About Alex Fahie
Ethical Angel was started by Alex as a passion project while he was working as an investment manager. He was initially interested in trying to find correlations between performance and corporate social responsibility campaigns but quickly found a more concerning correlation - that between performance and employee engagement.
He then spent the best part of two years exploring how employee engagement could be facilitated through community outreach and building the mechanisms to make it happen.
Alex is perpetual daydreamer who became an entrepreneur after 7 years in finance to “act upon these dreams”. Ethical Angel was born amidst Alex’s day job, first as a fund for early-stage ESG investors before pivoting into an employee engagement and development tech enabled service.
Alex is a trustee of Kidasha, an International NGO supporting children in Nepal.
Episode Overview
Founder and CEO of Ethical Angel, Alex Fahie, joins Alberto Lidji to discuss social entrepreneurship and his platform connecting corporates and employees to good causes around the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Alex is a social entrepreneur and regular listener of The Do One Better! Podcast.
He explains how Ethical Angel aims to create valuable experiences for individuals, and to mobilise the private sector and employees in ways to find challenges and causes that are trying to make the world a bit better. In the process, providing them with an easy conduit with ways to action them.
Ethical Angel is a young firm and recently went to market at the start of 2019. Their almost 20 clients are currently based mainly in the UK but, out of their 190 prospects, there’s a wide global footprint. Ethical Angel aims to serve a global client base.
They’ve raised approximately £230,000 from angel investors thus far. Alex talks candidly about the invaluable nature of his peer network in supporting him as he faces self-doubt and endures the emotional peaks and troughs.
The firm has attracted experienced and skilled individuals to their Advisory Board and as Ambassadors of the firm. Their Ambassador Board initially formed around Sir Stephen O’Brien, who was the Founder and first CEO of Business in the Community. Other Ambassadors include Lord Michael Hastings who is KPMG’s Global Head of Citizenship.
Alex isn’t shy in letting us know Ethical Angel was initially meant to be something quite different. The original idea was for it to be a fund for angel investors keen on ethical investing.
However, Alex noticed there was something much more valuable in trying to create a platform that brings the goodwill and resources of the private sector and tries to connect these with pressing social causes that are aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Ethical Angel platform creates individual experiences for companies and their employees. There is an appreciation that interests and skillsets are unique, and the platform reflects this. It not only serves to connect but, importantly, it also captures data – currently approximately 30 metrics – that help to inform individuals, managers and corporates alike; demographics, geography, areas of engagement, tangible reach and impact numbers.
Alex concedes that in order for success to be achieved, Ethical Angel’s business model needs to tick several boxes for clients. Indeed, the benefit to clients stretches beyond doing good and ticks boxes around corporate optics, the bottom line and human capital retention as well.
Alex notes that for him success is about affecting as many individuals as possible with valuable experiences that result in a highly positive social impact. He’d love to be in a position where he’s able to present Ethical Angel’s data on what global businesses have done through their people to make a real difference in the world.
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