Impact UK: Recipe for success
We interviewed James Perry as part of Impact UK: The sizing and the story of the impact economy.
From Cook, to B Corp UK, to his impact investment portfolio Snowball, James Perry has spent 30 years proving that businesses can balance profit with people and planet.
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James Perry has always had a problem with the system. Since studying economics at Manchester University, he has disagreed with the orthodoxy that the primary responsibility of business is to maximise profits. So, he’s made it his lifelong mission to promote a different type of system: stakeholder-based capitalism, where planet, communities, and workers are placed on a par with shareholders.
His bold career began in 1999, when he helped establish Cook, the homemade meal business with social purpose baked in. Then in 2010, he introduced B Corp certification for UK businesses that balance purpose with profit. More recently, he turned his attention to impact investment, co-creating Snowball, a multi-asset portfolio to create positive impact without compromising financial returns. With the successful fund acquired by Tribe Impact Capital, Perry is now turning his laser focus to the governance of capital.
The Spark
My parents were committed Christians and started a business whose employment policy was to hire recovering heroin addicts. It was chaotic, but it left me with the idea you could use business as a force for good.
I was taught at university that the responsibility of business was to maximise profits and that made me want to challenge the system. If you put financial capital ahead of everything, it risks turning into a plague of locusts on our planet. At Cadbury in the 1990s, I watched a great Quaker business shift to ‘Managing for Shareholder Value’. The good the company did for society stopped being valued, and shareholder value became the only measure. I thought that was a bad idea because I don’t believe trickledown economics works in practice.
My parents’ employment policy was to hire recovering heroin addicts. It was chaotic, but it left me with the idea you could use business as a force for good
The Choice
We built Cook to create value beyond the financial, a stakeholder approach. The first 15 years were a desperate struggle for survival. We’d said no to venture capital, so we had to do it all on debt. We were riding our cashflow, it was pretty hairy. Our first employee, who is still with us, is profoundly deaf. From the start, we hired people who were vulnerable or marginalised. The ethos was always there, even before we formalised it.
We felt gaslighted, the world said we were mad for seeing value beyond profit; we thought the world was mad. So we went looking for others and found the B Corp community at SOCAP in 2010. Cook was ‘spiritually’ a B Corp, so we certified and helped establish the movement in the UK.
The Impact
At Cook, 5% of our workforce comes from people with barriers to employment, returning citizens, people in recovery. We work with partners to get them job-ready and then hire them. Watching them graduate from our ‘Raw Talent’ programme is the most inspiring meeting you can have at work. B Lab UK launched with a target of 50 companies. Now there are over 2,600 B Corps in the UK, making it the largest community of its kind globally.
When our family foundation, Panahpur, was looking to invest in things with positive social outcomes, we found other people doing it and all agreed it would be easier to do it together. So, we pooled our assets, hired a management team, and created Snowball. By aligning our assets with our mission, we showed that charitable foundations could be investors for good, not just grant-makers.
The Future
I’m interested now in having deeper conversations around governance and incentives. I’m spending my time discussing with policymakers, people in finance, business, politicians, and people in civil society so we can bring about change on a more macro level. I’m working with an outfit called Our Future, which is rooted in post-industrial towns, Grimsby, Rochdale, Wrexham, and based in trusted community institutions like football clubs. Our theory of change is that the solution to people’s problems lies within them. People have incredible talent and potential, but it’s thwarted because they lack an outlet. We help them rediscover that agency.
Government has a set of incentives, business has a set of incentives, civil society has a set of incentives, and they’re all pulling in different directions. But the truth is that Big Capital is running the show and we need to have a conversation about that as a society.
Emotional ROI
Working with talented, good people is joyful. And I’ve learned, I believe in ‘original goodness’. I believe people are good. I think people broadly want the best, and people are incredibly talented. If you get them into an aligned structure, with the right kind of model and engine, they do the rest. I have huge faith in the seven and a half billion people on our planet, we can solve these problems if we give them the chance.
Giving Forward
Don’t just think grants; think capital. Philanthropy is a pile of capital with a charitable purpose. Ask if giving it to an asset manager to maximise returns is really the best way to achieve that purpose. Step back and interrogate the big drivers of the problems you want to fix. Bring your whole assets to bear, networks, influence, time, not just your chequebook.
Read the full Impact UK report
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