Ability Enterprises: Growing with purpose
Sefa and Ability Enterprises
Ability Enterprises provides meaningful, full award-wage employment and tailored support for people facing complex barriers to work, employing more than 500 people since 2012.
Sefa first supported Ability Enterprises to navigate significant commercial challenges while keeping its employment mission at the centre of its recovery. Its turnover is now expected to exceed $6 million in 2026, more than double its turnover two years earlier.
Through a second engagement with Sefa, Ability Enterprises strengthened its ability to assess new opportunities against both its mission and commercial capacity, recognising that consolidation is the most sustainable path for its next stage of growth.
Creating employment for the ‘missing middle’
For people facing complex barriers to employment, finding a job is often about much more than earning an income. Work can bring connection, confidence and dignity. Yet many people fall into a ‘missing middle’, excluded from mainstream employment while also missing out on the specialist or sustained support they need to succeed at work.
Ability Enterprises exists to help these people in the ‘missing middle’.
Established in Toowoomba in 2012, the not-for-profit social enterprise provides meaningful employment, tailored support, and pathways into future employment for people who face barriers to work. Since it began, Ability Enterprises has provided full award-wage employment to more than 500 people. Its team now numbers 97.
Holding onto the mission through uncertainty
Sefa first worked with Ability Enterprises through the Paul Ramsay Foundation Growth Incubator in 2023. During the program, it became clear the organisation was facing serious commercial and operational challenges, and throughout this instability, Sefa worked with Claire Torkington, CEO of Ability Enterprises, to restore the core business of the social enterprise – employment.
Myrna from Sefa and Ange from Pyxis worked alongside Claire and the Board to develop a strategy for moving through this period to build a stable foundation. Ability Enterprises also developed its Theory of Change, helping the organisation remain anchored in its purpose while addressing the commercial issues that threatened its ability to deliver on that purpose.
“The Theory of Change helped keep the focus on the mission whilst we fixed our commercials.”
Claire Torkington, CEO, Ability Enterprises
Areas of focus
1. Building a stronger foundation
Claire credits this combination of mission focus and commercial discipline as an important part of Ability Enterprises’ recovery. Since then, the organisation has grown rapidly. Its turnover is expected to exceed $6 million in 2026, more than double its turnover just two years earlier. This growth has created a stronger platform from which Ability Enterprises can continue providing meaningful, supported employment.
2. Testing the next stage of growth
3 years later (in 2026), Sefa had the opportunity to work with Ability Enterprises for the second time supported by a Social Enterprise Development Initiative grant. This time, the question was different. Ability Enterprises was no longer working to stabilise the organisation, it was considering what sustainable growth could look like and how to assess new opportunities on the horizon.
3. Knowing when ‘not yet’ is the right decision
A constant theme throughout the work we did with Ability Enterprises this time around centred around strategic decision making, and the dual importance of saying no to saying yes.
For example, research into a potential new market segment did not result in immediate expansion. Rather, it gave Ability Enterprises the evidence to decide that it was not yet ready to pursue the opportunity. Instead of treating this as a setback, the organisation recognised the value of a well-founded ‘not yet’. For the next one to two years, consolidation itself would be the most important form of growth.
"[The work with Sefa] has helped us understand that we’re not immediately ready for that piece of work, which is extremely valuable. For the next one to two years, consolidation is growth. We now have the tools and knowledge to be much more confident in assessing business opportunities alongside our mission and making sure we don’t stray into areas that we cannot deliver on very strongly.”
Growing with confidence and purpose
For Claire, the value of working with Sefa has been both practical and strategic: faster access to research and analysis, the ability to test options with an experienced team, and build systems that help Ability Enterprises hold mission and financial sustainability together.
This combination gives the organisation greater confidence to build a strong pipeline and extend its runway into the future, while continuing to create employment that brings income, connection and dignity.
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