In 2021, Upshot became an independent Community Interest Company. 
Upshot had grown within the Football Foundation, where we benefited from the systems, support and security of a much larger organisation. Independence meant taking responsibility for everything ourselves: the technology, the team, the finances, the clients and the purpose behind the work. 
I knew it was exciting. I also knew it was a risk. There was no guarantee it would succeed. 
Five years later, we’re supporting more than 1,800 organisations across over 30 countries. We’ve grown our team, expanded well beyond our origins in sport and developed a deeper offer around monitoring, evaluation and learning. 
We have achieved a lot. We’ve also made mistakes, changed our minds and faced some genuinely difficult decisions. 
Purpose-led doesn't mean every decision has an obvious right answer. We constantly balance mission and margin. Keep services accessible, or pay people properly? Say yes to income, or say no to bad-fit work? Invest in technology, the team or client support? 
This stuff is hard. 
Over the past few months we’ve been reflecting on our journey and five lessons stand out. 

We're proud to be a Community Interest Company. It anchors us in why we exist and who we serve. 
Upshot is a CIC limited by guarantee. We have no shareholders and no private owners. Nobody holds a stake they can sell for personal gain. We lock our assets for community benefit and reinvest every surplus in the organisation and its purpose. 
We are completely non-profit. Nobody can build up Upshot and sell it to get rich. 
That matters to us, and to our clients. They trust us for how we work, not just what our technology does. They know we're not trying to extract the maximum money from the organisations we support. 
But this structure limits us too. 
We compete with commercial providers that raise significant investment, spend fast and chase growth in ways we simply can't match. We can't offer equity or promise a financial return. That makes scaling slower and harder than it would be for a conventional technology business. 
There are benefits too. As a non-profit, we can win grants that fund work the market alone wouldn't. 
We haven't relied heavily on grant funding, but when we win it, it's a real gift. It lets us improve our offer, test new approaches and support far more charities and non-profits than we could alone. 
This type of funding has strengthened our work and extended our support far beyond what we could manage on our own. 
We want more partnerships like this - not to become dependent on grants, but because earned income combined with purposeful funding achieves more than either could alone. 
The challenge for the next five years: grow without losing what makes Upshot different. That's not always the easiest route. It's the one that feels right. 

The non-profit sector doesn’t always feel comfortable talking openly about money, growth and profit. 
But purpose without financial sustainability is fragile. 
Without enough income, we can't pay our team properly, improve the platform, deliver good support or invest in the future. At the same time, chasing income at any cost would undermine the reason Upshot exists. 
This tension shows up in real decisions. Keep pricing accessible, or charge enough to deliver a good service? Support a struggling client, or protect a small team from unlimited unpaid work? Invest in a new idea, or spend that money elsewhere? 
As CEO, I feel the weight of those choices. Financial decisions are never just numbers on a spreadsheet. They affect people's jobs, workloads, opportunities and confidence in the future. 
I have learned that commercial confidence is not a betrayal of our mission. It is part of protecting it. 
The goal isn't maximum profit. It's a financially resilient organisation that can keep serving the social impact sector, make long-term decisions and reinvest success into greater impact.

In a business's early years, saying no is hard. 
Every prospect feels important. Every contract creates income. Turning down work feels reckless when you're responsible for a team and a growing organisation. 
But bad-fit work is expensive for everyone. 
Sometimes an organisation wants technology before it knows what to measure. Sometimes it needs more internal capacity than any system can provide. Sometimes the expectations, budget and timescale simply don't align. 
When that happens, the client doesn't get the value it expected, and our team burns disproportionate time trying to rescue something that was never set up to succeed. 
Some of the hardest decisions are the ones where the income would be useful, but we know in our gut that the work isn't right. 
We've become much better at asking difficult questions earlier. What problem are you actually trying to solve? Who will use the information? Does your team have the capacity to do this well? Is Upshot genuinely the right partner? 
Being honest about fit is part of being purpose-led. It respects an organisation's time and money, protects our team and gives the work its best chance of succeeding. 
Sometimes the most responsible answer we can give is: no. 

This may sound strange from a technology CEO in the age of AI, but a system can't decide what matters. People do. 
Technology makes it easier to collect, manage, analyse and report information. It saves time, improves consistency and reveals patterns we might otherwise miss. 
But it can't decide which questions are worth asking. It can't build a meaningful impact framework for an organisation that hasn't agreed what change it wants. And it can't turn a dashboard into a better decision on its own. 
That takes judgement, curiosity and context — and the confidence to question what the data appears to say, and to listen to the people whose experiences sit behind the numbers. 
That's why Upshot has moved beyond being just a platform for collecting and reporting data. Our clients also need the skills, confidence and space to interpret information and use it. 
The sector doesn't need more data for its own sake. Most organisations already collect plenty. The bigger opportunity is helping them make better use of what they have. 
That's why insight and learning sit at the centre of our new strategy. 

As Upshot has become more international, I've grown wary of any approach that assumes there is one correct path to better impact measurement. 
Organisations operate in very different environments. They have different resources, languages, reporting requirements, levels of digital access and relationships with the communities they serve. 
An approach that works for a national funder in the UK may be completely wrong for a small community organisation in South Africa. Even organisations in the same place and sector can have very different starting points. 
We cannot drag organisations towards readiness, and we should not try. 
Our role is to understand where an organisation is, help it identify the next useful step and provide the right balance of technology, expertise, challenge and encouragement. 
That might mean introducing a new system. It might mean simplifying an existing framework, asking fewer questions or helping a team use the information it already collects on Excel. 
Progress doesn't always mean collecting more data. Sometimes it means stopping, reflecting and being brave enough to change what you do. 
This has shaped a core principle of our strategy: scaling with depth. We want to support more organisations — and deepen the quality and usefulness of their impact practice as we grow. 

The first five years of independence were about proving that Upshot could stand on its own. 
The next three are about being clearer and more ambitious about the role we want to play, with our emerging strategic vision: 

By 2029, we want Upshot to be recognised as a trusted impact and insight specialist for organisations and funders driving social change. We will combine accessible technology with the monitoring, evaluation and learning expertise of our team, helping leaders make better decisions about their programmes, investments and impact. 

We’ve been thinking about our strategy like a tree. 
Commercial sustainability forms the roots. Without strong roots, nothing else can grow. 
Insight and learning form the trunk, providing the core of what we offer. 
Scale with depth forms the branches — reaching more organisations without losing the quality and human support that make the work valuable. 
Community and sector leadership form the canopy, reflecting our responsibility to contribute beyond our own clients and contracts. 
At the top is the outcome we ultimately care about: better decisions, stronger organisations and greater social impact. 
This doesn't mean abandoning what has brought us here. We will continue helping organisations collect, manage and report their data well. But we will place much more emphasis on what happens next: how information becomes insight, how insight becomes action and how organisations learn and improve. 
Impact measurement is never only technical. It is strategic, human and ethical. Done well, it helps organisations understand what is working, confront what is not and make better choices for the people they serve. 
I am incredibly grateful to the team, board members, clients, partners, funders and critical friends who have helped Upshot reach this point. Building an independent organisation has been harder, messier and more rewarding than I could have anticipated five years ago. 
We have made decisions that worked and others that didn't. We have worried about money while trying not to let money become the only measure of success. We have had to grow up as an organisation without losing the optimism and sense of purpose that led us here. 
That balancing act will not disappear. If anything, it will become more important as we grow. 
The next chapter is not simply about making Upshot bigger. It is about making it stronger, more useful and more capable of creating value for the sector. 
And doing that without losing sight of who we are here to serve.