Clare Roberts: Meet the Superscaler and unofficial 'mum' to 40,000 children

12:10Clare Roberts:She's older or younger?

12:11John Roberts:She's 10 years younger than I am. So when we're at work, we're friends but colleagues and we are like that and don't always really 100 % and everything, but we're very respectful of each other. And when we're out of work, we're sisters, and we have great fun. Don't get me wrong, there is stuff that happens when we're out of work sometimes where we're forced into discussing work. But I think we have a better work-life balance between us where we get that when we're on holidays together or something like that, that it's different.

12:45Clare Roberts:What about your dad, John? I mean, your relationship with your dad, is that a normal relationship?

12:50John Roberts:Probably not, no. But it's our normal relationship. And, yeah, we're very similar. We're both, we're very honest. We're quite brutal. We don't hold back to the point where probably other people couldn't work the way we are. He would be so, I'm the oldest of four children, and I am definitely the one that he'll say exactly what comes into his head without thinking, am I going to upset Claire by saying this? because he knows that even if he did upset me, it's okay and I can deal with it. And I'm a bit the same with him. It's interesting. Like now I'm a parent with three daughters. You have different relationships with your kids because all your kids are different.

13:37John Roberts:So what I think has been amazing for my dad and I is we founded this business together. Lots of people go into family businesses where they are going into their parents' shoes. I think that's much harder to do than it is to be joint founders together because we have mutual respect for each other. He is an accountant by professions. He has very different skills to me. I am probably more of a people's person, more of I learned through growing through other sectors, how to businesses would scale and things. But we've got a really good balance between us. He is very good at challenging our business even now, where he looks at basic business principles and makes us sort of think, are we doing the right thing still?

14:22Clare Roberts:You use the R word, respect. Actually, if you respect somebody, you listen to him.

14:26John Roberts:Yeah.

14:27Clare Roberts:And especially if they're your dad as well. And I'm sure it's the same for him for you. Investment's an interesting decision. Do you take investment? And you took investment firstly in 2016 from BGF, which was a minority investment. Then you took investment, a majority investment to Freeman Capital in 2021. What was your thinking about taking investment? And how has the investment changed the dynamic of the business?

14:49John Roberts:So in 2016, truthfully, it was sort of one of those things that we just suddenly decided to do. We had bank debt at that point in time. My dad had put a lot of his own personal money into business. And it was more for him, really, to be able to sell some of his shares and take some money off the table, which obviously at that point he was sort of early 60s and and why not absolutely he should do and bgf being a minority investor it's different having a minority investor in because they they all say back entrepreneurs who are looking to scale businesses so we were an exact we were an exact example of what they wanted to invest in and and there was nothing really during that period that we ever wanted to do that they stopped us doing.

15:36In 2021, we took majority investment, partly for me to de-risk a bit and my dad to de-risk some more,

15:46John Roberts:but also because we'd got to a size where, and the scale of the business where you could see that there was change in our sector and that there was an opportunity to grow faster if we wanted to, and bringing in a partner who were more sizable enabled us to do that growth. I think as well, whilst Dad and I had obviously done well growing the business together, this is the biggest business either of us have ever been involved in. Do you know what I mean? So actually, we needed someone to support us as well, to look at what the next phase of growth would look like. And I think what Fremen have done, and I think what, and VGF as well, in fairness, we've taken investment from people who were brought into our culture and values, and that was the only way this would work.

16:33John Roberts:Obviously, I've been CEO for 12 years now. Well, sorry, 10 years since they first invested as a private equity. But it does change what you do to a certain degree. But I still act exactly the same way now as I did when we didn't have to be involved. I think I have to act that way, otherwise I shouldn't be CEO anymore.

16:56Clare Roberts:So coming into a business that you no longer own the majority stake in, does that change you at all?

17:04John Roberts:It doesn't change you. I think what it does do is it enables you to share in the risk that you're going to do as you scale. It's also you bring them in because they've got experience of being involved in larger businesses. Having them as investors has enabled us to think slightly differently. Could we have done some of the things? Yeah, probably eventually we would have done it. but would have taken a lot longer. So they came in and when they were like, in order to have a business of size, data and technology is clearly fundamental, which obviously everyone knows that, but you don't always, when it's your own business, invest as quickly in things as you would do, whereas they can see what's worked for them and been successful previously.

17:44John Roberts:So they look to make those changes and you deliver them and that's what you bring in. They also, as well, are a European fund. so for them it's about looking at how we can scale not just in the uk but also overseas as well and that everyone does if you're a ceo if you did the same job every day it'd be quite boring i i'm very fortunate in the fact that this has been a business that's grown in different ways over the years so my job as ceo keeps evolving and that's what makes it interesting for me what's the hardest part of founder? What was the hardest part? I think there's a sense of responsibility.

18:25John Roberts:So most of our team in our nursery have no idea about who owns our company. To them, private equity means nothing. And I think that's great, because actually, if they knew what private equity was, it would mean that our business had changed. But at times, they think I make every decision on my own. So I think it's hard, because on one hand you don't want them to know what's going on in the background but in the other way um it is hard because sometimes some decisions are outside your control and also as well i think sometimes a lot of our businesses and devolve by government and ofsted and regulation and things like that that is very difficult like not only are we regulated by ofsted we have 310 restaurants every day that we're feeding children that can't tell you whether they've got allergies or not and the responsibility sits with us to deliver that.

19:22Clare Roberts:I get that. No, I get that as well. And I think actually the focus of your staff in your nurseries is to provide the best childcare to those children so those parents walk out of there happy that they've made the right decision. So knowing the ownership model and the PE backing, actually they don't need to know that. But I think sometimes as a founder you expect to know everything um you can do um ask about and being a founder is a lonely place as well um i was having a conversation recently with people uh in my peer group and it was people that i knew and people i know in business as well and it was like as kids growing up did you ever hear the word menopause i never heard it in my house i'm not even sure my dad heard it right like that my mum never mentioned it you know and as you know being a journalist for 30 odd years now and growing up I never heard it was because I wasn't listening for it or was it because it wasn't being mentioned as well then you know you go through a situation where it becomes a part of your life you know with my wife and actually a lot of female fans are talking about it now as well in a in in in a big way you had uh you went through early menopause as well I think it's a good thing people are talking about it but when you were running this scaling business and you went through the symptoms associated with the menopause.

20:40Clare Roberts:Was that a big factor? Was it something you were able to talk about or not? So I think at the time, so it was probably around about 2020, I think I thought I had

20:49John Roberts:early onset dementia because I couldn't get my words out. I was starting to have what everyone describes as brain fog. I was probably at that time 42, something like that, which She's quite young, really. So I remember my mum and her peer group talking about menopause. I almost think that when they were going through it, it was like considered almost a badge of honour not to take HRT, which is crazy because if you go to the dentist and they're going to take your teeth out, you don't say, oh, yeah, just crack on and go for it. You say, give me the anaesthetic now. So it's almost like I think what we've become better at is talking about it and I think I think I think I should talk about it because I think loads of people probably go through the menopause and I can see it in our workplace probably 97 % of our workforce are females so you've got teenage kids who that's quite a trying part of your life anyway you're going through the menopause you've probably got aging parents that rely on you as well and I think people give up work often because they don't realize they're finding everything a bit overwhelming.

22:02John Roberts:Whereas the reality, it's a phase of life and you need people to say, it's okay and this is just a period of time that you need to get through. There are things you can do if you want to that can help you. But also talking about it, I think makes it feel more normal.

22:18Clare Roberts:We've grasped about that normal word again. I mean, like the biggest killer of men under the age of 50 is suicide. Because men don't talk about these things as well. One of the highest suicide rate among women is like I think late 30s to early 50s, which is like prime menopause age as well. And I think, yeah, you do talk about it. You don't, like, I'm a man, so it's not my position to comment really.

22:41John Roberts:I think GPs aren't, I think GPs are not great. Not all GPs, but some GPs are very quick to prescribe you antidepressants for menopause rather than actually thinking, why is this happening? Is it your hormones? and I think that's a real problem in society.

23:00Clare Roberts:Yeah, I agree and I think the thing is HRT, you know as a woman the menopause has come in and the HRT will be an option but when you're faced with that decision, it's like you're starting from scratch and you think actually you're not the first person this has happened to and it's Gary Neville's wife speaks about it because she had early menopause as well. So, okay, you've grown Kids Planet to 200 million turnover plus. We'll touch on some of the issues. Why do you think there are so few female super scalers?

23:29John Roberts:I think, well, I think there's a few things. I think we think that the world has changed so much in the fact that more females are working. But I don't think there are loads of females, sort of, if you look statistically, who have founded businesses that have got to size. But I think part of that is because the world's hard and it's a big juggle. And I think more sits on females than it does on men. And I know that's a very sweeping statement, and there are probably loads of men out there who do more than their fair share.

23:59Clare Roberts:That is a true statement. But it's hard.

24:04John Roberts:When we started Kids Planet, people used to say to me, how do you keep going with young kids? How do you get out the door and work the hours that you do? It's because I was really organised and because I knew it was the only way. When you've got young kids, it's hard to leave the house. So I had to leave pretty early once we woke up, and I was lucky. my job was the nursery so where else what a better place to take them than where i was going to work but it's hard you've got all the stuff that you have to do as a mum as a parent like even whether you whether you're not a mum or a parent there's a load of admin and i think naturally females take the bigger brunt of admin full stop in in partnerships because i think i think that's where we've not really changed enough.

24:52John Roberts:Even now, and I have a great relationship with my ex-husband, I still get all the admin from school and forward him the bookings that I've made for parents' evening and things like that. That's because someone had to take that role, and I think females naturally do that.

25:07Clare Roberts:Has education kept up with it?

25:09John Roberts:I think the other big thing is, and I know I've said this to you before, but the skills that I have as an entrepreneur are the skills that when I started school that they probably would have tried to make me stop, asking questions, talking. Brains will get you so far in life. Natural skills and determination and hard work and being inquisitive are the things that take you even further. And I think one of the things that we do that's a terrible job in this country is we don't teach children to understand that they've probably got a really good tool set themselves already. Instead, we want them to conform and be quiet.

25:53John Roberts:We want them not to be disruptive because it makes it easier to teach them. And actually, I think, I also think that the other thing that's really sad is there are loads of businesses where you don't have to be brain of brain. You just have to work hard. And I see it in our organisation. People who left school at 16 and went into early years who've progressed really far in our organisation. but that's because we have a real ethos of wanting them to succeed. We want to channel them through. And I think what we do in this country is we don't tell kids that you could go and work at any shop and say, I'm really ambitious, how am I going to progress?

26:33John Roberts:And people are frightened to say that. I don't know why they're frightened, but if you want to progress in life, you ask someone to help you progress. And I've done that in every job I've ever had.

26:42Clare Roberts:I went to my parents' winter parents' evening for me and my brother. We're twins. I remember the economics teacher said something along the lines of, the thing we can rely on with Chris is he always puts his hand up. You know, very rarely knows what he's talking about, but always puts his hand up. You could look back at me at school and people within my school would say he was the one who always puts his hands up asking questions. Now, I still do that now. If I don't know something, I ask a question. so you could argue that actually the career that I've chosen in journalism was the right one for me because I am incredibly curious incredibly nosy you can look at kids at school and you can see the ones I think who are entrepreneurial and if you harness that and grow it and develop it they'll probably become entrepreneurial but if you knock it out of them at six or seven or eight or nine they don't pick it back up again and I don't know if that's more aimed at a female thing or a thing but I always think if you see any talent in somebody you know grow it, put water on it, you know put fertilizer on it.

27:43John Roberts:I think the best thing we could do is really rethink our curriculum particularly in Sacraman School. I think there are loads of life skills that we could teach kids who were 11 to 16 much better things that would help because what is the point in coming out of school with a handful of GCSEs that haven't really got, aren't worth the paper they're written on. If they came out with skills that will help them develop, even talking about banking, talking about managing money, I just think we don't help people progress in life.

28:18Clare Roberts:Yeah. Yeah, we teach kids facts. We don't teach them skills.

28:22John Roberts:Yeah.

28:23Clare Roberts:A lot of talk about AI at the moment, you know. So, you know, kids know how to use chat to EPT. So there's a stat that's come out, which I think one in six young people are going to be without work. So we need to prepare them for that at an earlier age and get them thinking about that as well. I vote for you to be the next Education Secretary, Clare. I mean, ever tempted by a career in politics?

28:43John Roberts:I just think it's such a thankless road to go down. I'm tempted. Maybe, but I just, I think my kids would kill me. I think the scrutiny and the fact that you just put yourself as a target where we don't celebrate success enough in this country. And probably I'd just be criticised if I did it. But I think one of the things that we don't do well enough in politics for Daphne is you should be looking at people who've got expertise in certain fields to do those top jobs. Why on earth, when they give the jobs out, do they not say, well, you've worked in the healthcare system, you should be the health minister?

29:27John Roberts:I think they don't mirror up skills well enough often with the top jobs.

29:31Clare Roberts:There was a statistic, which I think there's 650 MPs and only six had a background in business. This was a few years ago. And as a consequence, business is wealth creation. All the people they employ, the 9 ,000 people that you employ, They all pay tax, probably, depending on what salary you've got. But it's seen as a dirty word. It shouldn't be. Yeah, I agree. If you teach those skills to people and then you put people in a position where they can actually impart that knowledge to other people, it's about putting round pegs and round holes. You talk a lot of common sense, which probably precludes you from a career in politics.

30:06Clare Roberts:But, you know, when you've made all these acquisitions, how do you identify those acquisitions? Do they come to you? Do you somebody drop your essays on LinkedIn?

30:14John Roberts:in so so we get we get some direct to us um there's brokers that sell nurseries i think i think one of the things and this is our sector is quite a difficult sector in the fact that people think investment means that you don't care about the business i i totally refute that i think investment means that we're able to invest even more in the business we we put we're always looking at how we can be better and the people that i've had as investment partners share that because i wouldn't want to be in our business you have to keep investing in your team whether it's in technology whether it's in resources whether it's in your buildings for us safeguarding is fundamental and so we're always looking at how we invest in in that um but i think i think it's the challenge is is making sure that you've always got a partner who shares in that values

31:11Clare Roberts:I've known you for a few years now and you've taken part in a number of my events and you've never been afraid to have a contrary view to everybody else and I did an event as part of International Women's Day and a lot of people were saying what we need is we need women only networking events, we need women only this and actually that's a very very fair view, you said I hate women only events I hate women only awards and I said, why is that for? Why is that for? So, that makes me sound awful. Don't mean it to sound awful.

31:42John Roberts:I can totally, I totally know why women-only events were created. I'm probably a bit strange in the fact that I went to an all-girls school until I was 16. When I went to sixth form and it was a mixed sixth form, boys were always quite sure of themselves and thought they knew the answers to everything. I probably have been more competitive against blokes than I would be against females. And I think that's just because I saw it at school suddenly having gone through an all-girls school. But it's almost like... I think what I think about all-female events is, though, it's very sad in this day and age that we're still talking about all-female events.

32:28John Roberts:and the statistic of people in the earliest stages in careers is way more balanced but I just don't see it balanced enough yet all the way up the ladder and I don't know I don't know whether that's because of what we talked about earlier because of the fact that it's hard you've got a load of other stuff to deal with that makes it more difficult to progress but I I've won female awards but I always felt I felt it slightly was cheapened by the fact there was a man category and a female category whereas I like it when it's you think you've won against everyone and then that might sound that equally awards are awards and I hate the fact that you feel that you could be positively discriminated against being female sometimes.

33:17Clare Roberts:Yeah when I think of you I don't think of what a great female entrepreneur I think of you as what a great entrepreneur and actually that's where you really want the conversation to be is you don't want to look at a football referee and say oh she's a great football referee because she's a female it's from a say that she's a great referee but you can't be what you can't see and I think there is that balance to be struck um if you had a male only award you know there would be an outcry about it you know for quite rightly as well so it's just that it's a it's a question um one question I asked earlier actually was if you had your three daughters in this room how would they describe you how would your staff describe you as a ceo and a founder

33:55John Roberts:I think they say that I'd remain true to what was important. I think, like, obviously, it's different in the fact that if you think back to 18 years ago, I went to every nursery every week in the beginning. I think it's difficult because often people who work in a nursery do not see the engine that sit behind that as the overall business, if that makes sense, because they don't see it. I think as I said earlier people think I'm quite honest, people think that I've kept true to what's important, people would say that yes of course we've changed because we have to change as we grow but there's a lot of things that have stayed true to what our core values are.

34:40Clare Roberts:Yeah and I've spoken to people about you, not today incidentally but they've all said the same thing, you know actually The Claire Roberts that you see is the Claire Roberts that we see. There isn't a different side, a public-facing side and a real side, which that's just about being authentic. We're in your offices in Lim today. The sun's out. Last year, you completed an eight-day trek across Jordan in aid of a charity called Girls Out Allowed, which helps teenage girls build confidence, resilience and self-belief through early intervention programmes and mentoring in school. Very important to you as a mum of three teenage girls as well.

35:17Clare Roberts:How important is charity and how important is fitness in your priority list?

35:22John Roberts:So fitness is really important to me.

35:24Clare Roberts:What's your fitness program like?

35:27John Roberts:So I run 30k every week. On my best week, I run 30k every week. I go to the gym twice. I have a PT once a week and I go to reform the plateaus twice a week. Probably do about 10 hours of exercise a week. I do that, A, because I like eating and drinking, and I think you have to balance out the badness with the goodness, and so it puts that out. But I also think exercise mentally helps you. So I love running before work because part of the problem is in a job, you get sidetracked into things. If you can get your exercise out of the way in the morning, tick you've won because you you've already started off on a really positive outlook but no one ever regrets having done an hour's exercise they always feel slightly better without themselves for having done it later on in the day yeah um i'm running a half marathon on sun on sunday so i have i normally now i'm about 10k i hadn't had knee surgery about seven years ago which means i don't do longer distances but i've committed to running the half marathon because i said i couldn't ask people to sponsor me for a 10k because it was embarrassing because they know i do that a lot yeah my daughter is running it with me she's i'm running for girls out loud she's running for smart works both female sort of charities that i think sort of help at different ends of the spectrum and i'm pretty proud of her at 18 to be able to do a half marathon because i certainly would have much better things to do than at half marathon at 80 but i i think i think when you when you when you're able to you should give something back i think i'm in a privileged position where taking a week off work every couple of years i can do that and i can do something that isn't just about raising the money to support the charities about raising the awareness of the charity and I'm lucky that I can do that and get other people to come along and do sort of different things with me like I was I was with someone yesterday who did the trek to Jordan with me and we were laughing because it was very basic and I think I sort of conned everyone a bit when I got to sign up I kept describing it as glamping which it really was not glamping the point where I was like oh I've got a tan and then I wiped my arm and realized it was dirty was a low point in my life.

37:52Clare Roberts:Blair that's the end of the Naked Founder podcast but we always end with the same question which is this, in the US, there's a tradition of the outgoing US president would write a letter to his or her successor, offering advice, if you're to write a letter to a young Clare Roberts or another founder, based on your experiences, what would you write?

38:09John Roberts:I think it's not to take things too personally, but also to enjoy the journey, because I think you can tell people lots of things that will stop them doing things in a certain way, whereas the reality is you end up where you end up and you just have to learn by the journey that you go through so that you share that knowledge and you share it with other people and that you try not to get too focused in the moment because things pass eventually as well.

38:43Clare Roberts:Great advice as always, Claire. Thank you very much for being on the Naked Founder podcast on location. That's all for this episode. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and family. Subscribe, you know, give us a five-star rating as well. Thank you to our sponsors, Financial Airlines, Dan Brown, for producing. As ever, my name is Chris McGuire.