Nigel Brewster

Today’s Business Live show (which airs every Friday at 9am) came within Global Entrepreneurship Week and the day after Social Enterprise Day.

Presenter Jamie Veitch was joined in the studio by Nigel Brewster, Partner at the Brewster Pratap recruitment group, a high growth business founded in 2011.

Nigel is also a private sector Board Member for the Sheffield City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (whose Chair was a guest on this show last week) where he has responsibility for the ‘Skills’ work stream.

Nigel discussed entrepreneurship, taking the steps to start a business, strategies for growth without diluting a business’ values, effective business planning, and how we might enable school leavers with business skills.

Following Nigel we turned to a conversation about social enterprise.

There are more than 70,000 social enterprises in the UK that sell products and services including clothing, chocolate, water, coffee, energy, childcare, printing and design. They are businesses driven by a social mission and use profits to tackle problems like homelessness, unemployment, carbon emissions and food waste. They contribute billions to the economy and are changing the face of business.

Sam Tarff, the new chief executive of The Key Fund, which invests in social enterprises and has supported over 2000 organisations since launching in 1999, talked about the financial and strategic support that Key Fund offers. Sam has a track record himself in running and working with successful social enterprises and third sector organisations and flagged up examples of successful social enterprises.

We were also joined by Sam Walby, editor of Now Then magazine published by Sheffield-based social enterprise Opus Independents. Now Then has put its social impact and values at the heart of its operation and Sam showed how this identity, vision and mission informs all its operations – and how the social enterprise generates income to support its work. The business has now expanded to publish Now Then in Manchester and will be widening distribution of Now Then in Sheffield.

You can listen to / download the full podcast of the show here.

More about the Business Live series of programmes.

Show sponsor, the Sheffield Enterprise Programme, is running an exciting event on 3rd December, Break Barriers, Open Doors, featuring successful Sheffield entrepreneurs who have overcome barriers to achieve their business dream. Details here.