Spotlight on The Apprentice Store
In our latest spotlight, we’re joined by The Apprentice Store, an Inverness based social enterprise. The Apprentice Store offers Managed IT services for businesses around the United Kingdom, while creating a vibrant IT economy, through supporting young people. We spoke to David Massey, Managing Director, about their work, values and plans for the year ahead.
What does your social enterprise do?
Our purpose is to create sustainable employment for young people who have barriers of transitioning into employment. From day to day, we provide managed technology services to our clients who are small business from the public, private and third sectors.
How do you do it?
We offer three main streams of work;
- Remote IT support and Cybersecurity advice. With Microsoft being a lead vendor, we do a lot of work with Microsoft 365.
- Website development, support and hosting. We specialise in WordPress, with developers that are happy to support and host sites that we did not build.
- Consultancy services to offer strategic thinking for our clients.
Why should someone buy/use your product/services? What are the benefits and what makes your organisation unique?
Our clients, from across the UK, choose to outsource their technology services to us and make a social impact with that purchasing decision. We demonstrate their support annually with our Supporter Awards that celebrate these supporters, whose purchasing decisions assist the development of an apprentice, through supporting their salary.
What is your personal motivation?
I want to support the sector that has given me a career for over 30 years that is struggling to recruit new talent. I aim to support the area that I call home in the Highlands to create and retain a skilled workforce. My goal is to support our cause by offering our clients a cost-effective and caring service.
What is the current focus for your social enterprise?
Our constant focus is to grow our passive and recurring income through product sales. As well as this, we aim to grow active support services that demand the creation of employment. This constant demand requires clear outbound marketing of the organisations commercial offering to find new customers, this is something that we historically have needed to do little of as most clients come through a referral, and why we have our Supporter Awards.
What exciting things do you have coming up?
We have been working with TechSoup globally on offering heavily discounted security solutions for the third sector and we are awaiting them to start advertising this to their community. We have been discussing with Charity Digital, the UK delivery partner for TechSoup about offering their clients our Managed IT Support service.
Who do you want to work with more?
As a business we specifically do not target clients from any particular sector or geography as technology is used by everyone, but are interested in working other third sector organisations.
Historically, we have tended to focus on the size of the organisation as smaller businesses struggle to access reliable technology services and need different skills at different times and it is where our apprenticeship model works really well. We want to talk with businesses that purchase technology, like Microsoft 365 or data backup services for Microsoft 365, and who want to make a social impact in their purchasing decision by purchasing these products from The Apprentice Store.
This recurring income offers our organisation a passive income that we can invest in young people and can come from organisations of all sizes and we can potentially offer a saving too. These product based solutions are not limited to small businesses as we have a number of larger businesses purchasing their Microsoft software through us to have the social impact of that purchase.
What’s your biggest challenge?
Our biggest challenge is the perception that all our staff are training as apprentices and as such the quality of the service may be low due to lack of experience. Added to experience issue is the negative perception that third sector organisations deliver a third level service but we know that our clients love what we do and why we exist as they refer other businesses to our services. All our apprentices are supported by a team of experienced and multi-disciplined professionals to ensure that the our services are delivered to a high standard.
Where do you see your organisation in 5 years?
We would hope to see that the organisation is offering employment to young people across Scotland, providing quality support to a larger client base across the UK, and beyond. Alongside this, The Apprentice Store seen as being a quality provider of technology services to small businesses. The key to this success will be overcoming the perception problems that we suffer.
What top tips would you give to other social enterprises?
Look to generate income to remove dependency upon grants, and possible purpose drift with the objectives of grant funders.
We have drawn less than 8% of additional funding over our 8 years of trading income as grant funding, this has removed the funding applications and the reporting to funding that many of our social enterprise clients have to do.
We would suggest that most social enterprises have something that they could sell. This is usually based on the domain knowledge, so I would suggest that they explore the possibility of starting to trade.
For more information about The Apprentice Store, please visit their website and make sure to follow them on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter/X. You can also find The Apprentice Store’s current services on the Buy Social Scotland Business Directory.
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