Clare Gilhooly, Cambridge House chief executive
One of the mysteries of the Charity Business saga has been how social action charity Cambridge House managed to come by the electronic and paper records of all the clients. In an exclusive interview with Tania Mason, Cambridge House chief executive Clare Gilhooly tells all – or at least, almost all…
Clare Gilhooly’s first inkling that something was seriously awry at Charity Business came in early December last year. One of her staff, annoyed about yet another missed salary payment from Charity Business, lost his temper on the phone to one of the outsourcing agency’s employees, only to receive a retort along the lines of: “You think you’ve got problems – we don’t even know if we’ll get paid this month.”
Alarm bells ringing, the Cambridge House team set about getting as much information as they could out of their contacts within Charity Business about what was happening, and were eventually put in touch with a ‘turnaround consultant’ who had been appointed to try to rescue Charity Business from the clutches of administrators. This consultant confirmed that Charity Business was in serious trouble, but also said there was a possibility it would be bought out by a white knight investor – the technology entrepreneur Nelson Wootton. But the relief Gilhooly felt at hearing this news lasted only until she Googled one of Wootton’s existing companies, motorcycle insurance outfit Bike Devil, and was confronted with provocative images of scantily-clad women and an over-18s section.
“That’s often the difference between the private sector and the voluntary sector, isn’t it – the values,” she said. “I just wouldn’t have been comfortable outsourcing our finances to a company connected to a website like that.”
So Cambridge House began considering other options. The charity was already waiting on a quote from another outsourcing agency which had been asked to pitch during the autumn as the service from Charity Business deteriorated, and Gilhooly knew how much due diligence was required to find a new outsourcer. Cambridge House had spent three months doing due diligence on Charity Business two years earlier before agreeing to outsources its finance function to it, so it even considered buying Charity Business itself, as it had long toyed with the idea of running its own outsourcing agency. But upon investigation, the numbers didn’t stack up.
“We signed a confidentiality agreement with the turnaround consultant and were shown a lot of financial projections, which only made us even more nervous,” says Gilhooly. “But we’ve certainly never shared any of that information with anyone.”
The simplest and safest option, Gilhooly and her trustees decided, was to try to get Cambridge House’s data back from CB and take the finances back in-house, for the time being at least. So on 23 December, Cambridge House sent a lawyer’s letter to Charity Business stating it wanted to break the contract, and get its data back.
But over Christmas, Gilhooly’s colleague, finance director Burger Edwards, grew increasingly worried about the situation and called Gilhooly to suggest that they go to the Charity Business headquarters in Swindon at the earliest opportunity and demand their files. So at 9am on 27 December, they arrived on the doorstep and confronted the skeleton staff on duty. But to no avail – the staff said the data wasn’t stored in nice neat piles and able to be handed over immediately, and Edwards and Gilhooly left empty-handed. In the ensuing days, though, they kept piling on the pressure, calling and emailing Charity Business constantly to demand their records back.