Jennifer Sieg sits down with Chris Caffrey, the founder of London’s newest entrepreneur members clubs questioning the status quo.
Starting a business can seem like climbing a mountain, and just like climbing a mountain, it’s impossible to succeed without the right support in place.
When Chris Caffrey launched an entrepreneur community, now known as Legacy Club, from his sofa in 2021, he set out with a simple goal: to help entrepreneurs who needed it.
Caffrey set out to make a network of networks (what he likes to call a club without a home) for entrepreneurs, both old and new.
Today, ‘Legacy Club’ members can be found within four leading private clubs and 10 separate venues throughout London. They work with over 40 partners to access the services they might need.
“We’ve reverse-engineered the members’ club, which nobody else would ever have done,” he says.
How a ‘club without a home’ works
Caffrey, like many budding entrepreneurs, cringed at the idea of being stuck in a room full of people he didn’t know or speaking on stage in front of a mass audience.
Why aren’t entrepreneurs able to choose where and who they want to spend their time with when it comes to the networking events they are paying big money for?
Caffrey skipped over the hassle of raising start-up capital to create his own resources and venue and decided to use what was already available, making it accessible all in one place.
It’s a quite common entrepreneurial trait, actually. If you don’t have the product you want to offer, you might as well partner with someone who does.
But the one thing he believes that’s made it all possible? Putting his passion for people first.
“Our members are the bricks and mortar that make it stand,” he says.
Our members are the bricks and mortar that make it stand.
Chris Caffrey
“We have built and continue to build a community of some of the best entrepreneurs and business leaders in the UK, with the aim of connecting them through our events for them to share challenges, do business together, and celebrate success together.”
You might be wondering why someone would decide to start up yet another members’ club within a city that’s already full of some of the best – especially when the pandemic took its toll on the industry as a whole – but the timing and unique approach seemed to work in Caffrey’s favour.
“People had been confined for so long that they really needed that outlet and they needed a shoulder to lean on, someone to put their arm around, someone to elevate them,” he says.
“We went live in July of 2021 and it was just an explosion of applications for membership because we were doing something different – we were telling people to come to us as an individual, don’t come to us as your business.”
‘Success is a sh*t teacher’
Caffrey spent 25 years working in the travel and hospitality industry before taking the leap into entrepreneurship – and he laughs as he tells me it was a pretty foreign experience.
“It [entrepreneurship] was something that was never in my vocabulary, it was never in my realm, nobody in my family ran businesses,” he says.
“I did have my own coffee business once… and in the end, it failed because I didn’t know what I was doing, but that, if anything, gave me that drive to make sure that other entrepreneurs don’t fail just because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Failing is a part of the journey for some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, Caffrey says, and he believes anyone in the industry should feel the same.
How would you ever learn the right way if you’ve never known the wrong way in the first place?
Nevertheless, Caffrey took his lessons and applied them to himself and the rest of the community, first with a group of 60 online members and now to over 600 in just under two years.
“We have helped our members raise over £70m in investment for their companies,” he says.
It’s these little milestones, he says, that will help you get through the hardest of times.
Now, having a re-branding partnership underway, Caffrey hopes to bring Legacy Club to even more locations and cities across the UK.
After all, there can never be too many ways to lift entrepreneurs up during the darkest of times, can there?
CV
Name: Chris Caffrey
Company: Legacy Club & Leave a Legacy Podcast (Spotify)
Founded: 2021
Staff: 3
Title: Founder
Age: 43
Born: London
Lives: Essex (Loughton)
Studied: Leisure & Tourism
Talents: Connector, Speaker and Collaborator
Motto: Do Good, Do Well / Success is a sh*t teacher
Most known for: Creating London’s first of its kind and most in-demand, entrepreneur community. Although people approach me thinking they know me as they’ve seen my Linkedin content.
First ambition: Become the go-to support network for startups and scaling up founders.
Favourite book: Million Little Pieces by James Frey.
