AOB: How entrepreneurship can change the world – with Sarah Field

0:03Welcome to Any Other Business. Thank you for joining us for this special episode. I believe this is the first time we've ever had a guest on Any Other Business, hopefully the first of many. And what a guest we are kicking off with. We are joined today by Sarah Field. Sarah is on the board of trustees at Sandams International. Now in yesterday's episode of the Property Podcast, you heard about the incredible work that they do and the incredible work that we are all going to do together to build a sand dam. So you can go and listen to that episode and you can donate if you haven't already at propertyhub.net slash water.

0:33But before doing that, Sarah had an incredible business story. Sarah was the co-founder of a business called Little Kickers, which a lot of people, especially if you've got kids, will have heard of. And the story of how that business started and how it grew is amazing. So Rob recently caught up with Sarah to hear that story and hear how that turned into the sand dams project that we're all getting involved in now. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I've heard your story before. And the reason I've asked you on the podcast is because I want other people to hear it as well.

1:03I think it's an amazing story from a business that possibly wasn't intended. It wasn't like a vision that you had five years before. And then we're like going to go, oh, I must start this. We'll tell that story in a minute. But before we get to your business journey, and then your incredible work with sand dams how did it all begin you don't have to take us back to birth but your career the foundations your stepping stones for what was built afterwards thanks very much for having me here obviously rob it's nice to be talking i think actually there is a bit of an important foundational step all of this really you know as you said sort of accidental fell into things definitely zero vision but one of the things that really has helped me at different points in time, which I didn't anticipate would, was my undergraduate degree.

1:51I did that at the London School of Economics, but I did it in geography. And, you know, it wasn't very trendy at the time. But I did a module, a few modules on sandy dry river valleys, which at the time was actually in Spain. And I also did some work on kind of remote sensing, geographical information systems, which was a brand new field at the time, because you're talking 30 years ago now. but that stuff was quite handy and I have referred back to at different points in my career and also just being at LSE meant I was in the city in my final year of university I just wandered down Fleet Street with a CV and I got a job in Goldman Sachs and they were very kind to me and I did sort of half of my final year I suppose I was working that job in parallel with my degree which helped me enormously to get a graduate training program with one of the big management consulting firms and I sort of fell out of LSE on the Friday, joined on the Monday, all of which was a really useful, fantastic grounding for what I ended up doing with the business.

2:48And even after that, in terms of scaling the charity. So yeah, sometimes things that you do early on, you don't really have any idea that they'll come back at you and be useful. And another thing, whilst I was working at the management consulting firm, we spent a couple of years in Johannesburg in South Africa, working at a bank there, which massively gave me the Africa bug. And, you know, I fell in love with the whole continent and was pretty determined to kind of work my way back there at some stage in the future. So another thing that sort of tucked away in my mind. So yeah, that was the foundational stuff, really.

3:19Left pregnant with my second child. That's when sort of Little Kickers came along. What I love about the Little Kickers story is it's the same with so many people who start businesses. It wasn't that you decided, right, we're going to start this business and it was all thought out it was solving a pain point you had the frustration and you wanted to solve that frustration and it turned into a huge business but the huge business obviously took time but what was the frustration how did Little Kickers start? Yeah a really simple beginning story exactly like you say just solving a pain point a problem that we were hitting which was that myself and my then business partner both had little boys and we were waddling around pregnant with girls on sort of Clapham Common and places like that.

4:02And the boys would do anything. I mean, they were tiny and they would follow a ball absolutely anywhere. Both the dads were crazy football fans. And we just felt like we weren't really the right people to be teaching them. And my business partner said, well, look, why don't we find someone who can do this? And we found a football coach on Clapham Common. And I remember actually unfolding a packet of Marlborough Lights and with a pen, scribbling down on the back whilst chatting to this guy, what the program plan could look like you know so we kind of have a bit of a warm-up and you know then we need to they're going to want to shoot some goals they'd be great if we could teach them how to kind of take turns and maybe we can bring colors and numbers into this and you know that's when the kind of how do we do it thing took off but the actual why should we do it was this is a pain and actually the football association were not teaching children under the age of eight at that point in time and obviously that's long since gone but little kickers were certainly we were pretty much the first people to do it.

4:56And we took a few pictures of my business partner's son kicking a ball around. We put them in posters, we stuck them up on trees and Clapham Common. We booked a village hall and we ran the first class and it was four times oversubscribed. They were like, I could be onto something here. Actually, this could be, you know, more than just teaching our kids. So yeah, that's where it came from. Because that's what's interesting here. It wasn't like, oh, we're going to build this international brand. It was just, let's put a class on for our children and keep them busy and occupied by a professional rather than you and your business partner.

5:31Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then everybody else just loved it. I suppose, you know, football is a phenomenal hook. It's universally recognized and known. We'll say quite a few guys think that, you know, little boy might be the next, or girl might be the next England player, or a lot of people, you know, aspirations for their children in that respect. And for a lot of the mums, it was just an opportunity to sit on the sidelines and relax and, you know, maybe breastfeed the baby or chat to the friends and have a positive role model teaching their kids how to count, take turns, be sociable, as well as some physical skills.

6:05And, you know, sort of 45 minutes off was very welcome. So it was popular for lots of different reasons, but it certainly just boomed, it exploded. And that's when some of those other skills, you know, sort of come, I guess, made it much easier for me to just tackle the operational side and not be intimidated by it. You know, to think, okay, well, we need to get this off Excel. You know, this is just agonizing trying to run this thing on Excel. So let's commission a business system. So, and I was like, okay, well, are we going to pay for it? Or can we get some grant funding? We got money from the Federation of Small Business.

6:39They match funded us. We commissioned the business system, went out, found somebody to build it. I think both of us with a city background, we just weren't worried. We're just like, okay, that problem needs solving, go and solve it. You need a health and safety approach, right? Let's find a consulting firm that can do that. We put it together quite quickly. All the kind of operational stuff that you need came together pretty fast. If there were problems, there were mainly problems of just how fast it was growing and trying to keep up with that. So you've gone from zero to one, one being the first event.

7:09Was it immediate in your minds that let's do another one and then from running the second session when did it become oh okay maybe we should run another location that our children don't even go to because that's kind of a big step going from okay this is servicing our problem and our needs but then you're going out to the world with a hey who else needs this yeah yeah absolutely and what was amazing about that is it was just demand we didn't have to push it very hard at all we very quickly got to a point where we had wait lists. I think we had only two age groups to begin with. And then we started to think, okay, we can divide it up a bit.

7:45We can teach younger, we can teach older. So we went from 18 months to seven years, four different age groups, but we were still wait listing on every class. And then I was like, well, there's another village hall just around the corner. Let's do a Wednesday class rather than a Tuesday class. We'll do Tuesday and Wednesday. I think both of us knew we were onto something that would scale quickly pretty fast. And we were both looking for something to do you know we were both of us by that stage were actually not even on maternity leave we'd left our previous jobs so we had all the incentive you know we thought okay let's build this up let's grow this and it literally just galloped you know there was a real pain point when we got to about 30 classes I think across south London and we were operating three different legal entities we were really struggling we'd get you know be on our own school runs and you'd get a phone call to say oh the coach hasn't managed to get into the venue he's lost the key or you know the systems crashed it was just continuous and a lot of pressure actually for just the two of us and then we had a lady who was in one of our South London classes who said you've got to come to North London you know we're moving up to North London my child is going to be bereft without little kickers you've got to set a class up and we're like no we can't that's too far we can't possibly stretch our lives that far.

8:58Can't go over the Thames. Yeah, exactly. And she said, no, I think we were well over the Thames when, but we were sort of central South London. So she just said, well, look, why don't you sell me a franchise? And we're like, you know, ding, light bulb. Didn't know quite what franchise was at that stage. So sort of confidently said, obviously people consider that. And then went away and learned what a franchise was and thought, absolutely, this has got to be the way to go with a business like this. Because if you just ran it all yourself from a central business, it would just completely overwhelm us so quickly.

9:29We'd have to have a huge central organization. But if you franchise, obviously, like McDonald's or any other huge franchises that are out there, you know that the quality is going to stay really, really high. You know that the brand is going to be supported. You know, the people you bring in are going to be people you like and people you screen and train yourself. And so you know, it's going to be done as well as you love doing it, but other people are going to be doing it. And then obviously, you know, you're going to be getting a franchise fee. And that's when the numbers really kick in, especially, obviously, franchising overseas as well.

10:00So going beyond the UK market, which we did really quickly as well. We were out, I think, by the time I got my exit, we were in South Africa. We were in Ireland and the UK. And people were just phoning all the time and saying, you know, we've seen this. We've heard about it. We were batting quite a few competitors off as well. That was always, you know, our strategy was just do it better. So if somebody else comes in and, you know, they're in that village hall, you set up next door and just do it better, right? Out-compete them. And we had just such a great formula and such amazing coaches and parents.

10:34And, you know, everyone was very loyal. The brand, my husband actually came up with the name for the brand, Little Kickers. And that's obviously endured. Amazing. So how long did it take for you to go from that very first session in Clapham to 30 sessions? So you had 30 different events going on. Was that every week or every month? 30 classes a week a week wow and how long did that take from zero to 30 i mean we are going back some time now i always get a bit of imposter syndrome because i've looked such a long time ago now we were probably did that in about a year and a half i think and that's when the first franchise came in yeah and that's when the lovely julie levine in north london said sell me a franchise and then really we i think it went up to at least four master franchises in other areas or franchise or international franchises, let's say, by the time I got my exit.

11:26So in seven or eight years, I don't have any remaining interest in Little Kickers. I sold my whole half, if you like, but I occasionally go back and have a look at the website and stuff. And I think someone mentioned a number of 70 ,000 children coming a week globally now. Once you're on to scale with a franchising model, if it works, the sky's the limit, really. And with football, of course, it's just never-endingly popular. doesn't go through phases. No, it's been around a while. It's been around a while. Yeah. So that's what drove us. And the scale was quick. It was fast. So from that first franchise, how many franchises did you roughly have by the time you exited seven, eight years later?

12:05I think it was in the 70s to 80s mark. I had done about 70 or training programs, I think at that point, where you pull the franchises. We had an office, we had a good staff team. We had, yeah, I'd certainly been kind of taking groups of franchisees through the five-day training program a lot at that point. And I remember the day I left, I put everything online. So that was always my kind of side of it, the web and the business systems and the making sure that everything was libraryed online, that people could access it online. And I mean, no one else was doing that when we were setting up. You went around to your little local village hall, you paid a five or a class on the day in cash you know whereas we were enrolling online re-enrolling online you're able to pause your classes online you're able to buy your strip online because of course every age group has different strip so yeah I think the technology behind it was really important that's incredible so the 30 classes that you had did you eventually franchise those out as well or did you carry on running those for yeah no we did we did we divvied things up some of the classes that we'd been running, we put into franchise areas and those were sold.

13:12Yeah, for sure. Because then that just reduced the amount that we were doing centrally. I'm not sure if that's currently still the case, but it was to try and make sure that we had the resource to really build that franchising model out from the core and not be distracted by constantly running classes ourselves. So there definitely was a kind of contraction initially. As I say, I don't know how things are now, but that was important. And it's also revenue. I mean, the great thing about this business all the way through until I know relatively recently they had VC in, it was all self-funding. It was just such a cash cow.

13:45Although you had a cash position to run because we were selling classes in advance and you have to deliver them over the next three months, if you like. So selling kind of terms in advance. Cash position was always great, you know, and it was completely self-funding apart from that very first grant that we got for building the business system from the Federation of Small Business. So yeah, the government funding kind of underpinned that bit, but the rest of it was all self-funded. And selling those initial franchise areas was definitely part of that. So the eight-year journey, it sounds like if we just left it there, that it was like you started, it ballooned, it grew, and then you exited.

14:19And if we didn't know better, we'd say, okay, well, that sounds easy. But I know it wasn't. And there's going to be loads of challenges when you're scaling, even if your business is in demand. What are the biggest challenges that when you look back at it now that really stand out to you that were particularly difficult to navigate as you grew that business? You know, just the blood, sweat and tears of having a young family and being at the coalface, you know, running initially everything on those awful spreadsheets. I mean, luckily, we worked with a brilliant, I found this lovely software company down on the Isle of Wight.

14:53They just held our hands brilliantly all the way through and were absolutely fantastic to work with called net guides but the pain of you know it's like when you're developing a business system and something falls over or you realize you need a different requirement or you need that change done or you need and you've got to keep track of absolutely everything and meanwhile you're tracking all the parents who are enrolling day by day and then one of them pulls out one of them doesn't send the check one of them hasn't paid it's just that relentless kind of I remember I mean I would put the kids to bed carry on working I know my business partner was doing the same you know, practically work all night, get up, carry on, take the kids to nursery, you know.

15:29It was really, really heavy going whilst we were just growing so quickly. We tried to resource it properly. We got a quality manager in fairly quickly, which was really helpful. They ran around and scooped up those keys that, you know, were suddenly lost on a Sunday morning or whatever it was. We did it intelligently, I think, but you just can't get away from all the different plates you spin. We had it so refined and we updated the game plans all the time. So it was new and fun and interesting and different. And we knew our parents, you know, had a lot of faith and trust in the website and in the business system.

16:03And, you know, they find handing money over to us, we weren't trying to shuffle cash around at classes and things. And we just, it was just really high quality. And I think people gravitated to little kickers classes and that, you know, doesn't always make you friends when there's other people trying to do similar things in the space, which obviously got a lot more busy as we went along. Because you were doing so well. Yeah. You know, people want to copy successful businesses, right? Yeah, exactly that. And we were always indoors in little village halls and sports centres. And that was the recipe.

16:33So we could do it 365 days a year, you know, pretty much. You weren't weather dependent. We weren't, you know, and a lot of people were running classes outside with more difficulty. So, yeah, we ran very safe. A huge amount of time and attention went in as another massive headache at the time into all the health and safety checks and making sure every venue was checked before every class. It was intense in terms of getting all those plates spinning and then keeping them spinning whilst we were scaling so quickly. And that's only to the 80 or so that we had when I exited. I dread to think almost how incredibly hard work and busy it's been since then, because now there's thousands and thousands and thousands of franchises and they are all over the world.

17:14But it's the same model. That's the thing about franchising. It's grown. I go back in, And I look on the classes being run and it's the same strips. It's the same age groups. It's the same session plans pretty much. You can see if you get it right from the beginning and it's high quality and you spend a lot of time and attention wiggling through all the details and getting it brilliant. Then if it's a franchise model, then it's going to scale that way. And of course, there were things that you had to adjust to and adapt to. But generally speaking, the pain and the sweat and the tears were worth it.

17:46but it was really really hard and I think it's hard on us personally you know lots of time lost with my small children you know set it up some the son you know in theory could play football he was never that interested in football and at the time we didn't have that many girls coming now of course fantastic that there's a huge amount of girls coming by the looks of it but that's great but yeah my own daughter went through it must have been seven eight years ago and she still plays today still plays today amazing and little kickers was a big part of that and plus having a big brother who loved football and she wanted to copy everything he did but little kickers also tell me about the competition it's easy enough for somebody to go and set up another class somewhere but did you have anybody come into the space look at what you were doing and then come in with you know decent funding and ambitions to try and really rival you or take over or or even just blatantly copy everything you do.

18:40I mean, I don't know what scale it got to the competition. Was it just localized or was there anyone coming into the market aggressively trying to compete with you? I'd say that franchisees would probably say that it's localized because to them, you have your franchise area, you know your venues, you know how many kids you've got. And so if somebody comes and suddenly sets three classes up on your doorstep, that's going to feel like competition no matter who they are. But in terms of a national scale, yeah, there was certainly someone up in Leeds had much more of a let's produce the next David Beckham let's produce the next England team was much more kind of football focused but because there were such young children that was never really our focus it was quality football but it was all about the sharing and the taking turns and the numbers and the those other kind of social skills and exercise and fun happiness and all those lovely things that football brings we weren't really focused on whether or not you could dribble backwards or whatever this was at five or five years old there was only someone who came in with much sort of higher football ambitions if you like who did spend quite a lot of time I think probably looking at our classes and on and set up in quite a similar way again it didn't materialize and we just carried on we just carried on doing it really really well I think it's a good lesson because whenever you get competition your kind of initial thought is oh no but actually they market make for you right if they're out there selling football classes, they're getting to more parents, that more parents are aware that there are football classes out there.

20:07And you're on that menu, you know, you're one of the choices. So I think competition is often really healthy. And it also just teaches you where there's capacity. So if somebody set a class up there, well, why is that? Because there's tons of small children over there who want to play football. So that's a good place to set up a class. Well, looking back, I can see exactly how unemotionally you could look at that. But were Were you so logic-based when it happened or were there emotions involved? Like, oh my God, we've got competition. Or were you just always calm and just went with it and you were confident in your position?

20:37Can you remember how you felt? I think I probably felt more threatened because I was a sort of operations one. But my business partner was super confident and just carried on. We just keep going. We knew we had huge feedback, tons of testimonials. Right from the very beginning, we included all the testimonials on the website. And you could look at how happy all the parents were. There was tons of really positive feedback, lots of media coverage. I probably had an initial hiccup, but it certainly didn't stop us day to day. It couldn't stop us. We were too busy to be stopped. You didn't really slow down for that.

21:08You've just got to keep going. So it's a different industry, right? Many people corporately might be a much bigger deal if somebody's selling the same widget sets up next door. But for us, just the levels of demand and the amount of preschool children that are out there, you knew that if somebody set up, what you had to do was just do it better. and then they would come to your classes and they would stay in your classes and we had literally had wait lists of over a hundred on these classes and there would be outrage if one parent got bumped you couldn't do it we all knew exactly what position they were on on the wait list because you could see it lots of loyalty overcame I think those feelings of kind of like this is a bit threatening we just kept going so you've talked about like working into the night and sometimes entrepreneurship scene is like that's part of the glamour like oh I worked through the night and I was tired but actually when you're living it it's exhausting and you see you say like the blood the sweat and the tears but it really can drive you to that do you remember a point where you were close to tears or maybe you experienced the tears where it's just loads could you share one or two stories around that because I think it's important people hear the success I think that's what's shared a lot in business like we grew and we did this amazing thing I mean to call and bumps is a real understatement.

22:22There are so many bumps in the road. Sometimes it's, the road's disappeared and you don't even know which way to go. It can be really tough. Yeah, I think in our case, the road stayed, right near the road, it was very clear how fast this was growing, what direction it was going in. We were pretty strategic. We understood where that this could go all over the world because football is global. So the kind of pull was very known. But what happened personally was my mother got very sick. She got ovarian cancer and ultimately in three years died from that. And at the same time, her husband, my stepdad died of liver cancer.

22:55And I had two tiny children at the time and the business to run, my side of the business to run. It was really, really challenging. And there were relationship issues. I mean, founders aren't always the right people to carry on and run a business. And I think certainly from an operations point of view, I knew when I had done my thing, when it was sort of time to move on, because not only was the business absolutely going to, you know, storm onwards, but I needed to take some time off and kind of reset and spend some time with my kids and, yeah, grieve what happened to me sort of personally. There was, that was definitely a big side of it.

23:35I, the business is not to blame at all. You know, it was, it was just a confluence of things that happened all at once. And my mum was my best friend and, you know, my biggest supporter. So it was really hard to go through all of that in parallel with this business that was just so super demanding. That's the thing with the business, right? You can't just go, can you just wait for six months while I process all this? Sometimes you can't go six hours without it needing you. That must have been really intense. It was really intense. And I did step back and then got my exit. So in a way, it was perfectly timed.

24:11And I certainly look back and I've got no regrets at all having stepped away like that because I really did need to do that and we'd moved and all sorts of things I just needed yeah some time to kind of settle down a bit really it was also wonderful you know the day I left was the day as this I'm not sure I said this already but it was the day that I put everything online so I knew that everything was kind of safely out of my head and out of my desk and out of all the drawers and the you know the chaos where you're running stuff in an office at home and it had all gone, all been uploaded online, was all accessible by all the franchisees and the business.

24:47And I could step away. That was a great moment, actually. It was like, that's the job done. And it's up there. And we bought in areas that were really kind of risk sensitive and stuff like the health and safety. I got a consulting firm to come in and take that over. So I really knew even the kind of really risky bits were going to be covered. The business system was brilliant by that stage. And I think carried on and ran the business for at least another 10 or 15 years after that before they switched platforms. And the franchise family was happy. They were all doing brilliantly. They were all running great businesses.

25:23That's kind of a really cool thing with having a load of franchisees is that they become your friends. They become people whose lives you're kind of looking out for. And you get all the lovely stories of how having this second income or having this primary income or, you know, has made such a difference to their lives. And so I knew it was kind of leaving a well-shaped business that was well set up, that was going to carry on and scale and be very successful. I never had a moment's doubt. And also my business partner is phenomenal. So I knew that she'd do a brilliant job, but it was hard. Yeah, it was hard.

25:54It's always hard to let go, I think. I can imagine to put a bow on it, to like take it as far as you felt was to the right point at the right time, doing all the things you wanted to do and then having a successful exit. You know, so many people don't get to go on that journey. So many people, like so many people don't even get a business off the ground. That's hard enough. But then to get one that's scaled and then had an exit and then you've left that what you felt is the right time for you, you know, that's like winning the business Olympics. There isn't an Olympics for business, but that is it.

26:26And you don't just get the medal at the end. You have to do lots of the blood, the sweat, the tears and all the emotions of having a life outside of a business as well. And that's super hard. But you got to complete that. Not many people do. So well done to you. It's an incredible story. I certainly wouldn't put myself up on the podium. It wasn't a gold medal. If it had been gold, it probably would have been worth more than that. But I had a number that I was working to at the time. And I got that number. And I got away from all the stress and the pressure. And yeah, the best thing about it and it was really hard don't get me wrong that was a really really difficult time for lots of reasons and some of them obviously I'm not going into now but it was a tricky time but what was wonderful was seeing it then carry on I mean I go out to randomly was in I don't know Iowa I don't know where it was somewhere somewhere out in the sticks in the states we just spent a few years living out there and I was I was having my nails done in a salon and a little stream of little kickers people.