Laura Earnshaw's mission to rethink mental health

0:00Laura Earnshaw:Welcome everyone to the Naked Founder podcast, the business podcast where nothing is hidden and we're on location today. We're interviewing Max, head of happiness at My Happy Mind, but we're doing it through the words and the voice of the CEO and founder Laura Earnshaw. Welcome Laura. Thank you, lovely to have you here. Absolutely, lovely, lovely, oh, it's lovely to have Max here as well. Laura, we always start each episode of the Naked Founder podcast with the same question. What didn't they tell you about founding a business that you wish you'd known at the start? I wish I'd known how all-consuming it would be and how much it just becomes part of your life.

0:37I think when you have a job, particularly a corporate job, it can feel intense and full-on, but it does stop at the weekend, whereas this just doesn't, never stops. You've not had any time off for ten years.

0:50Laura Earnshaw:Correct. You work every weekend. Yeah. And you work with your husband as well, and the compartmentalisation between work and home, there isn't one. No, I think that's right. And I think I say I work every day. I think as a founder, you never switch off. Even if you're going for a walk in the park with the dog or you're with your kids, a sports fixture, you're still thinking about work. You're still thinking about that next step. So, yes, it's intense. I'm always fascinated by where the idea came from, where the motivation came from to start a business. In your case, you started My Happy Mind after seeing friends and family struggle with their mental health and feeling that they didn't have the support that they should have had.

1:26Laura Earnshaw:yeah just explain how that shaped your journey yeah I think I've always been somebody who's massively purpose-driven in everything I've done but nothing shakes you to your core more than having a personal experience of a family member or a loved one struggling and I think I had a couple of those in quite short proximity one with a child and one with an adult and I just had this very distinctive visceral moment where I decided I wanted to be part of the solution around mental health um I was on the m25 actually when it happened having visited um somebody in a mental health hospital and decided I was just going to quit my career and be part of the solution or that was the big that was the big dream back then um what year would that have been so that was 10 years ago so 20 yeah 2016 okay I'm going to come back to my happy mind in a minute but let me take you back to the yeah early part of your career as well and I can actually read out what it says about the author because this is your book my happy mind published by penguin books as well This is what it says about you, about the author.

2:23Laura Earnshaw:Laura Merlin-Shaw worked as a global HR executive for 15 years, helping leaders thrive under pressure and teams fulfil their potential. She's worked at Harvard Business School and with CEOs in the FTSE 100. After a friend closed to her, was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, she quit her corporate job and set up My Happy Mind to help schools find a solution to their mental health problem. My Happy Mind has already been used by over a quarter of a million children, teachers and parents, and is due to be taken up by the NHS are made available in 40 schools and 322 nurseries. And that number's increased a lot since then as well.

2:54Laura Earnshaw:You worked at Accenture, AstraZeneca and PwC, worked in Australia as well for a spell. So just explain your career pre My Happy Mind. Yeah, so I was a corporate girl. I'd never planned to be an entrepreneur. I'm definitely an accidental entrepreneur. So I worked at Accenture out of uni for seven years in their human capital consulting practice. In London, for sure, right? No, not London, not New York. none of those glamorous places that they promised in the graduate training recruitment, but instead in Swindon. In Swindon. In Swindon. In Swindon. So, yeah, so I worked with them for seven years, and then I decided I was sick of living out of a suitcase.

3:30Laura Earnshaw:You met your husband in Swindon, though, didn't you? I did indeed meet my husband in Swindon. Absolutely. Well, all good love affairs start in Swindon. So you decided, if you'd stayed in that role, you would have made a lot of money, presumably, nice salary, nice pension, et cetera, et cetera. But you jacked it all in, and you decided to launch My Happy Mind. And I just think it'd be really helpful to explain what problem were you trying to fix when you launched it? So it's interesting just reflecting back on the if I'd have stayed question, because when I decided I was going to quit corporate life and start My Happy Mind, everybody around me said I was nuts because I was on a very nice salary.

4:05I was flying around the world very nicely and had a great pension and bonus scheme. So it was a lot to give up. But my view was, let me give this thing a try. I had this burning passion inside me that I wanted to fix this problem.

4:17Laura Earnshaw:Can I ask how old you would have been then? I was, that's revealing how old I am now. Never ask a lady how old she is, Chris. But I would have been 35-ish. 35-ish, right. So there was a point that you were thinking if you don't do it now, you probably won't do it. Yeah, I don't even know if I was that planful about it. I just knew I needed to do it. And my view was, I remember saying to my husband, give me a couple of years. If I can't make anything of it, I'll go and be a head of Global HR somewhere else. It's like somebody will take me. It'll be fine because no one can ever take your CV away from you.

4:47Right. You've got that experience banked. So I was just I was just viscerally determined to try and build something to fix this very real problem, which I saw, which is this. In our society, mental health is known to be one of the biggest challenges we face. Yet all of the funding, all of the resources and all of the conversation is around fixing the problem, not preventing it. and that's replicated in many disease areas across our society whether it's obesity or mental health it's the same thing we focus on reacting to the problem what I wanted to do was change the conversation so we were focusing on preventing kids from ever getting to the stage where they needed that clinical intervention and that's what My Happy Mind is all about.

5:28Laura Earnshaw:And then like we're here today in your offices in Orderly Edge and you know right next to the station great offices you've got 32 staff yeah and multi-million pound turnover company as well people lose sight of the fact that for years and years and years it was just you yeah at your kitchen table yeah um just explain what those early days were like and what's your element of just winging it i think there's absolutely always an element of winging it i think even today there's an element of winging it and i think anyone who says otherwise probably not being honest i should say it wasn't always just me this one's been by my side since since day one at the kitchen table but yeah i mean i think at the beginning particularly when you're not somebody who's surrounded by them say that that max is making me happy and as a head of happiness what more could you want because every time i look at you i just see this tongue come out like a lizard like that um so it was you and max so it was me and max from the get-go and i and i think a lot of founders will probably have the same experience i wasn't surrounded by loads of founders when i started my happy mind i'd had a corporate career my network was in corporate so i didn't have this like resource base to draw from on how the heck do you start a successful business i was led purely by passion and I think I've always been led by passion and purpose I've always kept that at the core and the profits followed you know I've never thought of this as a business I've always thought of it as a mission and I think that's really helped me to to keep going but also build something that that works and that adds the value that I wanted it to.

6:51Laura Earnshaw:I find what you said there about the p word fascinating because increasingly businesses now are talking about the p word is purpose yeah before profit yeah and you are driven and always have been by purpose passion yeah and the profit will come. Yeah, exactly. And I think there's a confusion with that sometimes. I think a lot of people talk about purpose now almost as something that they hope they can get as well as driving profit. But I think that's the wrong way to think about it. I think if you've got a purpose driven business and we are all about purpose, we're about helping children to thrive, there's not much of a better purpose than that.

7:24That's always been front and centre for us, where I think, you know, if you're making widgets in a factory, purpose becomes a bit harder to, you know, to keep at the center doesn't mean you can't be purposeful but it's not really at the center of your mission

7:35Laura Earnshaw:I always think with this podcast it's helpful to explain what it is that you do yeah and what we know is we know that there's this time bomb yeah with mental health especially in children because it's not diagnosed right and if it is diagnosed it's not treated for ages and ages and ages and what you've identified is that prevention is better than cure yeah so you've got these cards These My Happy Mind cards. Yeah. OK. So I go into a school. Yeah. OK. And for the sake of argument, you are playing the part of the, what, five-year-old, six-year-old? Yeah. OK. And I say, pick a card. OK? Yeah. OK.

8:08Laura Earnshaw:Now, I knew you'd pick that card. What does that card say? Think about one of your friends. What do you like about them and why? OK. And what would you say about that? So think of your friend. Who would you say? I would think of my friend, Fran. And the reason I like her is that she can always make me laugh. Yeah. And humour is really important to me. OK, OK. So how does that, how would that improve your mental health, that five-year-old mental health? Yeah. So the questions that we ask in these cards, which are just one small part of the programme, are all designed around getting children to reflect on the things that we know make them happy and that will give them that kind of dopamine released in the brain.

8:46So we know from the science that if you get certain conditions right in a child's life, they are much less likely to struggle with their mental health later in life. and one of those things which that card is is getting into is is positive relationships so you know the science tells us this but it's also obvious if you have positive relationships in your life whether that's with friends or colleagues or family members you will be happier you will better be able to cope with life if you have lots of negative relationships in your life and you're struggling with your relationships you will feel less happy and you'll be less able to to navigate life so what we're trying to do with the cards and with the digital lessons that schools get is create an environment whereby children are naturally focused on building those skills that will help them thrive and it's also like getting them to talk isn't it absolutely and to think and to think and to reflect because so often we're focused on the next thing and actually what's really important is to focus on the here and now as well one of the first things you did

9:39Laura Earnshaw:was you found two schools who were happy to test your software before you started charging for it um how many schools are you working with now maybe two thousand over two thousand wow and Between 2016 and 2021, it was you and Max. I'm going to have to remember Max all the time. Hard to forget, you're working on your kitchen table. And if you weren't homeschooling your kids during COVID as well, you were trying to build a business. You didn't make your first hire until 2022. Is the key word in a founder resilience? Yeah, I think resilience is absolutely massive. But I think it's also about focus.

10:13You know, when you're starting a business, there's so many things you've got to think about. and it's so easy to get distracted by the noise of all of those things but I think the other thing about focus that becomes really important is that never take advice from someone who hasn't done what you're trying to do and I had so many people around me who were saying this just seems like it's really hard work why don't you just go back and be head of global HR again and so I think being focused on your mission and not losing sight of that alongside resilience are two really important things.

10:39Laura Earnshaw:And was there ever a point in those six years when it was you and Max where you thought to yourself ah I can't do this anymore no there never was because I knew early on that what I was building worked and I got such early feedback from schools and from families that what we were doing had a real impact and I'd seen it in my own life as well in terms of my lived experience of how these things could help so I've never lost I've never wavered not once I've never thought this is just too hard okay um you don't just you're not just a founder of a business You're the mother of two children as well.

11:10Laura Earnshaw:You don't have a nanny. You're a female founder. Do you see yourself as a role model as well and an inspiration to other mums, particularly mums who have got their own businesses? I would never give myself the title of being a role model, but it's really flattering to think that some people might. I mean, I hope to inspire other people to think both females and males to think that they can build something from nothing and to think that they can take a slightly different path as well. because I didn't raise money on day one. I bootstrapped until very, very recently, as you know. And that's quite a different journey to the journey you often hear about.

11:44You know, you hear about a lot of founders raising funding and being in the VC space from very early days. And I didn't do any of that. Could you have done? I could have done 100%, but I didn't want to. I wanted to build it my way and on my terms. I didn't want necessarily other people kind of involved and having additional pressures, right, in terms of you know checking on performance seeing where we were up to with with how the business was going I didn't want that pressure um it was only when I I knew that um I was onto something really powerful in the last kind of year or so that I thought actually maybe this is the time to to press the big green go faster button as I like to call it and get some investment

12:21Laura Earnshaw:how would you describe your personality because determined is an obvious is an obvious uh description um headstrong um a lot of people entrepreneurs say they couldn't really work for anybody else you know yeah how would you describe yourself and how would other people describe you Laura yeah well I don't know you can go and ask them in a minute but um I definitely I definitely think I'm headstrong I'm definitely resilient um I like to think though that my values of um deep integrity are the things that would come to mind for people first um and kindness and that I like to have a good laugh and you know I'm not I'm not a born and bred founder I worked in in the corporate world very successfully for 15 years that requires a very different skill set to to what I do now um but I just try and be real and authentic and a good human being um I'm a vicar's daughter and my mum was a social worker so my upbringing was very much about service and giving back and being kind and being in integrity and that's that's a thread that not many people know about me but this is what I should have started with you can't just drop into a conversation vicar's daughter and leave it like that so what's your your father was vicar yeah what's his surname Reverend Jones.

13:31Laura Earnshaw:Reverend Jones. Okay, and what was he like? He's amazing. He's my absolute hero. Is he? I adore him. You weren't tempted to follow your father into the... No, no. I mean, I definitely have a faith. I lived my life against kind of Christian values, but no, I was never tempted by being a nun or anything like that. Well, I don't want to make you jealous now, but Max is now, you know, licking me. He's coming to you now. He's coming to me. He's gone to the dark side and one of the biggest problems for any health business is getting endorsed by the nhs yeah walking into your office on your wall behind your desk you've got my happy mind nhs backed by the nhs yeah i mean that and you've also got the fact that you're a b corp as well yeah and you've got rmhc which stands for one of mcdonald house charities right okay and you talk about having a purpose yeah and there is some evidence of it how easy or difficult is it to get that NHS endorsement?

14:24Very difficult. But for me, like with many things with My Happy Mind, it didn't necessarily follow a conventional route. I wasn't out there seeking it. It kind of came to our door. So our first NHS commission, it's a great story in that I was school shoes shopping with my daughter, who was about six or seven at the time, received a phone call to say, we want to pay for your programme in schools from the NHS. Most people getting their first NHS contract is a hard won battle and the reason we got it is that schools in a local area not too far from her from here were using the program and the NHS commissioners had gone to the schools and said how do we stop all of these CAMS referrals and the school said CAMS referrals CAMS referrals children and adult children and adult mental health services so children being referred for therapy basically how do we stop it you're sending so many kids to us this is well before covid and they said put my happy mind in all the schools and you'll give teachers and parents the skills so that we don't end up referring kids that was how i got my first nhs commission wow and so not in the conventional way of going after it but instead again focusing on the impact and the purpose and keeping that at our core these things naturally have naturally

15:38Laura Earnshaw:happened for us doing the right thing doing the right thing and making that the focus of what you're doing every single day and the rest follows um you wrote my happy mind yeah book which i've referenced earlier as well available at amazon and uh and all good books to us we love to say that okay um i mean writing a book presumably doesn't change your life does it financially no um but it's very cool and yeah i mean and it's great to have but if you're a founder starting a business and you're tempted to write a book what does this do for your for your business what has it done Yeah, I think there's a couple of boxes that writing a book ticks, right?

16:16One, I think there is something really quite special about being asked to write a book, particularly from someone like Penguin. It's a nice little recognition of the work you've done.

16:24Laura Earnshaw:They've come to you? They came to me, yeah. Yeah, I think I've got a book inside me, but what I need is an intro to a publisher. Let me see if I can help you with that. We've got this on camera as well, so if it does become a bestseller... Yeah, exactly. I can claim something from it. But no, so I think it was great from a kind of a business perspective because it validates our story, it validates our journey. But actually what's great is that it means that parents and families can access the methodology that we're teaching via a book. So if the programme isn't yet in their school, they can still access some of that science and use it with their own family.

16:56And that was really the purpose of writing it was to make the science of what we're doing more accessible. I think it almost gives you a little extra bit of credibility.

17:05Laura Earnshaw:Yeah, I think so. You know, because I think published author. Yeah. So are there many more copies of them available? There are many more copies of them available. You didn't move into your first office until 2021. Yeah. And your husband, Tim, joined the business soon after, actually, as COO. Yeah. Now, I speak to a lot of, I think there's a name for husband and wife's co-preneurs, I think. What was it like? I mean, bringing Tim into the business, was that an easy decision? And have you had to have any rules? um I think it was an easy decision because I knew that I needed somebody that could support with a load of the the operational stuff right that a business has to do and has to keep on top of and that's definitely not necessarily my strength and it was distracting me away from being out there and building the products and selling the products so it was an easy decision to bring Tim in plus the fact at that time he was working away three days a week so I was homeschooling the kids I was doing all the after-school activities all the homework all the cooking all the cleaning and running a business.

18:03So actually having Tim come in enabled a bit more balance from a work-life perspective. I could start to say, I've got a call. You're going to have to go pick the kids up, which was actually really, really good, I think. And obviously great for him to be part of the journey as well.

18:15Laura Earnshaw:Obviously winning the Northern Tech Awards and being included in LDC Top 50 and the Sunday Times list as well. You know, that must be great for Profile, but you also won the King's Award as well. I did. So what's that like? That's amazing. And I think that's the award. But if you said to me of all of the awards, which is the one that's been most special, I would definitely say the King's Award. Together we've been included in the Business Club Northern Leaders list. That was going to be the next one. Yeah, that was going to be the next one. But no, meeting the King was just it was just amazing.

18:43And, you know, they have to say the royal family put on a real show for the King's Award. You know, you're invited to Winter Castle and it's this amazing reception. They make you feel very, very special. And I think certainly from our school's perspective, We did a second celebration of the King's Award where we were officially presented with the trophy and the scroll. You get an actual scroll. It's very cool. And we invited 100 of our schools to join us to celebrate that. And we had the children make a video about why they were excited about the King's Award. So I think for our schools and for the children to know that My Happy Mind has been given an award by the King was really special for them as well.

19:18Laura Earnshaw:And when you're the founder who started that business in 2016, you don't ever imagine you're going to share a room with the King. And it's just such a special moment. Let's talk about LDC, because when you decided to raise investment, there was a big scramble, a big scramble, 16, I think, 16 different offers. You eventually went with LDC. You actually didn't start the process until September last year. You did the deal December the 23rd, you know, like three months later. But you drove that, didn't you? Yeah, I did. So just explain your approach, because this is about being focused and driven.

19:52Laura Earnshaw:Yeah. So what I will say is that we had really good advisors and we spent the time preceding September doing a lot of prep so that when we hit go on the sim in September, we were good to go. But yes, I was very focused on getting a deal done pre-Christmas. Q4 is our last, this is our last quarter now. So March year end, I did not want to be dealing with the deal between January and March. Because it can be distracting, can't it? It's a full-time job running a process. We had a lot of interest. I thought we would get a lot of interest. We got even more than I thought, and it was very, very competitive.

20:27But we gave exclusivity to LDC on the 1st of December and closed on the 23rd, which was a hard ask. But I have to say the LDC team operated with integrity and honesty throughout. There was a moment where they weren't sure if they'd get it across the line by the 23rd um but they told us that and they were honest about that and i you know that was the thing that was most important to me in picking a partner is that what they said is what they were going to do because you you know you don't know at the end of the day until you're in bed with these guys what it's going to be like but so far so good on ldc i mean you had

21:03Laura Earnshaw:a very tight turnaround schedule to write the book you set yourself a very tight turnaround schedule to secure the investment pre-christmas as well you you're your biggest taskmaster would that be fair? 100%. Yeah, yeah. Nobody will ever drive me harder than I drive myself. No. And how have LDC been as an investor? They've been great. They've been really good. I think you learn a lot about what an investor's like in the process. And obviously, there's a lot of conversations, there's a lot of coffees, a lot of dinners, and you're very much being courted as an entrepreneur in that process. I think what I saw in LDC very early on is that I think they are really straight, and they're really authentic as well.

21:41And what they say is what they do. and that was the thing that enabled me to separate them from some of the other investors I was talking to I felt that there was a lot of promises made and a lot of the conversation that weren't then reflected in the in the hard terms that you that you review with LDC there was a few things I wasn't happy with in the terms and everyone I challenged they changed not just verbally but in the in the documents as well and that's what founders should do though that was massive for

22:05Laura Earnshaw:me yeah because a lot of founders will just be almost caught in the headlines 100 % yeah and they'll just accept what they're given yeah i think because we had so much interest that we probably had more confidence to challenge because we knew there was a lot of people that wanted to invest in the business um but i will say that um there was lots of people that that told a certain story it wasn't then replicated in terms and i think that's the thing you've got to watch for i i co-host another podcast called the dealmaker i'm cut with jonathan boyers legendary dealmaker he talks about the fact if you want to get what you want the importance of having a competitive process is so important yeah i would really agree with that yeah and what about did any investors make assumptions about you oh yeah we all make assumptions I think don't we what do they make what sort of assumptions did they make about you um I think uh there's a lot of assumptions that are made about female entrepreneurs and I saw some of that happen I think I squashed them pretty quickly um so I think assumptions that were made were that this was just like a fun happy business and they didn't quite understand and believe the numbers until we got into the detail and I think that people assume that they can pull the wool over your eyes with terms they learned pretty quickly they couldn't do that with me either so I think there's a lot of assumptions that get made but I think probably I made a lot of assumptions as well about about them but that they quashed in me you know I was I was nervous about taking on PE money I was really nervous about it and I actually wasn't sure I would do it at the beginning but because the process was so illuminating and so open with with particular investors that did start to challenge some of the assumptions I'd made but yeah what is it they say making assumptions makes an ass out of you and me yeah absolutely and I think that's true I I use that one you know don't assume because it makes an ass out of you and me and yeah whenever I'm talking to young journalists or anybody generally yeah I just say it's the worst thing you can do and I never forgot that yeah um if I was Louis Farouk I'd be saying so tell us what they said to you uh I don't do impressions but I mean I think there is a problem with assumptions especially around female founders as well yeah And there's this massive imbalance at the moment in terms of the amount of investment that goes into female founders as well.

24:07Laura Earnshaw:I mean, you don't take any mess in. Would that be fair? 100%. And if you were a man, people would say, that's great. But because you're a woman, is there some element of people looking down their noses at you and saying, who does she think she is? I think there's a little bit of that that goes on for sure. And I think the work that the Invest in Women Task Force are doing out of number 10 is really illuminating in terms of just how imbalanced it is. One of the things I noticed in the process is how few female investors there are. So I met with probably 15 funds. Each meeting probably had three people in it.

24:44And I think there was only two meetings where there was maybe three meetings where there was a female in the room. The rest of it was quarter zips and gilets. This is 100%.