Hustle Awards 2025 Special: Garreth Wood, Winner of Founder of the Year

0:00Welcome back to The Serial Entrepreneur, I'm your host Anna Wood. On today's episode, I'm joined by Gareth Wood, the co-founder and chairman of Kids Operating Room. We discuss innovating a new approach to charity surgical work in middle and low income countries that empowers local teams, selling his company to start Kids.org and winning the Founder of the Year Award at the Hustle Awards 2025. Let's dig in. Hi, Gareth. Welcome to the podcast today. How are you? I'm great, thank you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah, thank you for coming on. So we begin every podcast episode with the same icebreaker question, which is what's your favorite breakfast cereal and why?

0:45Yeah, I was trying to think of a good answer, and I suspect I don't have a great one because I'm not a big breakfast person. But I do love breakfast and holiday because that's one of the few occasions is having teenagers and young kids is getting breakfast all together. So when we're on home, breakfast all together will be my favorite breakfast. Don't really have a cereal favorite, but that's my answer. Yeah, that's fair enough. I love kind of like eating as a group of people. It's always so nice to kind of come together. Yeah, absolutely. When I'm with the kids and Nicola at the same time around the table, that's my favorite breakfast.

1:21Yeah, perfect. So would you be able to introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your background and your journey? Yeah, my name is Gareth Wood. I am chairman of Kids Operating Room and also the co-founder of Kids Operating Room with my wife, Nicola. We've been doing that since 2018. Really before that, I was very much an entrepreneurial background from the age of 20, 21 years old. Went on to run a successful bar and restaurant group in Scotland. And really part of that journey was really the conclusion of that was selling that business to fund kids operating rooms. The initial investments were made in kids operating rooms.

2:04Yeah, great. So talk about kids operating room. What is it and what is your mission? Yeah, Kids Operating Room is a charity that was established in 2018. We look at building surgical infrastructure for paediatric surgery, in countries where there really is just no capacity for surgery on children. You look at Uganda, which is the very first country in the world that we built the first operating room. Uganda had 21 million children. To give some context to that, Scotland, where I live, has around 3.5 million children and 28 pediatric surgeons. John Sekibira was the only pediatric surgeon in the whole of Uganda for 21 million children.

2:54He didn't have a dedicated space for pediatric surgery. He didn't have the right tools. So everything that we take for granted in the UK and across Europe and really across high-income countries just wasn't the case. And, you know, there was a surgeon in Uganda, very talented, brilliant at his job, but just didn't have the tools, the space, and the capacity to operate on children. So huge waiting lists, you know, as a result of that, children dying unnecessarily from a surgically treatable condition, children going on to live their whole lives with disability or in pain because they couldn't access surgery when they need it.

3:31So just really heartbreaking. And when Nicola and I learned about what John was experiencing as a surgeon, having our own children and the path of having a family had made it that we had become quite reliant on the health service here in the UK to children. children. We had lost some children. We had a child that went on to survive having required surgery. So I guess we kind of took that for granted. Even with positive and negative outcomes in our journey, we always had hope that our children would survive or they would go on and thrive. And what we couldn't get our heads around was that just all across low-middle-income countries, millions of children are dying from surgically treatable conditions simply because you can't access surgery when you need it.

4:19I think we talk a lot in global health about malaria, TB, HIV over the last 20, 25 years. But five times more children die from a condition globally than from HIV, TB, and malaria combined. So what we saw is that basic human right that a family, that parents, that communities experience here, where when a child is sick, they get care. we just became very aware through the work we did with John Sekibira in Uganda that that just wasn't the case and what was interesting at the time that was back in 2014 four years before we started Kids OR this was meant to be a complete one-off Nicola and I saw this as a small investment from a philanthropic point of view we were going to support John and what ended up happening was John's trainee who had been waiting years to qualify, Nassar, years to qualify but couldn't access enough surgical time to qualify.

5:18Suddenly, Nassar qualified, and Uganda had two pediatric surgeons. And we felt, okay, this complete one-off, let's do one more. And really, that's where the story began at kids' operating room. We saw the kind of tremendous impact that those two operating rooms had in Uganda, where children who had not been able to access surgery, who were dying, waiting to access surgery. That hope that I talked about earlier that we had as parents in the UK, suddenly there were parents in Uganda that also had the same hope that Nick and I had, where they understood that your child would be able to live a normal life or live a life whereby they're free from pain or disability or just survive something as simple as an appendicitis.

6:01And to survive rather than watching a child die from septic shock seven days later because they couldn't access surgery in their appendix structure. Just tragedies that we were able to see hurted. And it was inspiring. And we were just hooked. We just kind of started to learn more about what are the issues, why are so many countries don't have pediatric surgeons, why are so many countries not prioritizing pediatric surgery in their global health plans. And we decided we were going to commit the rest of our lives to doing this. And what was a one-off became two. became three or four and really at that point in 2017 i started to have serious conversations with nicola about you know i actually want to do this for the rest of my life i feel like we've come across something that that we can actually have a tremendous global impact with and yeah we made the decision to sell our company now that wasn't the end of my entrepreneurial life i still have investments and other interests but actually what i took was that entrepreneurial kind of startup life that i'd had as a running businesses and i decided that if we were going to take this we needed to almost take that mentality to kids operating rooms so kids operating started in 2018 and we can register charity people that joined us right at the very beginning there's two or three key people like david cunningham who's still our ceo was the ceo on day one he's still the ceo surrounding myself with brilliant people was kind of part of the plan.

7:35And some of them came from the private sector, not just from the third sector. So yeah, really from day one, we started focusing completely around how do we scale this up? How can we do as much as possible? I've only got 30 good working years left in me, so I need to maximize it as much as I can and have as much impact as we can. And it was the right thing. We sold the company. we put half of that profits from the sale of the company and not the profit half of the sale of the company into starting kids who are and that really funded the first couple years the work we did and allowed us rather than focusing on fundraising that allowed us to build an impressive team who we knew we would need if we were to grow as quickly as i wanted to that truly is amazing and i kind of wanted to ask it it feels like a very natural progression from you kind of starting out doing oh it's just one off and then realizing this is what you want to do what do you what was that moment when you realized like I'm actually going to sell my business and really move on from this yeah so it was actually just after the decisions the you one of the eureka moments was just actually after Nicola and almost it was kind of it just proved that the right decision had been made.

8:55I knew that we wanted to sell the company, sell the company because we needed, I wanted to, not because it was a distraction, but because I wanted, or I needed the money to start Kids So Are, I just wanted to focus my life on something different. I'd run, I'd worked in hospitality for almost 20 years. You know, I'm kind of, at that point, I was kind of early forties. It's just, I'd kind of slightly lost my love of the hospitality industry. Just from having done it a long time and no longer feeling that challenged. So the opportunity that happened in Uganda came along at just kind of the perfect time.

9:28And maybe I was looking for other opportunities and challenges. I never realized getting involved with that first operating room would have such a profound impact on me personally. And just with my connection with Nicola and I, having experienced so much of what children and parents go through here in the UK, we just couldn't believe that there were countries in the world where a child's ill, just what Ezra had, our eldest. born premature, both her lungs had collapsed. Esha would have died had she been born in another country. And a low-middle country doesn't have a pediatric surgical service.

10:04She would die. So for us, we'd already made that decision. But then I went to India to the Global Initiative of Children's Surgery as a kind of young, not young, but an excited, this was young in my journey of philanthropy. be. And I was like convinced this was, I was told this was like the biggest conference in the world for global children's surgery. So I went there thinking, I'm going to go meet all these people that are providing surgery for kids that are desperately trying to, you know, solve this unmet need. And I landed in the lower and a few days I would go around people saying, so what are you doing?

10:49What's your involvement with global surgery? How are you, what are we doing to try and increase access to surgery for children? And it really felt like no one had the answer. Certainly no one else was doing it. And I was like, look, we built a couple operating rooms already and look at the impact they've had. Almost like a slight pilot. I kind of thought of it as a kind of pilot, the first few that we'd built. And I was like, surely this is not the case but i came home from velour going we are the only organization that exists in the world and this was only a month into officially registering kids who are that is doing this which is quite exciting from a business point of view i was like we're first to market no one else doing this and actually our model was completely different from what was being done previously because a lot of the time when we looked at people that were trying to solve access to surgical issues in, say, Africa.

11:47It was all mission-based work. So everyone up until, it felt like, I'm not saying this is the case, but it felt like everyone up to this point, you know, that model of sending surgeons from the US, from the UK to Africa to operate on children. You know, we've all known doctors and friends who've done that. But that was a long model. All it did was just increase dependency and foreign aid because these doctors fly in. Okay, it's brilliant. You know, they save, they do 100 operations and then they leave and go home. But no one's strengthening the health system. No one's strengthening the workforce.

12:27They might do a bit of training and things like that. But without increasing capacity for surgery, by investing in the local people, in the local workforce, and when I say people, I mean the surgical team, the nurses, the doctors, the surgeons, the biomedical engineers, the anesthetists, without investing in those people locally, all we're doing is increasing dependency on foreign aid. So my model was, our model, kids operating rooms model. And, you know, David Cunningham, myself, Nicola, those three key people at the start of kids operating rooms, we all like 100 % agreed this was the right way to move forward was we were going to do things differently.

13:06We were going to work with governments to establish the importance of investing in children's surgical services, work with them to identify a space within their health system, deliver state-of-the-art operating room. We're not talking about second-hand operating room equipment donated by the NHS or anything like that. This is state-of-the-art what you would see in an NHS hospital in Scotland or anywhere in England, UK. More than 3 ,000 pieces of equipment in each operating room. We would go and deliver these in working hospitals to working surgical teams. and where there wasn't the capacity to use, we would then go and train them.

13:47So train doctors, sorry, train the surgeons, the anesthetists, the biomedical engineers that work in these operations. And that is why our model has been so successful. And actually, you know, everyone is now looking at the way we do things and going, these guys have got it right. The mission is fine. Like, it works for some people, but for that long-term sustainable impact, would right away. And that is strengthening the health force, strengthening the health system. And when we leave, because that's always the plan, when we hand an operating room to a country, the country is responsible for paying the salaries of the hospital.

14:26The only thing we do beyond delivering the operating room is that we continue to maintain and service the equipment as part of a maintenance plan for 10 years. But other than that, the hospital, it's their hospital, it's their operating room, It's their surgical team that's working in it. It's their responsibility to pay for salaries, consumables within the operating room. And the only other big change since that model is we've started introducing solar into all our operating rooms. So now all our solar operating rooms, all our surgeries are powered by solar panels and battery systems. That means that when the lights go out, there's lots of issues across low-middle-income countries with power.

15:04So when they go out, doctors are able to continue operating. great for the environment but it's also good for patient safety you know because we have we've been in hospitals where you know a nurse is holding a mobile phone light while the surgeon is finishing an operating an operation because the lights yeah that truly is amazing it's kind of like being a trailblazer within the space as you said that no one else is doing it they were doing mission work and kind of what you're doing is making sure everything will still work down the line and it's not relying on that aid and that was my that was genuinely a eureka moment i talk about it quite regularly whereby i sat there on the flight coming home from india on my own going no one else is doing this like we've got it wrong or we're the first to market and yeah transpired we were first to market which is really exciting yeah you know from an entrepreneurial brain versus a philanthropic mindset, that was quite exciting.

16:04Yeah, that is really, truly amazing. So you spoke about how your model is quite successful. How does KidsLR measure success? It's such a brilliant question because when we first set out in 2014, we built one operating room. And that was like, we knew that would save a thousand children a year. And that was enough for me. Like genuinely, that was enough for me. I was like, this is amazing. Let's just support John forever and we'll do a thousand children a year. He'll operate a thousand children a year and have a profound impact. I should say they're not all life-saving. Some of them are life-enhancing rather than just life-saving.

16:45So is one child enough? You know, when you look at like the pain that family goes through when a child dies or when a child has to live with a disability or in pain, like any parent you know, the trauma you go through as parents when a child breaks their arm in the playground or playing outside in the garden. The thought, like in this country, you know, the thought that a child's appendix would rupture in the UK and they would die seven days later from septic shock in agony. I mean, that would never happen in this country. Can you imagine the Daily Mail front page that was allowed to happen in a health system here in the UK?

17:24So when you just identify one child? Because we're now providing capacity for 220 ,000 children every single year. So it's big numbers to kind of think about. That's why I said it's a brilliant question, because what is the impact? I think when we started in 2018, we thought about, let's try and do three or four operating rooms a year. That was really ambitious. And then in 2019, I stood up at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, and I said, we were going to build 100 operating rooms by the end of 2030. and everyone said like we were we had genuinely leaders in global health saying like you're mad like you won't do it you're setting yourself up to fail and it's just not going to work and in in just in may this year we were back at the world health assembly announcing to the same people in the same room or many of the same people that we'd completed our 100th operating room we opened it in Swana earlier this year in April, and then two days later in Ethiopia at 101st operating.

18:27So I don't know how to measure success. Do you measure it per child? Do you measure it per the economic benefit of investing in surgery, which is now into billions of dollars in terms of the economic impact that we've had? Is it the 220 ,000 children a year that we now provide the capacity of this surgery for? Is it finishing something four and a half years early? I mean, And in terms of philanthropy, global health, just the world as we see it, how often do people get to stand out and say, actually, that commitment we made in 2019, we finished early, and we're actually going to get another 100 by 2030.

19:01So I think the success for me is measured in, like, is my desire still there to keep doing it? And am I still as passionate today as I was eight years ago when we started Kids Awkward? and I would say 100%. For me, the success is having built up a brilliant team. I mean, let's face it, the team do most of the work. You know, I'm, you know, founders often get a lot of credibility, a lot of the credit for the work publicly and, you know, this amazing award that I got. But I feel that really, as chairman, my role is to make sure, well, executive chairman, But as executive chairman, my role is to make sure we don't run out of money and to pick brilliant people.

19:51And we have a brilliant kids operating room who are working every single day. We don't have a lot of high staff turnover. I think our team are really passionate, just as passionate as Nicola and I are, about why we come into work every day. Why kids who are exist to serve. and I think they're just individuals who work really, really hard. So measuring success is, for me, do my teams feel the same way as I do about the charity? Are they as passionate about it as Nicola and I are about and David are about why we're doing what we do? And I think that's the need. I think it is. I think that's a great measure of success.

20:35Yeah, great. So you also mentioned about the award. So you did win one of the big awards at the Hustle Awards this year, a founder of the year. So congratulations on that. Thank you. I did feel a bit awkward about it because who founded it was my wife, Nicola. So when I came home, she personally told her, I said, you know, I've won a founder's award. So she was delighted for it. I'm sure she was. So what does the winning of the award mean for you, kind of both personally and professionally? I think I don't actually seek the awards that, like, you know, we've got a brilliant team who quite rightly have won several awards already for different things that we've done.

21:27The Founder Award is a great honor to get it. I love that I was put forward and I was selected. I honestly genuinely had, if I'm being totally honest, not for a second that I think I was going to win it. So to have won it was brilliant. As I said, I'm very careful publicly when I talk about just the balance of what I do and what the team do. So without it, it's very cheesy, but I kind of feel like I accept the award on behalf of the whole team. But of course, like every organization as a founder, like Nicola and I very much pushed the idea of Kids All Creating Room, very much put the team together.

22:09We've built, with a brilliant team, we've built this amazing organization together. So, yeah, to be recognized is a beautiful thing. But, yeah, I'm just a bit, I'm always a bit uncomfortable. But that's quite humble being like, yes, I am the founder, but it's the team really. No, but genuinely it is. I mean, I know a lot of people say that, But I'm here talking to you. Jenny, I woke up this morning. I'm big into running. So I had my running this morning at 8.45. I got to take the kids to school. I get to have breakfast with my family. And then I'm now having this lovely conversation with you at half past 10 in the morning.

22:51But I know that from 8.30 this morning, there have been people just all around the world, in the US, London, Africa, depending on timings, there's people already thinking about nothing other than kids who are and who are already heading out, working away and making things happen. So genuinely, I do very much always live by that kind of yes. I understand why publicly I'm put forward and I get the accolade or there's a newspaper article that quote me, but I never get fed up of telling people that actually there's a lot of really good hardworking people while I'm doing it. That is truly amazing. So talking about the journey, you've been on it for a couple years now.

23:39What do you think have been some of the biggest challenges so far and how have you managed to overcome them? probably have been lots of challenges, lots of little ones. But probably as we progressed the journey of kids operating room, we started in 2018 and we knew that we already had good ideas that there were several pediatric surgeons that we knew well that didn't have the space, the capacity for surgery that we knew that with a similar investment in their operating rooms, we would be able to have a profound impact just like we'd had in Uganda. So in Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, those kind of initial countries that we then expanded into.

24:24But would you believe that we quite quickly came to a point whereby there were no more pediatric surgeons. None of them just kind of that we knew of. And we realized that one of the rate-limiting factors to our growth was we couldn't just keep finding pediatric surgeons and giving them an operating room. We actually had to start training surgeons. Not that we exactly ran out, but we knew that if we wanted to grow as quickly as we could, there just wasn't the capacity within the continent of Africa, for example. In many countries where they didn't have a single pediatric surgeon, we were going to need to train.

25:04If we wanted to build an operating room surgical service of excellence in Burundi, for example, Burundi has never had a pediatrician. So we were going to need to train them. So that was a massive kind of shift or pivot in our, you know, we thought there'd be a constant queue of surgeons that we could meet and want our, you know, we'd be able to build an operating room, there'd be a waiting surgical team there, but that wasn't the case. So as we expanded into countries like the DRC, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, some really challenging countries to operate in. Also, they'd never had a surgical service for children before.

25:43So we were starting right from the very beginning. And right from the very beginning meant training brilliant people, local surgical teams, anesthetists, biomedical engineers, nurses that can support the surgical system. That was probably one of our biggest hurdles. But I mean, it's absolutely the right thing to do. and now we've become one of the biggest trainers of surgeons anesthetists and biomedical engineers in the world that truly is impressive i guess on the flip side of that what would you say have been some of the highlights since founding kids of our i think i think i still love going to one of the so we do a lot of installs as you know we've done now over 107 and when very occasionally if the timing's right, and I go on quite a few installs, if the timing's right, then we can see an operation happening the next day that we've installed an operating room.

26:42It doesn't always work out like that. Maybe it's three or four days later, a week later before the surgeries start. But on several occasions, I've managed to sit there and see a child having the first operation in an operating room that we've just built. And that never, ever changes, that feeling of hope for the family because as I said to you before Nicola and I have been through a really tough time having children but we always had hope and when you see that hope on any family's face like mother father who are desperately despairing at a child who's sick who's been told they can't have surgery or there's no facility for them to go to when they suddenly know that actually here's a surgeon who's trained, who's going to operate on a child and that child's life is going to change forever.

27:31Even the profound impact of surgery is not just, okay, there's the immediate impact of surgery, but if you take a little girl, for example, who has a fistula where she's doubly incontinent, she's not going to go to school. So she's not going to get an education. It's already sometimes quite a tough, tough opportunities for a young girl in a country whereby she's not able to access surgery. Sorry, able to access surgery. But if that surgery doesn't happen, she may never go to school, not get an education. So the profound impact of not having access to surgery can be life-changing in the sense that that child's entire life will go in a completely different direction.

28:17So seeing that happen and watching a little child's life change and the parents, the smile on the parents, the joy and hope that they have. And then being able to go back and sometimes rarely, on a rare occasion, go back and actually seeing the child six months, a year later. That's the highlights. And as I said, I'm quite often there to be able to see the first operating room operation. Amazing. I kind of wish I could go back to 17 and train to be a surgeon. I was never clever enough, unfortunately. But it's such an incredible impact that these brilliant, talented surgeons and their teams have.

28:58The other highlights, we've never said no to challenging situations in the sense that there are countries that people don't want to go into that really are neglected. Built the world's first ever pediatric operating room in a refugee camp in northern Kenya in Ketuma. That was just incredible. We've got an operating room in the DRC and in Haiti where there's still ongoing problems in terms of civil war. and our operating rooms are still open and working and operating on children when others have closed. When other agencies that relied on mission work have closed their operating rooms, are still open because they're being used by local people.

29:37Again, proving our model works. During COVID, we shipped over 35 million pieces of PPE to Africa, all donated by the NHS, which was, again, a huge highlight. And I think opening an operating room in... in Kabul last year. Again, another highlight to be able to go out to Afghanistan personally and see the soldiers that are working there in Atatürk Hospital in Kabul when many, many other international agencies have pulled out of Kabul to be able to be there and see. It's actually our busiest unit of all our 107 units. It's our busiest. And to see children who have been horribly impacted by war, decades of war.

30:22But for them to be able to access surgery is just, again, just one of thousands of highlights. We first hit 10 ,000 children that we've operated on. Then it was 100 ,000. Then we hit half a million. And just these are kind of big moments that we always celebrate internally and within the team. It's just great. 100 operating rooms last month or two months ago with my wife there and for us both to be in Ethiopia as we opened it. again growing you know just lots of lovely moments not one in particular but lots of lovely moments yeah that is truly amazing kind of knowing the impact that you're making in all these different countries so you said about how you have 107 operating rooms already installed what do you think have been some of the biggest lessons learned from kind of scaling this initiative Yeah, I mean, fundraising is challenging.