Michael Coolican On IT Solutions Creating Cashflows For Social And Environmental Impact

Cirqle Group is a social enterprise IT professional services and recruitment company based out of Brisbane, QLD.

With a mission to shift the world closer to kindness, sustainability awareness and action, Cirqle Group provides IT solutions to organisations that do good for the world, and dedicates all profits towards solving social and environmental inequalities. Cirqle Group’s profit flow doesn’t exist to solve individual problems, but to enable solutions as they change over time. When starting Cirqle Group in 2021, Michael’s view was to simply build a platform to help him play his part to try to do some good in the world.

Michael discusses How he integrates IT business practices with sustainable social impact and Opportunities for entrepreneurs to effectively develop their up and coming change-led enterprises.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - Michael, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social enterprise?

[Michael Coolican] - I grew up in a little town called Peregian Beach in Queensland on the Sunshine Coast. After I finished school, I did a bit of traveling, and rather than taking the university route went into banking and finance. I learned some incredible skills in that period of time for the better part of six years. But I ended up coming to the realisation that you are a very small cog in a big machine, and I really didn't want that for my life. I went through a bit of a process of self-realisation as I'm sure a lot of people do at that age, and decided that I wanted to step more into things that I was interested in. I definitely was and have always been more aligned to giving back and trying to do more for the community and wider environment. I left the bank and at that point I had in mind that I wanted to start a business for good. I didn't really know what that would look like. I ended up moving into IT recruitment off the back of that and over the years started to formulate a bit of a plan into what is now Cirqle Group. Since then, I have started Cirqle Group, which is a combination of IT recruitment and IT professional services. It's an IT consultancy, but we run as a hundred percent model where all our profits go back towards solving social and environmental inequalities.

As the Director of Cirqle Group, can you please share more about this social enterprise and how is it promoting sustainability and change?

Cirqle Group is I guess you could say two different businesses. The organization is owned by a trust, and so with the trust we have a distribution model which has a 40% commitment towards social initiatives, 40% commitment towards environmental initiatives, and the remaining 20% is used as an investment or grant fund for profit for purpose businesses. Operationally, we work as both an IT recruitment company and an IT professional services company. Basically, we help build teams within organisations, but then we also help deliver IT projects and take a little bit of risk onboard with regards to what an organisation's looking to do. Then we essentially help deliver that project in various different ways. I always like to use the example of building a house. You've got different components; you've got your electrics, plumbing and scaffolding. We can do different components of building enterprise software or help with the whole thing and take on different levels of risk depending on what the organisation is looking to do.

That's how we make money; how we make impact is through our profit model. Cirqle Group isn't designed to solve a single problem; part of my realisation process earlier on was that there are significant issues, but there's a lot to do across the world.

Socially and environmentally, there's a lot of areas requiring attention. There's a lot of people doing incredible work across that. The whole premise of Cirqle Group was to create an additional cash flow from commercial engagements that could be used in a decentralised manner. We're not currently decentralised, but the view will be to completely remove ourselves from the decision making process as to where the money goes. It will be a voting process as to where our profits go. People will be able to come forward with a project and then the community can vote on it, and that's how we will work. Currently, we just partner with a few different organisations and deposit funds directly to them as a way to help.

What role does technology and innovation play in helping a social impact organisations address social challenges locally and abroad?

I try to strip it back a little bit more, because social impact organisations are quite simply organisations. We're in a market where you need to compete. At the end of the day as a business, you won't survive if you are not competing against organisations and providing the best service for your customers.

Ultimately, technology is an enabler. If you are not utilising technology effectively to run your business, you're doing your customers a disservice and you are ultimately doing yourself a disservice.

I would say, from a base level, ways to leverage technology would be to get your house in order. What systems are you using to run your operations? How effectively are you storing your data? What databases are you using? How are you managing your customers? Are you automating anything? Are you able to improve communications? Are you able to give yourself back time in certain ways? There are so many tools out there to help small businesses, and if we're talking technology in a small business sense, first and foremost you should be leveraging technology to help you with the operations of the business to run it as effectively as possible. I haven't even mentioned the outbound marketing and the sales component of a business too, which technology obviously plays a massive role in. The next step to that is technology innovation to make a positive impact, and there's incredible examples of that everywhere.

Probably the most impressive space we see that in at the moment would be in some of the environmental technology that's coming out to help solve some global issues. These are incredible and so necessary.

Again, there's so much to do, but there are so many people addressing different areas of the problem and ultimately, it's finding one larger solution. Most importantly when it comes to technologies, get your house in order. There are so many things that you can do to make your own business more effective, because ultimately, if you're not doing it, you're doing yourself and your customers a disservice. There's always things that you could be doing from an innovation perspective, and I'm looking at it from Cirqle Group's perspective. We've got to compete in a very commercial sector, so the social impact piece is secondary. I can't make a social impact if I'm not running an effective business. You need to focus on the business at its core, what we do at the moment, and creating a cash flow.

In our distribution and impact model, creating as much cash flow as possible to redistribute it to into areas that need help is vital.

What advice would you give to an entrepreneur seeking to take the next step in progressing their enterprise?

I think you need to understand why you're doing what you're doing to the core. What is it that's getting you up in the morning, because social enterprise is bloody hard. There's a lot of days where you're facing a lot of stresses and you have to have something that can push you and get you out of bed in the morning.

If you truly believe that what you are doing has a net positive, then that's going to really help you. Following on from that, you want to have a big goal, but you also want to be patient and break that goal down.

For us, we've got a five year goal that's broken down into yearly activities and goals. Then, we also have monthly activities and daily tasks thinking, “what do we need to be doing every single day to achieve this five year goal?” That goal is comprised of both commercial goals and then impact goals. We're targeting both as an organisation, but we want to be focusing on impact. If you're going to be a social enterprise, you need to be centred around what is the impact that you are trying to make? Secondary to that, what do I need to achieve commercially to achieve these goals? Finally, you need to understand your financials; what's coming in, what's going out? As if you're running a business, you will fail if you don't run the numbers properly. This is possibly the banker coming out of me, I possibly haven't needed to watch the numbers as heavily as I do, and it's possibly brought about more stress than necessary because I've watched it so heavily. But I think particularly in those early stages, cash flow and what you've got in the bank is going to be the difference between you surviving or not.

If you can get to a stage where you can pull an income with the business, that means you can spend one hundred percent of your time in the business or on the impact that you have for your goal.

I'd like to preface this as well; I'm an ant in the industry. I'm just giving it a crack! In no way shape or form am I achieving my goals yet of impact and where we want to be. We're still very much in the start-up phase. We've done all right, we're getting there, we're growing, but there's still risk as a business where we still need to watch our dollars, make sure we're operating effectively, competing and managing risk. I'm talking as someone who's currently learning lessons as I go, and there's still lots of lessons for me to learn.

As an Impact Boom Elevate+ Accelerator Alumni, what were some of the key lessons from that program you learned that would be valuable to share with other entrepreneurs?

Firstly, shameless plug to Impact Boom and the whole Elevate+ program. I highly recommend it to anyone thinking about this social entrepreneurship journey or looking to do it. I think it's a really valuable program. I certainly was not too sure it was right for me, and I had already established my business. We were doing it right, we definitely set things in motion, and I didn't necessarily recognise that there was value to be added, which was certainly my ego speaking. I ended up having a chat to Tom and Sarah at one of the Queensland Social Enterprise Council meetings, took the jump and have taken so much from it. By far, the most important thing I have taken throughout the program was being able to articulate and tell the story of what it is that Cirqle Group is and what we're trying to achieve.

Being able to talk to in a short, succinct manner about what you as a business is doing and how you're doing it is so important. Particularly in our space as social enterprises, we've got such a great story to tell and so many people will be aligned to it.

The ability to tell your story and articulate that has definitely been the core lesson, but then obviously things like the legal and accounting guidance I found were probably the two other avenues I got a lot of value from as well.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?

Since joining the industry, I get inspired every day to be honest. There are so many incredible people doing such incredible things, and I'm a big believer that you can take inspiration from everyone. Over the years, probably the biggest inspirations have been the likes of Daniel Flynn and Thankyou. We've mirrored their trust structure for our business, because I just think what they're doing is incredible. I followed their journey for quite some time, and it's people like that and the boys from Orange Sky who took the journey earlier on and made it a lot easier for other people. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, they have made it a lot easier for young people in in our area to pursue that avenue, which I certainly hadn't considered as an option coming out of school. I'm very grateful to be here.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

When it comes to books, self-help books are great. I love to learn in that capacity, but I think the only person that's going to really help you is yourself, you can read all the self-help books in the world! The Alchemist is my favourite book of all time. I would say that everybody has to read it, there are so many incredible awe inspiring lessons you get to read the whole way through. It has incredible lessons, and I think it's very relevant to the journey of a social entrepreneur. That's probably the most important and best book. From a resource perspective, everyone's already listening to this podcast. The Impact Boom podcast is fantastic. Humans of Purpose Podcast is one I've also spent a bit of time listening to and think is fantastic as well.