more support available than there used to be, and communities across Kent and Medway are actively looking for the kinds of organisations that social enterprise can create.
The question I get asked most
"But is it right for me?"
That's where the late-night conference conversations always end up, and it's the right question. Because the answer genuinely depends on what you're trying to do, how you want to fund it, and what kind of leader you want to be.
What I'd say is this: if you're sitting with an idea — something you want to build that goes beyond making money — it's almost always worth having the conversation before you decide anything. Not to be talked into anything, but to understand your options clearly.
That's exactly what the free 45-minute advice session with me is for. No commitment, no sales pitch. Just an honest conversation that helps you see whether social enterprise is the right vehicle for what you have in mind.
Like this kind of content?
Sign up for our regular (but not annoyingly regular) newsletter
Comments