How to Step Out - Your guide to leading a mutual or social enterprise spin out from the public sector

This book is for those people in the UK public sector who have been thinking about leading a new public sector social enterprise or mutual - but so far haven't taken the plunge.

Watch the launch video
It brings to life on the page the people who are doing this already - their thoughts, fears, hopes, views and advice so that you feel properly equipped for the journey ahead, should you take it, by setting out some practical guidance and opening up a community of people who share your vision.

This is a practical handbook for people in the public sector who want to find a new way to express public sector values. This is also very much a book for those in public services charged with finding the best services on which to spend public money. The book will, I hope, stimulate not only direct procurement
from this kind of provider - but also encourage commissioners inside public services to look at the residual services provided in-house and examine their potential to be commissioned as
social enterprises, mutuals or joint venture partnerships.

This book is, in part, making a case for a different future by laying out a different approach - that of the spun-out, or stepped-out public service. To write it, Mark Griffiths and I were given
innumerable hours of busy people's time - people who have done this, who want to share what
they now know and put their name against their comments. This book is written as much by these trailblazers as by ourselves. While many publications talk about public services and social enterprise, I wanted to write a
book that explains social enterprise as it is being done today, in the 2010s, through the voices and experiences of those in the vanguard. There is much to be learned from this, not just by
those who might want to follow in their footsteps, but also by opinion-formers and public intellectuals, who, so far, have remained either pro-existing public services or pro-privatisation.