Why we gave away 51% of our business

Giving away more than half of our business shares so early on in our start-up journey may seem like madness to many in the business community, but at Counter Culture Drinks we believe in doing things a little differently.

The decision to give away 51% of our business was driven by a personal goal to raise at least £1 million for non-profit organisations. Like all founders we wanted to grow the value of the equity in our business, so we wondered whether the non-profit equity could grow symbiotically alongside our own shares.

In response to this goal, we created ‘commercially compassionate’ (CC) shares to allocate to charities and civil society organisations that share its values and vision. Rather than simply donating a set amount of money to charities each year or having one charity partnership, we wanted to make sure that, from the very start, the success of the business would directly benefit our CC shareholders as well as traditional shareholders. Being something quite novel and not yet something we’ve encountered elsewhere, we wanted to make a statement with something bold.

Whilst we worked on our CC share concept in 2022, Patagonia made the decision to gift 98% of its shares to Planet Earth - this further strengthened our belief that there is a place for ‘radical compassion’ in business. We were similarly inspired by the B Corp movement and admire how they celebrate and promote purpose led businesses.

Our CC shares have now been allocated to charities and civil society organisations that share our values and vision,Alcohol Change UK, andBillyChip. With supermarket sales of kombucha growing by 31% in value and 28% in volume during 2023 alone, the booming alcohol-free drinks market could see our CC shareholders making significant returns over the coming years.

The process of recruiting two charity shareholders  has taken us more than 12 months. We were naive in the beginning as to how easy it would be to secure CC shareholders. It was soon clear to us that charities are unsurprisingly protective of their public image. Charities are typically unable to give time to assessing equity proposals such as this, given both its certainty, quantum and timing are all highly difficult to assess.

Being 51% means that collectively our founders, employees and investors will never outnumber the money sent to CC shareholders were somebody to acquire our business. We thought that would be an interesting experiment to see how that would impact the motivations of us as founders, our staff, and any future investor into our business.

As a young company breaking the mould in the soft drinks space, we are passionate about starting conversations with like minded people about how businesses and civil society can work together to create greater positive impact.  

We’d love to work with other brands, retailers and customers who share this passion as we continue to grow.

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