Hi, this is Paul Zelizer and welcome to the Entrepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request, if you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps more people learn how to have a positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today I'm thrilled to introduce you to Tim Griffith. And our topic is accelerated social change through the power of people. Tim is the CEO of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, an organization that supports people with innovative ideas to tackle Ireland's social problems. They provide a range of programs, including an Ideas Academy and the Changing Ireland Accelerator, as well as direct funding and access to an incredible community of funders sector leaders and alumni. Tim, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Paul. It's great to be here.

You all are doing some amazing things there in Ireland and we're really excited to let our listeners know about it.

Yeah, well, we try our best, that's for sure. And thank you for the opportunity to be able to share some of the things that we're up to.

So, Tim, give us a little bit of your personal backstory. Like, what would somebody who doesn't know who Tim Griffiths is want to know about you personally and a little bit about your professional background before we get into the work that you're doing now.

Oh, gosh. Where to start? Well, as you can probably tell by my accent, I'm Irish, so I'm born and bred in Dublin and I went to university and I studied economics in University College Dublin here. And when I left university, which was back in the early 90s, there was a recession going on Ireland and I didn't quite know what to do it myself. And I ended up going to London and working for an advertising agency, so I sort of fell into that a little bit. And the agency that I was working for at the time didn't have an operation in Dublin and they decided that they wanted to set up an operation in Dublin. So I had the opportunity, effectively, to come home, but to be part of the team that set up that agency in Dublin. And we had a pretty good time of it. And I guess our claim to fame is that we won the Diageo account, which was the Guinness account in Ireland, which, as you can imagine, was quite substantial. So that was an exciting time for us.

Did you get free samples? Of course, I have to ask.

Well, not always, but occasionally, but it was a real privilege to work on the brand, that you were a very impressive organization and they certainly trained their staff and their agency staff very well as well. So that was a great learning curve for me and all of us who were working on that business at the time. And then I think it was in 2005, I jumped shipped to another organization to set up another ad agency, which was, again, the Irish operation of a multinational, which was OMD, which was Omnicom's media buying operation in Ireland. And I was the founding managing director there. So we set that up. And again, it was a small company. I think there were seven of us when we started. And I left there about two years ago, and we're up to 130 or 140 people, something of that nature. But round about 2005, as we were setting up OMD, I got approached by a former client of mine who was in the process of setting up Ashoka in Ireland. And I'm sure many of your listeners might be familiar with Ashoka, but they are originally a US organization, but with a global footprint that were identifying and supporting social entrepreneurs. And I'd never heard of a social entrepreneurs back in back in 2005, and many people hadn't. So this guy's name is Paul O'Hara, and Paul was setting up Ashoka. And he knew that marketing skills would be an important skill set to have as part of the organization, largely because there were such fabulous stories to tell about the individual social entrepreneurs and the work that they were up to. So he asked me to get involved, and I formed a very small, informal sort of marketing committee for Ashoka. And really, that was the start of my journey with social entrepreneurship. And I guess over that last, whatever it is, 18 years since then, for various reasons, I was sort of slowly falling out of love with advertising and becoming more and more passionate about social entrepreneurship. So I had the opportunity to make the switch about two years ago, and that's what I did. And here I am today.

I started my business in 2008, not in Ireland, in the US. But I have some sense of sort of the state of the union, shall we say. It was really early and in some ways we didn't even know what to call it. Right. Was it conscious capitalism or business for good, or social enterprise or social entrepreneurship?

Even?