Active4All’s rapid demise show’s how precarious trading can be for Scotland’s hard pressed social enterprises – and how reputation is everything.

Just last year the social firm’s trading arm Yooz employed 29 either long-term unemployed or disabled young people, turning over an estimated £1.2m for the social economy.

It was a great example of how social capital is created: recycled goods resold at a profit with those profits helping to employ those who can’t find work easily.

Such was its success one councillor described the charity as “the darling of the county” – and then it all went wrong.

There's appears to have been a range of reason for this, but one was that it seems the organisation was driven more by social aims than business goals – and this ultimately proved fatal.

As Strachan himself said, he couldn’t get board members with business expertise and instead had a board gleaned from the third sector whose knowledge and expertise lay in disability and employment initiatives.

So when a particularly wet summer hit the firm, resulting in a sharp fall in income, the board found itself struggling to find business solutions to see out the downturn.

Although Strachan believes it was the reputational damage linked to an OSCR investigation that sealed his charity’s fate, the reality seems that the organisation was firmly on a downward trajectory by that point.

Active4All wasn’t best equipped when it came to governance. Despite OSCR’s intervention being initiated on a malicious complaint, it nevertheless found issues with the way the organisation was being run and Strachan didn't have the skills to address these properly.

At times it feels like there is a mass of support and guidance out there for social enterprises in Scotland but there will be risks as there are with any business. Why Strachan wasn't able to access more help and support remains a mystery.

In the end though it was reputational damage that explains why the firm was able to woo funders in March but six months later was filing for insolvency. When your business is dependent on the good will of others, one whiff of alleged mismanagement can be enough to send supporters scarpering for a better cause.

This is a lesson that social enterprise is not an easy route into business; if anything they have to be more competant than their mainstream competitors.