For a man who says he has never had a proper job, Steff Wright, founder of Gusto Group, was destined to have a transformative effect on the work lives of many other people.
The football-mad entrepreneur began his first business at the age of 17 running mobile discos. An archetypal customer-facing enterprise providing disco entertainment was a modest but useful starting point in his career, where he learned the nuts and bolts of commerce.
Wright says: “I didn’t go to university. I didn’t get any formal education in business but I’ve just picked stuff up on the way. I got into a job in building and I did a building diploma and off the back of that I started to get into development.”
He founded Gusto Group with his brother, Jerome, in 1992 and it has gradually evolved into a diverse range of companies. It includes a construction and development company, Gusto Construction and Gusto Homes, an architect’s practice called SGA, and a manufacturing business called Rototek. The common theme threading them all together is sustainability and innovation.
It was the 1992 Rio Summit that fired Wright’s interest in sustainability and new technologies. This passion would see him make the unorthodox decision to switch from being the customer of a company that made rainwater harvesting systems and large underground storage tanks to buying it up when it went into administration.
“The business was just about to fall over,” Wright explains, adding: “We were going to lose them as a potential supplier. They were local to us. We understood the business a little bit and decided to step in. We bought the business out of administration and it had 40 staff at the time, very good engineers but not very good at the commercial side of running a business.”
His faith in the company would pay off. Eventually the failing business was turned around and is now a successful and innovative rotational moulding company employing 120 staff out of two different factories.
Wright’s belief in innovation doesn’t stop at the workplace. He himself lives on a development of 30 houses, built on land that was owned by the Lincolnshire Agricultural Society, which was keen to see more innovation on it. That’s when Wright stepped in with a development concept.
It was a win-win situation for both sides, with the agricultural society benefiting from the quality sustainable housing Gusto provides, which would not have been on offer from one of the housing behemoths that dominates the market.
Central to Wright’s vision of housing is the concept of community. He stresses that Gusto Group doesn’t just build rows of smart but soulless low-energy homes but designs developments with the intention of creating communities of people who live cheek by jowl and share each other’s joys and tears. He wants them to be full of communal spaces and places where people will bump into each other.
The development that Wright lives in is a case in point. It’s a world away from the dull, utilitarian housing developments. Rather, it harks back to the garden cities envisioned by Victorian reformers and comes peppered with a range of life-enhancing and environment-sustaining features. These include allotments, a shop selling lawn mowers and gardening kit and even a communal bin store so that instead of the residents having three or four wheelie bins parked outside their houses, they can take their rubbish to a communal bin, with all its attendant opportunities for a neighbourly natter.
Investment in innovative quality housing is a contrast to the dominant pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap business model but as Wright points out, it usually results in a better product and better housing. The usual commercial model for house building of adding value to land by building down to a minimum standard to maximise the margin and the profit drives out innovation, Wright feels.
The kind of bold innovation Wright champions can involve the use of some unlikely materials. One company Wright is backing, called Hemspan, is developing a range of hemp-based building products. Hemp is a very fast growing crop, which sucks the carbon back into the ground and it locks carbon up within the material itself. If you manufacture building materials using hemp, the carbon is then locked up within the fabric of the building.
Wright doesn’t anticipate hemp buildings becoming mainstream under current legislation but if it did, it would be “a massive business opportunity”, he says.
Gusto Group has prized B Corp certification, attesting to the high standards of social and environmental performance it meets but Wright’s goal is a more holistic one; he wants it to become a fully employee-owned enterprise. This will make for a more productive model, he believes, as those that work for and own slices of the company will be far more engaged in its future. They will have skin in its game, as he puts it.
Wright says: “The future for Gusto is one of growth through innovation right the way through the business and we believe that innovation will come better when every member of staff within the company effectively becomes an entrepreneur.”
The employee-ownership goal he has set for Gusto Group dovetails with his own life plans. In three years’ time Wright will be 65. As Chairman of Gusto, he hopes will still be adding value to the business but importantly he will have achieved an organisation where entrepreneurial spirit sits deeply within the company, in its employee-owners themselves.
At that stage in his life Wright will be able to devote more time to his other consuming passion: football. He was chairman of Lincoln City Football Club many years ago and now has a small, semi-professional football club that plays in the FA Cup. But this is a football club with a twist; it’s a plant-based operation, with players and supporters served vegetarian meals and snacks.
“We are very focused on sustainability in everything that we’re doing throughout the football club and we’ve got a lot of B Corp sponsors at the football club. We’re creating a B Corp football shirt that’s going to be our first team home shirt,” Wright says, adding: “We are doing innovative stuff within football and you know football is an important part of a lot of people’s lives. Football and sport has a big role to play in this transition to a more sustainable future.”