Jennie Johnson: Why founders are afraid of the F-word (failure)

0:00Welcome everyone to the latest episode of the Naked Founder podcast, the business podcast where nothing is hidden. Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur, Jennie Johnson, MBE, who has experienced the highs and lows of being a founder. She founded three businesses. Business one was Kids Aloud, which she ran from 2003 to 2020 before exiting. Her second business was called My First Five Years, which closed its doors after four years in 2025. now she's back with her third business the pet euthanasia people three very different businesses

0:30Jennie Johnson:but Jenny Johnson how's it going it's going really well thanks Chris Jenny delighted you can join us on the on this episode of the Naked Founder podcast we start each episode with the same question which is what didn't they tell you about founding a business which you wish you'd known I guess no one tells you how hard it's going to be and how personal it's going to be to you and you talked about highs and lows I think you get some incredible highs when you're running your own business but you get lots and lots of lows as well where you have to get right in the trenches and sort problems out and and you're going to have more of those certainly in the early days than the highs and just how personal it all becomes to you because it is like people say like having a business is like having another baby you feel so passionate about what you're doing and you're working so hard that you you know you believe success should follow if there's any justice in the world, but it doesn't always work that way.

1:21Jennie Johnson:So I would say be prepared to need to be incredibly resilient because it's not for the faint hearted. It's not easy or everybody will be doing it, but I'm still delighted, even though there's been many highs, many lows, I wouldn't change my career path for anything. I think there's two things that you've said that jump out at me. The first one is the R word resilience. And it's what I hear from every founder I speak to. You've got to be resilient because there'll be plenty of bad days as well the other thing is and it's a lot of sports men and women talk about this they talk about the need not to get too high when it goes well and not to get too low when it goes badly as well as a founder would that be the top piece of advice well i would say for me anyway the highs are so um they're so fleeting as well for me because even if something amazing happens in the business you kind of know right i've got to deliver it now.

2:14Jennie Johnson:So there's always more work to be done. Nothing's ever easy. You never get to sort of sit back on your laurels and go, right, okay, I can just sit back and this is all going to just take care of itself now. No matter what element of the business we're talking about, you've got to get stuck in. You've got to work incredibly hard. And there is always barriers coming up that mean that the path that you're on is just never going to be a straight path. You don't go from A to Z nice and easily. You meander, you get taken off track, you need a break, you need a rest, you need to refill your water to carry on the journey.

2:53Jennie Johnson:It's such a wiggly path. I think a lot of people talk about career paths being a wiggly path and I think owning a business is a wiggly path as well. And you've got to be ready to roll with the punches, try your best to learn from the mistakes you make so that there's value in everything and try not to make a bottle of wine the answer every night as so many founders do no uh and we'll talk about that actually as well um so this is naked founder podcast and we're going to talk about um your career and you've had one business that was a big success one business that you had to close and your current business which is showing real promise as well looking back can you explain why kids allowed was a massive success and why my first five years, despite the effort and the fact that you'd gone through the checks and balances, why that wasn't a success?

3:46Jennie Johnson:Yeah, I think for Kids Allowed, it solved a problem that nearly all parents have, which is that they're looking for high quality childcare, that they can feel happy that they've chosen and that they can feel that their child is getting a really good experience. And for me, it was grounded in a very personal need. I needed that for my own child. And I created an environment that was just a step change for the sector. Everything that we did, we did to be the best. And we had parents that loved what we were doing, that could physically see a building in a very prominent place close to where they lived that was delivering a service that they needed.

4:31Jennie Johnson:And as long as we delivered an exceptional service and looked after our staff and looked after our customers, it kind of just worked. And when I say it just worked, there was a lot of graft going on behind the scenes to make sure that it worked well. How big did you get, Kizilow? Well, we got to eight sites. We looked after 2 ,000 children a week. We had 500 colleagues. So it ended up being a fairly large company and something that I'm incredibly proud of as well. If I look at my first five years, which I then in my naivety thought, well, I've got all this experience in early years. I really understand how we can support parents to do this parenting thing a little bit differently so that they can relax and enjoy it.

5:15Jennie Johnson:And children will have better outcomes because their parents are more informed about how to do this thing, this first five years of a child's life that none of us really prepare parents for properly. I really felt we had something. But I think what we were trying to do with that was change behaviour. And actually changing behaviour is really, really difficult. You need an awful lot of money to launch a direct-to-consumer brand that's going to change behaviour, even if it's for somebody's good, because it's easier to do nothing or not change than make a real commitment to something. So I think, you know, Kids Allowed was providing a service people needed.

5:54Jennie Johnson:What we were trying to do with the app was help parents elevate their experience as a parent and elevate outcomes for the children. But you had to buy into that. You had to decide you wanted to go do it. And we just couldn't get the traction. We were successful on so many metrics. But the one thing we couldn't do was get our traction to a sustainable level that would pay the bills. And it was that simple. It was D2C is hard. Direct to consumer is incredibly hard. And you could say that launching a childcare company is direct to consumer, which it is, but it's a physical service in a physical building that people are driving past every day.

6:31Jennie Johnson:And they can see with an app, people need to come find you. They need to be aware of you. And to create that awareness at scale is just incredibly expensive. Some people get a bit of luck along the way. And I don't, you know, I've always said, the harder you work, the luckier you get. So, you know, I'm not trying to say for one minute that people that are successful have just been lucky. They will have worked incredibly hard as well. But sometimes with apps, you just have that viral moment or the right person download it and rave about it that can just give it that new trajectory. And we just didn't have them lucky breaks.

7:06No, and I think I could see my first five years still being a success for somebody else because timing is all important as well.

7:15Jennie Johnson:Yeah, I mean, we did have the perfect storm as well when we were out there trying to raise money. We couldn't have been raising money at a worse time, but it is what it is. And I think the other thing that I'm kind of proud of with my first five years is that I didn't bury my head in the sand. I could see we were going to have a problem and I treated every colleague with respect and fairness. We gave them notice. We paid them notice. We helped everybody find their next role and really supported people. And I think that there are examples of founders that know there's a problem, but just wait till they get to the very edge of the cliff and then everybody's in a mess.

7:51Jennie Johnson:And I didn't do that. And I kind of take, you know, some solace from the fact that I did it right. No. And what we're going to do, because there's certainly a wrong way of doing it, what we do with the Naked Founder podcast, We take the learnings from your career and then apply it to your current business as well. So if we look at Kids Aloud, you focused on the two big Cs, culture and colleagues. They were really important to you. So if you were founding a business, you would say, get the right colleagues and look after them and get your culture right. Would they be the pivotal parts of your success?

8:22Jennie Johnson:What, going forward or retrospectively? If you were talking to a founder right now and you were going in there as a non-exec director, would you say look first of all get the right colleagues and look after them you always used to say there's no excuse for one of your colleagues to miss the kids sports day and that was something which other companies followed and said you know we're going to do the same yeah so but that that bled into the culture of the business as well didn't it so you felt as a parent giving your kid over to kids allowed i was going to get the best experience for john or ann or sarah yeah i I think culture actually underpins everything.

8:57Jennie Johnson:And again, when I set up Kids Allowed, I think I'd just turned 30. So I hadn't run a business before. I wasn't well read. I'd not, you know, attended a management school. So everything I was doing was I was doing from how it just felt right to do things. And I must admit, it took me probably about a year into the journey to understand how much culture matters, how much the values of the business matters if you're going to be successful. so we um I had that sort of eureka moment that oh not everybody does understand what it means to to work at Kids Allowed because I haven't been explicit and explained what we're trying to do what we're trying to achieve what the culture is here how we support each other so I went on a massive journey as a young founder recognizing the importance of the values and culture of a business because how can you recruit people if you don't know what's expected of them and if you're not explicit with them about the behaviors that you expect to see from them when they turn into work so um that whole piece around who who are we trying to employ and what sort of a working environment were we trying to create for them so that they could flourish and be the best person they could be at work and and i feel we did that really well you use the p word purpose so when you started kids allowed you weren't happy with the child care that was available for your own child So you set up Kids Aloud and created what you wanted to be, the right childcare as well.

10:26You got three daughters as well. As a founder and a mum, how did you combine all that?

10:32Jennie Johnson:Probably terribly. I did my best, though. We all juggle too many balls, I think, especially I'm sure you'll have a number of female founders come on to talk about their experiences as well. But I think as a female founder, you know, you've founded your business and you've got your CEO hat on. If you're a family person as well, you've got your mum hat on, which probably means you've got a partner. So you've got your partner or your wife hat on or whatever that might be. And we spread ourselves too thinly. And this myth that we can have it all, you know, we can kind of, with compromises left, right and centre, have it all, or we can try to have it all.

11:10But I had to change

11:12Jennie Johnson:the narrative for me and say, I'm spreading myself too thinly. I'm juggling too many balls. So on any one given day, I used to have this little mantra of like, what am I going to need to put down today so that I can do that? So instead of dropping balls when you're juggling balls, I was putting them down to pick them back up later. And that might be in practical terms that, you know, there was a demand on me as a wife or there was demand on me as a mother and there was a demand on me as a CEO. And that day I could do two out of the three. so I might have had to say to whoever sorry I can't do that for you today because I'm doing this but I wasn't dropping balls I was placing them gently down to pick them back up later but you asked me how did I do with that as I say ask the kids actually ask the ex-husband yeah maybe that in itself maybe that'll be the next podcast um I mean one thing I was going to ask actually is when you did the deal for Kids Allowed and Claire Roberts bought the business as well and that was like march 2020 i think that was when like the news came out and then we had covid and i think everybody thought my golly jenny johnson pulled her blinder there she sold her business before covid yeah going into lockdown got the obligatory dog i think i did yes absolutely but i remember you saying at the time we say oh congratulations jenny and you said listen i'm overweight i've been drinking too much i've not been doing any exercise as a founder i have pit my health last last yeah okay and you've spoken about that a lot just how bad did it get well i think the health thing is if you speak to somebody that becomes critic and critically unwell and i think i've chose the wrong word there with critical but anyway chronically unwell and ask them about anything else nothing else matters yeah ultimately when you're seriously unwell it's all about health so when i look back at how i treated my body that i didn't look after it that I didn't look after my mental health either I just did everything for everybody else but me there was no wonder by the end of that journey that I was overweight that you know sometimes the answer seemed to be that glass of chardonnay or whatever it maybe was um going to the gym just seemed like a crazy idea where were the minutes in the day never mind the hours in the day that I'd need to do that so I guess my biggest regret as a founder is not thinking about my health all the way through that journey.

13:38Jennie Johnson:I ran that business for 17 years. And in that time, I never prioritised myself. That's a long time to neglect yourself. And there's going to be major consequences to your body, to your fitness, to your mental health, to your robustness. So we talk about that resilience piece. But I think I could have been even more resilient if I was fitter, if I was more nimble, if I wasn't carrying quite so much timber at the time. Which you're not carrying now, can I say? Well, because I've had time to give myself a bit of love, which really matters. And when I look back on it, I think, you know, the healthier person, especially somebody that's got a lot of responsibilities, you know, again, I talked about those multiple hats of the mum, the football mum, the taxi driver, the wife, the CEO the fitter I would have been the better I could have done those things and I think there's loads of mantras out there like put your own oxygen mask on first all that good stuff it matters yet somehow I forgot that it mattered for me I remember interviewing you in the morning for an event and then in the evening both our respective daughters played football and we met about 9 o 'clock at night at the same event at football training.

14:54And I just thought to myself, wow, that's a long day. But you don't think about it because work's a job and being a parent, you know, is front and centre for what you do. I remember when you left Kids Aloud and, I mean, Stephen Redgrave said, if anyone ever sees me near a boat again, shoot me. And you came up with something similar. You basically got the dog. If I remember rightly, you got a camper van as well.

15:17Jennie Johnson:I did. You had all these plans and all the things you were going to do. Literally, I think you were going to like live in the wilderness that was the plan and then you said to me you said about my first five years you said i think you were in bed asleep and you started thinking about this idea having had three children as well yeah and the idea and it's true actually when you become a parent you know you know you go from not being a parent to being a parent in two seconds yeah and no one teaches you and you thought actually the way to track development change and use technology that's the premise for a business and you said you spent ages trying to disprove it could work and then you couldn't find a way why it wouldn't work so then you learned you launched my first five years you mentioned how difficult b2c is um you know when you look back on it would you do anything differently and as somebody who'd run a successful business when you had to close the doors on that business did that hurt more oh of course it did because at first when i was licking my wounds a little bit I'm thinking it it's not just undermined this business it's undermined my achievements before it as well I really felt like it sort of soiled my career completely um I got better balance eventually on that and so many people saying yeah it's how you learn from your failure that you know makes it a success but yeah there was a lot of things when I look back we we should have um bootstrapped the business more we should have had less head count how big did you get my first five years?

16:41Jennie Johnson:I think at one point there were maybe around 13 colleagues. It's not big. It wasn't big, big. It wasn't 50 people. No, but the other thing with an app is that a number of those colleagues were expensive headcount because they were developers and developers are not cheap. And you know, it was a very competitive landscape at the time where if you weren't paying going rate, you couldn't get anybody. And even like practical things, and I'll share it just in case anyone reads it and goes, oh yeah. But we had an app that covered the first five years and we wrote five years worth of content. And if I think about it now, we could have just said, well, the only people that can download this app right now are those with a brand new baby.

17:21Jennie Johnson:And then we could have stayed four or five months ahead with the content rather than write the whole thing all at once. And that would have made a dramatic difference to the headcount and the amount of content that we were writing um so yeah loads of lessons learned and because of that going into this third business of um the pet euthanasia people it is exciting in a in a funny way to get a third opportunity to learn the things that went well from the first one and bring that forward the things that didn't go so well from the second one and bring that forward and i do think i have a broader experience now as a founder than I could have possibly done if I hadn't have done that second business and learned the things that I learned.

18:08I'm going to talk about the third business now, but was there a feeling, even if it's just a small part of you which said, listen, I don't want that to be the last chapter. I don't want to walk away and people think to myself, people think to themselves, my first five years was the last rodeo, you know, and forget everything you see.

18:23Jennie Johnson:And kids allowed us a fluke. Yeah. Was there an element of that? Absolutely. Yeah. Undeniably, it's like, right, okay, dust ourselves off, we go again. But there was definitely a pressure then for the third one to be successful. Because could you imagine if the third one wasn't either? No, well, what I find fascinating is your three businesses, the first one, looking after kids. Your second one is tracking kids development. Your third one is pets who die. End of life. End of life. End of life. Okay. Where did the idea come from? Well, first of all, you've rightly said I've worked with children.

19:00Jennie Johnson:So what do they say? Never work with children, animals and Chris McGuire. There you go. And I've done all three. I just felt it was important to do all three. But no, it was looking for an opportunity to run a business again. I've met my wonderful partner, Mike, and we both have we're very career focused. We're very focused on anything that we do, really. and meeting later in life we're thinking well you don't want to go off and focus on your career to the left and my career to the right and we never get to spend time with each other so why don't we try and find something that we can do together because mike is your co-founder yep and your partner that's right right okay so we wanted to find something to do together and then as it happened i have a very talented cousin called sinéad and she's a vet and she's always dreamed of opening her own vet practice.

19:56Jennie Johnson:And I'm going to name drop her vet practice as well, which is MCR Vets in Media City. Sponsored by MCR Vets in Media City, the Naked Founder podcast. There you go. That's got a ring to it if you're interested, Sinead. But she left a big corporate practice and her dream was to set up her own independent vet practice, but she needed to save up to do that. So for almost two years, she ran her own home euthanasia business as a vet. um just her going out to support um owners in that most terrible time where they need to make that decision but instead of going to the vet practice where most pets are not that happy to be um regardless of how amazing the vet is it's never a pet's favorite place so it's not typically where you would want to have your last moments in your last day so Sinead was going to people's homes to give end of life care in the comfort of the pet's own home, surrounded by love and surrounded by the family.

20:55Because I've got cats. As a kid growing up, I had dogs. And I've got a lot of friends who've got dogs. And somebody recently, they lost a dog and they had to jump in the car with their dog, knowing what was going to happen. And they were welling up, literally, I was surprised they didn't have an accident on the way to the veterinary practice. So when you mentioned your idea for a store, your idea for a business, I thought straight away, well, I can see the need for that.

21:20Jennie Johnson:Yeah, exactly. We're back in that territory of need. People need this service. People are already using this service. They don't want the service, but they do need it. 90 % of pets, domesticated pets in this country, do need the owner to take the initiative at end of life. Is it just dogs or is it? No, cats as well. Guinea pigs, rabbits. People get very attached to all sorts of different pets. and what we're offering with our service is the chance to go into people's homes to do it so it's a very very purposeful business again now when Sinead had finally saved enough money to open her practice she was going to close her home euthanasia business and we thought it was something that was purposeful we understood the value of it as pet owners ourselves so we said well rather than you close the doors on that Sinead how do you feel about us taking it on and seeing what we can do with it.

22:14Jennie Johnson:So obviously we're doing a very different thing because we're doing it at scale. We have vets across the Northwest now and we've just opened in Greater London and the Southeast as well as another cluster. And what we offer owners is within moments really of phoning us, we will secure you a vet to come to your home either that day or the next day to support you. and all the aftercare you know um collection private cremation ashes returned all of that we take care of everything so if you read our google reviews what people are consistently talking about is that they were able to hand that stress and that problem over to us and we were able to fix the whole thing well fix is the wrong word help them because we can't fix what's happening make a difficult situation make yeah better when i was a young journalist um i get sent to do door knocks and I'd have to interview families who've lost a loved one and everyone said to me they said what's the worst part of the job and I always say it's a door knock the door knock and but I was quite successful in terms of getting people to talk to me but I always said to them I said look and this is what I always encourage members of my team when I you know became uh the editor I said look I said this is the worst situation anyone can ever find themselves in but you have a choice and an opportunity to make it better or worse I said don't make it worse I said if you can make it better and you can write a tribute which they can share with their family and friends so they don't have to do it you make that situation better I look at what you do the idea of people losing their beloved dog is horrible but the idea of doing it on their own terms so the dog's familiar you're performing a service really and I suppose in essence that's what you are and when did you launch the business it'll be a year old at the end of this year at the end of this month okay and in terms of we're talking about growth but it's a business fundamentally it's just it's done for the right reasons how is the business going it's going incredibly well and what do we mean by well well i guess we're helping more families have that experience at home because this is happening anyway yeah you know there are i think 12 million domesticated dogs in the uk and slightly more cats so there's many many animals going through this experience on a daily basis mostly at the moment in practice which isn't their favorite place you know it's expensive as well well anything to do with pets is expensive you know it's not inexpensive having us come to your home either but what we are doing is you don't have that car journey that we've just talked about you don't have to wait in the waiting room with other people that are there for much nicer reasons than you are and you're not having to leave without your pet so we're going to your home no need for that car journey it's us that do the journey to you your pets in familiar surroundings sometimes in the summer we're out in people's gardens with the sun shining down and again if you read the reviews people literally talk about how beautiful it was even though they didn't want to have to do it and it was the saddest day of their life it was something that they could look back on proudly and say their pet's end of life was as good as the rest of their life and that they gave them the best farewell that they possibly could have done and it will help them with their trauma of losing that pet knowing that they did it in a way that that couldn't have been better.

25:40Can I ask you a question about co-founders? I think I'm right in saying kids allowed just you you were the founder?

25:45Jennie Johnson:No I had a co-founder at the time as well. Have you always co-founders yeah because i'm not the finished article myself and never have been you know you were the face you were very much the public face of kids allowed at least for journalists like me yeah and i think for my first five years you were when there was a speaking opportunity we'd always come to you first as well so you've got you've got your third co-founder now okay see your favorite of course for the benefit of people who aren't watching is in the uh in the gallery watching at the moment as well picking the right co-founder can make or break a business can't it um so do you look for somebody who's got the skill sets that you don't have or who can challenge you and you can challenge them i think it's a bit of both really the skill set that i don't have so if i look at and my sorry the first business kids allowed um my co-founder maureen was was a finance wizard and i'm not so great at the detail of a spreadsheet which really really matters when you're trying to you know financially forecast a business and figure out how much money you need and all that good stuff so I've typically paired myself with someone that's operationally strong and that's certainly what I've got with Mike as well so we've got different skill sets that we bring to the party that together strengthen the other.

27:00Does it feel different third time around in terms of being a founder?

27:04Jennie Johnson:I feel wiser yeah and I've got I'm more I've come into it more bruised but each one of those bruises is like a a learning so I do I mean if I look at my 30 year old self that's oh kids allowed well when I look at most 30 year olds now including my eldest daughter's going to be 30 soon I look and think was I that young when I set that business up where did I get the the gumption from to go for it it was crazy it was absolutely outlandish when I look back that I thought I could do it, but I did. Whereas now I know I can do it. So I've got less of the imposter syndrome. I've got so much experience now.

27:45Jennie Johnson:The things that frightened me when I was 30 are just a walk in the park now, because over time, your comfort zone gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But I guess the one thing that you're always going to be frightened of as an entrepreneur, at least me anyway, is the F word, failure. And certainly, you know, you can dress it up all you like but the the middle business although it had lots of successes depending on what metrics you used ultimately it wasn't a sustainable business so the f word might get associated with it and you have to own it how many times did you take your driving test oh once of course yeah first time see i was i was third time and i'm a twin and my brother took his before me and passed and then i came and i failed and then my dad said i'll sort you out and he gave me all these lessons and I basically picked up every bad habit I could pick up, including crossing my arms when I was going around the bend.

28:39Jennie Johnson:Yeah, you don't want to do that. Absolutely. So I failed a second time and then I took it the third time and I passed it. But actually for me, I felt it was my time to pass. I didn't feel ready the first two times. I sometimes feel that running a business, it might not necessarily be that it was down to your failure. And actually that failure was part of literally, in the case of driving, part of the journey to get to where I wanted to get to. I want to ask you two final questions. the penultimate question is that fairly recently you formed a tribe of other successful female entrepreneurs haven't you how do you know about this because i have done my digging um but as you've got older you've found like-minded people yes who you'd love to have met when you first started your business the impact would have been amazing yeah and we talk about the importance of a network as well so we're not naming names but in terms of what that group brings to you Who are they?

29:31I mean, you know, in terms of just talking generally.

29:34Jennie Johnson:Yeah. So as you rightly say, and I literally have no idea, Chris, how you know about this, but there you go. Maybe I know the members of the tribe. You probably do, but I'm not going to know the names. But you're right. In the very early days, you don't have a network. You don't have, you know, those people that you can you can call to support and help you. And I would say in the last five years, and these are all successful founders, female founders, they've all got partners, they've all got kids. We, in other words, have had to navigate very similar journeys, similar issues. And I think what we'd all say is that it's hard to find somebody that understands what you've been through.

30:18Jennie Johnson:yet what I feel I've got with this tribe is an amazing support network that have been through similar things so when I'm talking about my challenges they're not in the abstract they're all able to go ah yeah when that happened to me I did this and it's been incredible because it isn't just um about business it's about everything life you know and and being able to To have people around you that you can pick up the phone to, that want you to succeed, that are your cheerleaders, but that also have a lived experience that's relevant so they can genuinely support you is a game changer. People talk about the value of networks, and I've got a big network.