When I was 21 years old, I founded an events business called Capsule Events with a very traditional motive of making a profit. And for several years I completely deviated from any social or political interests. However, even though I loved being an entrepreneur and thinking of ideas, I did have a nagging awareness that I felt a kind of emptiness. A voice saying, “This is not what you planned on doing.” So a few years later, when I came across a social enterprise business model based on entrepreneurship with a social mission at its core, I thought, “Wow, this is really for me, this is really where I’ve been.” I felt like I could get back on track.” equate with
We opened our first Social Bite Sandwich Shop Cafe in the summer of 2012. The original idea was very one-dimensional, making profits and donating them to various charities. But within his first two weeks of opening, this young homeless man… [called Peter] He mustered up the courage to ask me for a job. He naively thought I could change his life, but it’s much more accurate to say he changed mine. He changed the entire focus of the business and what we do going forward.
My grandmother passed away a few years after we turned around, but she came to see the first cafe. We opened on Christmas Day and began serving homeless people. I remember one year when my grandmother went to Scotland for Christmas. And she realized that when I was at a big fundraising dinner with celebrities like Bill Clinton. She always wanted her grandchildren to get involved in politics. I think she’ll be really happy that she’s been an inspiration to what we’ve been doing.
There are so many things I can go back and tell my old self about starting a business. Social Byte really should have gone bankrupt 100 times. When we first set it up, we were naive and ignorant and had a very steep learning curve. From day one, I managed to raise around £40,000 through an events company to open the cafe and that was all the money I had. We invested in renovating the store, including painting and tiling the walls. And on opening day, we literally ran out of money. The fruit and vegetable rep came by with the first day’s produce and said I had to pay in cash upon delivery. I didn’t have anything. So I had to come up with an excuse to not go to the bank. It’s an absolute miracle that we survived, but I think it’s a miracle that people supported you and supported you. I don’t know if I would tell my younger self to do something different. Because people can only learn by doing. Sometimes you just have to jump in with both feet, make a lot of mistakes, and try to keep learning and pivoting.
There’s kind of a myth that if we founded this cafe and we told George Clooney about it, he flew all over the world just to eat sandwiches.. The longer version is that in 2012, before setting up Social Bite, I set up an event called the Scottish Business Awards. I thought that if I called it that, it would sound luxurious, as if it had been around for a long time. And it turned out to be a pretty big dinner. In the first episode, we had Bob Geldof speak.
The following year, I simply Googled Bill Clinton, found the Clinton Foundation website, and filled out the contact form on the website. That’s how we got Bill Clinton. At the time, Social Bite had a small chain of cafes in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. We were looking for another keynote speaker for our annual dinner and came across George Clooney, co-founder of the human rights charity. He agreed to come and talk, so we told him about the cafe and asked if he would like to come along and spend 10 minutes there. And he said he would love to do that. The following year, Leonardo DiCaprio was born. Everyone was stunned as to how on earth this little cafe could make friends in Hollywood, but it was a game changer for us.
I really enjoyed working with George Clooney. Best of all, he was really funny and had a really good sense of humor. Obviously the cafe was staffed by people from all backgrounds, including homeless people, and he really valued his time. He had no class or class and was taking selfies with everyone. And he was with us all day, so we were able to spend quite a bit of time with him during the day and then until dinner at night. He was just a super nice guy, completely unfazed by the craziness and the media attention and all. I attributed it to the fact that he didn’t become famous until he was in his 30s. In other words, he was fully formed by his rise to fame and now seems to be enjoying it and taking everything in his stride.
There were many times when I looked around and thought, “Oh my god, this is actually happening.” George Clooney at the cafe was one of them.And the world’s biggest sleepout [Will Smith and Helen Mirren were just two of the 60,000 people around the world who slept outside on 7 December 2019 to raise awareness about the many homeless people who have no choice to sleep anywhere else]. It was in a pinch that he went from wondering if he could convince a bunch of people to stay out for the night to lying in a sleeping bag next to his wife in Times Square, surrounded by 1,000 people. did. I’ll probably never tackle something this ambitious again, so I’ll cherish those memories forever.
At 16 years old, I think I’m pretty satisfied with my life. It was my ambition to make a difference. What I’m most happy about is feeling like I’ve achieved some kind of alignment with my younger self. I think that’s really, really lucky. So many people can’t or won’t manage it. I was lucky enough to start on that path when I was young and had no responsibilities, before I had a family or a mortgage. I think from the moment you have to pay the mortgage it becomes very difficult to take those risks. In my book, I wrote a dedication to his wife and 11-month-old son, and I made a little wish for him. I thought about my alignment with my younger self and wrote him a letter, “I hope you become yourself.”
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