2 years.
£74,590.
100%.

What a whirlwind!

Time has flown by and it seems like a long time ago since I came down off the moor and pitched the 100% initiative to Claire.

2 years on and I’m hugely proud of what we’ve achieved so far. 

£74,590 donated. 247 beds given to children who didn’t have one. 1 Kenyan rescue centre funded for a year. And funds provided to rebuild a school in a remote village in Nepal.

If someone had told me when I started this business that we’d do those things I would’ve laughed in their face.

Reporting on Impact

Today we launch our first Impact Report which you can download here.

This will be something we produce each year to highlight the excellent work being done with our donation, by charities that use our support to drive their impact forward.

We’ve already learned a lot along the way. Our understanding of how we can help our partner charities, not just financially but in other ways, is growing. 

And we’ve learned a lot about how our own model works as well to ensure it drives as big and sustainable an impact as possible over the long term.

We’ve had to make some tweaks to how we structure that giving to ensure we preserve our own stability. It’s no good giving all your profit away for a year or two, only for your business to die straight afterward in the event that a crisis hits. 

To protect against this we’ve tweaked how we give the profit to ensure we’re still here in 8 years to hit our £1 million target. One of these changes is keeping a reserves fund in case of emergency, which can cover the running costs of the business for 3 months. 

Another is structuring the giving in 2 donations every 6 months so we maintain some capital in the business in case of a catastrophic event (read ‘Covid’). 

These were all lessons taken from a fantastic training programme I undertook this year that I would recommend to any small business owner. I learned from other fantastic businesses like Belu that also give 100% of their profits and how to do that in the most impactful way.

I want to make sure we’re being transparent in what we do and how we do it so others can learn the lessons with us and hopefully make the choice to do something similar.

Everybody wins

Our business has doubled in size over the last year. 

When we launched the 100% initiative I made a point of highlighting it was not a selfless act. It was driven by creating stability for our business and everyone in it as well as making a positive impact on the world.

We’re starting to see the fruits of the new model. More clients are joining us who are inspired by our mission and share similar values.

Majorly talented people are joining our already impressive team because they believe in what we’re doing and want to be a part of it.

The work we’re doing is better than ever and so clients old and new are benefitting from even better results. 

And we’ve doubled the amount of money we’ve given to our partner charities compared to year 1.

Everybody wins.

If you haven’t considered a giving model in your own business yet then maybe these results might give you pause for thought.

“SEO Travel’s decision to break the norm of the business world and donate their profits to two charities, despite the challenging current economic climate, has no doubt led to hundreds of lives being changed. It’s this incredible support that has not only allowed us to support 133 children with new beds from this years donation but it has also facilitated our work to grow and take the fight against bed poverty to those in places of power and influence. Thank you for believing in us when many did not”

Bex Wilson, Zarach Founder and Chair of Trustees

Inspiration

Seeing the work that Gavin and Bex do with Moving Mountains and Zarach is truly inspiring. 

Every day they do things that change lives, and we’re proud to be a small piece in the solution to the puzzle they are solving.

I hope some of the people that discover their work through us are prompted to support them in their own way, be that through volunteering, donations or simply following and sharing their work with more people. Please do check them out.

“We are very proud and delighted to have SEO Travel partnering with us, not only because of the obvious need to build a school up in the Himalayas but also because it an organisation which understands the ethos of how a sustainable business model can work. The funding provided by SEO Travel effectively expands and maintains our ability to work with the local community in a way which benefits it over a long period of time.”

Gavin Bate, Moving Mountains Chairman

The Future 

We’ve made a great start, but there’s a long way to go. 

We’re only 7% of the way towards our £1 million target but we’re more confident than ever that we’ll hit and surpass that over the next 8 years.

And we hope our story will inspire others to do something similar, and reap the rewards themselves along the way.

Thanks for following the journey so far.