Simple, Until It Wasn't

For the first 18 months of running Training Cave, I was owed money constantly.

Kids would turn up off the local estates. Bikes, dirty clothes, holes in their trainers. I'd rarely see a parent. And when I did chase it, it was always the same line: "mum's not given me any money Jack, can I pay you next week."

I never turned a kid away. So I'd let it go.

But it added up. Months went by and I was carrying more and more in unpaid subs. It wasn't sustainable. I remember thinking — the numbers don't work, but I'm not willing to be the reason this kid doesn't come.

That was the moment I went looking for advice and found social enterprise.

Simple, until it wasn't

In the beginning, Training Cave was straightforward. Amateur boxing classes and fitness classes covered the rent. Personal training was my living. That was the whole model.

Rent was covered by two boxing classes a week and a handful of fitness sessions on the side. Everything else — the extra kit, the competition entries, the vans to shows — came out of what I earned doing one-to-one PT, session after session, because that was the only part of the business that actually made proper money.

But it took over everything. Daytimes were filled with PT sessions back to back. Evenings were filled with classes. Weekends I was out with the boxers, at shows, in their corner. Something simple and manageable had turned into something that wasn't.

Hitting the ceiling

Somewhere in that first year, it hit me how lucky I'd been as a kid myself. My parents took me to training every single night, no question asked. I was never short of kit. I never once had to think about whether I could afford to be there. Then I'd look at the kids stood in front of me and know straight away that they didn't have any of that behind them.

Running as a limited company, I kept hitting the same wall. Every decision came down to the same trade-off: do the right thing by the kid in front of me, or protect the numbers. As a small business, there was no structure to absorb that gap — it just sat with me, quietly, until it didn't anymore.

I didn't want to build something that only worked for the families who could afford it. That defeated the entire point of why I'd started. But I also couldn't keep running a business where the model itself worked against the mission every single month.

Something had to give — not the mission, the model.

I spent weeks reading about it — CICs, charitable structures, the different parts of social enterprise — trying to work out which one actually fit what we needed, rather than which one sounded best on paper. In the end it wasn't complicated. I needed a structure built so that commercial income subsidised the mission by design, not one where I quietly ate the cost myself and hoped it evened out.

Becoming a not-for-profit

Becoming a not-for-profit meant the funding existed to cover kids like that properly — not as a favour I was quietly absorbing, but built into the model.

That shift changed everything, but not in the way people sometimes assume. It didn't mean relying on grants to plug the gap. If anything, it meant the opposite. Grant funding is unpredictable, competitive, and it can disappear as quickly as it arrives. Building an organisation around chasing the next grant isn't sustainability — it's just a different kind of financial anxiety, wearing a nicer outfit.

So instead, we built revenue streams that could stand on their own: paid placements with schools, private sessions, programmes that families and corporates were willing to invest in. Not because the mission had changed, but because a business that earns is a business that lasts — and a business that lasts is one that can actually keep its promises.

Getting the structure right

I want to be straight about one thing: charities can trade commercially too, so it was never really "charity versus business." The choice that actually mattered was building a structure from day one where trading income was designed to fund the mission, not bolted on as an afterthought once the model was already running.

We set up as a not-for-profit social enterprise on that basis. The next step in that same direction is already underway — we currently have an application in with the Charity Commission to become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), a structure built with exactly this kind of work in mind.

Whatever the legal wrapper ends up being, the discipline underneath it doesn't change: build revenue that doesn't depend on someone else's generosity turning up on time, and use it to fund a place for the kid who can't pay.

One funds the other

It's still the model now. One school's paid placement funds another child's place in a community programme. The maths that nearly broke me in year one is the same maths that keeps the doors open today. It just runs the right way round now.

In 2025 alone, that funded referral route gave us 565 sign-ins through our referral service — young people sent to us by our network of local schools, council services, children's homes and the youth justice service, not because they or their family could pay for it.

That's the part I didn't understand at the start: being a social enterprise isn't about softening your commercial edge. It's about being sharp enough commercially that you never have to choose between the mission and the numbers again.

What the model produces

In 2025, that model generated £455,184 in total social value, calculated against the National TOMs framework — a return of £3.84 for every £1 spent, and £2.81 for every £1 spent by our funders directly. Schools and colleges paid us £118,336 for the education sessions we delivered; that strand alone accounted for £282,708 of the value created.

Behind those numbers are people. One YP, who's autistic, came through our NOCN-accredited NEET employment-readiness programme and went on to a genuine coaching role, now specialising in supporting other neurodivergent young people. Another YP, who has SEND, completed the same programme — even where it surfaced just how hard the open labour market might be for him, it hasn't stopped him showing up every single night. A third YP, also autistic, went from being terrified of public transport to travelling independently, and landed a job in IT with a civil engineering company. A fourth YP joined a funded not-in-work-or-education programme at sixteen and is now working toward a sports psychology degree.

None of that happens on subs alone. It happens because the model is built to carry it.

Why this matters beyond us

I think a lot about the child whose mum never had to have that "can't pay" conversation with me, and just came in and trained like everyone else. That's the whole point. Accessibility isn't a value you put on a website — it's a line item you have to actively fund, every single month, on purpose.

That's not a message aimed only at people running gyms. Any founder building something with a social purpose at the centre of it eventually hits this same fork: keep absorbing the gap yourself and hope you don't burn out, or build a structure that absorbs it for you. I'd rather more people found the second route earlier than I did.

If you're building something with a mission at the centre of it, my honest advice: don't wait until the unpaid subs pile up and break you before you look for another way to structure it. The model you choose isn't just admin — it's the thing that decides, in the end, who gets to walk through the door.