How Lisa Vincent built her Ed-tech business How Too on Venture Capital through COVID

Transcript: How it Happened – How Too with Lisa Vincent

Lisa, thank you so much for making the time to talk with me today to share with me your journey and your experiences of developing HowToo, and how that, and how being in a venture capital funded organization affects the way that you actually implement strategy. So listen, tell me a little bit about your background and about how you came up with Yeah, so look, I have a background in HR and learning and production and started a business in the early 2000s focused on developing custom digital learning services for corporate and government customers.

That was our savvy business and really, a couple of years ago, found that there was a really good opportunity to take everything we knew about digital learning. And pour it into a SAS platform, software as a service and make it easy for other people in our organizations to create their own digital learning and share their knowledge internally and with customers.

And so really for me, I’ve been running two very different businesses, one, which is very service, more small, stable business growing at a certain rate per year. And then now working in a SAS rapidly growing venture backed business very different business in terms of running and growing that and the way in which we set our strategy.

We have our metrics. We have our planning quite a different approach, much more, yeah, it’s frantic, crazy growth and focus different team members recruit, different style of team that we’re building for that business as well. Yeah it’s very exciting having the two very different style businesses.

Which is great. And so what does the platform do? So what it does is it makes it easy for anyone who has knowledge or know how to convert it into learning that they can share with others within their organization or with outside their organization. And the way it works is it’s got the inbuilt learning science already built in.

So you come in and you have an outcome you want for your learner. And within the tool we’ve already set up like an interactive sequence. That you can just pour that content in and then share it with others. And and the other key, key thing about it is that it’s got all the accessibility features, so anybody who’s living with a disability would need inclusive learning.

It’s all built in into the software itself. Wow. So very topical and potentially very high demand. Yeah. Yeah. So it hit about two weeks after we launched in 20, 2019. And yeah, we had our launch party and then we’re all.

They were often running, and there were a lot of organizations that really needed to convert what they did face to face into an online form. So the timing kind of couldn’t be better in terms of what was needed in the market. And how did you see your subscriber base grow and what you’re expected. Yeah. So very rapidly probably a lot more rapidly than we expected largely because of what was going on. In the world. And so yeah, organizations needed to get up on up and running online very quickly. So we built up kind of 10, 000 subscribers within a year, which was very exciting.

And that was, primarily in Australia, but now we’ve also launched into to the U. S. and where. Really getting some good traction there as well. And so 20, nearly 24 months in 22 months in what’s your subscriber level now? So it’s around 15, 000 subscribers. And We’re starting to get, we’ve got probably about four or five customers internationally now and really looking to grow that subscriber base, particularly into the U S.

Yeah. Fantastic. And so how did you go about funding this? So we were very fortunate. We actually made a pre sale initially mid 2018. So we had a a very valued customer who was also indicating they needed this sort of software. So we made a large presale to them that got us up and running that gave us enough cash to build a minimum viable product.

We also leveraged, the profitability of our service business and our customer base and our Intel as well. So we managed to fund it from the presale. We made, we’ve got some government grants and we’ve got an accelerating commercialization grant. A boosting family, boosting female founders grant R and D.

And then in April last year, we also did a fundraise and raised two and a half million with three investors to two Australian based and one in the U S. So it’s a combination of that, our revenue growth. And our service business also continues to grow and give us another source of funding to continue our runway and grow our product and our sales and marketing efforts.

Yeah. Was the the grant applications process as well as the VC funding process, was that a trigger to really drive and shape your strategic plan? Yeah, they all aligned together. So one of the milestones in our accelerating commercialization grant was to raise so that was the last, one of the last stage, latter stages of our our plan.

And the funding for the grant was all based on that accelerated growth. And to do that, we really realized we needed to have investors for funding, but not only for funding for also for connections, networks, ideas, Intel profile as well, building a profile. So many reasons. We’re driving us to go about the fundraise, not just the funds themselves.

And so the work that we put into accelerating commercialization grant and all of our planning and our strategy fed in really nicely to funding process. That all worked really well together and we were fortunate to access a lot of funding. Support through the government as well to help us put that funding plan together.

So I, I am extremely appreciative of the government support we’ve had to date. We would not be where we’re at now without that. And also going through the, the masterclass as well. It’s been, great benefit for us. So all of those. Things have contributed to where we are now.

Yeah. And for those who don’t haven’t gone through a VC funding process, tell me a bit more about that process and how you approached it. Yeah. So look, the first thing I did was I learned how to pitch a couple of years ago. So preparing your pitch deck. And your plan, but I did do a lot of pitch training a couple of years ago, which really got me pitch ready.

I learned how to create curiosity with investors. So telling a story is really important. Having a clear plan for what you what your vision and your mission is. Describing, what the trajectory is in terms of your growth and what, what the money that you’re looking for and what the outcomes that you would have with your investors.

So having all of that planned out first and making sure that you’ve got your story and your pitch prepared. In advance and that you’ve done a lot of practice because I learned very quickly that it’s, there’s different types of pitches you lose, lose interest very quickly if you don’t do it well.

Making sure you’re trained up and I can tell you what it’s a skill like any other. Practice and support and training helps a lot. You might be good at doing sales pitches, but pitches to investors are quite different. So learning the nuances of that process, that was first. Then the next thing is determining like really like any sales process.

What are we trying to achieve? What is our target audience? So what kind of investors? So what are the criteria that we’re looking for in our investor? Then building out a set of targets, then having a funnel. So basically working out what is our sales process into those potential investors.

So outreach, Finding networks, warm leads are much better than cold ones. So it’s really like running a sales process. So you do your first meeting, you’re trying to get their interest, then you follow up and then you have a second meeting. And then what I found is that once you’ve got like a lead investors, a lead investor in place.

So the lead investor is the one where you usually set the terms. And they’re the one that are going to, They’re going to be, they’re going to put in usually a higher percentage of investment. Once you’ve got them on, secure it, then you end up having a lot of FOMO and you can run a really nice little kind of sales campaign where quick, we’re closing soon getting those, the rest of the team on board.

I found a lot of confidence for the agency, doesn’t it? It does. And it’s committed, therefore it’s worth it. You will get a lot of rejection along the way, like again, any sales process. So it’s learning from that. So what I would use, I would usually always ask, I would want to get a lot of feedback as to why I didn’t get to the next step.

And sometimes it would just be the timing’s not right. Sometimes they just wouldn’t have resources that were focused on our industry or our area. Or maybe it was what I did. I don’t know. It’s a whole range. I need to tweak the pitch. A lot of it, particularly in the early stages of the startup is around your chemistry with the particular investors.

How do you get on? Are they, do they like you as a founder? Are they motivated by your mission, vision? A lot of it is that chemistry that you’re building. I think it’s also your confidence. Building up that confidence, being very clear about what your goals are, what you think you can achieve, and being very confident about the way you project that to your, to that audience.

Obviously there’s a whole lot of other things like your cap table. So working out, what’s your, what, how much you want to raise, how much you have now in your cap table and all those technical aspects. And then obviously all the labels as well. Once you. Further down the road. And you’re negotiating everything with your investors.

But it’s quite a process. It takes a lot of time. This is all I would say as well. It takes up a lot of your time. So what are the biggest challenges? So what are the things like us took at least six months, probably seven. It’s making sure you have the time to dedicate to it because difficult. So if there’s two founders, it can be quite handy to have one who’s focused on the business and one who’s focused on fundraising.

And then maybe the one who’s focused on business just comes in at the latter stages. We, with my business partner, we did a bit of a split. So We’re split up running the business and split up running. I led more of the fundraising, but then knew that my business partner was focused on more of the day to day.

You do need to think about how you’re going to resource it. And would you describe that as being something like a full time job? Almost. Yeah, probably 70%, 75 percent of your time. Cause if you’re not on it like any selling, yeah. If you’re not responding quickly, if you’re not keeping all of your leads up to date, if you’re not spending the time, looking at their questions.

They ask a lot of questions. So the other thing that you do is set up a data room with all your data in there. So you get a lot of efficiencies with all your typical questions. And so there’s a lot of processes you can set up, but yeah. And I think once you’ve done it once, I think the next time we raise will be a lot easier because I know, the process because you’re learning a lot through the process.

And did you use Pow2 as your data room repository or did you use another tool? We did use another tool, but just because Pow2 is probably not, but yeah, it’s a great idea though, John. Might do that next time. Great idea. The other thing the investors wanted to do is obviously spend a lot of time in the software.

So they, you spend a lot of time with them, taking them through what it does and getting them on the trials and getting them because for us products for our investors, the product and the software was a really key part of their decision making. And they also wanted to talk to customers.

And get some testimonials and refer, They wanted to make sure customers are getting value for what we do. And so tell me a bit more about the the strategic planning process. A large, in addition to the tool, a large portion of what was being sold to the funding parties was your plan and your vision as to what was going to happen.

But more importantly, how you were going to get there. How would you say that was different from say your services business. So I think for us the go to market, so the product market fits. Describing the whole market that we were targeting was really critical. What is the size of the market, the total size, the total addressable market and so I suppose building up a vision of what’s possible.

And making that clear, cause that’s really critical to an investor. They want to see. A very large potential market. And that wasn’t just for us. So in the past, my planning has been more around an Australian market for a venture backed SAS platform, the globe, particularly with a high volume sort of selling process the market size.

It is really important to clarify for them and to talk about that in a monetized form. Financially what does that look like is really key. Other key aspects, which I think is important with any planning is when you fit in the market, what are your differentiators? So how are you different from others?

And it’s really emphasizing that it’s providing a lot more detail perhaps than what I’ve done before, because for them they want to see that you can stand out against the competition and get that conversion for your sales. Other key, so market competitive landscape, how you’re different, what’s your key differentiators and really fleshing that out.

What’s your traction today has been. So you put your proof. Where have you been? What have you achieved? And then how can you translate that with a go to market strategy? And probably for me, in some ways, in a startup, it’s a lot of trial and error. So they want to see that, yes, we have this go to market strategy, but we’re agile and flexible and clever and talented to adjust and adapt.

As we go and that’s probably another key differentiator and difference, sorry, between a more stable business because more stable business, you’re talking to what you’ve achieved in the past. And then how you’re leveraging that and growing. We had to leverage a service business, the expertise we had in that, what we’d achieved so far in our business, how are we going to leverage that for the future and what our team looks like to achieve that.

So that I found that different. And then the other thing that constantly came up was, What are our metrics for success? And they were really quite different to what I’ve been used to. Us it’s conversion. So it’s like number of new leads or new trials, our conversion rate, our average revenue per customer, a month on month growth.

Lifetime customer value. So it’s really honing in on what are those metrics that’s going to demonstrate what we’ve achieved so far and how we’re going to produce that significant month on month growth in ARR or annual revenue recurring revenue, cause that’s what it’s all about for an investor.

How are you going to achieve that? And with a smaller, with a smaller startup, you don’t often have a lot of that data yet. So it’s how are you going to build up that data dashboard and how are you going to build that growth? And how are you going to use product as a driver for growth?

Yeah. So let’s unpack this a little. So when we think about how to, there’s, A whole raft of online learning systems available at the moment in the marketplace. So what do you see as being the key differentiators of HowTo? So the key differentiators are that it’s not designed for learning designers.

It’s designed for anyone who has knowledge. And what it does through the smarts of the software, it enables that conversion of knowledge into really high quality learning. So it’s really like a creative platform. So in the same way, we might talk about TikTok or other platforms that are used for other types of creation.

How to is really the enabler for the conversion of knowledge Into really effective learning that’s shareable within organizations and outside of organizations. So it, what it does is it speeds up the creation process. It means you don’t need learning designers and digital designers to create content and it reduces the knowledge drain.

So I suppose like candor of learning, it’s often to be described as it’s a easy way to convert knowledge into learning. But also learning that’s inclusive. So creating accessible learning is actually quite difficult. It’s quite technically challenging. And there’s a lot of specific technical requirements around if you’ve got a screen reader, if you can’t see, then there’s all these sort of technical issues you need to build in.

What we’ve done is built that all in. So basically when you create content in how to. There’s an assurance that content will be inclusive and accessible. And for, large corporate and government agencies, that’s actually super critical. We’ve just been talking to one very large SAS platform CRM actually in the U.

And they said that just recently, they’re coming on board now to use how to in the coming weeks. They said that, the accessibility for them was the, it was a learning science, but actually the accessibility. Was super, they hadn’t found anything that could any other tool that could create accessible content the way how to does, and it’s become really critical now in organizations that want to make sure, because it’s like learning has actually become a human right now.

If you can’t actually access learning. It’s very hard to be successful, so making sure and assuring that’s actually accessible and inclusive learning is really key. Yeah. So we’ve talked a couple of things about metrics and so on. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you use OKR and dashboards?

Yeah. So we realized that traditional planning processes weren’t going to quite work for us as a rapidly growing SAS. Scalable bench back business, so we looked at objectives and key results as being a good method for us to do our planning. So the way we do so objective, the difference between objectives and key results as opposed to maybe KPIs and is that they just keep, they do keep changing.

So they’re not set in stone, like maybe a KPI might be. Cause we need to constantly look at new ways of monitoring our business. So the way we do our planning for OKRs and by, by no means is this perfection. And it’s a continual process for us and we’re still evolving it to get it to a place where it’s, but this is the way we do it.

So we pulled together the leadership team first and we workshop, what are our key objectives? So what are our goals? For the coming, we, we do 12 months in advance. So then we do a workshop to identify what those goals are. And then we translate within, we say, all right how do we measure those in key results?

So what are the key measurements that are going to show us that we’re achieving those objectives? So as a team, as a leadership team, we identify those for the year ahead. So what are our OKRs for the year ahead? Then we workshop the quarterly OKRs because each quarter it does change, so we break it down into, based on those objectives for the year ahead, what do we need to achieve for the next quarter?

So we set our objective and then our key results for the upcoming quarter, then that translates into team OKRs and kind of individual OKRs. We like to put them on the wall. I think we’ve had most success where we put them on the wall of the office, which of course we haven’t been in much. So we put them, that was actually really good having them up all the time.

We also put them up digitally and we refer to them at our team meetings because the other thing that we wear. These things fall down if they’re not embedded in our cadences, our regular cadences and rhythms week in, week out within the business and in our one on ones. So we bring up our OKRs and our one on ones as well.

So I think for us, so it’s translating. I learned a lot in the masterclass, but it’s translating some of those ideas. into something that’s a little bit more appropriate for a more agile, rapidly changing business that needs to shift and move the ebb and flow with what’s going on. For us, it’s a real challenge between focus because focus is key, but agility.

And I still find that quite a challenge. We need to be focused. But we also need to be very agile and I think where you can fall down in the startup is it’s just way too much going on. So I can’t help just focus. Yeah. So would you like to give an example of that? Okay. An example is we’re rolling out our plan into the U S and we’ve set it so we were very fortunate to do the US landing pad to go into that market.

So our plan was to, first of all, employee sales debt development representatives to target into that market first. And we were going to go for the West coast of the US and California. And then as we started that process. We realized that there was actually more of an opportunity through some leads that came in through inbound market, like marketing leads to more focus on some partnership.

and pivot more towards partnership model and into a different region of the US. So it’s just an example. So what happens to us all the time is we understand our market more, we understand our audience and our customers. Then we need to change because what we’re doing, we plan to do it this way, but as we do it, we realize, Oh, actually, this is where we’re getting more traction.

So we need to just pivot a bit and focus on that. Another example is that we’ve just, we’ve discovered a really good opportunity into a particular industry to create a suite of content. And at first to keep that very wide because we also create content to go into our platform. So as well as creating, having created tool, you can also have the content that you buy in the tool.

And we were first going to go down one path. Then we discovered as we brought on new customers, Hey, there’s more of an opportunity here to explore. This looks more like where we’ve got more traction and more opportunity. So the product does pivot and grow and develop. As we understand our customers more and our opportunity more.

So it’s quite fun, but you’ve got to be careful that you don’t do too many things all at the same time, which we probably do, we have to keep focused. So the critical few actions was really good for me because as a founder of business that has so many opportunities, I am definitely someone who can fall into the trap of.

Hey, let’s do this and I have to be focused. So the critical few actions combined with our chaos, which is, they’re really quite similar is really, it was really important for me. Yeah. Cause I guess as you were saying, there’s a tension between focus and being agile. Yeah. And I guess part of that tension is every time there’s either a good idea or there’s a new market opportunity or there’s a new, there’s new feedback that’s coming from the system or from the business that, cause the business is trying to teach us something every day.

If only we can listen to it. Then the opportunity is for us to become unfocused because we’re actually focused on too many other bits and pieces or we’re being so dynamic that we’re just creating noise. Yeah, exactly. So data is probably the other best friend of our business. So we’ve built in some really great software in the middle of our ecosystem in our business.

So this software called Segment and Mixpanel. And so Segment allows us, it draws in the data from our product. It draws in the data from our marketing and sales. And then we feed that into other software like Mixpanel. where we actually do a lot of analysis as to if we do this, what’s the ROI on this?

If we do this, what’s the ROI? So doing some really nice. analysis of not just based on the gut feeling, gut is important, but really checking things against the data. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve, another big thing I’ve learned is that to ensure that those decisions are being made based on the data and asking our customers.

So now we’ve got so if we’re thinking about a new feature for our product, We’ll put a little in app questionnaire and we’ll base it on the answers to that, not on a gut feeling. And yeah, so really digging into the, to the data and. Helping that driver decision making and yeah, working out what would lead to a better increase.

Really? It’s about revenue growth. And it’s pulling together the team across sales marketing product. to look at together. How can we generate that increase? If we make these tweaks, which tweaks are going to get the best results. And of course, having done that, you can then test to see whether your hypothesis stood up.

Yeah, exactly. We’ve got great examples of that, like a sign up page, we did one little tweak. And it reduced the sign up, like the conversion rate we tweaked it back and made a few other changes and it popped right up, but you’ve got to give yourself enough time to assess. the outcome of that change and not be too impatient to see the shift.

And speaking of impatience, dashboards are all your dashboards electronic or put together? Through Excel spreadsheets or through some other form. And who’s exposed to them? So we’ve got a whole lot of, I’ve got a ton of dashboards. The overall company dashboard is still in Excel. And, but it draws.

The data because that’s really a summary for us of what are the most important metrics that we’re tracking. And unfortunately now we still are doing those a little bit manually but everybody sees them. So everybody in the business has access to those and we review them together on a regular basis.

And we have a look at a leadership team. How we’re performing and what we can do to improve things. And as an overall business, we look at those on a more kind of regular level, we have dashboards across a product. Our marketing and our sales. And then we’re looking at them more specifically at a ball kind of micro level around things like, from the sales, obviously it’s about our deals and our conversions product.

 It’s more around products. Cause we have PQL. So product qualified leads product traction and marketing more around, leads conversions and all those sorts of things, but they all feed into overall business dashboard. And that’s about it. I’m actually really open also about everything right across the team in terms of revenue.

And it’s quite transparent. I’m actually being more and more transparent. To the business. I’m really sharing, for example, with the product team, this is this product feature we’re working on the plant. It’s like a theme builder. We’re planning to put all our enterprise customers on this.

This is going to be added to that. Then we’re going to move all of our kind of one subscription subscribers up to enterprise. That’s a five time revenue gain from just that feature. So the potential of that feature for the business is huge. This percentage increase. For our revenue. And if they can see that I also, we also do things like make sure product are really aware of new customers, what they’re telling us, net promoter score, all those things so that we’re all together in this.

So we understand, okay my part of this picture, and that’s, what’s great about a smaller product business like as a software business, you can have a significant impact. Through your ideas, your work, your contribution and in a way that you can’t in a huge huge business. Because retention is a challenge as well.

I haven’t even talked about that, for businesses like ours, people want to come and coach our people. So one of the things that we have that’s quite different is A much closer connection to the business and what our mission is all about and what we’re achieving and what you can learn.

Oh my gosh, learning. So everybody in our business is, yeah, has a plan around their learning. And ensuring that’s aligned to where the business is going. And again, that’s what our business is all about. Yeah. And how much visibility do you give your your investors of your dashboards or do you report differently?

So they get a full visibility to overall company dashboard, which has around 25, 30 metrics in it. We’ve got the top ones and then we do filter down. So they get a copy of that every month. Obviously, they get all our financials, our updates across each of the key areas of business. I also bring our team leads like a leadership team members in to talk about different parts of the business with them, give them a lot of connection there.

And then, they’ve actually, yeah, anything they want, they can access. So any specific. Because they’re actually sometimes they’ll, I’ve got some investors that are more interested in the marketing side of business. Some of them want to sit in on a sales meeting, fine, come along in the US, if you want to come, I don’t mind.

I’ve opened it quite transparently in terms of what’s happening. The good, the bad, the ugly. Yeah. And you talked a bit about cadence. Tell me a bit about the cadence that you have internally. I take it that from a leadership time perspective, you’re having huddles on a semi regular basis or erratic.

Yeah. How does that work? How do you keep them all aligned when things are moving fast? Yeah. And focused and agile. So we have quite a few different cadences. So from the top sort of from the leadership team, we meet every fortnight. And that is really to do updates on what’s happening across the business, how we’re tracking against our metrics, our OKRs, we would do sort of special sessions sometimes on learning, retrospectives, so we mix it up a bit as a team and do that on a fortnightly basis.

Then we have a more in depth workshop on a quarterly basis around our OKRs. So at the end of one quarter, we’ll be planning for the upcoming, coming quarter. And that’s more of a workshop over lunch and activities. I like to do a retrospective at the end of quarters as well, just to, a bit more of what went well, what we can improve on, what have we learned, what do we take with us?

So that’s a leadership. leadership team level product team have a daily stand up. Then we have regular cadences around our product planning prioritization. We do retrospectives as a product team. So there’s a lot going on that side of things. Always interested in how do we continually learn and feed that into the next sprint planning process.

Sales and marketing. We have a weekly full sales and marketing stand up. That was on a Monday morning. We’ll go through our results from last week plans for this week. A lot of data we share a bit of helping each other plan for the week, and then we have a daily stand up in sales. Other teams have no regular stand ups.

So yes, there’s a lot of meetings and gatherings, and I think that’s why. As a team, having some face to face time is important. So we continue to have an office. We’re not a full remote team. We are a hybrid team. And it’s interesting with a continually changing and evolving team, having time together is actually hugely beneficial. We work well remotely, but we, I never, I don’t think, We’re ever going to lose that face to face time.

And so the face to face space we chose was somewhere where it would be a really great place to be. So we’re in a shared working space. We’ve got our own separate office and, there’s coffee on demand. There’s beer in the afternoon because we need to compete with that kind of environment.

And. Having somewhere fun, a destination, because you almost have to draw them back. Not so much, I think generally I think they’re happy to come in, but it needs to be a place that you want to be, have fun, feed it. We have a lot of younger, team members. They don’t want to be sitting in their bedroom on Zoom all day.

They want to come and collaborate and be together. Learn together. Yeah. So the daily standup cadence, how important is that level of frequency? That, that’s, that has carries with it a fair amount of overhead. I take it. Are they long, short, no. Sure. Structured. So daily structured, very tight.

 So very tight format. Five to 10 minutes max. Yeah. So it’s a daily huddle. Yeah. Yeah. So it just keeps, so the two areas of the business where it’s particularly important is product just to keep people in, particularly if you’re not together in the office, but that’s 10 minutes, 10 minute huddle.

Sales. Those are the two areas that, that daily huddle is pretty critical. So it’s worth it and it’s not just for the it’s the morale, keeping the team particularly for sales. Cause we want to hear those great results from yesterday. It’s all about activity and outcomes and same with product is keeping people on track, keeping people excited.

And the other thing we’ve been doing lately is. A show and tell for a larger, like for a longer huddle sometimes so people can see under the bonnet of what people are doing. So that continual sharing of learning the team, it changes all the time and we continually look at how we improve these cadences because what worked last year is not going to work this year.

It’s not going to work, not even next month or next quarter. So people do need to get used to change. And I do recruit people that cope with a need, a need for being adaptable and being really focused on learning. And so just to wrap up things that have worked well and things that haven’t worked well from a strategy implementation perspective.

So I think okay, us have been a good strategic initiative for us as a business. I can’t say that we have. Completely nailed it, but I think it is a good methodology for us. And doing that as a team, as a leadership team, and then flying that through the business has worked well for us.

I think a dashboard’s been brilliant and the regular review of that. And I think for me, the critical few actions. have been really a valuable habit because it’s a habit that goes a little bit against my brain I’m naturally someone who more it’s going to be potentially distracted by the opportunities.

So for me, I do need to be focused. Otherwise everything is a chaotic mess. So that’s been important. If I did nothing else, what would have the biggest impact? What are things that haven’t worked so well from an implementation perspective? So we have struggled a little bit with some of our structure, thanks. So the way which, so I think what I’ve realized is at first I thought in a business like ours, we’d have sales marketing product and they would run in a way in their lanes and run their shows. What I’ve realized is that the bringing together of those three areas, particularly in a business like ours and working together as a team on combined objectives and combined strategies is absolutely key.

And having that alignment together, because none of those areas can run as their own little island. That’s probably one thing I’ve learned and probably strategically ensuring that I get Yeah, focus. I think that other thing is finding the right people is absolutely key and not keeping them if they’re not working out, which I think I do pretty well at, but it’s still a continual work in progress, but there’s nothing more important than getting right people.

Yeah, I think that’s a consistent theme I see across all build all businesses, but also that ability to actually be fair and decisive quickly. Yeah. All too often people delay. Yeah. 20, 000 a month. That’s it. And it’s an expensive procrastination and avoidance process.

Yes, it is. And if you think maybe they’ll get better. Actually one of the things I find the most difficult decision to make is around team member who’s inconsistent. So someone who’s brilliant one minute and. Terrible. The other. That is actually where I find it very difficult. That’s where I go up and down.

But even that inconsistency in itself is it’s impossible to get the outcomes you want because you can’t actually, you can’t have the confidence. Who am I going to get today? So yes, making those pretty quick decisions, even if they’re sometimes brilliant, if they’re not consistently at the standard that you need them to be you’re going to so wish that you made that decision much earlier.

Yeah. And and in the same vein things that you’ve done well or not done well with your equity partners. Where have they added the most value in the least and created the most distraction might be a different way to look at it. Yeah. My, my investors, I couldn’t be happier with them.

I think they’re absolutely brilliant. I, the things that have been good, really I’ve been happy about is tapping into their network early. So I, they’ve created some great opportunities for us. through that network. So not being scared to ask for their input. I, so I think that’s been really good.

So their network, tapping into the network has been probably the number one value. I think being open with them. Has been really good. I think you move from this place where you’re pitching to them all the time and showing your best self. Yeah. And I’ve learned to just be a lot more frank and open.

And I think I’ve got better outcomes from being more open with them. So that’s been good. So I think, yeah, I moved from wanting to please them to wanting to be more open with them. I still want to please them, but I can’t bring them on board. Sorry. Also being open to counsel from them. Yeah, exactly.

And then I think bringing my team on board with them, so bringing them in with them. So that’s been a really good thing, bringing my team into board meetings. Getting them involved, having them collaborate directly with the board members and the investors has been really good. So in terms of things that I haven’t done so well, I suppose it’s just, I haven’t done enough of those things early enough, probably.

So now I’m comfortable with, it takes a while to warm up the process. I think. Yeah, I think you’re working, I think seeing them as your partners to where you need to go and they want to help and they want to, and so leveraging those opportunities and bringing your team in to that process as well, being two things I’ve learned.

Yeah, there’s quite a transition, both in activity and in mindset. Yeah. Going from basically a hardcore sales process to then actually turning it into a partnership. Yes that’s mutually respectful and mutually beneficial and sharing. Yes. And I don’t think that comes naturally to anyone until they’ve done it a few times and possibly, depending on the participants.

It might not happen so easily anyway but from what you’re saying, that’s one of the real imperatives of harnessing. Thank you. Your equity partners. Yes. How important is communication to them? Yeah, really important. So I’m constantly in touch with them. And I want to know, what’s going and where the challenges are.

I don’t want to give them any surprises at the board meeting. So I try and preempt any, anything prior to that. So that, and I try to. Even if something isn’t a problem now, I want them to know early. And and I think then they trust me more that I’m upfront, honest and straightforward with them.

And then, then they don’t have to guess or wonder. And then I can also get them involved in any ideas they have to help solve the problems. Cause it’s constant problems and challenges. The other thing I would also say is they’re going to tell you a lot of things.

They’re going to come up with a lot of ideas, but at the end of the day, you’re running the business. Always take on board their feedback with respect and interest and curiosity. But at the end of the day, there’s no one that knows the business more than you do in your team. So you take that on board and some things you may implement that they’ve suggested it and plenty of the vast majority you won’t, but it might, the idea might then spark something else that you do.

So that would be, cause again, at the end of the day, you’re running the business. Not the investors. And that’s what they’re, that’s what you’re charged to do. So their ideas are ideas and you may or may not take them on board. Yeah. And in that transition, you’ve probably gone from what 75 percent of your time to pitching to them to what 25 percent of managing and seeking input from them or more 25 would be the max. Yeah. Much less. So yeah. And there’s all different ways that they like to some like to have a Slack channel that they interact with you. Some like WhatsApp, some like something else. So you just find the channels that work for them. And they never, they’re always, very keen to hear from me.

About things I need from them always came to help. So I would also say, always think about how they can help you to get to where you need to go. Or the other thing I found a benefit is they also have large cohorts of other companies. They invest in that for you as a founder is a huge resource of other companies.

You can. tap into and talk to. And they’re always keen to introduce you to, to other businesses. And a good idea is to think about talking to people who are ahead of you down a certain road and talk to them about what they did in those circumstances. How can you learn from that and maximize the impact?

The, efficiency is to, as to where every bit is different, but, those insights are still really valuable. Lisa Vincent, thank you for sharing your insights today and the insights that you’ve gained from your journey with how to I wish you all the very best with the global domination strategy.

It sounds like how to’s in very good hands. Thank you so much, John. Appreciate your time. Thank you.