A charitable company that buys good businesses and locks half their profits to public benefit.
Not as a pledge. As a clause in the constitution that no future board, member or founder can quietly amend.
The second half is the point. Every business acquired increases the capacity to acquire, which increases the funding to programmes, year after year. Ordinary philanthropy spends a pool. This one grows a base.
An engine, not a fund.
Global Collective Enterprise Australia is being established as a charitable holding company. It acquires established, profitable Australian businesses and holds them permanently — never resold, never asset-stripped, never loaded with debt.
Half of what those businesses earn funds evidence-based social programmes. The other half buys the next business.
The structure is not new. Bosch, Carl Zeiss, Novo Nordisk, Wellcome and Patagonia are each owned by a foundation or trust on the same principle — internationally known as steward-ownership. What is new is building it at scale in Australia, and pointing it deliberately at social outcomes from the first day rather than the fiftieth year.
Good businesses with nowhere to go
Tens of thousands of profitable Australian businesses are owned by people in their sixties and seventies with no succession plan. Their realistic options are a private equity buyer, a trade aggregator, or winding up. Many trust none of them with the staff who built the place.
Philanthropy that never compounds
Grant funding is finite, annual and contested. Charities spend an enormous share of their capacity raising money rather than doing the work, and next year they start again from zero. Nothing accumulates.
Each problem is the other's answer. A business that needs a permanent home becomes a permanent source of funding.
Tax is the whole advantage.
A charitable owner endorsed as income tax exempt does not lose company tax from its retained earnings. A commercial acquirer does — every year, permanently, from the same operating profit.
That single structural fact means GCE can pay a fair price for a business, fund social programmes, and still out-accumulate a private buyer holding the identical asset. Over a long hold the difference does not add. It compounds.
And it compounds twice: the tax that never leaves also buys the next acquisition, which earns, which buys the one after.
31 businesses held
23 businesses held
Illustrative modelling only. One representative business — $600,000 EBITDA, acquired at 3.5× on vendor terms — held by two owners with identical operations and identical reinvestment policy. The only variable is tax. Assumptions are conservative: 2% organic growth, a cap of three acquisitions a year, and no leverage beyond vendor finance. The full model is available to serious enquirers, and its tax treatment is subject to professional verification.
What exists, and what doesn't.
Most organisations publish this only once it flatters them. We would rather you knew now.
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Model and structure designed | Complete |
| Charter drafted and published | Complete |
| Financial model built and tested | Complete |
| Legal counsel engaged | In progress |
| Founding directors appointed | In progress |
| Incorporated with ASIC | Not yet |
| Registered with the ACNC | Not yet |
| Chair appointed | Not yet |
| First business acquired | Not yet |
Four people, and one good business.
A lawyer who will help us build the structure. Three founding directors — commercial, governance, operating. A chair. And, in time, one retiring owner who would rather their life's work funded something than simply changed hands.
How a charity comes to own operating businesses.
The structure, the economics, and the mechanism that keeps the allocation from ever being softened.
Three layers, deliberately.
Trading risk sits in the corporate chain. The charity stays clean. Each acquired business is ring-fenced from the others, so a failure in one cannot reach the rest.
The holding company can borrow, give warranties and take on vendor finance without ever putting the charity's registration or its assets at risk.
Why the allocation holds.
Good intentions decay. Boards change, pressure arrives, and the first year cash is tight somebody proposes that thirty-seventy would be more prudent just for a while. Only structure survives that conversation.
No Australian constitution can be made literally unamendable. What can be built is a set of hurdles high enough that amendment is impractical and publicly indefensible:
- Placement in the objectsThe allocation sits in the objects clause, not in a general provision. Amending objects carries a higher legal bar and triggers regulatory notification.
- Unanimity and supermajorityA unanimous resolution of every director then in office, plus a special resolution of members.
- A guardian memberAn independent holder whose written consent is required for any change — the Australian analogue of the golden share used internationally to protect steward-owned companies.
- Published accountsA binding obligation to publish the split every year in audited statements. Sunlight is the cheapest enforcement there is.
In formation. These provisions are drafted and awaiting settlement by charity counsel. Nothing on this page should be read as a completed legal position.
Deliberately unglamorous.
The businesses that suit this structure best are the ones nobody writes about.
Revenue between $1.5m and $5m. EBITDA between $400,000 and $1m. Profitable for at least five years. Low capital intensity, recurring or contracted revenue, non-cyclical. Crucially — not dependent on the owner personally, with a second-in-command who can step up.
No turnarounds. No businesses dependent on a single government funding programme. And never gambling, tobacco, weapons, predatory lending or fossil fuel extraction — we will not acquire the causes of the harms our programmes exist to address.
The three questions we get asked.
"That's unfair to taxpaying businesses."
The profits are legally locked to public benefit and cannot be privatised by anyone. Staff, suppliers and vendors are paid market rates throughout. This is the principle already operating at Bosch, Zeiss, Novo Nordisk and Wellcome — long-established, not a loophole.
"Who would run a capped business?"
The cap applies to owners' distributions, not compensation. Managers receive market salaries and performance bonuses on ordinary commercial terms. This is written into the Charter so that it is never a surprise and never quietly eroded.
"Why would anyone sell to you?"
For cash alone, they wouldn't — private equity pays more. They sell for succession: the name kept, the staff kept, no debt-loading, no resale, and their business permanently funding a programme that carries their name.
You built something. Someone has to take it on.
If you are weighing what happens to your business when you stop, this page is the whole proposition.
Three doors, and none of them good.
Sell to private equity and you will likely get the best price. You will also watch the business get renamed, restructured, loaded with debt to fund the next deal, and sold again in five years to someone you will never meet.
Sell to a trade aggregator and it becomes a regional branch. The head office moves, the brand disappears, and the people who have been with you twenty years report to a system.
Wind it up and it is simply gone — along with every job in it.
Most owners we speak to are not primarily trying to maximise the number. They are trying to avoid all three of those outcomes and have not found a fourth.
The fourth door, in writing.
These are not preferences. They go into the sale agreement and into our Charter, and they bind every future board.
- We will never sell it.GCE acquires to hold, permanently. Your business does not become an asset that gets traded again.
- We will not load it with debt.Your balance sheet will never be used to finance our next acquisition.
- We will not strip its assets.Property, plant and reserves stay with the business that earned them.
- We will keep its name and its place.The identity, the brand and the location stay — unless the people in it decide otherwise.
- We will not cut staff on entry.We buy businesses that work. We do not buy them in order to reduce them.
- We will honour its commitments.To your people, your customers and your suppliers.
- We will name the programme.Your business is permanently linked to the social programme its earnings fund. Your name goes on it, if you want it to.
Structured to be possible, not just principled.
Vendor terms. A deposit at completion, with the balance seller-financed over five to seven years and paid out of the business's own cash flow. This is how a charitable buyer can transact at all — and it means you retain a direct interest in the handover going well.
Part gift, part sale. Many owners choose to gift a portion of the value rather than sell all of it. Where deductible gift recipient endorsement is available, that portion may carry a tax deduction. It also materially improves the funding the business generates for its programme.
A real handover. We are not buying a job. We need a second-in-command who can run it, and we will want you available for a transition period on terms that suit you.
Tax treatment varies with circumstances. Nothing here is tax or financial advice. Any structure would be settled between your advisers and ours.
If any of this sounds like your situation
We are pre-incorporation and honest about it — a first transaction is realistically twelve to twenty-four months away. But these conversations take that long anyway, and the earlier we start the better the outcome. There is no obligation and no broker involved.
What we will do, and what we will never do.
A plain statement anyone can read and hold us to. It is published deliberately — its power is that it is public.
Half of everything we earn funds social programmes. Half acquires further businesses so that next year's half is larger. This split is written into our constitution and cannot be changed by any board, any member, or any founder.
We publish the figures annually, audited.
- Market pay.The profit cap applies to owners' distributions, not to wages. Nobody is asked to take less because the work is worthy.
- Real incentives.Managers receive performance bonuses on the same commercial terms they would receive anywhere else.
- Operational independence.GCE sets the ownership terms. It does not run your business from a head office.
- Honest conditions.No unpaid overtime culture. The mission is never used as leverage.
- Full financial transparency.Audited accounts published every year, including the allocation split and every programme funded.
- Independent programme selection.Programmes are chosen by an independent panel against published criteria — not by the board, and not by the founder.
- Evidence, not intuition.We fund programmes with demonstrated outcomes, and we fund them long enough for outcomes to occur.
- No political donations. Ever.No party, no candidate, no campaign, in any country, under any circumstances.
- Nobody enriches themselves.No director, member or founder may take private financial benefit from GCE beyond reasonable, disclosed remuneration for work actually performed.
Gambling. Tobacco. Weapons. Predatory lending. Fossil fuel extraction.
Or any business whose activity causes the harms our programmes exist to address. There is no price at which this becomes negotiable.
That we are judged on the numbers, not the argument. That the first line of our annual report is the amount we moved — not the change we intend.
Early, unfunded, and specific about it.
An organisation asking people to take it seriously should be precise about what it has and has not done.
What has to happen, in order.
| Stage | Status |
|---|---|
| Charitable objects drafted Purposes suitable for ACNC registration, given the commercial activity | Complete |
| Charter written and published The public commitments, in plain English | Complete |
| Financial model built Fifteen-year projection, tested against a taxed comparator | Complete |
| Charity counsel engaged To settle the constitution and the entrenchment provisions | Seeking |
| Three founding directors Commercial and M&A · charity governance · operating experience | Seeking |
| Incorporation and ACNC registration Company limited by guarantee, then charity registration and tax endorsement | Follows counsel |
| Chair appointed Someone with standing in Australian business. Not the founder. | Not yet |
| First acquisition One good business. Discipline over speed. | 12–24 months |
Three specific asks.
A charity lawyer
Three scoped questions: charitable objects for ACNC registration, entrenchment of the allocation, and the charity-subsidiary structure. Pro bono if possible — a defined matter with a defined deliverable, not an open-ended relationship.
Three founding directors
Six meetings a year, an eighteen-month initial term, unpaid, with directors' insurance in place before the first meeting. We are looking for people who will tell us what is wrong with this, not people who will agree.
A chair who is not the founder
Someone whose standing in Australian business causes a broker to return a call. We would rather wait twelve months for the right person than fill the seat next month.
Graham Davies
I began this because I could not find a good answer to a simple question: why does structural change stay out of reach even when the people involved genuinely want it? The conclusion I reached is that the problem is not intent. It is that capital compounds and goodwill does not.
So the intervention has to be at the level of capital.
What I am not. I am not an M&A professional, a charity lawyer, or an experienced fund manager. That is precisely why I am recruiting a board rather than proceeding alone, and why the first thing I am looking for is people who know more than I do about the parts I don't.
What I will not do. Take a salary from this before it is earning, take any private benefit from it at any point, or chair it. Those constraints are in the Charter for a reason.
Start a conversation.
Every enquiry goes directly to the founder. No form fields, no autoresponder, no mailing list.
Thinking about succession
A private, unhurried conversation with no obligation and no broker. Tell us roughly what the business does and what you are trying to protect. We will tell you honestly whether it is a fit.
Pro bono or advisory
Three scoped questions on objects, entrenchment and structure. We will send the draft Charter, the draft objects and the establishment plan before any meeting.
Founding board
We will be direct about the risk, the stage and the commitment. If you think the model is flawed, that is a conversation we particularly want to have.
Establishment capital
The immediate requirement is small, specific and priced. The full fifteen-year model, with every assumption exposed, is available on request.
conversation@collectiveenterprise.org
Graham Davies, Founder · Melbourne, Victoria
Global Collective Enterprise Australia is in formation. It is not yet incorporated, not yet registered as a charity, and holds no funds. Nothing on this site is an offer of securities, an invitation to invest, or legal, tax or financial advice.