Design for Good | Ivo Gormley, GoodGym's Founder on how to design for contribution, not consumption

0:00Ivo Gormley:Hello, everyone. I'm Eka Tarina from Future London Academy, and welcome to our conversation today about how design can change things for the better. And my guest today is a very special human. Ivo Gormley is the founder of Good Gym, a very incredible organization and the platform that connects runners, walkers and cyclists with physical tasks which benefit community. They now have 25 ,000 active members, completing over 390 ,000 tasks, that's quite a number, and community projects across 60 cities. Before starting Good Gym, Ivo directed documentaries, including Us Now and The Runners, and was creative director at Think Public, a service design agency working on user participation in the NHS and local government services.

0:52Ivo Gormley:It is a personal pleasure to welcome Ivy because I do believe that there need to be more businesses who do great things, not just create profit. So I was a great example of someone who managed to build a company who does exactly that. And today we'll find out how. Welcome, Ivo. How are you doing? I'm great, thanks. Very happy to be here with you. Brilliant. Well, let's start with your lovely story and the journey that you've been on. you were a creative director you had quite a fantastic career and something made you start your own company that does something very different can you tell us a bit of a backstory of what were you doing before Good Jim started and how did you decide to start your own company that does something incredible well yeah it feels like terrifyingly long time ago now but um yeah I suppose since I studied anthropology and was always very interested in the kind of social structures that shape how people live their lives I was I started off being actually very interested in in comedy and humor and I went and studied the Chicago comedy scene in 2004 for for six months really trying to understand what the role of humor is in human society and I actually my conclusion was that it was kind of an innovation kind of engine for humanity in a way, and that basically that new ideas that are potentially dangerous get into our lives through comedy, and that's why we have this reward system in built into our switch, right, which rewards this kind of idea that are on the edge of what is acceptable.

2:29And so I suppose that was kind of the beginnings of being interested in this, like the systems that shape our behavior and the kind of how we, and the role of these different kind of rewards in our brain that shape our behaviour. And so, yeah, from doing that, I've started making other documentaries, having made a short documentary about comedy in Chicago, and then became involved in these structures of local government and the NHS and how they could be done in a more positive way. The company that I started working for and then became a creative director was called Think Public. and really the founding idea of that was that you need to meaningfully involve the people who use and deliver those services.

3:12So we were working with people who are on housing benefits, involving them in the process of designing how that system works, working with cancer patients to get their meaningful long-term input on how the service is designed and delivered, and then also with frontline staff as well. and I think in many ways it was very rewarding and interesting work in that it opened up that sort of process of innovation to a much broader group of people and I think gave many people the option to sort of express their creative views about how something could be improved. So I think that since then, I mean, we were one of the first service design agencies in the UK, in particular we're focusing on public sector work because that's what we were most interested in.

4:06I think I had a general belief that you'd make a massive difference when you did one of these innovation projects or you know really involving these services but it wouldn't necessarily last. Once the people who've been involved in that project if it lasted for six months or a year once they had all left that organization five or ten years later it didn't necessarily stick the changes and so much of the value of that process was kind of disrupting that organizational hierarchy right that suddenly that person who had brilliant ideas about how something should work massively affected their work had a voice and was freed up to express themselves and but then once the project has stopped that stopped and everyone goes back to sort of doing this as normal so I then became interested in you know I suppose organizational design and thought about how you managed to set something up that's sort of based on embedding those ideas.

5:02Ivo Gormley:I love that you had such a creative and artistic upbringing but also you always had this idea that creativity could do something good I think we all as creatives intrinsically think that way or intuitively think that way but it's not an obvious idea for majority of people on the planet that actually those creative ideas that kind of service design and other things that are frameworks and instruments to create a positive change can be actually applied to any problems. So can you tell us a bit more, I suppose, when you decided that you want to be the leader of that change and actually start something of your own rather than be part of the organization.

5:48Ivo Gormley:And I suppose, was it like a immediate moment? Because I feel like everyone who looks back at their stories of a founder, it's like, it's always good to say the shiny story of like, and then idea came to me and I decided how to change the world. In reality, I myself as a founder, I cannot say that there was just one second in my life where everything came together. It's quite a gradual process. So what would you say were those in maybe ingredients or kind of science solidified you already, okay, now is the time to actually do something on my own? I think like many people who start their own thing, it was solving my own problem to start with and then taking some action to do so.

6:32I was very, basically around 2008, 2009, I had stopped exercising. I used to play basketball as part of the team and that was like a big part of my identity growing up was basketball and you know going to different cities for competitions or just playing with my friends in the park and then I had to yeah I basically stopped didn't have a team anymore and was thinking I should do something my friends said I should go to the gym and I just didn't like that idea of exercising for the sake of it and paying lots of money to be in a sweaty basement and lifting things that don't really need lifting and that just sort of sense of literal waste of energy but also a waste of time and human potential right this is time where you should be alive and living and happy or you know potentially doing something useful and instead you're kind of just focusing on a repetitive painful thing i mean i'm not like against gyms for for people who you know are training for a specific thing or some people really have a fun time but i think for me it just didn't it didn't fit that kind of um it just felt like a waste of time and so i think like Many people are thinking, how could you use that energy to do something good?

7:44And people have done things like plugging in exercise bikes to light bulbs and stuff. But the average treadmill in a gym will take something like 0.5 horsepower just to turn it on. And a person can generate way less than that. So you're probably not even going to be able to keep the lights on from the energy generation. I think what else can you use which will be a useful use of that time while you're exercising? and at the same time I had found out that my then I'd met this guy who was my friend's parents ex-builder and he lived about a kilometer and a half away from where I lived at the time and I had met him and knew he was on his own he was housebound he couldn't go out couldn't leave the house and he didn't see any other people on Tuesdays and Thursdays he didn't have carers visit him on those days and so I went to him and said would it be helpful if I was to you know come around and visit you for a chat and he said it would be much more useful if you could bring the newspaper and so that's why when I started I started running to deliver the newspaper on Tuesday and Thursday and it gave me that reason to leave the house and some accountability for the exercise and he also told me I need to run further and faster and do press-ups and stuff as well he used to be in the parachute regiment of the army and he'd been a singer in nightclubs and he had this amazingly rich sort of history of living in the same area.

9:12And so for me, it was this fantastic connection to another completely different experience of the area and another generation. And for him, it was that sort of friendly visit on a day where he wouldn't otherwise be in touch with anyone. And so, yeah, that was that was sort of the genesis of it. And I did that for a couple of years and I thought, well, actually, this is quite good. this has really helped me to form that exercise into a habit and also has feels like this really positive part of my week and so I started trying to get other people to do the same thing and then you know over time I never I thought someone else should take this idea and do it no one else did and it just felt like it was the most important thing that I was doing and so I in 2013 yeah stopped everyone everything else I was doing and focused on it full-time and was it an easy decision for you to leave a career because what did you know how to monetize it because this is all great

10:07Ivo Gormley:and fantastic idea how to help people but to make sure that it can be a business or at least provide some sort of sustainable living for just one person there needs to be some business model behind it so did you already start making money with it by the time you quit your job or how did this transition process work and i was extremely lucky in some senses i am in 2012 i got something called the claw social leadership program and that was a development program for them that trying to sort of support the next generation of social leaders and at that time it was this amazingly generous and flexible sort of support process where you i was in a cohort of 17 other brilliant people who I'm still connected with now.

10:57And we were given a lot of time and space to get the development support that we felt we needed and wanted. So I did lots of other interesting work. I went and worked for TaskRabbit in San Francisco, who were a small startup at that time. And I was doing user experience work, helping them. It's a service based in the US that basically connects people who want to do practical tasks for money with people who need those tasks to be done. So there's similar elements to what I was trying to do with Good Gym. I wanted to get my head around that as a business. That was really interesting to sort of help shape their strategy.

11:36And then I also went and at the same time studied the German pirate party who were doing fascinating stuff with digital online decision making. and then also was um yeah did a course in negotiation uh did a course at London Business School and then also was able to at that point the course was funded so I think we got um 20 000 pounds to live off for that year so we didn't need to do other work so it meant that I had that year to kind of really position myself to think about how that how this this program could work so I feel extremely lucky not to have had to take that it was you know it mitigated the risk significantly being able to shift across and also to prepare myself for that change and then business model wise we had probably from 2010 onwards i started employing someone else to do it first so i was still working on other stuff and employed someone to work on good gym uh we had had i mean one of the complete still mind-blowing sort of turnarounds was when you know so a big change that happened was that we started doing group activities so any support for older people was matching matching runners with older people and in order to do that safely you need to do background checks in the uk they're now called disclosure and barring service checks a criminal record check and it's quite a boring process i've got to show you my passport my driving license and so forth So it's a really tedious process to go through.

13:07So to get around that, I thought we could do as a group projects that support community projects instead of older people where there's not the safeguarding risk. And so started organizing monthly sessions where we'd run and help a community project. It might be a park or a playground or planting trees, shifting wood chip, helping with food banks. Anything that was unskilled labor, we would do it as if it's a workout as part of a run in a group. When we started to do that weekly, you suddenly got this amazing sense of community, forming people, turning up every week, come rain or shine, making friends with each other.

13:44And just it felt like this exciting event show we were having every Monday.

13:47Ivo Gormley:And how many people did you have in your community at that point, roughly? Was it tens or hundreds? That's like in the tens probably. We're talking sort of around the 20, between 10 to 2012, it was like, you know, you'd have 10, 20 people coming every week, probably sort of hundreds involved over the year, but people dropping in and up. And it was all free? You can show up and just do it or there was some payment involved? Show up, just do it. You do, from the very beginning, we had photographs of every single session. And we also had a register. So in every good journal, it had a profile so showing all the good stuff that you've done um so that was kind of forward thinking at the time there's still actually quite forward thinking and volunteering in most volunteering stuff it's this really hidden thing like you don't have a record there's definitely not a public record and we tried to make it quite fun and light-hearted so they have quite silly like puns of the titles the pictures are quite you know they're more like the way that you might photograph a party rather than the way you might photograph a um you know a very serious activity and that was so that was I think a really important uh thing and that has become increasingly important as we try to help people to sort of celebrate what they've done but but back to business model it was um I had a people started asking how can we how can we contribute to this thing and I'm like no you're like you are doing the helpful stuff it's not your responsibility to help keep it and they're like no this is like I don't need to go to the gym anymore this is like saving me loads of money and I really want it to keep going so how can I contribute and then just in the pub after one of the sessions sort of people strongly suggesting I said okay so how much would you want to contribute and I can't I think it was like eight pounds or something was the average and so we set that up as a donation suggestion and from then on it's been a really important revenue stream for us the decision was that it wasn't a charge it's a donation so we didn't want people not to participate because they felt they couldn't afford it but that um it was uh if but it's a very strong suggestion if you can contribute uh please do and here's what we suggest and since then that's become a major part of the part of the revenue with about 30 percent of people who who join will choose to make that donation on a monthly basis can we pause here for a second because I love the few things they already mentioned quite as a side note of this journey that I feel like a great representation of what creativity and creative brain and creative thinking actually brings to a business.

16:16Ivo Gormley:The fact that you were trying to find a way around the legal kind of issue of doing background checks and I would say like any traditional maybe startup or any traditional business would get either technology involved to do background checks, especially nowadays days that definitely would be let's do an AI solution that does background checks or it would be let's employ someone or get funding to do these background checks while your brain automatically went into different direction of let's make it community thing that will be a different solution that kind of solves the same problem and turns out it was a better solution than if it was done all individually and probably maybe good gym wouldn't be where it is if everyone always had to be on their own and um that because community is such massive part of what good gym is so i love that this um restriction is always opportunity for creativity i totally agree and i think many of the things that uh many many of the best innovations have come from really difficult times or lack of resources or you know very interesting restrictions being being uh imposed that force people to make better solutions.

17:33I think going into that, it really is interesting that potentially that wouldn't have happened, right? If without that bit of bureaucracy, we might not have the idea of doing it and doing something in a group, which is pretty basic. But you're right, that's now absolutely fundamental. I think one of the things I've been really keen to do and was kind of part of Good Gym from the beginning was this disruption of the idea of volunteer and beneficiary and we try not to use the word volunteer because we think it has some baggage but the general idea is that you've got this volunteer whose sort of life is perfect and they give up their time because they've got a surplus of good to give to the world and they give it to this poor person who's got problems or this poor person who's got no money or whatever it is and I think the real world is much more complicated but also the brilliant thing about human beings is that we really enjoy that process of supporting other people and you know Catherine you probably have this from your work right you probably get a huge sense of positive identity because you are contributing hugely to the lives of the people that do your program and I think that was brilliantly to enter that initial relationship with me and Terry I was gaining a lot from that relationship right and he was and he was gaining from from the relationship too but it's it was a it was a mutual thing so it wasn't just a straight volunteering role and I think that we recognize that by calling the older people that we visit regularly we call coaches because it's their responsibility to encourage and support and share their wisdom with the person who's I love it and I think that that's the case still with with what we do we try to say hey this is a fun and exciting part of your day if you went and did good gym tonight you would meet some interesting people you'd explore a new place that you'd never been to before you'd make a contribution to it hopefully the person who was there would say that's amazing what you've done today and you're welcome back anytime and just you would feel many of the things that are associated with high levels of well-being and so I think it's it's really interesting I think how we can try to yeah slightly change our perception of what counts as you know that sort of free time and giving and say actually this is one of the best human experience users you can have to make a contribution in some way love it

19:53Ivo Gormley:so let's go back to your story so you've got a few people they're happy to donate eight pounds was it a month a week what was there a month a month eight pound a month so where do you go from there so then um slowly started to think about expansion we'd had uh people in those early days actually people all over the world were interested and there were some runs happened in lots of different countries we had people in berlin doing it there was like people trying to do it in the states some of it so and often getting people saying oh yeah we're gonna give this a go and in those days i didn't have you know i was just sending out a pdf saying oh yeah have a go this is this is what i know and then most of those fizzled out apart from people in liverpool and bristol in the uk so uh tried to understand what was going on with those areas and what made them work well um and in bristol they had a really great uh personal trainer who was running the session so there's some real fitness expertise that i didn't have and so started doing that started getting some money from uh local authorities saying hey invest in this thing will employ a personal trainer.

21:02They will run these sessions really well. They'll be great for fitness. They'll be great for community building and help lots of important projects. And then long-term, we'll sustain it through the member donations. And so it did that for many years, really up until the pandemic. Local authorities or local funding would support us to employ someone local. People would sign up from all over the place on the website, and then we'd bring them together as soon as we'd got the person in place.

21:29Ivo Gormley:and was it easy to convince the local governments to do this because i i mean any budget approval is always a difficult thing so how did you go about that you just keep going basically i mean i think the uh secret of getting many things done is uh keeping going but i think that we were also lucky that i think so much of what we do right is very well aligned with government priorities people want to support more older people they want people feeling better connected people need to do more exercise we need to improve the mental health of the population we need to bring people together across demographic boundaries so it was no one could really say no if you say do you want to achieve those things they say yes if you say do you you know and do you think this is good value for money they say yes and then they say we haven't got any money there and eventually you know yeah you find the right people and put together a coalition of people who are interested in the organisation and make it happen.

22:29So it wasn't necessarily easy, but it also, everyone's saying yes, right? There's the, it brings together so many positive things that it was very hard to say no.

22:39Ivo Gormley:Was going for governments and administration your first choice or did you think of kind of other ways to support when you identified, okay, we need to bring the personal trainer or someone who has expertise. I suppose there are many ways you can go around it. Again, maybe more donations, increase the membership fee you can do kind of private sponsorships something like there are so many routes we did a bit of that as well i think the um the if you're if you're a for-profit business you would just take a load of investment right and then you'd employ the employ the people and then long term you're getting more and more of these direct debits coming in and you you know you become profitable and pay back your investment or you know they're taking equity so i think we needed an equivalent of that right which was the cash injection at the beginning to to make it make it happen and i think luckily you know uh well local authorities see that saw that as a good deal but they have they have in some places you know they've paid once in 2010 and good gym still exists and there's amazing stuff happening every single week so they've got a good deal of it in a similar way to how an investor might do in an you know in a for-profit company but then on the other side we were also you know part of what we were trying to do was to make this exciting and fresh feeling and i've always said you know i wanted it to feel more like nike than it feels like age concern if you know i mean i want this to feel like a sports brand more than it does a sort of yeah social enterprise or charity and that was very exciting i think in 2015 i bought on new balance as a partner and at the time they were uh well yeah smaller than they are now but still up and coming and running and we were able to tell this story i think in a really powerful way of how you can our joint campaigns would use your run and it was saying your run can be so much more than just for yourself and you can you know you can work out in this way that's good for you and and and other people and so that was I think really exciting to be able to do this thing that was essentially a complete rebrand of volunteering that was making it fast exciting cool rather than slow sad and sort of quiet if you know and I think yeah I feel feel very proud of being able to you know make that shift in a way that was you know recognized that we were in you know runner's world and we were in all these like we were in all the cool running magazines and it was like it felt like this real social movement that had incredible momentum and that people were also getting a lot out of which uh and that it was so it was so straight up good if you know i mean there was no downside that's a great business to be in when literally all you do is good and good for the people so then pandemic hit so that's where people wanted to do even more good in their life and were even more lonely yeah i mean it was it was really tough i mean i think the um that period also of the expansion which now look back at you think that looked amazing was also very stressful and you're still you know concerned about the you know financial security you're still concerned about all the other stuff going on so it wasn't a while it looking back it looked like huge success at the time it felt like scrambling to you know to keep up with things and yeah and then the pandemic so the pandemic meant that no group activity was possible and then the group activity was how we involved new people so it meant we basically missed out two years worth of new people coming through and people were also like amazingly committed they did extraordinary stuff that people doing stuff you know every single day and we got 10 times the referrals for older people so all of the work that we do with older people it comes referred into us through an organization like AGK or the British Red Cross or adult social care services they do a digital referral that causes an alert to go to someone who's verified in that area the person signs up to do it so we had 10 times the volume and amazingly just good gym has stepped up all over the country and just did this just incredible amount of these drops who are dropping off medicine we're dropping off food uh still helping with like basic stuff like access or if people's light bulbs are going out or if you're just doing these small tasks that meant meant that people could safely stay in their own homes and obeying all of the code rules as well and that was quite a big change of direction we didn't we didn't allow any financial transactions between the older people and good gymmas before the pandemic so we had to set up that sort of financial processes but it was really incredible and we supported 5 000 older people and who were housebound and isolated through that through that uh whole period and were able to keep many good gymmas um active there's a really uh beautiful article from the guardian and i think also one from the washington post that just shows what some of those interactions look like and we also still had lots of people who were still yeah visiting on that uh from the coach uh perspective people who just go for um going to chat so it was it was It felt really put on that whole period and was amazing in terms of its impact for older people but it was also really problematic for the impact on the groups because people had that really tight identity and you miss it for two years and it takes a long time to rebuild and also everyone moved around and loads of people moved out of the cities they were living in and so it did cause a long term, it's taken probably two or three years after the pandemic to get things to get groups feeling that same sense of identity again wow there must have been a few tough years especially as a founder when you don't know anything what was going to happen in the world but then you are responsible for for other people did you have a team around you at that point it was just you or was there like how how did your internal structure work yes i think probably since about 2000 i don't know 15 we've probably We employed about up to about 15 people and then about 60 part time people working in the different areas.

28:52So the people who we call trainers who now are called area activators who support people to set up sessions. And then that's been the big transition of the next few years, the most recent few years has been transitioning to people stepping up to actually organize sessions in their area. So now we will have people who are just good members who will say, I know about this playground over here that needs a bit of work. Or there's this community center that I know about that needs a bit of help. And so they are now we now have more sessions listed a week than ever. I think last year we did something like 4000 different environmental tasks of tree planting, etc.

29:36So we're now providing more sessions than we ever have before, and it's organised by the Edgidion members. So it's been, yeah, it's in a great place, I think, to be able to expand. I've sort of resisted doing something international again, just because we added complexity, but I think we are now in a sort of, in a stronger position to be able to expand it.

30:01Ivo Gormley:What was the most fun task or weird activity that was ever listed on Good Gym? There is really all sorts. There's ranging from one where we were just making pom-poms that I'd never done before for some sort of fare. there was one there's one i absolutely loved where we had to and there was a these huge logs that someone in a park wanted to move from one park in london to another one and they were about the size of you know huge and like uh lorry tires they were massive wow and so a group of about 20 people just rolled them through the street so that we went past the tube station we went over a bridge over a sort of main road uh and you just think this is crazy this is like it just looked so bizarre because there were just these huge chunks of wood being being sort of um moved around by people in uh in lycra and you just thought what that this is this is just it just it sort of doesn't make sense you know i mean it's one of those uh a site in the city that you'd be like what i think but uh yeah we did it and it was really hard work and i can imagine yeah we've also done you know it's always quite fun around Halloween doing work in graveyards where we'll be clearing ivy from the gravestones.

31:25You see behind the scenes of a lot of places that you otherwise sort of just go through, so you know living like housing estates that have gone past millions of times and suddenly you're in the middle of it spending some time there and actually helping make it a beautiful orchard that we've helped plant very near where I lived. I wouldn't have known it was there. And then suddenly you've been there, spent some time and you now feel a connection to that place. My kids are very bored of going around London with me and saying, do you know that we planted those? Or do you know that there's this amazing community centre behind there that we did, we set up there composting, whatever it is.

32:05But you just feel that deeper sense of connection to the place because you have had these experiences, not just of going and drinking a coffee there, but of actually helping make the place what it is. And I think that's very, very valuable. And again, one of the things that means that it is so impactful on well-being.

32:27Ivo Gormley:This is so amazing. And seriously, I so admire your business for the amount of impact it creates. as you said in those small instances it's not about transforming everything top down it's about finding those challenges and problems and things to do in the local community where you can have an immediate impact and when those things start accumulating then you start creating such a massive impact on the whole area on the whole community and it's such a powerful thing of like just doing small small bits I think you know sometimes I describe what we've done as basically designing volunteering from the point of view of the volunteer rather than from the point of view of the organization so you know I was working full-time didn't have loads of time but wanted to do something that fits into fitted into my life right and I think that's what that's always a disconnect between you know organizations that need the help and the people that might do it is that if you're thinking for Butcher Academy, I would like to have someone to help run our program as a volunteer, for example.

33:37You might think it would be great if I can have them for six weeks during the residential section so they can prepare and blah, blah, blah. And it'll be, I'll do a training program for three days.

33:47Ivo Gormley:Whereas potentially the volunteer thinks, oh, I'd quite like to do 45 minutes on Tuesday, right? So there is a natural disconnect between what an organisation that uses volunteers might want and from what a volunteer might do. There might be someone who wants to do that six-week thing, but for every one of those, there's probably 100 who might do 45 minutes. So I think the challenge is, and I think why we have been successful is we've managed to find a way to make this incidental or micro-volunteering, something that actually, in aggregate, is reliable enough that it makes sense for the organization to do it.

34:26A lot of the time people say to us, I just can't believe that anyone turned up. I was waiting there at 7.30 PM. It was pitch black. And I was like, there's no way anyone's coming. And then out of the night, you know, 20 people come, turn up and then start working straight away. And they're like, what? That's like, you know, I can't believe that these people actually turned up. And then once they've done it once, then they trust us to, you know, to come back. And for quite a lot of places, we'll have the keys or have a way of being able to access it. So opening up these situations to enable the volunteers to access it that enables you to then do it in this quite casual, informal way.

35:02Ivo Gormley:Love it. And you're so right. I think majority of people don't do whether it is volunteering, recycling or pick any good cause. It's not because they don't want it because it's not easy or it doesn't fit or like making something just a no brainer and something that is very easy to, again do I think that's what actually makes a difference I would love to ask you a bit more about kind of the the technical parts of the business because there are many creatives and designers and design leaders and founders who are listening to this and trust me they they want to do good they want to have businesses that create this positive impact I haven't met a single creative or designer yet who doesn't want to leave something great behind and actually affect the world in a positive way the problem always lies with kind of marrying it with the business side operational side that will make a sustainable change because it's all great to have good ideas how will change the world but to make sure that it actually can be some sort of self-sustained system is very hard.

36:11Ivo Gormley:So the first question I have for you is about the fact that you decided to register as a charity versus, let's say, social enterprise. Again, in the UK, we have many different versions of it, or making it a business and making a B Corp, another way to, again, run something that does something good, but kind of has a different business model. What was your thinking behind doing it fully as a charity versus potentially a business? I think my decision making is pretty much purely practical. I set up as a company limited by guarantee. And from that position, I could have gone either direction, potentially could have moved more towards being being for profit or could could register as a charity.

36:53I think that the advantages of going for profit is basically the equity investment, right, that you could secure large volume of upfront capital to pay for some expensive, massive bit of infrastructure or employ loads of people. and I think I was I mean you you mentioned before we spoke about Eric Crease and Lean Startup and I think I was fairly influenced by that and everyone was reading that at the time but basically you know do it cheap and make it work at a small small scale and then because we had a really great programmer called Ian Drysdale on board from early on I didn't feel that you know throwing 10 million at the marketing and the and the tech would is what we really needed to do i felt like work on the you know work on the efficiency and small scale and then you know and then you yeah we didn't necessarily need that uh cash injection in order to start getting revenue and then when donations started coming in and that and recognizing that that's a scalable income stream i was like well let's make most of that and in the UK you can claim a gift date for the government meaning a 25 % top up on every donation from the government.

38:13That felt like a sensible thing to do so 2015 registered as a charity which has opened up other grant funding opportunities.

38:22Ivo Gormley:I think I've tried to think of it in a similar way to a for-profit company in a way that that grant funding is like investment to boost your you know your your capacity short term and then the member donations are this you know sustainable they're much more like you know a a membership payment they're reliable you're going to see is it very unlikely that they all stop on the same day so it's um that was that was my perspective i think you know i think in a different with a different idea or a different product i think yeah there are there are plenty of options and i might choose a different one if I was to do something different.

38:59Ivo Gormley:I think it's very interesting, like in general, that decision between how to raise money, whether you essentially raise it from traditional investors and build it up as a company or whether, again, you get it from donations or government and again, build it up that way. I suppose my preconception of charities, which might be completely wrong, so please correct me, there are lots of limitations when you decide to become a charity. It's all great to say like, yeah, we get free money, gift aid, no taxes and all these great benefits that you get as a charity but with that comes a lot of limitations obviously apart from just complying with doing good which is hopefully not an issue with any company who is generally trying to do that but you cannot technically make any profit am i right that you cannot declare any profit or something there are some limitations about how you operationally run your company or am i completely wrong and the limitation is you can't spend money on anything that is not related to the charitable objectives and that's pretty much it from what i mean there are some like you have to do some reporting but it's not like that is not that onerous i would say have you ever felt like you're limited by the fact that you charity have you ever had second thoughts it's like ah if we're not sure we could have make got money from this i don't know sponsor or something that may have benefited business i think no the only thing we can't do is equity investment right and paying people for a contribution in the past or they have to any money that goes out needs to be spent on achieving uh you know happier healthier better connected communities is our goal so we need to make sure that every pound that we spend goes on that so it's staff costs it means i've got no equity i've got no ownership of the organization and so that is a you know that's a you know that hopefully puts in good stead for the long term but no i don't think there's there's not a um yeah but then that is a limitation on the equity investment so we couldn't uh we could take it can't take debt investment if we wanted to but not actually so that's really it i would say is the only you know difference is is what you can what you can spend the money on and which has to which is sort of you know locked to the organizational goal and no equity and how does it feel being a founder of a charity that knowing no matter how well it will do and how much it will succeed you not going to benefit from it in any financial way ever yeah i mean it's very i mean that's that's very real for me and that this is i'm stepping back as ceo this week right which means that there's not a um there is uh and it's incredibly exciting because you know that's within the goal i suppose to make something that you know outlasts me and it's been amazing uh just having this period of handover with our new brilliant ceo hannah crane who has incredible experience of community and community sport and and young people particularly but that is it's interesting right that definitely that's a decision i made a long time ago so i knew that this was the deal that this was not going to be a um you know lucrative exit.

42:07And so, you know, I will leave with the, you know, the story of what has been achieved, and I have to be happy with that. But yeah, that's different. And it's definitely not a, the world probably appreciates it less than the kind of, you know, a for-profit exit.

42:24Ivo Gormley:Well, I would love to talk about what you're going to do next in a bit. But before we go to the future, I would love also for you to reflect on a few other things that you've done in the past, clearly successfully to get to this point in growing the company to this level. Again, doing great is brilliant and coming up with ideas and companies is fantastic. Now, to survive, you've been over 12, 13 years now. It has been sustainable. It keeps growing. Were there any moments in that journey where you felt like, okay, we might not survive another year. This this might be the end or it was quite a stable growth up and it was generally i mean actually it felt that we were you know in a similar way to be before the pandemic we were kind of addicted to the growth like we needed these uh payments of for new areas keeping coming in and you like that's just that we're just so focused on keeping that uh revenue coming in and then keeping the growth going then the pandemic did definitely throw everything up in the air because we just couldn't do any things we're doing anymore so that that also felt felt risky i think the and then after that it almost felt like you were rebuilding from scratch and that was quite a challenging time where we'd lost that momentum right and we were completely outside the kind of hype cycle that first I don't know five to eight years it's like wow this new exciting thing and now we want a new exciting thing we were sort of solidly delivering and then that transition to try to yeah find that momentum and and sort of story again was challenging but the last two years have been just incredibly exciting because we've been back on the back expanding again and we've had this amazing growth of people called task force who good gyms who organize sessions and then we've also had just some exciting new big partnerships we have this big award from sky which has given us this national advertising campaign which called work out for the future that encourages people to do environmental volunteering and which has been very exciting and then we've also been working closely with other brilliant organisations like WWF, Friday Night Lights, we've done some exciting collaborations with.