From failure to success: How switching to social enterprise transformed my company

What do we do and what good does it do?
Why do we do it?
Who pays us to do it?

These are the three questions I believe we should all ask ourselves and our colleagues as we go about our working lives.

The danger is that in many organisations the answers will tell you more about what people don't know and understand about their role and the purpose of their organisation and their customer offer than anything else.

In most organisations the same mistakes get made, the same excuses made, the same lessons go unlearnt, over and over again.

At P3, where we have used a social enterprise approach since 2002, we have transformed a failing organisation with a turnover of £800,000 and 30 staff to one with a current turnover approaching £7m and around 200 staff. We support, equip, train and manage our staff to do an excellent job - we aim to be the best and were UK Charity of the Year in 2005 and number one in the Sunday Times Best Companies Top 100 list in 2007.

To explain how this fundamental change in the business came about, the work which has P3 has done to combat one sign of social exclusion, teenage knife crime, is one example. Too many kids have no chance from day one and are serially failed by their parents, schools and care homes. The results are predictable: gangs, drugs, crime, violence and mental health problems. We are providing a range of responses developed with and for young people that offer choices and routes out of desperate situations.

This is where social enterprise comes into its own.

Using a social enterprise approach we can innovate and develop service models and responses that can offer positive choices and opportunities to people who have previously had precious little chance in life. These problems are our challenge and motivation.

The response of P3 to the problems that I describe is to target the people that have been serially failed and excluded by other services and work with them as partners, looking to help them achieve a more stable and consistent way of life. These are the people who have had every punishment in the book, the people for whom sanctions or the threat of sanctions do not work.

P3 believes a new approach is needed, an approach that jointly agrees and pursues a positive way forward with the service user, the customer. We jointly assess the situation with our customers and jointly agree the support we will offer and the 'what good does it do' the outcomes we aim to achieve. The evidence is that what we do works either that, or our services must be located somewhere on the road to Damascus, as lots of people who use them turn their lives around.

This isn't rocket science, but it might as well be in many cases because instead of this approach often the same mistakes are made, the same person arrested for the same crime, sent to the same prison, kept in the same cell with no rehabilitation programme, released to 'no fixed abode' only to start the same cycle all over again at great and unnecessary human cost for victims and perpetrator not to mention the wasted financial costs.

When we see things that aren't being done properly or not being done at all, things that we know we can do well, that's all the motivation we need to develop a service that makes a difference, that's P3, that's social enterprise. We are clear about our vision, our mission, our offer and our outcomes because we understand what do we do, why do we do it, what good it does and who pays us.

That's what gets us out of bed in the morning.

Martin Kinsella is founder of P3 and a social enterprise ambassador.