How businesses can be a force for good

Corporate partner at Shakespeare Martineau James Hawkeswood demonstrates how businesses can be a force for good.

One of the things that attracted me to Shakespeare Martineau was its strong culture, believing business could be both purposeful and profitable, with one often leading to the other.

In my day job as a corporate lawyer, I have been fortunate enough to work with a number of people who have used this combination of a strong culture and the desire to make a positive impact to achieve incredible things. Here are just two:

Building your business to drive environmental ambitions… Simon Morrish

Someone who knows the value of engaging and empowering people to drive performance is Simon Morrish, CEO of Ground Control and Xlinks.

Simon is an ex-McKinsey consultant and Morgan Stanley Derivatives analyst. He holds a master’s degree with Distinction in Economics, Engineering and Management from Oxford University and an MBA degree with Honours from Harvard Business School. He was awarded the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award for Transformational leadership in 2018.

Employee incentivisation has been a key theme through all of Simon’s ventures. Having worked with him since the early days of his involvement in Ground Control in 2006 I have seen it grow into a highly respected, multi award-winning environmental services business looking after over 60,000 sites in the UK.

Throughout this time Simon has been constantly leveraging his business interests to serve his key passion: caring for the environment:

• In 2020, Ground Control launched the Evergreen Fund, devoting 5% of Ground Control’s annual net profits to a £5 million Impact Venture Fund dedicated to environmental initiatives, rewilding of the countryside and reducing carbon emissions;
• Through Solar Ventus (which he founded in 2010) he has built over 100 wind turbines, which currently supply renewable electricity to over 2,600 households in the UK;
• He set up Future Motors to decarbonise buildings by offering 30- 50% energy savings on new retrofit switched reluctance motors that not only save energy but have a payback period of approximately three years; and
• His drone and eVTOL venture, Skyports, is promoting emissions-free air transport for both people and goods.

All of these pale into insignificance next to his latest project: Xlinks. The Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project aims to generate 11.5GW of zero carbon electricity from the sun and wind in Morocco’s Guelmim Oued Noun region, and to ship it direct to Great Britain via 4000km (2485 miles) of HVDC sub-sea cables. Most importantly this power is firm and flexible, delivering higher load factors between the peak hours of 7am to 11pm than nuclear and at less than two thirds the price.

This would be enough to provide affordable, clean power to the equivalent of over 7 million British homes; a truly remarkable achievement.

Completing the circle: investment, philanthropy and spreading the word… Jay Verjee

Another alumnus of Harvard’s Business School, Jay Verjee grew up in an entrepreneurial family and in his own words ‘was always encouraged to see how business could be used as a vehicle to help society’.

As the Chair of the Rumi Foundation (which was set up by his uncle, himself a highly-successful entrepreneur), Jay helps identify and promote grass roots charities around the world, seeking to give them a springboard to develop their own projects, profile and activities. The Foundation does this not just by providing finance, but also by mentoring the people that are involved in the charities and giving them access to wider networks which may be beneficial.

In Jay’s words: “We provide our skills, mentality and money: taking the approach and rigour we use in our business lives and applying them to charitable organisations and projects to help them succeed.”

Jay follows a similar approach in his own entrepreneurial endeavours; he is increasingly drawn towards businesses which make money AND do good – whether by the products and services they supply or by the impact they have on their local community (they may for example provide a lot of jobs in areas where employment opportunities are scarce).

As Jay sees it, in the traditional model of capitalism, ‘success’ was to invest and deliver profit for shareholders. Now success is about investing to deliver more than just profit to the shareholders; it is about creating benefits for a wider group of stakeholders.

As with his family foundation, supporting education is seen as a priority because of the ‘multiplier effect’ it creates. In Jay’s case this tends to focus around the institutions he himself attended (he and his wife have endowed a fellowship at Harvard Business School, and are working on student access programmes at Cambridge). One of the big cultural differences between the US and the UK, he notes, is that in the US, if you go to a prestigious institution like Harvard it is taken as a given that you will have an ‘obligation’ to give back an element of your success. That is not yet how things are viewed in the UK, but rest assured Jay is working on it!

As Simon and Jay (plus many others) have shown, aligning a strong people-centric culture with more than just financial goals can be a powerful recipe for success. Maybe the next time you wonder if
a business decision is going to pay dividends, you can ask if those dividends might be more than money, and who is going to be receiving them…?

Unlocking potential

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