Transcript

DANNY QUINN:

My name’s Danny Quinn from the Black Sheep Collective Community Interest Company.

JULIA CHARLES:

My name is Julia Charles from Julia Charles Event Management.

DAN WRIGHT:

I’m Dan Wright. I am the founder the Heliex Power Ltd.

CATHERINE BOTTRILL:

I’m Catherine Bottrill. I’m CEO of Pilio.

DANNY QUINN:

The Black Sheep Collective is a social enterprise working primarily in arts and culture and performance-based work and participatory community arts. We train new and emerging artists and we provide opportunities for real-time experience in the creative industries working alongside professionals both in the corporate realm and the public realm as well as devising our own projects.

JULIA CHARLES:

We operate within the corporate sector and the private sector. So an example of a corporate event, we do a product launch for Audi for their new car. And that would involve project management and we could then work on an amazing private event where we could organise a large festival for a private client for their 50th birthday party.

DAN WRIGHT:

The company that I formed in 2010 is called Heliex Power Ltd and it’s a company specialising in the development of equipment to recover energy that would otherwise go to waste in industrial processes. The customers for this equipment are major energy users like the steel industry, the food industry, biomass companies, petrochemical companies and what we do is to recover energy that would otherwise go to waste, basically, up the chimney.

CATHERINE BOTTRILL:

Pilio is a software business that works with other businesses to help them understand their energy use to identify opportunities where they can reduce their energy bills and their environmental impacts.

DANNY QUINN:

We came up with the idea for the Black Sheep Collective really by just connecting with other artists and creative types that were kind of operating in silos and on their own and looking to connect with others really.

I met with my now business partner, Georgia, who graduated from the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and also returned to Milton Keynes. And we both felt the same, that there was a lack of opportunity for people like ourselves that had gone out, got some experience and returned to Milton Keynes to really engage and follow what we want to do not only as a career but as a passion. It wasn’t constituted for the first kind of few months, we were just artists in our own right doing our own thing but operating under a banner. And then when we felt that we had more strength in being an alliance of such, we decided to constitute in to a company.

JULIA CHARLES:

I came up with the idea for my business when I was incredibly young. I was 18 years old and I just came in to work on the Monday morning and was looking around the office and realised that IT just wasn’t for me.I had a passion for entertainment and I wanted to pursue it. And then I realised that actually a company I was currently working for in the entertainment sector wasn’t open to suggestions about moving their brand forward. So I decided to give it a go myself and here I am.

DAN WRIGHT:

I worked in the compressor industry and there was a particular type of technology in the compressor industry used worldwide and it’s called a screw compressor. City University in London for about 40 years has been a major source of innovative technology to the compressor industry. And that’s partly because of two professors, one world famous thermodynamicist and the other a very good mechanical professor. So over a period of about ten years we kept each other posted on our thoughts on how this new technology might be worth something one day.

And eventually when the costs of energy, the need to reduce carbon dioxide and so on became important to politicians and to governments, the time for this technology to go into the marketplace had come. I decided to have a go at forming my own company. And that worked.

The first one I formed I sold twice and bought back once. I used that money to do some other things.

CATHERINE BOTTRILL:

I was a researcher at Oxford University in a group called the Environmental Change Institute. Researchers need data to do good policy analysis and understand the world that we live in. And what we found is there was really poor energy data and therefore we couldn’t do good analysis.

So Russell Layberry, my colleague, and I, over cups of tea, lunches, conversation, thought, how could we create some tools to gather that data, and we didn’t want just to gather the data. We wanted to be able to give feedback to the people that had contributed the data. And it was through that exploration that I started designing an online tool for building energy management.

And that collaboration and exploration turned in to my company, Pilio.

I’ve also been involved with a business called Julie’s Bicycle which is an organisation which is helping the arts embed sustainability across the supply chain from everything from a theatre venue, to a record label, to a music studio, to a festival, and helping all the organisations there understand what their environmental impacts are and what they can do to reduce those environmental impacts.