Alex Depledge MBE on taking a Founder’s Mind into the Government & why the UK is a great place to scale

0:00Alex Depledge MBE:We are brilliant in this country at starting businesses. We're brilliant at it. We've got the third largest pool of venture capital in the whole world behind China and the US. And this is why I think we're on the cusp of scaling up, right? It's the second wave. We're building on that.

0:20Welcome back to 40 Minute Mentor, the podcast on a mission to raise aspirations and inspire the next generation of category-defining founders, all in just 40 minutes. Today, for our final 40-minute mental episode of the season, we're joined by Alexandra DePledge, MBE. Alex is a serial tech entrepreneur who originally co-founded Hassle.com, Europe's largest domestic cleaning marketplace, which she grew to over 8 million in revenue across four countries in just two years, and then sold it for 32 million euros. Today, she is co-founder and CEO of Resi, the UK's largest residential architectural firm, focusing on using tech to help solve our country's housing problems through residential extensions and renovations.

1:05Earlier this year, she was also appointed as the entrepreneurship advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the first time an entrepreneur has been at the heart of the treasury, and she is already having a massive impact. As you can imagine, there is so much to dig into today's episode from Alex's scaling experience, why she decided to launch another business after exiting hassle.com and the future of UK entrepreneurship. So without further ado, Alex, a big warm welcome to 40 Minute Mentor. Thank you so much for being here. How are you?

1:35Alex Depledge MBE:I'm actually quite tired, James. I'm not going to lie. It's been a very, very busy few months, but yeah, I'm like looking forward to Christmas, I have to say. And I don't like Christmas. That's a big statement for me. Okay, wow. Okay, well, we will try and I hope this conversation will be joyful and full of festive cheer. But no, I think a lot of us are feeling the same way. It's that time of the year. It's just about grinding it out and getting there and having a bit of a rest and reset. Well, I know you've been up to a lot of very exciting things, which I can't wait to dive into. But before we get there, I'd love to just warm you up with some quickfire questions so our audience can get to know you better.

2:09So please finish the following sentences after me.

2:12Alex Depledge MBE:The A moment that defined my career was when? Probably moving to Wisconsin. Oh, really? Oh, when was that? After I finished undergrad, I went to grad school. And it was very challenging for all sorts of reasons and led me down different paths and meant that I became a bit more American. And I actually credit that resilience building, the risk taking and the directness that I discovered, because Americans are really direct for being a part of my success. And it's a bit of a bizarre answer. No, no, it's a great one. And the biggest lesson I've learned about leadership is? I think it has to be authentic.

2:53Alex Depledge MBE:I think there are many attributes to a good leader, but they all die on impact if you're not an authentic version of yourself because people just see through it. And there's loads and loads of examples of inauthentic leadership out there. and so I guess it's the quality I look for and it's the quality I try to emulate as a leader couldn't agree more thank you and a skill I wish I'd mastered earlier in my career is I mean a skill I wish I'd mastered like period is excel because I'm really bad with it and it's like it just feels like the tool that you need to get on in life and I'm really bad with it and I guess you know the skill that I mastered in the last sort of five years and I really wish I'd had it before because I would have been a lot happier and better is stoicism.

3:41That's a great one. I'm just going to say for another terrible Xseller and all the other founders out there that are not great with Xseller, that's the best thing I've heard on this podcast. It makes me, if you can have all the success you've had and not be great at Xseller, that is very reassuring. And if I could change one thing about the way companies build teams, it would be?

4:00Alex Depledge MBE:Balance. Because everybody looks like your leadership team or your management team or your sales team and we always over index for the technical role and then we you know we index for the attitude but the kind of third missing pillar of like a three-legged stool if you like is is what type of person they are and the example I'd give on this is like you know four or five years ago I realized I just had loads of like amiable storytellers right and not enough drivers and not enough people that were really good with processing data and so actually it doesn't really matter if they're in a sales role or in their finance role or in a product role you need to have that strength balanced so you have a very balanced team otherwise you end up with like with a load of people like I did that told a great story and all wanted to sit around and sing come by are that's not going to drive a business forward so it's the kind of like bit that no one really talks about is the profile of the team so true that's yeah brilliant absolutely and it is a constant thing as headhunters this is a constant thing that comes up is like what is actually going to be complimentary and different to what you already have that will move things forward.

5:08Yeah, that fills a gap. It's very easy just to hire in your own likeness. Yeah, it's so true. Well, thank you for that already, Alex. Already some absolute golden nuggets there. We're going to talk about your entrepreneurial career and the very exciting stuff you're doing with government as our conversation progresses. But I want to just take this back in time. We'd love our audience to get to know what was your upbringing like? You've alluded to it already, actually, but where did this sort of entrepreneurial spark this drive to challenge the status quo come from oh my god

5:36Alex Depledge MBE:if i knew that i would have to have such expensive therapy but to try and answer the question so i'm from bradford or if you're actually from bradford you say bradford with a t in it and it was something i never used to admit it was always like oh we i'm just from near leeds because you know bradford's got there is very challenging from a socioeconomic perspective lots of race relation problems and it's a really poor city like it's you know it's in the bottom 10 with Blackpool and I'm really glad that I grew up there because it made me a resilient character and I think resilience is one of the most underrated qualities that we are like lacking as a as a nation at the moment you could even say in the western world and so I think where my entrepreneurial spirit came from is I never really fit in I'm not even sure I do fit in now I was bullied a lot at school probably because I'm a bit of a gobshite but a nice but a nice kind person those two things don't sit well in when you're growing up in it especially when you're a girl and um I I don't know like I never really fit in and I went to work and I didn't fit in so you know I went to Accenture and the excuse I always sort of give when I was like wanted to leave was that I didn't see how I could have a career and a family and I was really bored with like everyone having a lot of blue sky thinking and then it get watered down and watered down and then we never really enacted the big kind of revolution.

6:59Alex Depledge MBE:And so I guess what I discovered is I really love problems, particularly if problems are like really hard. And then there is a bit of a subtle arrogance to that, right? Which is like, I think I can solve all these problems. Like I'll always say to people, it can't be that hard. Like, let's just have a go. And I think that sort of can do attitude. And because I never fit in, I always wanted to prove everybody else wrong, particularly coming from Bradford like people would hear me even now people presume right they just presume you you're working class you're from the north you're not that intelligent and actually that's been a that's been so good for me because everybody's underestimated me my whole life and so that desire to prove everybody wrong with a can-do attitude and a love of solving problems I mean isn't that the definition of entrepreneurship so I just think I was always going to sort of end up there and my dad my dad had his own business and you'd think now we'd call that an entrepreneur but you didn't back then and so I always saw my dad as like going out on his own and I think he was a bit of an inspiration for me that I saw the freedom it gave him when he stopped working for someone and started working for himself yeah oh you can really see how all of those different things come together to create the person you are and the leader you are today and I think that's it's really refreshing to hear thank you for being so honest it's going to be a lot of people listening to this that may feel different and othered and maybe written off.

8:21And it just goes to show that sometimes you can use that to stoke the fires, to really prove people wrong. And yeah, I love that. Let's talk about entrepreneurship. It's kind of a nice segue from that conversation. You started hassle.com and you scaled it to a fantastic exit within just a couple of years, but you were building at a time when the ecosystem for tech was so different to how it is now. So can you share us with our audience who may not know the story a bit more about your experience of building hassle.com and what led to your success at that time?

8:48Alex Depledge MBE:Well, you know, I think it's really a really timely question, right? Because when I look around now, there is a lot of like fatalism about the UK, like a lot of talking it down. We're almost manifesting our own decline. And it does feel, it feels like we're stuck, right? And there's a lot of entrepreneurs that don't feel very loved and don't feel like anyone wants to reward the risk that they're taking. But the interesting thing about that is I started this company, hassle.com, originally the sort of kind of ideas were around 2011. 2012 was when we really kind of got going and became part of Springboard because, you know, Jules didn't know how to code at that point.

9:23Alex Depledge MBE:She wasn't an engineer. She was self-taught. I didn't know anything. We were just like making this up as we went along. Right. And that was in 2012. Like cast your mind back. 2008, we had the great recession. Like 2012, we were not in a good place as a country, but the difference was, and I remember this, there was a feeling, right, that we were on the cusp of something because they'd got Rohan Silver in number 10, who was like coming out with SCIS and George Osborne was paying close attention to tech and innovation and what the Northern powerhouse and how we were going to fix all that stuff. It feels really similar now.

9:58Alex Depledge MBE:Like maybe we haven't got that vibe back yet, but I feel like we're in the same sort of position. And so that's why I feel quite hopeful for the UK. And I went into entrepreneurship to back to your question in 2012 it's quite a wanky name for it isn't it we were just like starting a business and it wasn't the done thing right you know most people went into banking or finance or they went to become a consultant like I'd already done and we were very much seen as like wantrepreneurs but we joined this program called Springboard which was like the first accelerator in the UK I mean I didn't even know what an accelerator was I had to look up Y Combinator at the time like I'd like literally no idea never didn't know what venture capital did I mean you couldn't get more green than Jules and I and it's a bit like you said you know you're 25 and it's like everyone probably said to you James what are you doing and you have to have that naivety that big idea but the naivety that you can actually achieve it and you just go don't you and you ignore all the dissenters and your parents being like oh James get a job right but you know go become a doctor do something really like but actually you need that naivety and that big thinking because that is what entrepreneurship is and Jules and I just had this like stupid idea that we were going to start this marketplace where you could book local services and and we couldn't code and we had no money and we didn't know what the hell we were doing but we just did it anyway.

11:13Love that it's so funny because I started JBM in 2012 and it was just that yeah it's at this time I felt this change I'd actually been recruiting into management consultancies for a big corporate and I was like all the best talent I'm meeting is starting to think about more entrepreneurial things. So that's what JVM started as. It was moving the talent from consulting and banking into more entrepreneurial settings. And it was a bit of a mishmash of boutique consultancies and challenger banks, but then it was startups. And then it was like, okay, wow, there's this wave, this momentum shift. But I'll be honest, I had so many people that just said, this is not going to work.

11:45You've got no experience. You've never run a business before. You don't have the right skills. You can't do business development. And here we are 15 years on. But I think you either let that sort of drive you forward to prove people wrong, or you let it just put you off. And I think this is back to what you were saying earlier. I think it's really important, especially when you're young and you don't have all the other distractions of life, to go for it if you've got an idea.

12:07Alex Depledge MBE:But I think it's so right. And I'm so glad you said that you started in 2012, right? Because you will remember, right? The economy was not in a good place then, but there was a feeling, particularly around London, that we were on the cusp of something. And it was really the startup wave, if you like. And we've done really well. Like, we are brilliant in this country at starting businesses. Like, we're brilliant at it. We've got the third largest pool of venture capital in the whole world behind China and the US. We've got the top two universities for R &D in the whole of Europe. Like, we're really, really good at starting up.

12:40Alex Depledge MBE:And this is why I think we're on the cusp of scaling up, right? It's the second wave. We're building on that. And I feel that's why I'm really excited about where we are now, because we already know we've got the raw ingredients. We've got the startups. We've got the talent. We've got the money. The regulatory framework for startups is not that bad. Like, don't get me wrong, we can do more. But that's why I wanted to do this government role around scaling up, because I think that is the next wave. And if we do that, it's the next wave of growth for the UK. And maybe we can get out of this like quagmire we've been in for like what feels like the last like, you know, since 2008.

13:11Alex Depledge MBE:eight. And I guess that's why I'm this like outlier that's actually really hopeful that we can change things. Because I look back to where I was as like you were in 2012 as a startup found with nothing but naivety. And maybe I'm being naive again. But like, I think that's where we are again now. Yeah, I love that. Slight spoiler alert for our audience about what we're going to come on to talk about. But before we get to your new role, I want to talk a bit about Rezi, which you've been building for the last nine years. I would love to firstly ask, why did you go again? You just built a business.

13:43It was probably brutal. Why did you go again so quickly? And how did you approach building the second time around?

13:50Alex Depledge MBE:Well, the short answer to this is because we're fucking idiots. That's why. We did not have enough time off. And I think the truth is because from inception to exit, hassle was about two and a half years, which is really fast. And I just don't think we felt done I definitely didn't I felt like I'd got so much more to give it sort of ended too soon we weren't done with the journey and so we were like yeah difficult second album and my god has Rezzy been that difficult second album and it all sort of evolved from we were working at Index at the time and that was really interesting because we were getting to see all this like these different tech companies totally outside of consumer like from the valley and Europe and it felt like you still have that bug don't you and I did an extension and that's it I rang Jules up and I was like this is pants like we've got to make this better and like literally she came back a week later and she's like well I've just been playing around and I've built this which is what Jules does all that you can't give Jules and say you can't say to Jules I've got this problem and I was thinking about this solution because she will literally go away and she will build it and she will come back and she'll be like ta-da because she's got a huge bias to action like I do and that was it that was the start of Resi and we we got properly going at the end of like 2017 start as 2018, I think, I can't remember.

15:06Alex Depledge MBE:It's been a long time, James. I'm very tired. Fair enough. I love that you went again and we've worked very close with Index over the years. I can imagine that it was the perfect breeding ground for new ideas and getting inspired to go again quickly. Out of interest, for our audience who don't know, can you just give a quick explainer as to what Resi is? And then we'd love to know what you did differently. How did you approach it differently the second time around? So Resi is now the largest architectural platform in Europe. We do about 150 extensions a month. So we design them, but we're kind of soup to nuts establishments.

15:41Alex Depledge MBE:We take you from ideation and we help you all the way through to completion. We're quicker, faster, more value-add. There's loads of cool tools on the website. Like, I mean, I can't even pretend to know what the technology is anymore because my whole product team under Nick Yales is just so fantastic that I'm like, I just let Nick get on with it. But the idea really for us was to try and take some of the stress out of it because for me there was a lot a myriad of people doing all sorts of different things I didn't understand I didn't know what it was going to cost or how long it was going to take or why I needed all these people and is this really confusing process that you basically all the risk and the understanding falls on the consumer and we were like we need to do something with technology because it's like the least digitized industry ever there was a lot of negativity about us when we first started because it's like you know what of these two girls are not architects doing trying to like do a professional services tech play but I think we we've proved a lot of the dissenters wrong and and it's got to like a really good place now and it's a great company and I guess what did we do differently we did all the start better so because hassle was like two and a half years and yeah we internationalized and we grew the team and we got to kind of onto that scale up ramp we did all that bit better loads better like we grew like a weed we raised more money than I could even like shake a stick out um the brand was great you know it was good the team was great but then once we got scale up oh I just did all that wrong because I've never done it before so it was like start that was the piece that was really difficult because I've not done that proper scale up journey um so I made loads of mistakes yeah and was that largely around hiring specifically or were there a few other things just just because you hadn't done it before yeah so you can get away with hiring scrappy generalists that are hungry in a startup but when you get to scale up phase you need to professionalize you need people that have been there and done it before that you can rely on and Jules and I kept control too tightly between the two of us for too long and the business suffered but then to be fair it's really hard to separate what was all the black swan events and what was our inadequacies because we went through COVID and then we went through like high inflation Liz Trust wars mortgage interest rates Donald Trump.

17:52Alex Depledge MBE:I could just keep going forever, right? And we're still not out of that. This is the new normal. And actually, I would say the last three years has made me a better CEO than any other period in time. I've hated a lot of it. But actually, you're not really a proper CEO. You're not really a proper leader until you've had to lead in very, very difficult times. And so I'm grateful for that. But it's been tough. And for any founders listening to this that might be facing adversity at the moment, as you said, you've developed a lot as a leader and you've faced all these macro cycles that are totally out of sight of your control, which is a big part of entrepreneurship.

18:26But what advice do you give them about how to stay resilient and how to get through it and maybe take some positives from the experience?

18:33Alex Depledge MBE:I used to get way too emotional about this stuff and you control the controllables, right? And so what I learned was through a lot of coaching, actually, I had a brilliant performance coach. Now when I'm facing a crisis, I just have to ask myself, what is the worst that's going to happen? And normally that answer is the business is going to die. And once you speak those words out loud and you accept them, because it is a real possibility and you're like, okay, the business could die. Okay, so what? Well, I'm still quite young. I'm relatively okay at my job. There's probably another job out there or another business in me.

19:11Alex Depledge MBE:I've got a great support network. So you start working through these things and you realize like it's just not that scary so then whatever crisis you're facing you're like okay the business might die but i've accepted that and that is okay so like now i've dealt with that emotional bullshit let's just get down to working out how we get through that crisis and it just makes it brings calm when you're in the eye of the storm and it just brings a bit of serenity that i didn't really know how to tap into or to access before and i know that people listening to this will be just like what is she talking about as they you know look at their cash flow forecast and realize they can't make payroll.

19:45Alex Depledge MBE:And I know how stressful that is because I've been there. But the worst that can happen is people don't get paid. So you just need to deal with that and put it to one side and then work out how you actually fix it so people do get paid. And we sort of a lot of times stop at that first hurdle and spend all of our time worrying and obsessing about people not getting paid and actually don't fix the problem. So that's how I sort of built resilience. And so I just encourage people like the next time you're facing a crisis, think to yourself, well, what's the worst that can happen? Work it through. And actually, then you can put it to one side and get on with the real job at hand.

20:17Yeah, well said. And we're part of a founders community that's been incredible for me. I think peer mentorship and support from other founders in a similar boat for far too long in the first five, six, seven, eight years of JBM, I was so intern. I was so almost scared to admit the mistakes I was making or worried about being judged for being a rubbish founder. And the sooner I got my head up from the parapet and actually started to talk to others, one, you realize you're not alone. And most people are going through the same crap that you are. and two you might actually get fresh perspectives or mentorship or advice that will really make a big difference so I completely relate to that I think it's brilliant advice we now need to talk about your new role as entrepreneurship advisor to the chancellor of the exchequer which is incredible and I've already sensed from this conversation just how passionate you are about the work you're doing and I think it's brilliant you have said previously that the UK is brilliant innovation but terrible at scaling companies so can you tell our audience a bit about what this role entails and what have been your top priorities since stepping into the role yes james i can but

21:18Alex Depledge MBE:first i have to just address the first bit of that which is passion i don't know if this is passion do you know that or if it's not just like absolute frustration at people poking holes and moaning and doing fuck all about it and it goes back to that point about like do you want to be a victim or do you want to be part of the solution? In a personal sense, your own solution. But in this sense, like, do we want to lean in and be part of the UK's solution to our problems or do we want to hurl stones from the sideline? And I was just like, I was a bit fed up of everyone being like, oh my God, and this, and like, we're doing that.

21:56Alex Depledge MBE:And like, have you seen that, you know, this tax rate? And have you seen that? And I'm like, yeah, there are trade-offs. So let's get real about those trade-offs and let's explain them and let's actually go in and make them. And I just thought, well, I need to put my money where my mouth is. And luckily I'd met Rachel four years ago and she offered me this role, which I think is like really ballsy of her because number one, no one's ever taken an entrepreneur into the heart of government before. Like, yeah, we've got Rohan in number 10, but I mean in the treasury. Like the treasury did not know what to do with me, still does not.

22:29Alex Depledge MBE:Very alien person wandering around. Like, you know, it's like going into another world and it's the same for me. But Rachel also took a bet on me, right? Which like, if any, most of the people who know me would be like, that's quite a ballsy thing to do because Alex is not a quiet person. And I'm very direct and I do blow shit up because sometimes it's the only way to get things done. So I think Rachel's been really bold in this. So I think it's more frustration than passion. And the fact that like, yeah, Rachel took a bet and I thought, oh my God, if she's like actually taking that bet, maybe I should accept.

23:01Alex Depledge MBE:So what does it entail? well actually what's entail what it looked like this was one of the hard things about the role because it didn't exist and so there wasn't really one like Rachel was like and here's your job description right which a lot of people would find quite difficult so I actually worked with Katie Martin which is her actually outgoing chief of staff who's a great great woman and like absolutely adore working with her and I sort of wrote up a scope gave it to Katie she sort of fed back and then we I went in and pitched it to Rachel and said what do you think about this and the advice that I got before I went in there from very dear friends like Jimmy McLaughlin and Matt Clifford and Dom Hallis was do few things, which sounds really obvious to an entrepreneur, right?

23:44Alex Depledge MBE:Because that's what we do. It's like we obsess over one thing to do really, really well, but that's really hard for government to take. And it's really hard for people who want government to change things to take because they want you to change everything. But the problem is when you try and do everything, everything you do nothing well as we all know so I went in there with the criteria of just getting three things done and then pissed a lot of people off by being like I'm really sorry I'm not interested in what's going on in small business SMEs are not what I'm focused on bothered about long stopping SCIS or SCIS limits or startups or and so I think I made as many enemies as I made friends by being like this is all this I'm not bothered about this stuff over here is it important Yes, it is, but it's not for now.

24:25Alex Depledge MBE:I'm just going to focus on the levers that I think can unlock growth for scale ups. And that's what I focused on. And so what my day to day looked like is it was meant to be two days. It ended up being three days in the office, but it ended up being more like five. And it just was a lot of like banging heads, getting people to understand, collecting evidence. I did a tour around the country. I went to Darlington, Edinburgh, Bradford, Bristol, like all these different places met with scale up founders. and just try to pull this all together into a set of policies, which my amazing private secretary, Amy, drove through for me.

25:01Alex Depledge MBE:So she really helped me navigate government. And then it went into the budget and that was sort of it. I don't really know what I've done, actually. I don't know what I've been doing, but I've been really busy. No, no, you've done a lot. And we'll come on to talk about the budget in a minute. I guess from your vantage point, what do you see as the biggest blockers that are preventing ambitious founders from building these category defining unicorn businesses in the UK? And what needs to change to make the UK a better place for entrepreneurs? Okay, so there's three buckets, and you can argue about what's most important, and people argue about this with me all the time.

25:34Alex Depledge MBE:But one is talent. So how do we attract and retain the best talent? And that is both homegrown talent, like we need to do more to have homegrown talent, and there's more to attract it. So that's number one. Number two is regulation, like getting rid of shit that just makes no sense, which there's a lot of that right we are too centralized over governed as like a country and we're also like we're run by lawyers now i heard this great phrase the other day like you know we it's just over legalized there's too much risk everywhere oh there's we're too afraid of risk so we're over regulated so talent regulation and then money you could add procurement into that but i guess procurement and money come into this and so i focused on money like access to capital for a couple of reasons, because it sort of touches the other three.

26:23Alex Depledge MBE:One, I wanted to just be concerned with things I could touch in Treasury. The minute you start going for talent, for example, you have to deal with the Home Office, you have to deal with the Ministry of Education. And I was like, it's hard enough to get anyone in the Treasury to do stuff. I'm not getting outside of it. So I'd pick things that were just within my gift and access to finances. Two, I feel like we're underwriting American R &D because like 50 % of all venture-backed companies have left the UK, meaning the talent goes with it the tax receipts the exit returns the university of like knowledge because your first hundred employees always become this kind of knowledge base that thrives and you spin them off and they go off and start their own startups and that's how the wheel of startup life goes and three you can see that we've got like all the foundations there because we're always spitting out these amazing startups but then there are the dying that or they can't raise capital in the UK so they raise it elsewhere or they're selling too early so this the valley of death so that's why I went after access to finance as a starter for 10 because I felt like I could have an immediate impact don't forget I only went in like five months ago so it was quite a big job to do in five months yeah amazing and I know well we'll come on to the budget now because I know you've had a big impact with shaping it and making it more entrepreneurially friendly so what were those changes that you push for behind the scenes?