in back-to-work schemes aimed at
men and women who are excluded from the workforce, but who
in addition to this difficulty, are also going through a number
of issues that mean they need to spend one or two years with us,
or even more, to get back on their feet, train, rebuild
a personal and professional development plan.
In the 2000s, my group experienced an extremely pivotal turning point
followed by growth that has not
subsided since, because as with classical entrepreneurs, with
social workers who founded the group,
we decided to change our model and, above all, significantly
scale up our activities
on the market and grow the number of jobs
considerably. To do so, we were prompted to raise funds from
institutional and private investors.
The funding round at the time consisted of raising
around 2 million euros to provide us with the capital
funds to finance, to pre-finance, among other things, the development
of a new area that has been hugely successful for us ever since,
that of the circular economy, the processing of waste electrical
equipment, end-of-life vehicles, and more recently
waste management for discarded furniture.
This funding round took place in an original way,
a form of wizardry that was a huge success for us because
we reached out both to private entrepreneurs to get them on board as
minority contributors to our capital, i.e. the capital funds
for our back-to-work schemes, and at the same time canvassed
community investors, principally France Active who are the
principal social financier here in France,
to raise money through debenture loans, and this critical period
in the 2000s led to us having
specific resources available to maintain our development
which is rather successful today.