Back in 2017, Alex Stephany was looking for a new challenge. He had not long left the business he had run for four years - ParkatmyHouse, by then known as JustPark - and was looking for something else into which he could challenge his entrepreneurial energy. "I had this basic thesis that I could use my technology skills to have some kind of social impact, but I didn't know what that would look like," he says.
He started going for coffees and meetings with various people he knew, but when inspiration came it was from an unlikely source. "The real impactful meeting was with a homeless man at my local tube station," he recalls. "I would buy him cups of coffee and pairs of socks to stop him from getting cold, and I saw his condition going from bad to worse. At one point he had a heart attack and he was then back out on the street. I was trying to help him and I was aware that other people were trying to help him too, and it seemed to me like a real failure in co-ordination that we weren't able to offer him something more long term."
The result was the concept for Beam; a social business that connects people wanting to help others out of homelessness with those in need of help through the power of crowdfunding, channelling money towards getting them support and training that will hopefully lead to them getting work and rebuilding their lives.
"I met as many homeless people and people who worked in charities as I could and we developed the idea for about six months," says Stephany. "The way it works is charities and forward-thinking local authorities refer people to us. We have a case worker who sits down with them and talks about the risks in their life and how they can mitigate them, and also what they could be doing professionally, based around the individual's experience and strengths.
"Once that is done the campaign goes live, is funded by thousands of people from the Beam community and then the case worker supports them through their training and into their new stable career." At the time of writing, more than £560,000 has been donated to 148 campaigns, and 52 people have started work as a result, all from the London area where Beam currently operates.
Beaming up
One individual who sticks in Stephany's mind is Tony, a homeless man who was something of a guinea pig for the Beam concept. "Like the overwhelming majority of homeless people in the UK, he lived in a homeless hostel so he had a roof over his head but a real lack of opportunity," he recalls. "I told him about Beam. He didn't say anything for the entire meeting, apart from at one point when he asked if he could ask a question. He said: ‘I don't understand. Why would anyone help me?' It was a real punch-in-the-stomach moment, when I realised that one of the key problems faced by the long-term unemployed is a lack of confidence and belief, even though there are millions of people who would want to support them.
"I explained that I thought people would care but I couldn't make any promises, and he trusted me enough to say he'd give it a shot. We went to see some electrical training providers who said they would teach Tony to become an electrician if we could get the money together, and we built his campaign and then I picked up the phone to some journalists and told them about the idea.
"We got a huge amount of coverage and funded the campaign because of the press we got. Tony started his training, got his City & Guilds accreditation and started work as an electrician on a building site in London. It was the first time he'd been in work in two decades and he used the money he got from that to move out of the hostel and into his own place." But not everyone is a Tony; some 13 people to date have dropped out of the programme or training; information Beam makes openly available on its website as part of its commitment to transparency.
One unique element to Beam, says Stephany, is that every penny pledged by an individual goes directly to help fund campaigns, rather than being absorbed in the costs of running the business. "We're trying to do something totally different," he says. "The way we pay our overheads is through the social entrepreneurship business model whereby we charge government to deliver this service, because what we are doing is getting people who are long term and extremely welfare-assisted into work very cheaply and quickly.
"There's also an upskilling agenda; if we can channel people into areas where there's a high demand in the economy we can help employers to hire and grow their businesses. In London there's a huge infrastructure skills shortage and we've created a lot of construction roles; there's a healthcare shortage and we've seen people become phlebotomists, who are absolutely critical to the running of the NHS." The business currently employs 11 people, a mix of technical staff working on the platforms used to connect homeless people with donors, and support specialists who work on individual campaigns, which can also cover costs such as transport and childcare as well as training.
Donors, meanwhile, can choose to support individual campaigns - although only around 20 per cent of donations come in this way - or to spread it across multiple initiatives, sometimes through monthly donations. "We use the monthly donations to ensure that all the campaigns fund at the same rate," he adds.
Tech for Good
For Stephany, the desire to help others is in the blood. "Even before I was born people in my family - grandparents and great-grandparents who I have never even met - were involved in business and charity work, and had the attitude that you should give back and serve your community," he says. "So I grew up with that sense that if you can help, you should."
He's a firm believer in the concept of "Tech for Good"; a movement based on the idea that new technology can be channelled to help deliver a social purpose: "This is coming at a critical stage for the industry as a whole, but also for people who are looking at the impact that some of the tech giants have had, where people are questioning whether the technology is a positive thing at all."
His own entrepreneurial journey wasn't straightforward. Having qualified as a lawyer, his first job was working for a large international law firm, but he soon discovered that he enjoyed "making things happen commercially", rather than acting in an advisory capacity. "The corporate environment also wasn't for me," he says. "I'm much more comfortable in smaller environments, working in smaller teams that can really move very fast and where people are very empowered and passionate about what they're doing, and that dynamism is very rare in large organisations."
Still a relatively fresh graduate, Stephany fell into various projects and even questioned whether business was for him at all until he landed a job as chief operating officer at the tech start-up ParkatmyHouse. "Within hours I realised that there is a place for people like me in the business world; it's just not in these massive international businesses but in a small start-up where you can feel the impact you're having on that organisation every week," he says.
He would go on to become CEO, overseeing investment from venture capital firm Index Ventures, and also an equity crowdfunding round which at the time was the largest ever for a tech start-up. "We raised £3.5m from almost 2,000 people, and that was the key thing that planted the seed in my mind of crowdfunding being a very powerful model," he says.
That wasn't the only formative experience. During the period between leaving JustPark - he remains on the board to this day - and starting up Beam, Stephany was asked to write a book on the sharing economy, called The Business of Sharing, published in 2015. "I interviewed entrepreneurs like the founders of Airbnb and Zipcar, and I began to think about the different potential applications for this model," he says.
"One of the great things about these peer-to-peer platforms is that they can be so scalable and so efficient, and that's a model we're using at Beam to help connect donors in a very stable and sustainable way with people who need that help. The donors get that real connection, and get to see exactly where their money goes, but the beneficiary also gets that and realises that there are people out there who care about them and want them to achieve. That's a key part of the model."
Hard graft
Having spent the last two years building up Beam - it recently held a two-year birthday party bringing together donors, other supporters and some of the people it has helped - Stephany is under no illusions about how hard it is to get a business off the ground. "It's tough, and at the moment we live in a world where entrepreneurship is glamorised and people think they can just build a company and then sell it two or three years later," he says.
"The reality is that if you're working on an important problem then it can occupy you for decades. People need to have a massive reservoir of energy, because there will be a lot of highs and there will also be a lot of lows. You need to have almost irrational levels of resilience and determination to make a business work."
But he's all for encouraging people to explore business ideas, and tries to help out those who are in a similar situation to the one he found himself in a few years ago, meeting up-and-coming entrepreneurs and offering advice. "You don't need to make a huge thing out of starting a business," he says. "That's the glamorisation of starting companies and founding businesses again, but people need to take a little pressure off themselves and be comfortable in just experimenting. If things are working and you're excited and solving a problem, then they will take on their own momentum. And if it doesn't look like it has any legs, then fine."
As for Beam, the challenge going forward is to get more high-networth individuals or businesses to support the concept, which would help Stephany achieve his vision of expanding into other cities beyond London. "A lot of our funding so far has come from really successful entrepreneurs and businesses who really believe that these entrenched problems like homelessness can only be fixed by entrepreneurs who are innovating," he says. "Those are incredibly helpful but the biggest challenge on the finance front is how we raise more money, to raise millions of pounds, so we can take it to a stage where it's helping thousands of people every single year."
He believes there's potential to help 10,000 people a year in the UK alone, and the organisation is currently looking to identify another city in which to operate. "The way we'd do this would be to have a team of support specialists in that city but we would run engineering, data and products from our London headquarters."
With Beam accounting for most of his time and energy, it's no surprise there's not much else that occupies Stephany. But he's fond of playing the guitar and practises yoga, and tries to get out of London for at least one day a month "to let the adrenaline seep out of the body".
But after his false start in corporate life, it's clear that Stephany feels he's finally found his calling, and he admits he can't see himself doing anything else now. "You can tell the story of your life backwards and you realise that things make much more sense, and the fact I did a crowdfunding round, I had this family history of social impact and community work, I'd always lived in London and been concerned about homelessness and I'd written a book on collaborative models; all of these things were just ingredients for Beam," he says. "If you look at all that, how could I not be working on something like this?"
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