When something simple makes people squint

AON: THE CALL songwriter and producer, David Sheret

I’ve been part of building small businesses in the offshore energy sector, I’ve sat in boardrooms of all shapes and sizes, where complexity is often a kind of currency, and I’ve learned to live with the fact that hard problems rarely come with neat answers. Yet the most fulfilling journey I’ve ever been on, our social compact at SEO, Finn Moray, is built on an idea so straightforward that it sometimes seems to confuse people more than it should. So I thought I’d share my thoughts on why this is.

Finn Moray is this. I write songs about Scotland. We produce them and send them out there, in this case as a two part album called AON, for people to hear and hopefully enjoy. That’s called THE CALL. We then find talent from the regions the songs were written about to sing them and perform them live. That’s called THE GATHERING. We drive a significant part of net profits back into the regions the songs, and the people behind them, come from, and we’ll repeat the process with the next album.

That’s it.

Not a loophole, not a PR wrapper, not a venture in costume. A simple, transparent loop of culture, talent, and value returning to source.

And yet, when you say it out loud, you can see the mental friction in people’s faces. Some tilt their heads. They ask the same questions, in different accents.

Is it because it’s different to what you’re known for.

Is there a catch.

Is it actually not simple.

Has this been done before.

Has it never been done before.

The honest answer is that it might be all of these, and none of them, at once.

Let’s start with the first. When you spend years being associated with a particular world, in my case business, offshore energy, and the discipline of service delivery, people quietly place you in a box. It’s not malicious. It’s human. We use categories to reduce uncertainty. When someone steps outside their category, the brain looks for the missing explanation. If David does that, then what does it mean about the David I thought I knew. That’s not cynicism, it’s pattern recognition trying to protect itself.

Then there’s the catch question, which is the question behind the question. We’ve trained ourselves, often by experience, to be suspicious of anything that sounds both good and workable. We’ve watched too many initiatives built on the theatre of generosity, where the giver keeps the control, the credit, and the upside, and the community gets a photo, a handshake, and a promise that fades once the spotlight moves on. So when a group of people says, we’ll share the value, people instinctively look for the hidden mechanism that makes the sharing optional. I get that reflex. I’ve got it too. Scepticism is all too often my default position.

That’s exactly why Finn Moray isn’t a charity. Charity matters, but charity is also, by design, in my humble opinion, discretionary. It’s often admirable, but it’s voluntary, and it tends to sit downstream from the core economic engine. Finn Moray is different. It’s a social compact. It’s a public pledge from our company that binds the project to an ethical and financial structure, and it’s designed to be transparent, repeatable, and durable, not dependent on mood, fashion, or goodwill alone.

The compact matters because it answers the catch question with something firmer than reassurance. It says, for THE CALL, that fifty percent of net profits go back into Scottish communities, into projects tied to the places that inspired the music. The other fifty percent stays in the engine, because sustainability isn’t a nice to have, it’s the difference between a movement and a weekend. If the project can’t fund production, attract talent, and keep its own lights on, then the giving stops, and the whole thing becomes another well intentioned story that ends early.

Sustainability isn’t the compromise of purpose, it’s the protection of it.

And within that engine, there’s a fairness rule that matters just as much as the community pledge. When we find artists for the second part of the album, THE GATHERING, they don’t get treated like hired hands. They get an equal share of the twenty five percent net profits that sit on the artist side of the house, across the album and the merchandise they’re involved in. Equal share. Same basis. No games. Because if you’re asking people to lend their voice to something bigger than themselves, you’d better be prepared to treat them like proper partners.

And this is where the people paying attention ask the right question. Where does that twenty five percent come from. You’ve already allocated one hundred percent on THE CALL. It comes from Finn Moray itself. We drop our own share from fifty percent to twenty five percent, and we do it on purpose. The region pot stays the same, because the communities are the central point of the compact. The artist pot exists because talent has to be valued properly. What’s left for Finn Moray from THE GATHERING is still enough to keep building, keep producing, keep promoting, and keep scaling the catalogue. But we’re choosing, deliberately, to take less so that the people who create the vocal magic and the places that inspire it both get their fair share.

So why does it still feel complicated.

In my humble opinion, because simplicity isn’t the same as ease.

The idea is simple, but the implications are unfamiliar. We’re used to cultural value being extracted from places, packaged elsewhere, and monetised in ways the original communities never see. We’re used to the few doing well, and the many clapping politely from the sidelines. When you propose a model where the communities are, in a very real sense, the primary shareholders, it scrambles the usual hierarchy. People don’t just have to understand the mechanism, they’ve got to update their assumptions about how the world works.

We live in an age that often confuses sincerity with strategy. Truth has become so refracted by opinion, speed, and repetition that its distortion is now something we can feel as much as debate. If you’re earnest, you must be selling something. If you speak about values, you must be compensating for something. If you offer fairness, you must be hiding the knife. In my humble opinion, that’s not because people are bad. It’s because people are tired, and tiredness makes you cautious. The strange part is that a straightforward commitment to do good, and to do it in a way that survives scrutiny, can feel almost radical.

And then there’s the final layer. Finn Moray hasn’t been done like this, at least not at the scale of ambition we’re pursuing. A living musical map of Scotland, town by town, village by village, with a transparent economic loop back into those places, isn’t a typical industry play. I don’t know exactly where it sits. Maybe between art and infrastructure. Maybe culture as an asset that communities can share in, not just consume. When something sits between categories, people don’t know which mental shelf to put it on, so they keep picking it up, turning it over, checking the label.

I find all of this more thought provoking than frustrating, because it tells me something important. We’ve normalised models that don’t serve the many, then we act surprised when someone proposes one that tries to. Confusion, in that context, is often the first draft of curiosity. And curiosity, if you treat it with respect, can turn into trust.

That’s what’s happening now. My friends and family have kept supporting, even when it was just an idea and a handful of songs and a stubborn belief that it could work. And more and more people are buying in, not just buying the music, but buying into the journey. They’re sharing it, backing it, getting involved, putting their hand up to help, sometimes even stepping onboard in ways that really surprise me. The momentum isn’t coming from big glossy campaigns. It’s coming from ordinary people deciding this is worth their time, their attention, and their support.

And there’s another truth sitting under all of this, the one I don’t dress up, because it’s the real spark.

This project came from grief, yes. But it also came from a realisation that we’ve got a short time on this planet, and the only thing we really leave behind is family, what we did, who benefited from it, and what people ultimately thought about our contribution. When you feel that properly, it changes your tolerance for nonsense and superficial bollocks. It changes what you chase. It makes you ask a sharper question. What would it look like to build something that’s enjoyable, ambitious, commercially real, and still leaves the room better than you found it.

I started Finn Moray and I sit at the centre. It’s definitely my baby, but I didn’t and couldn’t build this alone. Graeme and I set it up because we share a stubborn belief that value should circulate, not pool. Andie joined because she’s got that rare mix of operational steel and human warmth, the kind that turns a vision into a cadence of real delivery. Eilidh and Thomas bring the young driven intelligence that every serious project needs, the pace, the digital instinct, the refusal to accept that something can’t be done simply because it hasn’t been done before. We’re not building a slogan. We’re building a system, and we’re building it carefully, so it can last. Then others like Scott, Mariano, Jill, Fiona, Richard, Paul, Mark, Ally and many others stepped in to help because they believed in what we were doing. That list grows every day, and we’re immensely appreciative.

So yes, the concept is simple. The world we’re trying to apply it to isn’t.

But that’s precisely why it matters.

If you’re looking for a catch, the only catch is that we mean it. If you’re looking for the trade off, the trade off is that we won’t build this by hollowing out the communities that inspire it. If you’re looking for what I get out of it, I get the same thing I hope Scotland gets, a creative project that makes people feel seen, proud, and connected, and a way of doing business that treats fairness as design, not decoration.

I’ve learned, over the last year, that the most meaningful work often starts as the easiest thing to misunderstand. People don’t resist clarity, they resist what clarity demands of them, which is to reconsider what they’ve accepted for too long.

Finn Moray is a pledge, and a plan. A cultural project with a commercial engine, and a social compact at its heart. It’s not about taking from Scotland. It’s about singing Scotland into the room, then making sure Scotland shares in what happens next.

#SocialEnterprise #CreativeEconomy #PurposeDrivenBusiness #CommunityWealth #ScottishCulture

To buy AON: THE CALL and help support the compact, go to:

Download: www.finnmoray.com/music

CD, Vinyl and Merch: https://www.finnmoray.com/category/all-products