Phillip Ullmann is a passionate social entrepreneur with a mission to create business models that deliver benefits that can be measured as much by people, community and nature as by financial assets.
Phillip believes in creating workplaces that empower and encourage innovative and forward-thinking leaders. By giving them the tools and opportunities to succeed, leaders can change their own lives and the lives of the workforce as a whole. This philosophy is exemplified by Phillip’s recruitment of talented and like-minded executives who grew the Cordant Group into the UK’s second largest recruitment and services firm with a turnover of £850m and a workforce of over 100,000.
In 2017 Cordant became a social enterprise, and Phillip’s guiding principles became enshrined in the Company’s Articles of Association with pledges to cap executive pay and the company’s dividend, and the setting up of a profit-sharing plan.
In 2019 Phillip co-authored Cordant’s Social Impact Report which set out a ‘five point social strategy’ focused on improving worker’s opportunities by putting purpose before profit, and wellbeing before wealth creation. A campaign was also launched to promote and implement the Real Living Wage.
In 2020 Cordant Group was sold to Twenty20 Investors who have pledged to continue Cordant’s commitment to be a socially responsible business, and where Phillip will continue in his role as Chief Energiser.
Phillip recently set up Covenant Advisory to provide independent consulting to national and local Government and to businesses in order to develop alliances between the public and private sector for the wellbeing of the British people. Covenant’s objective is to help businesses and institutions find their purpose, transform their organisations and deliver lasting change using new methods and metrics.
Covenant Advisory is an independent consultancy with just one vision: to help business, institutions and the State start putting people and nature first, instead of focusing exclusively on profit.
Phillip Ullmann is Chief Energiser at Cordant Group PLC. Cordant is one of the largest social enterprises in the world. It provides recruitment and facility services and operates in the UK, Ireland, all over Europe, and in Australia. Dividends to shareholders are capped, as are executive salaries.
In this second episode of the series ‘Perspectives on Purpose’, Phillip Ullmann (Chief Energiser, Cordant Group and Founder of Covenant Advisory) and Lord Glasman (Labour Peer and Political Theorist) will be discussing the role of the State, its relationship with business and its obligations to citizens and society.
In this podcast with the BBC’s Tanya Beckett, Phillip Ullmann argues that purpose must be prioritised over profit and wealth redistributed more fairly. Business must reinvent itself for the benefit of people and communities, and demonstrate its ability to co-create, tackling inequality, and build a fairer society.
This paper, written by Phillip Ullmann for the Social Market Foundation, discusses the benefits of social business, and the role it can play in creating a fair and robust market economy.
