sbc - social business consulting

about us

Social Business Consulting was set up in January 2005 by Rob Greenland and Moira Halliday. They both fell in to social enterprise a little bit by accident, having met in 1999 on the Board of a fairtrade co-operative in Leeds.

Rob is originally from Liverpool and came to Leeds in 1992 to study Spanish at Leeds University. He spent a year in Ecuador as part of his course, working for an NGO which worked with young people. He came back convinced that he wanted to “do something useful”, but wasn’t quite sure what.

He then worked for Trade for Change, a local fairtrade business, where he stayed for five years in various roles. He then moved on to supporting social enterprises at Social Enterprise Leeds for a couple of years. Then in 2003, he joined West Yorkshire Social Enterprise School to run the Start-Up Scholarship Scheme, offering six months of support for new social businesses.

Rob's main areas of expertise include social business planning, marketing, market research and support to start-up businesses.

Moira is originally from Bradford and has been an organisational consultant since 1989, working exclusively in the voluntary sector as part of a network of consultants called Framework.

Prior to joining Framework in 1990, she worked as an HIV counsellor for Bradford Social Services and as a Health Visitor/Fieldwork Teacher for Bradford Health Authority.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moira's particular areas of expertise include executive coaching, evaluation, organisational development, strategy and policy development, and management committee training.

In 2007 Rob took over the running of SBC, but Moira continues to work with SBC as an associate on a number of projects, including Keeping House.

Rob also works regularly with a number of other consultants, trainers and advisers, including Andy Peers, Ed Gamble, and Geof Cox.

what can we do for you?

Maybe you’re an individual with an idea for a social enterprise but don’t know what to do next? Or perhaps you work for a voluntary organisation which wants to become more socially enterprising? Or maybe you work for a regeneration initiative which now has to support social enterprises alongside everything else?

We’d like to think that we can help. The best thing to do is get in touch with us so that we can find out more, but here’s an idea of the kind of work that we do:

training – full day and half day sessions including The rough guide to social enterprise, and Building relationships with customers

social business planning – we help write business plans in engaging english

feasibility studies – could your good idea become a great social business?

starter for ten – step by step social business planning – click here for more information about Starter for Ten

bizwatchers – monthly sessions for groups of social entrepreneurs to help them to keep an eye on their bottom lines

We’re both based in Leeds, but can work anywhere in the UK. To find out more, please contact us

how we aim to do business

SBC isn’t a social enterprise (we own the business ourselves), but we try our best to be a good business. The most important way of doing this is to give you a really good, value for money service.

However, we also try to maximise the positive social and environmental impact of our work. As we’re a new business, we’ve started with the easy things – we’ll do some more difficult things next year (honest!). We get all of our phone and internet services from the phone co-op, we get our electricity from
green energy, and we’re based in a building run by a social enterprise
(LCVS Enterprises Ltd).

Given our fairtrade credentials it goes without saying that we drink cafedirect in the office. And of course this lovely website was designed by brava design part of the award winning social enterprise The Blackburne House Group.

There’s plenty more to do but obviously you need to start somewhere. We’re currently learning about social accounting, so that in the longer term we can keep an eye on how we’re doing socially and environmentally.