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- [00:00]
Unknown
Foreign.
- [00:12]
Tom Edwards
Hello and welcome to the Entrepreneurs on Monacle Radio. The show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. On today's program, we're spotlighting business as a community builder. First, we'll hear from a London based social entrepreneur. Rethinking early years education.
- [00:30]
Dr. June O'Sullivan
Working with children is the most political job you can do because it touches on all the major issues. Children are like the canaries in the mine. They are the first to fall over with the sort of decisions we make at policy level and adult level and beyond.
- [00:43]
Tom Edwards
And later, we head to Vienna to meet the founder of an independent cafe chain that's opening a new location in a neighborhood that passes under the radar of most visitors.
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Philip Feyer
There was a little bit of specialty coffee here, some small cafes, but not a lot. And I just saw the opportunity to do something that was both a passion of mine and something that I felt was missing in the city.
- [01:06]
Tom Edwards
This is the Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards. You're listening to the Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards. Dr. June O' Sullivan is the CEO of the London Early Years foundation, one of the UK's largest charitable social enterprises. The organisation runs 43 nurseries across London and employs more than 1,000 staff. Operating with a mission to combine financial stability with genuine social impact, June joined Monocle's deputy head of radio, Tom Webb at Midori House to discuss the role of social enterprise in shaping modern business. Tom began by asking her about the value of community based business models.
- [01:52]
Dr. June O'Sullivan
So I came to England from Ireland to train as a nurse in true Irish pathways and I indeed train as a psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley, which if anyone out there is ever thinking about what to do as a first step career, that is a very good one because once you can establish yourself as a psychiatric nurse, you more or less can cope with anything. And then I went into social work and working and noticing the issues with small children and how loads of the social work problems we were dealing with started when you were a small child. And so I began to get very interested in that and I was looking at what might be a good way of doing things. And then I had a child quite young and I was looking for a nursery for him and I discovered that there weren't many and the ones that were were quite judgy. And so when I went to try and get a place, even though I was contributing and everything else and working as a nurse, I was treated really not very well. And I sort of vowed then that I would do something that would change it so that we create a model that everyone was welcome at. But it would be a balance of social purpose, commercial acumen and business discipline. And that, indeed, is a social enterprise.
- [03:00]
Alexei Korilov
So did you have your eureka moment at the psychiatric ward or when you had a child?
- [03:05]
Dr. June O'Sullivan
I had my eureka moment much later on. I had my determination moment when I had my boy. And I thought, this isn't right. There should be something better than this. But I was very young and very naive and very much a stranger in a new land trying to find my way. So I knew it would take me a while to do that. And then as I got older and got much more experienced, especially in social work, I kind of began to sort of formulate in my head something would happen. And also, there's always a bit of serendipity in people's journeys, I always think. And so you have the right glass of wine at the right time or the right cup of tea at the right time, and then you end up with somebody sort of framing what is in your head. And I think there was quite a bit of that for me. So I got this job at this little, tiny charity, and that was because I was doing an MA at Roehampton University. In the evening, one of one of my colleagues there was running an under fives, what they call a maintained nursery school. And she said to me, june, you really ought to do something. There's places that could really do with your thinking. And so I got this job, and I was a little bit bewildered as to what I wanted to do. But then I got absolutely obsessed by pedagogy. When I die, I have to have pedagogy somewhere on my grave. From that, I began to really study how children learn and what it means for them. And I began to test it a lot in this little, tiny charity. And I thought, there has to be a better way than doing childcare through to small local charities. You had to do something better. And I got the job as the CEO. I did an MBA at South Bank Business School, and I framed in my head what I wanted to do. And then I was talking to some other people, it was probably the beginning of the 2000s, and they said, you know, you're doing what you're doing what you want to do as a social enterprise, June. And they framed it for me, and they are themselves very famous social entrepreneurs now. And I thought, okay, this is what we're doing. And I thought, this is what we have to do. We have to find a way that every child is welcome, that we are commercially astute and that we're not Dependent and that actually we can do things the way we want to do things. And for me, that was all about social justice. Cause social justice starts with small children.
- [05:15]
Alexei Korilov
You've mentioned many themes and we're going to come back to one of them. But I have to go back to pedagogy. Okay, please. For those who don't know, of course I do. What is it? And why have you got a tattoo of it on your forehead?
- [05:28]
Dr. June O'Sullivan
Pedagogy is how we lead people to learn, how we lead children to learn. And if you don't understand that, then you make really bad policy decisions about schooling and about how we support children and how they develop. And far too few people understand what pedagogy means. They all talk about curriculum. A curriculum is a set of subjects and of course they're very important. But if you haven't got a pedagogy, a way of understanding how children learn, you can have all the subjects you like, but they won't land and the children won't absorb the learning and they won't sort of benefit to the best of their own ability.
- [06:01]
Alexei Korilov
Nice. Right, we're going to tackle two concepts in one now because we've wasted too much time on pedagogy. Social capital and community based business models. How do they work together? What is the role of social capital?
- [06:13]
Dr. June O'Sullivan
So social capital was a term that was devised by Robert Putnam in 2000 after one of the many, sadly, one of the many massacres of children in schools by usually a lone gunman. And that really threw America at the time. And he wrote this book about social capital. And what he was saying, which is really pertinent today, I have to say, is that if you have a frayed community, if you don't have connections, if you don't have social capital networks, knowing who people are, a strong community, which sometimes people are a little bit sneery about. But actually if you haven't got that as your basis, then you're in trouble. Because what happens is it frays and people are not held by the community framework. Now, someone who left a country like Ireland, where it was very religious and women didn't always have the best deal at the time I was there and we also had to deal with the war in the North. I was really keen on community because I feel it's something that holds people. And right now I think also there is real anxiety that the center is not holding. And also in the uk, one of the strengths of the UK is also now one of its weaknesses, which is that it's not very explicit about the rules of the game. The rules of the game are quite implicit and they work when things are strong, but when the community starts to fray, they don't work. So for us, I think our job in nurseries is to be a community catalyst, is to bring people in, is to have conversations where so many parents will say to me, I never would have spoken to somebody from that community had you not had these events. So I'll have parties for everything. Right now I'm organizing a party for a wall because we just got a new wall, so we celebrate the new wall. I mean, it's a very expensive wall and it's sustainable and it's all very fancy, but let's have a party for the wall.
- [07:55]
Alexei Korilov
I'm all down for a party with a wall. And as you mentioned earlier, there's always a good time for wine, which I think is always community. Then good, strong communities have strong leadership, arguably. Why is leadership with purpose the future and how to do it well and build resilience in the face of lots of opposition.
- [08:15]
Dr. June O'Sullivan
Coming here on the train, I decided to open one of my books and this one was on social leadership. Just to remind myself what I say about this, because I had a feeling you might ask me this. So social leaders is actually the favour of the young generation as well. Interesting. They don't really want to work for extractive big corporates where they feel are taking all the benefit for a small few. So they really want to work within what I might call a regenerative economic model, where the company actually regenerates the money and develops the service. So for example, at Leif, the fees are restructured within the organisation to cross subsidize children that would never be able to afford nursery, and that's about one third of them. So we're talking about substantial numbers, but also is reinvested in staff's training. So I have an institute of early years where the staff can have any training from arrival with no qualifications right up to a full honours degree. And I'm currently looking to develop the master's degree with them as well. So I think a lot of young people, and when I think about my own staff colleagues, most of them have joined us because they believe that they're contributing to something, so they're contributing to something like true sustainability. You know, those three pillars, the pillar of economics, which is about regenerating and, you know, not taking from the next generation, but making decisions in the now that actually are going to be beneficial for the future, social, which is exactly what you were talking about earlier, connecting with the community, partnerships, building that network, feeling safe in your community, knowing your people. And then environmental, which is the kind of doing around the choices you make in relation to how you procure, how you serve, how you look after your planet and how you do that in a way that actually thinks of the children as the future global citizens and, you know, their right to have their voice heard in all of this. And our sort of responsibility to make sure that we make those decisions that leave them in a better place than we found it. And I think we're way off that at the moment, so we really have to sort of pull back. And I think leadership with the social purpose pulls you back into those kind of conversations without being preachy or, you know, naggy are making people feel guilty at all, but making people feel that they have a voice and their voice counts. And they are what I call sustainability informed. And I keep going on about the three pillars. It's not simply environmental, you know, less plastic bags. That is of course, part of it. I just did a doctorate on that and I've become slightly obsessive about sort of understanding that from the UNESCO perspective, from the. The sort of local perspective, from the wider European perspective, from the wild perspective, but also from the voice of the children. So, for example, we took some of the children out the other day. There's four. Took four nurseries, so four different parts of London, nice Shishi part in southeast London, right in the heart, Soho, more mixed area in Lewisham, and quite a deprived area out in Newham. And they are all made up of children aged three and four. And they were all given cameras and they were asked to go and photograph what they found that they didn't like in their environment. And they were very precise. And so they didn't like litter and they didn't like bari guano and they didn't like dog poo, our dogs, too much. They didn't like the big buildings that were dark and sort of distressing, actually, and they didn't like the noise of the traffic. So they were very clear about what they did want. What they did want was more green, was calmer, was space. And so they are the future and they're telling us this now. And I know there's other studies with older children who've said something quite similar. So for me, the whole sustainability thing, the whole leadership with social purpose starts that level and is kind of woven into everything. And as a consequence, you have the most wonderful staff who never want to leave you. And that is you Know, great. And they come like some of my apprentices come to me aged 17, 18 and they move through the organization and they're managers and their. In fact, the manager of the apprentices was herself 19 years ago, one of our apprentices and she's sort of developed all the way through. And I just think that the way the kind of corporate model has kind of taken. Come in and taken over and that kind of eating each other, that kind of has really not helped in terms of what the kind of the ethos of companies. Because companies are a force for good. They employ people, you know, they support people. And if you look back at the sort of, you know, the great, you know, philanthropic Quakers of the past, you know, the great sunlights and all that, they always looked after their staff. And I feel this move towards technology where you're, in a way, you're replacing your staff, your staff voice, the move towards the disconnect, working from home, all of that kind of thing and the lack of, kind of understanding that you're a community in your workplace. It's really not helpful, especially for our younger staff who are often finding their feet in the workplace and making their friends in the workplace, especially in a busy and sometimes very lonely city like London.
- [13:28]
Alexei Korilov
A fascinating study. I think my pictures probably would have been the same, even though I do love brutalist architecture. So you mentioned the leaf's pillars, that is the London Early Years Foundation.
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Dr. June O'Sullivan
Oh, yes.
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Alexei Korilov
What other sectors could learn from your approach to scale, sustainability, inclusion? These pillars you mention.
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Dr. June O'Sullivan
Well, I think that working with children is the most political job you can do because it touches on all the major issues. You know, children are like the canaries in the mine. They are the first to fall over with the sort of decisions we make at policy level and adult level and beyond. So where there was issues around child obesity, we saw it first. In the small children, issues around tooth decay, we saw it first, you know, the implication of poor housing planning. Like we see now, the world is just full of these big concrete blocks being sort of thrown up really often sat there idle, no green space, no trees, no thinking about a courtyard space for the children to play in. Those are the kind of things that really trouble me. And they're the kind of things that are kind of highlighted when you work with small children. Then you're looking at things like fairness, who can access what poverty. You see, poverty is like. It's like a river, you know, it seeps in all into and gets in the way of things like poor housing, overcrowded housing, lack of Access to education, poor starting life. A lot of children with special education and learning needs have, you know, are starting from a disadvantage. Children even like things like summer born and, you know, and premature children, they all have, like, they have few extra steps to reach. So what are we doing about supporting them? And so therefore, if your purpose is all around that and your thinking is around that, from the view of the children, we're either patted on the head and patronized because they assume we know nothing. You know, oh, they work with children, play all day. I wish, you know, you're separated, as in the education space, like you're the early years, so you obviously know nothing. But primary and secondary and higher education matters. Actually, if people stepped away from their own narrow thinking and thought, like us, about, well, what are the issues that we have to address for small children? What are they that we need to think about? In the way we rethink our structure, we rethink our relationships, we rethink the way we design the world, then I think all businesses would benefit from us. And then as a social entrepreneur, you have to like your staff people, you have to want to make things happen for them. You have to employ people locally so you can build a local economy as well. You have to feel like that their contribution is more important and was going to leave a lasting kind of implication for not just the business but for society. And you have to think like that and sort of, in a way be more ambitious. And I think a lot of people think about pay packet go home. Pay packet go home. There's also that very antagonistic kind of employee, employer relationship. We don't really have that. It's much more of a shared relation. And when I ask people why they join, it's because they feel their contribution to something bigger than themselves. Because ultimately everyone likes to have a purpose.
- [16:38]
Alexei Korilov
That was my last question on staffing and retaining good staff and also encouraging and growing, particularly in a very difficult economy in hospitality, in nurseries, how are you able to create this workforce that you can, can rely upon?
- [16:55]
Dr. June O'Sullivan
So first you have to value them. And when you talk about there's a lot of cliches around employing people and leadership, you read it all over social media. So you want to, you know, you really want to puke sometimes when you listen to it. And so really, you, you have to be genuine. I know the term is authentic and everyone talks about authenticity, but I mean, they make that so hard now that you actually feel it's not you, it's not believable. You just have to be Actually compassionate. You have to create opportunities for people, people want opportunities. You have to create good sort of benefits and pay them everything you can. So even though Early Years is a very underfunded sector, so it's very hard to pay them a lot of money. When you work in a social enterprise, the staff believe you, they know that you're not taking huge amounts of money, they know that you're sharing it out and stuff. So that belief makes them feel that they matter. I take a view from the social pedagogues of this world. So social pedagogy is really about your head, your heart and your hands. It also translates into your private, your personal and your professional. At work we're very professional generally it touches on some of your personal stuff. Very rarely do you really understand what people's private thoughts are. But if you work in an environment where you pick up on that and what people are really interested is allowed to be nurtured and is woven into the sort of pedagogy of the day. So if give you an example, I was a young man came to one of the nurseries on a skateboard and when he came in, he put the skateboard outside in the buggy shed. And the manager said to him, why are you putting your skateboard out there? And he said, oh, in my previous place, a large chain run by the corporates, I wasn't allowed to bring it in because it would have been a health and safety risk. And she said really? And so she said, well, it's not a health and safety risk here. You're not going to be scooting around the nursery on it. So bring it in and put it where everyone else's stuff is. And then she said to him and take it to the children and see what they say. So he took it into the children, the three and four year old. No, two year olds as well actually the two, three and four year olds. And they were very interested. So they started to explore what is a skateboard? How do you use it? They started to watch him, he did little shows for them and everything. And then they introduced, we introduced skateboards for them. So we brought skateboards in for the 2, 3 and 4 year olds. We took them to the local skate park, we brought the parents involved. Just think of the physical development of those two year olds. Just think of the way that they suddenly engaged with a different way of thinking about it. Parents were absolutely astounded at the competence, the physical balancing skills that they learned on this. Then they connected with the local community cause the skateboard park is usually for kind of older adolescent, for the most part, boys, they were fascinated that small children could do things. They built up a relationship. Some of the parents then started to go to little classes on skateboarding. There was a little network created. And so your social capital, as we talked about earlier and your community began to roll out. And so people that you didn't anticipate connecting, connected. And some of young people are also becoming our apprentices. So, you know, you open the door, you might say, this is an Irish thing. You know, you talk to anyone. My children have a heart attack about this because I'll talk to anyone. But it's when you open those conversations, you never quite know what's going to happen as a consequence. And so that young man who was interested in skateboarding, instead of being alienated from the business and being told it was the health and safety, he like the social pedagogy kind of principles. We recognized his private, we recognized his personal, and we recognized how to make a professional. And I think if people could do a bit more of that and really capture people's interest. And people are fascinating. They all have very different stories and how much of their stories do you know? And I always try and think about people's stories and remember the stories. I have a facility. I don't know how I've got it, but I remember all the staff's names and I have little stories in my head about all of them. And it is getting harder now. There's nearly a thousand of them. Well, there's over a thousand of them now, but. And I think these things matter because it means that they feel that you're interested in them and they have things to say and they're not just a member of staff coming to work. So I think those kind of things, you often see more in a social business or a business with a clearer social purpose. And I think that's what other businesses, and I see young tech companies like, they're very much into this kind of thing as well. And I think that's very important for people, especially in a disconnecting world.
- [21:10]
Tom Edwards
That was Dr. June O' Sullivan Obey, the CEO of the London Early Years Foundation. And you can find out more about the enterprise by heading to leyf.org.uk Philip Feyer runs Jonas Randall Coffee Roasters in Vienna. He opened his first Speciality Coffee Cafe 11 years ago in a prime spot by the main university building, before branching out into other districts and starting to roast his own beans. Along the way, the team has grown too, drawing in People from across the globe. Now, as he prepares to open his fourth outpost in the city, Filip sat down with Monocle's Vienna correspondent Alexei Korilov. Alexei began with the, well, perhaps obvious question. If Filip is the founder and owner, then who is Jonas Freindl?
- [22:06]
Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
Your name is not Jones Reindl. So why is it called Jonas Rijndl?
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Philip Feyer
The reason for that is that the first cafe I opened is at Schottentor, kind of transport hub. There's a subway and tram station there. And in Viennese colloquial terms it is also called Jonas Reindl that location because the mayor who had this transport hub built was Franz Jonas. And a Reindl is a cooking pan in Viennese. And if you look at this transport hub from sort of bird's eye view, it's shaped like a pan. Viennese people are pretty funny and to give like funny nicknames to things.
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Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
But I mean you've got a very international team. Do you have to explain this to them as well or do they not even ask this question?
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Philip Feyer
They often asked, but I think often they probably did their research already in advance and you can find that on our website. Website. Also before they start they get a handbook from us and obviously that's one of the first things in the handbook. So latest by then they usually get the message. Yeah.
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Unknown
My name is Mia Croni, I'm the general manager at Jonas Frangl and I work with Philip to run the company. At the Moment we are 23 people. It's really international. Of those 23, only four are German or Austrian. I'm from Barbados in the Caribbean. Every day is very different for me. I usually have a couple of set barista shifts in the week. Usually one if there are people who are sick or on holiday then I jump in. I do a lot of learning from Philip on how to run a business, how to hire, how to look for the right people, training. And then another fun part is just making sure that everybody's happy. I do a lot of feedback talks, one on one talks with all of our baristi. I think it's really important. It's my first managerial job and it's so eye opening to be a manager in this position in a place that's so healthy.
- [24:03]
Philip Feyer
So this is what we call coffee cupping where we are just tasting a bunch of different coffees side by side. We do this either to find new coffees for our menu or for quality control. So we're roasting different beans in different ways and we want to compare and see the different roast profiles or changes we make in the roasting process. So I'm going to go ahead and slurp a little to it. You don't have to slurp. It's just that you can taste a little bit more.
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Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
And what happens now? So who makes the executive decision?
- [24:36]
Philip Feyer
That would be Ben and me, because Ben is the head roaster.
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Dr. June O'Sullivan
Hi, Ben.
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Ben (Head Roaster)
The best trick, I can say is always just drink as much coffee as you can and have the most exposure, because that's my personal opinion, the best way to enhance your palate, because once you've drank so much coffee, you kind of know what you're looking for.
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Philip Feyer
We can do two of these. It's like a chair beer.
- [25:01]
Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
So we are here in the storage room. We're sitting on some boxes. I don't know what's inside these boxes, but I see one open box in front of us, and it has some of your merch, right? T shirts with your logo. That's one of the things that lots of businesses do, Lots of businesses in the hospitality sector do. But have you done. I mean, obviously, you know, you have the roastery right there, which is quite unique. But apart from that, have you done anything that you think makes you stand out?
- [25:25]
Philip Feyer
I mean, just in terms of the merch? We try to stand out through the artwork. It's done by an artist called Peter Phobia, and it actually portrays the coffee supply chain. So there's three different pictures. One is of a coffee farmer, one is actually of me with the coffee roaster. And then the last one is a couple on a skateboard drinking the coffee. So it's kind of the bean to cup story. Other than that, we try to, I think, stand out actually through the interior, for instance, which I also completely design myself. I don't actually work with architects, of course. We're not always reinventing the wheel. But I take a lot of pride in very much like hand selecting every part of every cafe. And each cafe, I should mention, is also designed individually. But there's a concept of we'll always be working with vintage chairs. And it's usually some chairs that are, I would say, collector's items almost. The first cafe, for example, has chairs by a company called Rovac, which stands for Robert Wagner Chemnitz. Some of them well over 100 years old. They were one of the favorite chairs and stools of Beiter Gropius, who was one of the founders of Bauhaus. And I don't know of any other cafe, certainly in Vienna, maybe even internationally, that has that Big collection of Rover chairs and stools. I think we might be the only one, for instance.
- [26:58]
Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
All right, take us back to your beginnings. What made you decide on this career path and what were you doing before?
- [27:04]
Philip Feyer
I was actually doing something very different before. Straight out of school, I worked in the film industry, and I actually studied that as well. Still an interest of mine to this day. But I realized that that was not actually the right path for me. And I did grow up with hospitality. My father had a restaurant for 25 years in the first district of Vienna, and that was my whole youth. My childhood was being in the restaurant. And I started working in hospitality just to gain experience. So I was just working as a bar keeper for several years and just noticed that the thing I enjoyed the most was working on the espresso machine. And just. Just through that, discovered a whole world of coffee. I just realized there's, like, a niche in Vienna. There was a little bit of specialty coffee here, some small cafes, but not a lot. And I just saw the opportunity to do something that was both a passion of mine and something that I felt like was missing in the city.
- [28:08]
Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
So you opened 11 years ago now?
- [28:11]
Philip Feyer
Yeah.
- [28:11]
Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
Do you feel that you've matured more? You've become more adult first?
- [28:15]
Philip Feyer
I definitely matured a lot because, yeah, when I started, I was 27, and now I'm 38. And, you know, it's very stressful in the beginning. Lots of uncertainty, lots of inexperience. And as you grow older, as you've seen every kind of scenario before, you become more relaxed, you become more able to roll with the punches and. Yeah, but I could have. Maybe I started delegating work to others faster, sooner. I became much, much better at that. You had the opportunity to meet some of the crucial other people in this company, such as Mia or Ben. That was huge for me to realize I can better pass on responsibility to others, which then in turn allows me to not be spread so thin and focus on things like opening the next cafe, other projects. You have to be able to trust that other people can do as good a job as you in maintaining accuracy and consistency.
- [29:21]
Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
Do you ever get tired of this? You know, of doing the media rounds and of talking, you know, because I've had interviews where people told me, you know, just look at the website. What can I add? You know, it's all there. You know, this is telling and retelling your story all the time. Would you rather just crack on with it, you know, and just do your job rather than talk about it?
- [29:41]
Philip Feyer
I would lie if I'd say it's the favorite part of my job. But I also think, yeah, I could just be focused on my day to day work and there's enough to do there. But if there's not, every once in a while that acknowledgement that what you're doing is appreciated in some way, the day to day is also harder. So like, I don't want to be doing this all the time. Certainly not. But every once in a while, when the right people ask, it's really nice to do.
- [30:10]
Interviewer (possibly Alexei Korilov or Tom Edwards)
And let's conclude this interview to the sound of the bells.
- [30:16]
Tom Edwards
That was Philip Feyer, the founder of Jonas Randall Coffee Roasters. And you can find out more by heading to JonasRandel at. And that is all for this episode of the Entrepreneurs. We'll be back at the same time next week. The program is produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Jewers. Listen again and find out more at the website monocle.com that's where you can also subscribe to Monacle Magazine and read more about better businesses every month. You can also follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to get in touch with the team, email Laura on lrk@monocle.com. i'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to the Entrepreneurs.