What's alternative about alternative entrepreneurialism?

Alternative entrepreneurship is not just entrepreneurship in cooler clothes.

If you joined The Soc of Alts because you just want to learn how to run a business, and what you really want is all the fruits of capitalism without having to tow the corporate line, you're not in the best place to achieve your goals.

We're radically alt.

We're oppositional, creative, inventive. Sick. We stand for something in a world that's sold out.

We're the future, I truly believe it.

Yet what we do is often old-fashioned: the artisanal, the oral or performance-based, the work of the community healer or village wise woman.

We aren't pretending to be different to look good.

We're not looking to virtue signal whilst actually merely creating mini versions of all the old trouble.

No. We look at words that litter LinkedIn like career and position and founder and success and we question their worth or relevance to our sources of joy or purpose.

We're looking for alternatives to greed, exploitation and lies, alternatives to the definitions of success the world imposes.

If you wondered where the stress falls in the phrase 'alternative entrepreneurialism', it's on the first word not the second.

Are we a bunch of hippies, then?

I still hear and sense a lot of confusion about what alternative entrepreneurialism even is, including from members.

Is it OK to want to make money? Are we anti-profit? Is anything alternative entrepreneurialism, if we're non-corporate and our hearts vaguely in the right place? Can you be an alternative entrepreneur and serve clients in the corporate sector? Do I need to learn how to milk goats?

There's little vagueness in my own head. Though these are questions best for you to ponder. I've never milked a goat, that's sure.

In ways I've written about in The Manifesto and other pieces, alternative entrepreneurialism is a principled refusal of the assumptions that underpin mainstream enterprise: that growth is always good, that profit justifies all means, that success must be individual and scalable, and that the market is arbiter of merit.

Where conventional entrepreneurship asks, “What’s the gap in the market?”, alternative entrepreneurship asks,
“What does my community need? What can I build that aligns with my values? What needs doing in this world? What sets my heart alight?”

The difference is in the foundations of the building, and from that different structures grow. It begins with the question not, what do I want or what can I make money doing, but what does this world need?

So often these days, when I think about something, I conclude that in the end, it's a matter of goodness.

That's a word we don't often hear anymore.

Or pure.

Imagine the restaurant a child might design. Where there is great thought to the menu and decor and none to the logistics of grease disposal or leverage.

Impractical, you might say. Doomed to failure.

Else it might be that, if we start with an idea of something that excites us, we figure out such practicalities along the way.

My greatest advice is: look at what drained you and be careful not to replicate it.

This is where some go wrong. They hated their boss, so decide to be the boss, but treat their staff poorly.

Or they grew tired of the bullshit, so started something new, without breaking the habit of hype, repeating old patterns, wondering why peace eludes them still.

Yes, I suppose what I'm saying is that there's a lot of thinking that needs to go into being an alternative entrepreneur.

Some conscious and painstaking unlearning.

And that's why we're here. To do that together, so each of us might move forward more quickly than we could alone.

Success is Measured Differently

Mainstream entrepreneurship measures success by revenue, reach and valuation.
Alternative entrepreneurs are more likely to ask:

• Is my work healing something?
• Am I accountable to the people affected by my decisions?
• Do I still like who I am at the end of the day?

Income matters, because we have real and human needs and desires that require money; but it's not the only metric.

Alternative entrepreneurs often prioritize ecological regeneration, cultural preservation, mental health or social repair.

Such concepts replace dollars, rupees or pounds as the ultimate bottom line.

Our purpose is redefined.

Rooted in Resistance

Alternative entrepreneurship is often born from disillusionment.

But this isn't the self-pitying "my boss is toxic" or "I didn't get the promotion I deserved" world-weariness of envy.

This is a deeper, principled antipathy to capitalism, or elements of it, to extractive industries, to white-dominated startup culture. To something.

An articulated aversion to something more specific than "corporate life" can be a springboard into an endeavour with integrity.

But this pause for thought is necessary.

What, specifically, are you against?

You need to know this in your core.

I mentioned earlier that there was no vagueness in my mind, and the same is true of the alternative entrepreneurs I've interviewed: the nature of the itch varies, but is visceral, and can be spoken of with clarity.

If you want to be an Alt Ent, you need to know what it is you want to be an alternative to.

The marvel of the mundane

Recently I pinned member Mark Silver down for a conversation (article to follow shortly).

I've known Mark for three years, vaguely, but his projects are legion (though cohesive) and I had to be frank. I asked him, what is it you do really?

Oh, he said, familiar with people struggling to summarise a vision and impact at once historically significant and wonderfully whimsical.

"I sell badges," he said.

It's true and it's not the truth.

Mark creates community where none existed.

Put in the egoless language of the alternative entrepreneur: he builds badges.

It's the graphic designer opening a printshop that pays fair wages .
The ex-dev who starts a mobile IT support café for the elderly.
The marketer who writes letters to politicians on behalf of those with passion but no power.

These are acts of quiet rebellion. Of saying: these holes in the membrane are ones I'll stitch. These skills you taught me for your own ends, I'll repurpose for mine.

And there's something here too: alternative entrepreneurialism doesn't try and dazzle. There is a steady quietness to it. A dry humour. A release of the tension that comes from carrying the weight of corporate life's self-importance.

Built to last and adapt

Traditional entrepreneurs often chase the “exit”: the acquisition, the IPO, the big sale. Alternative entrepreneurs tend to build businesses they actually want to live in.

That means they grow slow, stay small or focus hyper-locally.

Don't mistake this for a lack of ambition.

It's about creating on a human scale. And rejecting legacy as a vanity.

It's about seeking collaboration rather than trying to conquer or even compete; making space for others means we don't try and suck all the oxygen up ourselves. Rather, we plant seeds.

Alt Ents do this not because they lack ambition but because they’ve redefined ambition (members of longer standing will remember that our original community name was Unplugged Ambition).

We don't seek the badges of merit they make available, like picking your favourite candy from a box of low grade options. We bake our own cookies.

Alt but constructive

The disruptors have been and gone. Let's get real and say disruption was but ultimately was not cool.

Air BnB, Amazon, Uber.

In the name of accessibility and value, and enabled by the bloat, incompetence and lack of imagination of self-satisfied corporates, brave and smart men remodelled industries.

But it was done at the expense of small businesses rooted in communities, of workers who believed that their adoption of harsh conditions was part somehow of a brave new world, and that their sacrifice would be rewarded with loyalty.

I don't think alternative entrepreneurs seek to disrupt anything. At least: not destroy it.

We offer new paradigms. We move beyond the trauma and anger of what we felt. We embody joy.

Both things are true: you can be new and react; you can exist without taking on the burden of dismantling what came before.

It's Global, Rooted and Old as Time

It is a great source of comfort to me that alternative entrepreneurship isn't new at all. The world of venture capital is a blink of an eye, but whilst alternative entrepreneurialism as a term and as a concept might be new to LinkedIn, indigenous economies, mutual aid societies, women’s informal trade networks and subsistence farmers have been practicing it for centuries. Millenia.

What’s fresh is recognizing the value of those models again, after the failures of the mainstream, and using the great democratisation that technology can offer to better reach, bring together and serve the communities we wish to impact.

Yes, we can use the softwares of the evil empires, the Shopify and the Stripe and the Meta, for our own good purposes.

The time is ours. And we don't need to be perfect. We just need to be better.

Is it only for the radical or idealistic?

Radical just means:

“grasping things at the root.”

And many people today are reaching for the roots...of climate change, burnout, inequality and disconnection.

So your projects don't need to be earth shattering: they need depth.

Alternative entrepreneurship isn’t utopian. This is the greatest misunderstanding. It’s deeply pragmatic. It's a response to real limitations in the mainstream economy.

It’s for:

• People who’ve aged out of hustle culture but still want to contribute.
• Parents who need flexible, purpose-aligned work.
• Tradespeople, artists, farmers, and craftspeople.
• Career changers looking for meaning, not just a salary.
• Young people who want to build a future without selling out.

You don’t need to be a radical; you just need to be curious about a different way of living and working.

You don't need to be beyond reproach in all your practices; you just need to be able to have an honest and public discourse about them.

Alternative entrepreneurship is a return to business as it could be: human, honest, embedded in context and able to sustain us financially.

It’s not for everyone. It requires a relentless honesty, enquiry and sense of being 'at odds' with the mainstream.

But for many of us, especially those who’ve been burned by the dream of the personal brand, the 10x hustle, or the startup grind, it offers a home for our values and talents.

Embrace difference.

Be an alternative.

If you offer choice, believe me: enough people will choose you.

For it's there that opportunity lies.