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How (Not) To Do Business
How (Not) To Do Business episodes
- Impact Before Profit, and Still Growing: Inside a radical publisher - Pluto Press
A small publisher can’t buy paper by the warehouse-load, so it can’t price books the way the corporate houses do. Pluto Press makes up the difference another way. Some titles carry others, and when a book matters more than it is likely to sell, Pluto looks for an organisation to buy copies at a discount, which raises the print run, lowers the cost of every copy and lets the book go out at a fair price.
Its ownership was shaped by similar constraints. When Pluto needed investment in 2018, staff on publishing salaries couldn’t put money in, so the Pluto Educational Trust, a charity, invested and took a 60% stake. Three former staff hold 30%, and the current staff hold 10% through their own co-operative, with a seat on the board. The trust also lends to Pluto when the banks won’t.
Veruschka Selbach, Pluto’s managing director, joined me to talk through how that works day to day: why a split decision on a book goes back for more work rather than to a vote, why she counts long service as an asset, what the business side of a values-led publisher actually demands, and what it takes for a book to change how people think.
Watch in full on the Changing the Narrative website: https://content.changingthenarrative.media/impact-before-profit-and-still-growing-inside-a-radical-publisher-veruschka-selbach-pluto-press/
Changing the Narrative is independent and has no advertisers and no sponsors to ensure that remains so. Paid membership is what helps sustain the work we do and helps change the narrative at a time when it’s needed most – Become a member
Follow Changing the Narrative on social media:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/changingthenarrative.media/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/changing-the-narrative-media/
- BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/changingnarrative.bsky.social
In this episode
- How Pluto keeps impact-first titles viable: some books carrying others, and partner organisations buying discounted copies to raise the print run and lower the cost of every copy
- Why an independent publisher prices at the top end of the market, without the economies of scale the corporate houses have
- Staff first: equal parental leave for fathers and mothers, two months’ sick leave on full pay, a four-and-a-half-day week, and five of a team of 18 who have stayed more than 20 years
- Who owns Pluto since 2018 – a charitable trust, three former staff and a co-operative of current employees – and why it isn’t a full worker co-op
- How the biggest decisions need the agreement of every shareholder group, staff included
- The weekly meeting, open to anyone in the company, where Pluto decides which books to publish, and what happens when the room is split
- What a managing director does when she is one voice among many
- Opening a US office in Las Vegas in 2022, and bringing Lawrence & Wishart, founded in 1936, under Pluto as an imprint
- What it takes for a book to shift how people think: accessibility and timing
About the guest
Veruschka Selbach is managing director of Pluto Press, the independent publisher founded in London in 1969. She has worked in publishing for more than 20 years, mostly on the academic and trade side, after answering a newspaper ad in Cape Town, South Africa, for a marketing assistant at Oxford University Press. In 2012 she co-founded Do Sustainability with three former Earthscan colleagues, publishing short, practical books on sustainability for a business audience; it published 50 titles before it was sold in 2015. She joined Pluto as managing director in 2017, after working with the press as a consultant.
Links mentioned in this episode
- Pluto Press (London, England), the independent publisher Veruschka leads
- The structure and governance of Pluto Press, Pluto’s own explanation of how it is owned and run
- Pluto Educational Trust, the charity that holds 60% of Pluto, and the Decolonial Centre, one of its projects
- Lawrence & Wishart, founded in 1936 and now a Pluto imprint
- Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer, first published by Pluto in 1984
- Red Prepper: Building Collective Resilience in an Age of Collapse by Eric Shonkwiler
Chapters
- 00:00 – A book’s impact, found years later
- 00:47 – Companies that break convention, and succeed
- 01:07 – Impact before profit, and still growing
- 02:40 – From a newspaper ad in Cape Town to publishing
- 04:41 – Co-founding Do Sustainability after Earthscan
- 05:27 – Joining Pluto Press
- 06:04 – Taking out less than you put in
- 08:47 – Why people stay: long service as memory
- 10:10 – What sets Pluto apart: a mission that holds it to account
- 12:11 – How some books pay for others
- 14:33 – When crises bring new readers to the backlist
- 16:22 – What to do with profits from crisis-driven sales
- 17:34 – A not-for-profit in practice
- 17:56 – Who owns Pluto: a trust, former staff and the team
- 19:45 – Why not a full worker co-op?
- 20:58 – The board, and how the biggest decisions are made
- 22:28 – Why slower decisions are worth it
- 23:54 – Growing by acquisition: Lawrence & Wishart
- 25:44 – Making your own luck
- 27:53 – The spreadsheets behind the mission
- 30:43 – Passion, creativity and partnerships
- 33:40 – Sharing without money
- 34:22 – How a book gets published at Pluto
- 37:13 – When the room is split: the bring back
- 38:19 – What a managing director does
- 39:58 – Opening a US office in Las Vegas
- 43:24 – One editorial team across two continents
- 44:01 – US demand for books on mutual aid and care
- 45:29 – What it takes for an idea to change minds
- 47:02 – Be realistic, then prove the alternative works
- 48:22 – Building the case for something better
50 min - Neighbourhood Care: The nursing model where better care costs less - Buurtzorg
A patient in a fragmented home care system can have twenty or thirty different people come through the front door in a month, each delivering one timed task from a list. Buurtzorg sends one nurse, who does whatever that person needs – and whose job includes teaching them to need less of it.
That inversion is the model. Jos de Blok started it in 2006 with a single team and nobody above them. It now runs around nine hundred teams of ten to twelve nurses, who hire their own colleagues, run their own rounds and split in two when they outgrow the neighbourhood. There are still no managers. The first objection it met was that nurses qualified to work that way would cost more – what happened instead was that doctors started sending Buurtzorg the most complex patients they had, because they trusted the nurses with them.
Changing the Narrative is independent and has no advertisers and no sponsors to ensure that remains so. Paid membership is what helps sustain the work we do and help change the narrative at a time when it’s needed most -https://changingthenarrative.media/support
In this episode
• How home care was reorganised into billable products and tasks, and why that left patients more dependent rather than less
• What a Buurtzorg team actually is: ten to twelve nurses, one neighbourhood, no manager
• Why Jos argues that doing the right thing costs the system less rather than more
• The two objections the model met first – that higher-qualified nurses would be more expensive, and that it only took the simple cases
• Growth without marketing, and teams that split like cells once they reach twelve
• April 2016, when around 2,400 domestic care workers moved across and left their managers behind
• What happens when a team can’t resolve something on its own, and where the coaches come in
• Taking the model abroad – Taiwan, China and the turn towards primary care – and what “humanity over bureaucracy” means in practice
About the guest
Jos de Blok is the founder of Buurtzorg and a community nurse by training. He started a business-school degree, left it, and qualified as a nurse instead, working as a nurse for fourteen years before moving into management as a director in Dutch home care. He founded Buurtzorg in 2006 with a single team; it now runs around nine hundred neighbourhood nursing teams with no managers, alongside arms for mental health (Buurtzorg T), youth care (Buurtzorg Jong) and domestic care, and he puts its turnover at around €600 million.
Links mentioned in this episode
Buurtzorg (Almelo, Netherlands), the neighbourhood nursing organisation Jos founded in 2006: https://www.buurtzorgnederland.com/Buurtzorg International, which supports the model outside the Netherlands: https://www.buurtzorg.com/
Buurtzorg in Taiwan, the partner organisation marking its tenth year: https://www.buurtzorg.com/buurtzorg-in-taiwan/
The World Health Organization on primary health care: https://www.who.int/health-topics/primary-health-care
Full show notes and the archive: https://content.changingthenarrative.media/corporation-tax-how-you-know-if-a-company-is-good-or-bad-regardless-of-its-size
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:13 Meeting Jos: from business school to the nursing round
03:14 Why he built something different: care going “industrial”
06:33 When care became a product: fragmentation and dependency
10:10 The first steps: a model with every answer, and a five-year plan
12:19 What Buurtzorg is: neighbourhood nursing, and how a team runs
15:56 Why self-organisation: trust, autonomy and learning from experience
20:34 Overcoming resistance: “it’ll cost more” and “only the simple cases”
26:53 A €600m organisation on a strikingly simple financial system
27:05 Growth without marketing: teams that split like cells
29:36 The 2016 takeover: 2,400 workers leave their managers behind
32:19 When teams struggle: coaches and the “self-cleaning” process
35:53 Going global: Taiwan, China and the turn to primary care
39:44 Can it work anywhere? Demography, prevention and the WHO
42:45 The takeaway: humanity over bureaucracy
43:45 Closing reflections and outro
46 min - Making locally-grown organic food more accessible - Unicorn Grocery
Unicorn is a wholefood supermarket in Manchester, UK, owned by the roughly 50 people who work there. Every member is a director, and every member is paid the same hourly wage, whatever job they do. Two-thirds of what it sells is organic, including all the fresh fruit and veg, and it chalks its own prices up on the shop wall next to Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons’ and Asda’s so customers can check the gap for themselves. Thirty years on, it’s still trading.
My guests are Debbie and Kellie, two of Unicorn’s worker-owners.
We get into how they hold those prices where they are; the money the shop gives away each year, worked out from its wage bill rather than its profit and taken out of takings before profit is counted; a no-strings grants fund for the UK
farms they buy from; the farmland they bought and the farming that didn’t work; why they have never opened a second shop and published a free guide instead; and why “owner” turned out to be the wrong word for what they are.Show notes, links and the full archive: https://content.changingthenarrative.media/making-locally-grown-organic-food-more-accessible
Unicorn Grocery - https://www.unicorn-grocery.coop/
Grow a Grocery, Unicorn’s free guide to starting a wholefood co-operative -
https://www.unicorn-grocery.coop/about-us/grow-your-own-grocery/The Kindling Trust and Kindling Farm - https://kindling.org.uk/
How (Not) To Do Business is from Changing the Narrative - a show about companies breaking convention on how they’re structured and run, and how they engage with their communities. It’s member-funded and ad-free. New episodes every second Tuesday.
Chapters
00:00 The 1% and 4% funds
00:39 How Not to Do Business
00:59 A whole food supermarket that competes on price
02:15 Meet Debbie and Kellie
03:35 The Solidarity Fund
04:46 How they both ended up at Unicorn
07:21 What a co-op gives you that a normal job doesn’t
09:48 From weekly meetings to sociocracy
14:02 What Unicorn actually is
16:22 Flat pay, no hierarchy, low overheads
20:43 Growers, climate and the Growers Fund
25:26 How this differs from a supermarket
27:43 Is organic really more expensive?
28:41 Price boards and word of mouth
30:31 Why there’s only one Unicorn
36:29 Growth to what end?
38:07 Stewards, not owners
40:25 Why the language changed — and shrinking back from 75 members
42:48 Recruiting for a co-op
47:19 Raising money from customers: loan stock
52:20 The farm: what worked and what didn’t
58:37 Is the UK hostile to worker co-ops?
1:02:47 What happened after the co-op heyday
1:04:12 The one thing to take away
1:06:49 Close
1 hr 8 min - Outlandish - The tech agency with no boss and no shareholders
Outlandish is a digital agency in Finsbury Park, London with no boss and no shareholders - a worker co-operative, owned and run by the people who do the work, that puts its profits into social projects like the community workspace Space4.
In this episode Chris spoke with two of its member-owners, Natasha Natarajan and Maddy Neghabian, about running a business by consent rather than hierarchy, and about a strange new problem: now that “it’s almost become mainstream to be good,” how do you explain why a genuinely democratic model is different? We get into surviving a shrinking market and the arrival of AI on their own terms, why co-ops remain so hard to fund, and the cultural barrier beneath it all - a business world still built around the lone entrepreneur. As they put it, “we take the risk together and we support each other.”
Listen and browse the full archive at https://content.changingthenarrative.media
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:43 Exploring Outlandish’s mission and services
04:18 What sets Outlandish apart?
05:52 Outlandish’s unique selling point
09:13 Challenges in the co-op sector
11:59 Adapting to AI in the workplace
13:46 Maintaining cooperative values
16:41 The two-tiered system of membership
21:29 Funding challenges and the co-op model
25:30 The struggles of co-ops in a competitive landscape
29:18 Fostering collaboration and new business models
31:59 Co-op vs conventional business experience
34:56 Challenging conventional business narratives
35:23 Promoting co-op awareness and education
Outlandish: https://outlandish.com/
Space4: https://space4.tech/
Co-operatives UK: https://www.uk.coop/
CoTech: https://coops.tech/
New episodes of How (Not) To Do Business are available every second Tuesday. If you’d like to support the show, please consider becoming a paying member.
41 min - Calverts - How a worker co-op outlasted the collapse of London's print trade
This week on How (Not) To Do Business, Chris King sits down with Cherry Haynes and Siôn Whellens of Calverts, the East London design and print co-operative founded in 1977. Calverts has no managers and complete pay parity — everyone earns the same — and it has outlasted almost every other printer in London.
Cherry and Siôn explain why the co-op is happy to hire people who are sceptical of co-ops rather than true believers, how it survived the collapse of London’s print industry by refusing to compete on price, and why they care more about who controls a business than who owns it. Along the way: a 16-year average staff retention, what happens when someone has to leave a place with no line managers, the difference between co-operatives and Employee Ownership Trusts, and practical first steps for anyone thinking about starting one.
Chapters:
00:00 Show introduction
01:14 Introducing Calverts
02:27 How Calverts works as a co-op
03:07 Who they hire — and why
06:56 Surviving London’s declining print industry
09:37 How the culture has changed
12:57 Staff retention and tough decisions
17:35 Learning from other co-operatives
20:17 Managing informal hierarchies
23:00 New generations and systemic change
25:54 Barriers to wider co-op adoption
31:02 Hope and agency in the face of systemic change
35:19 Co-ops vs Employee Ownership Trusts
40:57 How to get started
44:13 The business myth Calverts challenges
45:44 Further resources
Resources mentioned:
Calverts - https://www.calverts.coop/
workers.coop (Worker Co-op Federation) - https://www.workers.coop/
Stir to Action - https://www.stirtoaction.com/
Centre for Democratic Business / 21st Century Social Clubs - https://www.democraticbusiness.org/
CoTech (tech co-ops network) and forum - https://www.coops.tech/ / https://community.coops.tech/
Find this episode and the full archive at content.changingthenarrative.media, where you can become a member and sign up for the newsletter.
50 min - Suma - Inside Europe's biggest equal pay workers' co-operative
Discover how Suma, the Europe’s largest equal pay worker-owned co-operative, challenges conventional business paradigms and proves that ethical, egalitarian practices can sustain a thriving enterprise. This deep dive explores their innovative approach to ownership, pay equity, decision-making, and resilience in a capitalist world.
This episode offers practical insights into building sustainable, ethical workplaces that defy traditional hierarchies. Whether you’re a business leader, entrepreneur, or activist, understanding Suma’s approach can spark ideas about reimagining work for fairness, resilience, and community benefit.
Subscribe and Support: https://content.changingthenarrative.media
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/changingnarrative.bsky.social
RESOURCES & LINKS
Suma: https://www.suma.coop
workers.coop: https://www.workers.coop
PunchCard Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@workerscoop
The Hive Cafe Huddersfield: https://hivecommunity.org.uk
Guest: Beau Bulman
Host/Creator: Chris King
MAIN INSIGHTS INCLUDE
Suma’s origins in the late 1970s countercultural movement, emphasising community and vegetarian ideals.
The core principle of equal pay regardless of role, tenure, or hierarchy
How a decentralised, democratic decision-making process works at scale with 250+ members
Recruitment practices focused on shared values and work ethic, not just skills
The internal and external barriers to adopting models like Suma’s in traditional businesses
The impact of culture and collective responsibility on organisational resilience
Strategies for integrating democratic principles into conventional business structures
The importance of transparency, feedback, and collective accountability
Challenges related to growth, decision-making speed, and geographic autonomy
How worker cooperatives like Suma can influence wider societal narratives about work and ownership
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction
03:07 What is Suma
09:05 The source of Suma’s resilience
10:59 How to recruit for the right people
14:08 Are there opportunities for the older and less able?
16:20 Adaptability and Resilience in Operations
17:23 Attracting Specialists in a Cooperative Model
21:01 The Impact of Equal Pay on Workplace Culture
23:09 Feedback Mechanisms and Performance Reviews
25:44 Informal Hierarchies and Team Accountability
28:46 Challenges of Direct Democracy in Business
31:30 Balancing Autonomy and Decision-Making
33:34 Implementing Sociocracy and Team Autonomy
35:38 Empowering Workers and Redefining Roles
39:12 Barriers to Egalitarian Workplaces
43:37 Challenging Traditional Business Narratives
44:36 Other co-op-related organisations to explore
49 min
About How (Not) To Do Business
From the publisher's feed
Stories of breaking convention. Practitioner stories from worker co-operatives and other businesses run on democratic, egalitarian lines — how the model works, and the challenges they face.