Good Leaders Clinic episode 2: Losing it all

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Behind the hype around successful social entrepreneurship is a topic that is more rarely talked about: what happens when it all goes wrong? In the Good Leaders Clinic podcast, Tim West and Liam Black invite purposeful business leaders to open up about their real-life issues in candid conversations.

In this episode, the hosts talk to Dominic Llewellyn, co-founder of social investment company Numbers for Good, created in 2012 to help social enterprises and charities access more funding through social investment, while attracting more investors into the sector. 

But in 2019, things went wrong and Numbers for Good went into voluntary liquidation. In an evolving market where “if you made a mistake, you were done”, the company didn’t survive. “It was a perfect storm,” Llewellyn recalls in his conversation. Llewellyn personally lost a lot of money and ended up relying on state support, with his mental health hitting rock bottom.

• Read more: Numbers for Good announces closure

How did he recover from it? What would he have done differently, in hindsight? Llewellyn, now at the head of Achieve Good, an organisation that builds partnerships between governments, philanthropists, investors and communities around social environmental impact to support specific projects, shares his years-long journey from a “dark time” to one of hope.

Llewellyn talks about:

• The rise and fall of Numbers for Good
• The personal impact of the failure of Numbers for Good – financially, socially and, importantly, mentally
• His journey towards recovery
• What he learned along the way and his advice for others