Louise Hill founder of GoHenry | Extraordinary Life Stories

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0:39Louise, thank you for joining me. Thank you for inviting me. Been looking forward to this. Tell me, who is Louise Hill? Boy, that's a question. How long have you got? Grew up in Lerstoft on the East Coast. I am a mum, two kids, both grown up now. They're 24 and 27. A dog lover. I have a dog at home I don't get to spend anywhere near enough time with um I guess business founder which is maybe why I'm sat here today friend all sorts of things um lots of aspects I guess to the whole of me let's aggregate all of that into the business founder so what business are you the founder of my current business is called go henry um it's a debit card financial education app for kids helping kids get a head start and be empowered with money uh it's actually the third my second business that i set up the third business i've tried to set up okay so i want to open that up i want to know the why behind it because introducing yourself as a mother as a wife and as someone that was ultimately in business yeah there's a real why behind it it's like that's a mission-led founded business yeah it is yeah um gosh it is probably 15 years ago now but so when my kids were way way smaller um and i guess the internet was just starting to turn into something that was really usable and and transactional and i realized that my kids were trying to do things on the internet mainly they'd had iPods for Christmas that my brother had given them and I gave them my iTunes login and they were spending a fortune on my credit card downloading music and I couldn't fathom how as a mum to get them to understand that that was spending money and so we had a routine in our house Saturday mornings earlier and earlier they would stand in front of me with their hands out expecting their pocket money and I was trying to make them realise that okay maybe I was going to give the oldest one five pounds this week but if she'd spent four pound 20 on iTunes then she was only going to get ATP and it was that whole interaction with my kids and seeing their disappointed faces and realising I was having to be the bad guy yet again I started joking about it with other parents and all the stories came out about kids who'd spent way too much on eBay or kids who were buying their way through game levels on their Playstations or game boxes all sorts of things like that kids were transacting on the internet but unbelievably to me at the time there was nothing out there that let parents put safety parameters around that or no sort of tool that allowed them to teach their kids what money really was and that you have to earn it before you can spend it and importantly kids not understanding the value of money yeah you know hand out i remember that yeah you know and opening a birthday card and having a five pound note in it and having a tangible value of that money and then being very careful where i spent it yeah and i think that's a key part of conversation here is that actually have kids lost that value of money because it's a transaction they're not seeing it like cash the society I would say we all lost that tangible value of money because yes, when I grew up, once the money had gone out of my purse, that was it until next week.

4:10And then when I was older, until my next paycheck. You could physically see it as well. You could count your money, right? Whereas now it's sort of an online scenario. So a very important part of what I said about building, and there were three of us who co-founded the company, was to make that as tangible as we could make it. So little notifications, pings on phones or family tablets every time the child spent money, both to the parents and the child, to say, you just spent£2.99 at New Look, you've now got this much left. Or you just tried to spend£2.99 at New Look, that's above your weekly spend limit.

4:46To create that sense of reality and then tasks and chores so that they learnt about earning their money. Yeah, which is a key part of Go Henry, isn't it? That you're actually earning your money and you can be rewarded for that. From having an idea to then actually creating a business, how many people have ideas and don't see them through, right? Everyone wants to be a founder. Yeah. So from having children of your own and trying to solve a problem to becoming a global business. Yeah. I want to know the journey. I want to know from a founder point of view and ideas to then at what point you're still the leader and still very much involved every day.

5:24Yeah, that's a lot to try and distill down. So the first decision for me was, was I going to jump away from a nice big fat salary and private health care, etc. and do this? And that was quite a tough decision because I was an ex-wife at that point in time. So I'd been divorced probably two years, three years. And so there was just me, big mortgage, two kids, both at school. it meant a lot of changes to our lifestyle uh did sit down with the kids i'm not sure if that was altogether fair or not but sit down with them and say you know this does mean we're not going on foreign holidays for a while and um sky subscription might have to disappear for a while um so sacrifices are being made right there and then yeah yeah yeah but your purpose and passion for this overrode any of the fear of leaving the safety of employment and the more i the more i looked at it the more certain I was that this was a huge gap in the market and that somebody needed to fill it and and thought that I could do something about it so yeah yeah so I partnered up with two guys who both happened to be dads with kids at the same school as my kids and we found the pre-seed funding now I know that's what it's called I didn't know that was what it was called then and launched a business.

6:50And yeah, I mean, people have joked with me about, you know, did you see hockey stick growth, the traditional, you know, that shape on the graph. And I have said a couple of times, well, it was a hockey stick, but it was laying on its back because it took a while. It took a while. We were the first in market and that still amazes me. There was nothing anywhere in the world that we could find that did something similar. And so trying to communicate with potential customers what we were and why they needed us in that kind of split second you have of somebody's attention was really, really tough.

7:30You know, we'd worked out how much pre-seed funding we needed to get the app built and get the business off the ground and have enough money to market it. Of course, it took longer. Of course, we spent more so we didn't have very much marketing money left we needed to bring in more funding to do that initial marketing and then gradually the hockey stick started to turn upwards but it was it was a long drawn out process I guess it was a really scary process you know but you are you thriving on the growth though because there's like you say didn't understand certain terminology now you live and breathe it yeah was an element of actually really appreciating the journey and away from dare i say the sterile same day in the corporate environment now you're learning so much and continue to because you're still growing you're still developing the yes i i think that's that's something i've always thrived on i you know my career before that had been had ended up in e-commerce, always in operations, setting up websites for companies, some of the very first transactional websites for some of the big bricks and mortar retailers in the UK.

8:44That's what I've been doing before. Always running the warehouses, the contact centres, the returns bays, all those exciting things. But I've always loved solving a problem. I joked historically that if everything's working smoothly it's time for me to go and find something else to do because what excites me is making things happen either building something new or fixing something or improving something yeah which you live and breathe yeah i can relate to that and i'm having been a founder myself in something innovative that no one's necessarily done or necessarily interpreted it can be quite lonely it can be quite uh daunting as much as it's you're thriving on it there's an element of i wish i could talk to someone else about this what was your experience because you said there were two other co-founders with you but you were pioneering you were doing something that hadn't been done before so where do you draw your kind of benchmarks and barometers from on that and and were there were there times when you were ever questioning whether it would actually work oh so many times yeah hundreds probably thousands of times yes and um i mean one of one of those co-founders left almost immediately so as soon as we'd found that pre-seed funding he decided um He wanted to go and do something else.

9:58So he disappeared. And the other one stayed probably two years and then went back to the security of a corporate salary, which at the time he needed for his wife and his kids and himself. and and that left just me and yeah it I don't know is the answer to your question I think maybe an inbuilt resilience you know I look back now and think my parents um very very much brought us up to have a go um and actually that's where the go comes from in the name go Henry is because I always talk about having a go you know what's my dad used to say what's the worst that can happen and his point was you fail you fall over you don't make it whatever it is you're trying to do so what pick yourself up either try again or try something else and looking back growing up I never even thought about that but it gives you an incredible strength if you're being given permission to fail and I think that's really stood me in good stead.

11:11I love that bringing the upbringing into it and I think that's a key thing I see you as a role model I think we talked and having got to know each other before filming today about the importance of women in business and entrepreneurship and being a role model because less than two percent of VC funding has gone to women historically year on year and trying to unpick that and understand why it feels like there's not enough girls that can believe in themselves and can go and start a business because so many women around them potentially have not. Interestingly, your father obviously planted that whole go after your dreams and pursue.

11:44Do you see yourself now as a role model? Do you feel that? Well, I'm squirming slightly as you said that phrase. I do actively try and stand up and be seen now because I think GoHenry's given me the platform to do that. And I do think it's really important i think it whatever background you come from if people see people that look like them who have managed to do something have a success build a business it's really important because it gives them hope that they can do the same thing inspiration and empowerment when you mentioned the word success you know everything from what was a slow graph, if you like, to then what you're achieving now is successful.

12:30Sitting here now, how would you describe success? For me personally, I suppose having made an impact, having changed something, having made an impact, that's how I would like to judge myself. From a business perspective, so many things. If I look at GoHenry, I'm not going to be a good person. Our mission statement for years now has been making every kid smart with money. That is really important to me and it's really important to everybody who's part of GoHenry. If I give you an idea of size, there are probably 230, 250 people on our team working for the GoHenry part of the business. There's another 50 who work for our European operation, which is called PixPay.

13:21and then there's another couple of hundred in the states running the acorns business which is investing for the everyday american and trying to bring democratize investing and bring it to every american not just the wealthy ones and it is it's all mission-led and so success for the business is how many people can we how many kids can go henry and power with money and make them feel confident with money in the states how many americans start investing in a small way and start building their wealth and and achieving their goals with with money from another angle from the business it's profitability it's scale it's revenue it's it's all of those usual yeah i love the fantasy but legacy ultimately you know that is a huge impact that you have made and continue to make.

14:14One thing that I find fascinating is we all as kids still learn how to use a Bunsen burner at school and algebra, but we're not taught financial literacy. I can see you already going where I'm going, right? So you came up with an idea that you then found no one else has come up with, which is to try and help both parents and children have the value of money and actually use their money and earn it. Why is that? Why is there a lack of education in schools at such a young age when all children go up to be adults and need to manage their own money. You'll really get me on my soapbox. Do you know what?

14:49It beggars belief. It really does. Ten years ago, just over ten years ago, so in 2014, financial education was added to the secondary curriculum in the UK, but only 20 % of schools currently have to follow the curriculum. It was added in citizenship and maths so no specific place there was no specific training or content provided so schools had to figure it out for themselves and if you think about that so 2014 last year was the 10-year anniversary all the research shows that 18 year olds are still leaving school here's a terrifying stat 64 percent of 18 year olds are leaving school saying they've never received any financial education at all at school and even more scarily some research we did showed that 82 percent of teachers in secondary schools did not know it was on the curriculum so I kind of rest my case it's in theory it's there but it's not happening and actually it has to start in primary schools because there's loads of research there's a particularly big study from Cambridge University that everybody in this space talks about that shows financial habits are formed not start to be formed are formed from the age of seven so if you're not teaching it with kids really young it's why we start at six um with go henry um that's where you need to start talking to your kids about money and giving them the basic sense of wants versus needs regular pocket money those kind of things which actually feels like it puts the pressure i'm a dad as you know so it puts the pressure on the parents to actually be educating the children whilst the schools are not because i think dare i say a lot of parents can be guilty of well you need to you learn everything in school but we as parents we really need to understand there's so many things that are not taught in school and the earlier you start you know and actually to get to go home with children is an amazing opportunity to then actually bring that in and earn money through chores and have the value of money.

17:03Also, there's lots of parents who don't feel confident about teaching their kids about money because maybe they never learnt about it. Maybe they're not confident in how, whether they think they're in control of their money and they manage it well. Who am I to teach someone when I'm not even managing my own finances? Everyone's in some way where they're trying to manage their cash flow and their finances. The human side of everything we're talking about here the the long hours the resilience you know what what what sort of works for you in the world where there are so many books and podcasts about um being successful and what it takes and often that's get up really early in the morning run a marathon read a book meditate so where do you sit with that never going to run a marathon uh that's uh do you know what i the only detention i ever had at school i don't think i've ever told anybody this was for telling the games teacher um I went to a convent for the first um seven eight years of school life and doing the cross country and they they were awful with how they used to make us do the cross country in freezing cold weather I told the games teacher that God did not intend me to run he had other plans for me and I got detention so no I'm never going to run a marathon um do you know what yoga is what I carve out space for um when do you carve that out when do you make the time I every morning uh when I get up I have half an hour to just kind of gather myself come into myself um get my body moving um stretch so that's physical and mental yeah you're achieving both at that point absolutely that that's what what i love about yoga actually this that it is both parts and i know people talk about running doing that as well it doesn't for me but whatever that's my point whatever works for you so in that moment you can be getting a physical and mental stimulation and being present now i have a lesson first thing on a monday morning so eight o 'clock monday morning is blocked out in my calendar and so is the hour after that one one of the things set those things in stone yeah we do you've got to make time because people don't realize how much effort and time goes into being an active founder right and i think this is where it's almost been glorified particularly i think celebrities now in particular there's every celebrity is becoming a founder because it's almost fashionable but do they actually really send the right message to aspirational founders that it's hard graft it's sacrifice yeah and then making time for yourself you know you actually really need to because that can get lost content it absolutely can do you know three or four years ago um i was talking to a group of female ceos um i belong to a group um of women in it's called wit's end women in technology and um a group of female ceos and one of the other women said we have to stop calling it me time because the minute you talk about your yoga lesson or your walk with the dog or whatever it is you do to relax or focus or get fit or stay fit stop talking about it as me time because the minute you call it me time it starts to sound selfish and it's very easy to no I'll just do a call with the west coast or no I'll just of course I'll take that meeting or of course I'll there's a board pack I need to prepare and you lose that regularity of that commitment that you've made and the point she was making was if you're going to be a successful leader nobody wants to work with a leader who's burnt out and stressed and tetchy and irritable they want someone they need someone who's balanced and thinking straight and can be strategic and and can guide and lead effectively and so actually it's not me time it's making sure you're being a good leader and I remind myself about that often and one of the things I took away from that was I kind of went back into the business and said right everybody put in your diary loud and proud where you do stuff like that so I will start my Monday mornings that's it eight o 'clock till nine is yoga nine till ten is travel back from the lesson have a shower get myself sorted out and I start my day at 10 on a Monday and that works so we we have people who put the school pickup in um put having tea with the kids in on tuesdays and thursdays priority for what works for them and what needs them to be working at their optimum and we all try and respect that unless there's an emergency there's a lot to know i've certainly been guilty in previous time previous years of just filling my diary up with what I think is optimizing productivity but the sacrifice of not actually looking after myself and making time for the people I want to be around family namely and of course that's then not making me the best best I can be yeah leadership's really I imagine you're a phenomenal leader and you started in the company if there were three of you and then you've now got really sizable operation around you how have you adapted to that because there's leadership where you're creating an innovative now you're working within a team that's only probably going to get bigger and bigger how have you managed to manage that shift if you like i'd always had big teams in my previous career and so that helps i'd been used to running big teams um when your operations you know operations can be anything from that big to this big in a company and um i guess that helps You, I think you almost have to reinvent yourself and the focus of the company, if you're growing quickly, every six months.

22:59And that might sound like madness. But, you know, when you're 20 people, if six months later you're 60 people and six months after that you're 100 people, you need different structures. you need different you need to tweak the communication methods you need all sorts of things which meetings are held when who's in them and so I think you have to constantly reassess and adapt and and I haven't always got that right I definitely haven't always got that right and I know I've talked publicly a few times about um one point where we were growing and insane pace and we had gone that's why I said 60 and 100 but we'd gone from 60 to 100 to 150 people over the course of about nine months 10 months that's fast it yeah it was terrifying and I was absolutely drowning I was I'd got to the point where I knew I felt I was doing nothing well you know I really was worrying about what the heck is going on what did you do that well step back uh did you let anyone know did you let the key people around you know or did you just step back to then process to know what to say at that point didn't say anything but i took two days off and went and literally sort of sat and questioned myself what was not what were the symptoms because i could see what the symptoms were but what were the causes and what i realized was while I thought I'd done a really good job of letting go so on the surface I delegated we'd hired some fantastic people I was very very clear I wanted to give them the space to do what they did brilliantly and not get in their way but too much of what we did and why we did it and where things were was in my head or locked up in a login that was on my laptop and it meant people were constantly having to come to me to ask questions or ask how they did something or why we did something stupid so I decided kind of let's go public about this from a business from inside the business perspective and I called it single points of failure and I said let's let's take three months and go through the business and every single team identify the single points of failure where is there one only one person who can access something through a login or one person who knows how to do something and let's get rid of that let's make sure there are two or three we change the logins and you you know what I'm going to say my name appeared on it hundreds of times and we still have to do that regularly but that's being conscious about that's having the maturity and perspective to know that that's a that's a if you get hit by a bus that night yeah the business is in trouble and the business is now a lot bigger than just Louise Hill if that makes sense because it's gosh the numbers you're doing and all the people yeah so that's smart you know I mean uh and I guess like you say you've got to stay on top of that and you've got to keep evolving Yeah, but it really snuck up on me.

26:23Yes, but I think this is a key part of why I'm enjoying this conversation because that's a reminder to me I'm learning from that. Anyone watching, listening, that's a key thing that could sneak up on them. To round off the conversation, there's so much I've learned talking to you in this conversation, which is a snippet, if you like, of a long journey. You've got the perspective, again, of maturity to look back on from where you were to what you've been doing to where you are now. what's the one piece of advice you give to a younger version of yourself or an aspirational entrepreneur do it go yes have a go yeah if you you know obviously map out a business plan obviously think through the ramifications and and what what you think you can achieve but have a go go go go back to what my dad said what's the worst that can happen if it doesn't work try again i love that it's powerful and one last question you i think i can tell the the journey is is a key part of what drives you but is there a destination is there is there a milestone is there something that you would love to achieve is it go henry on something somewhere or is it a is it a number if you like you know what's what's the destination oh there are two separate ones i don't know if i'm allowed to but i'm going i'm going for two so for the business continue to grow continue to reach more kids continue to empower them with money make them smart with money and then for the uk persuade the government to make financial education mandatory in every primary school in the uk that's brilliant are you working on that been lobbying for three years i'd love to help you with that in any way anyone watching listening get involved yeah thank you so much for making time to talk to me thank you i've loved it

28:23We'll see you next time.