Supporting Noisy Cricket Ltd – to fully realise the potential of the social impact consultancy with a mission to build people-powered movements – Direct Path provided both people and process related investment to CEO Lauren Coulman, to help create a step change in the bootstrapped business’ ability to create impact.
Launched less than two year’s prior, exploring the capabilities of Lauren as both a purposeful and conscientious leader was essential to understanding the business capacity. With a vision of bringing collective voices together to create equality, beyond the strategic talent, there were opportunities in her core offering that were underutilised.
Working with businesses, charities, public sector bodies and grassroots organisations, Noisy Cricket’s offering is underpinned by guerrilla research, getting to the root cause of social issues, and structured around strong collaborative partnerships cross-sector. Publishing papers and running events were key opportunities to capitalise on.
With a need to generate profit to reinvest in her issues-based approach to creating social change, Direct Path supported Lauren through shaping a business growth plan. Clearly, defining the scope of the brand and business model, we also pinned down key operational relationships and built in a keen sales focus to enable the business to scale.
“Working with Direct Path to scope out new commercial opportunities and sharpen my strategy was incredibly helpful as a social entrepreneur.
Having spent a year testing and learning with Noisy Cricket, looking at the outcomes I’d achieved objectively, and connecting the dots between different areas of my business to create new opportunities helped reveal where additional revenue streams lay to help achieve my commercial goals, and focus my efforts to achieve maximum social impact through the social issues I address.
As a result, it’s become clear how best to scale my social impact consultancy, and in the next year plan to take on board a new member of staff to help better achieve our mission of building people-powered movements”.
With coaching and mentoring underpinning the process, we focused on three key areas;
Offering a broad skills base and client offering, Noisy Cricket’s opportunities were myriad, so homing in on those which would balance income with impact were essential for sustainable growth. Event sponsorship and research paper funding, in addition to building a sales funnel to help build Lauren’s consultancy work, were key.
Scaling the business was dependent on financial reinvestment, so a financial plan, mapped out over three years to understand the full potential of the business was essential to helping realise Noisy Cricket’s ambitions. That and shift Lauren’s mindset to understand what a greater flow of wealth could help her achieve,
With greater clarity and focus, on the turning points for growth, we were able to determine where support would be needed, both internally and externally to Noisy Cricket. With strong partnerships already in place, Lauren could plan to bring on board a new team member within a year to support in building people-powered movements.
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