The Straight story
This article was taken from Issue 78Back in the 1980s, a clean-shaven Jonathan Straight was looking after a call centre, learning the black art of direct marketing. It became apparent that he had aptitude for making companies perform efficiently, while being a “bit of an outsider”. And although he was lured further into sales and marketing by the promise of a mobile phone and an Austin MG Maestro, he came to realise that he wanted something more.
After trawling though ads for charity jobs paying a pittance, he turned to The Green Directory for inspiration. “I remember alighting on this page and there was a little paragraph titled ‘Recycling’, and there was this statement: ‘We pay to bury our waste in holes in the ground and yet the material be bury has a value, so we pay for it twice.’ And this was the light bulb moment, the opportunity, this was a problem to go and solve, but how, and in what direction, I really didn’t know. All I knew was that if I could address this even in a small way, not only would I be doing a great social good, but I also might make some money.”
