When people ask me how I built Inside Success—how we’ve achieved such significant yearly turnover and kept the youth consistently engaged, returning, and structured—I always tell them the same thing: it all started with identifying a problem.
Before you start, you have to understand your own “why” and your personal goals as an individual. My goal was simple: I wanted to build a community. I saw a crisis in our area where young people were being overlooked, unemployed, and manipulated into lives they didn’t want. They were being groomed into county lines, credit card fraud, and shoplifting.
But perhaps the most terrifying part was the “pandemic” of knife crime. It was a national fear that gripped our community; everyone was afraid, and the youth were caught in a cycle of violence. I saw this pain and thought, “I need to create a situation that inspires them to choose a different path.”
To solve this, I focused on three key pillars:
- Inspiration and Belonging: We used our front covers to spark hope, but we realized that the real secret is the human need for self-belonging. People want to belong to something positive.
- The “Big Issue” Model: I was deeply inspired by John Bird. He took a demographic that society thought was “worth nothing”—homeless individuals—and built a multi-million-pound organization. I looked at our community and knew we could do the same. We took a resource everyone else had written off and turned it into a positive force.
- The Individual “Why”: Most young people just want to provide for their families and do something good. We gave them the structure and the community to do that.
The Blueprint for Success
To build a community, you must first see the problem within it. Then, you create a solution, recruit people into that vision, and preach that solution until you have case studies to prove it works. This generates belief—not just in the organization, but self-belief within the youth themselves.
You must be consistent, hardworking, and maintain positive thoughts because it will be challenging. People often ask about the timeline, but there is no fixed timeline for success. This is where prayer and God become so important. You can have all the pieces in place, but things take time because there are things you need to work on within yourself first.
The biggest challenge is the “challenge of self.” You have to navigate relationships and the hits that life throws at you while maintaining faith and pushing through.
If you want to get rich, find a problem. Find the thing that scares the community, whether it’s knife crime, fraud, or unemployment, and build the solution that gives people a place to belong.
David Sonowo is the CEO of Inside Success
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