On the MBE, the Queen’s Award, and How Consistency of Purpose Delivers Results
I am asked almost every week about the MBE. People want to know what it was for and who presented it to me.
The straightforward answer is that the citation says: For services to disadvantaged people and the Environment in London and that Prince William presented it to me in Buckingham Palace in 2019. But of course, there’s a lot more to it than that.
A career, not a single achievement
The MBE was not given for any single organisation or project. It recognised a pattern of work sustained across multiple businesses over several decades: the same purpose applied in different contexts, producing measurable results each time.
The purpose was this: to create economic opportunity for people who had been excluded from it, through businesses and organisations that were focussed on sustainability but yet commercially real rather than simply well-intentioned.
That took different forms at different times. Some businesses employed people directly from backgrounds of unemployment, imprisonment, homelessness, and addiction and placed them in demanding commercial roles with serious clients who expected the work to be done properly and on-time. Tree Shepherd, which I founded, and which continues to operate in South London today, approached the same challenge differently. Rather than employing people directly, it helped people who were unemployed or receiving benefits to start their own businesses. Over 10 years it supported hundreds of people through the process of developing a viable business model, starting to trade, and building the confidence and capability to sustain themselves commercially. Many went on to employ others. As Tree Shepherd matured, the work extended to advising established small businesses on growth, recognising that a business expanding and taking on staff creates employment just as meaningfully as a new one starting up. You can find out more at treeshepherd.org.uk.
Before both of those, there were earlier ventures built around the same idea. I started Papercycle with £150 (which bought me a 19-year-old Ford Transit) and an obsession with recycling paper. I collected paper early in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evenings around my full-time job until it was too big to do part-time. It eventually grew to employ 15 people and collect paper and multiple other things from across London. Cybercycle and Renew also created meaningful work for people on the dole in recycling and reusing everything from computers to washing machines. The MBE citation reflects that breadth. It was recognition of a consistent body of work, not a single moment.
The Queen’s Award: How a Consistent Purpose Delivers for Everyone
The Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development, which Her Majesty The Queen presented to me for Green-Works, is perhaps the clearest illustration of what happens when a strong purpose is properly aligned with how a business actually operates.
Green-Works was founded to meet a glaring gap in the market: Large organisations, particularly in the financial sector, were regularly disposing of huge quantities of office furniture. Desks, chairs, storage, fittings: most of it going to landfill, almost all of it still entirely functional. That represented both a wasteful and unnecessary environmental cost and a practical opportunity as these organisations looked for a better, more sustainable alternative to landfill.
For me, it also created an opportunity to generate meaningful employment for people excluded from the labour market.
We built a commercial operation around acquiring and redistributing that furniture, and we staffed it with people who had been written off by conventional employment. The clients were not easy. We worked with RBS, Barclays, Macquarie, J.P. Morgan and others and had to operate to extremely demanding timescales and standards. One project with HSBC is thought to have been the largest single office clearance ever completed anywhere in the world. Over the life of the business, we diverted 47,000 tonnes of office furniture from landfill and employed hundreds of people who had previously been unable to sustain work.
Working with household names with corporate demands was part of the design. People doing genuinely demanding work for serious clients, work that is paid for and valued, are engaged differently from people on a subsidised placement. The commercial weight of the work gave the employment its meaning.
The Queen’s Award recognised that Green-Works had achieved real environmental targets and employed people in great need while delivering in a high pressure commercial market against sometimes unscrupulous competition.
What This Means for the Work I Do Now
Awards of this kind are not given for effort or for having good intentions. They are given for sustained, verifiable results. The results across these businesses came from the same source each time: a clear and honestly held purpose, and operations that were designed to serve it; the choice of clients, the design of training, the standards applied, and the way success was measured.
The consistency mattered as much as the quality of any single venture. One organisation built around a strong idea is interesting. The same purpose applied across different ventures, in different circumstances, over several decades, producing measurable outcomes each time, is what turns a good idea into a coherent body of work.
That is the central lesson I bring to the owners and leaders I coach through our business coaching services and the teams I support through Intentionality. Purpose is not a values statement for a website. It is a working tool that tells you which opportunities to take, which to decline, and how to measure whether you are actually doing what you say you are doing, much like a structured business health check. Clarity about what you are trying to do, and genuine alignment between that purpose and how you operate, is not a nice extra. It is where the results come from.
Colin Crooks MBE HonDSc is the founder of Intentionality. He is a business coach who works with owners and senior leaders of small businesses to build better businesses through good leadership, effective teams and a clear purpose. Contact him now for more insights.