The Fabric of Success in Technology with Lisa Eaton

Embark on an empowering journey with Lisa Eaton, a trailblazing tech entrepreneur who's not only defied the odds but is also shaping the future for female founders.  As Lisa unveils her brainchild, Fabric—an inventive online training platform—listeners get an insider's look at her transition from service-based businesses to spearheading a tech company. She shares her own candid experiences, highlighting the hurdles she faced as a woman in the tech investment arena, and presents invaluable advice for entrepreneurs weighing their options.


Listen to learn:
-Lisa's unique insights on identifying market opportunities, nailing product-market fit, and the indispensable role of strategic marketing 
- The impact of aligning educational resources with industry demands
- How to remain authentic in a space  with gender biases
- How Lisa has mastered the art of public speaking and storytelling to captivate investors 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:38

The Northern Power Women Podcast for your career and your life, no matter what business you're in. Welcome to the Northern Power Women Podcast. My name is Simone and this podcast is all about highlighting the phenomenal, fabulous role models, enabling them to share their personal and professional stories with you. We hope to bring you some great top tips, advice, guidance, support and strategies, whatever it is that will help you navigate your way on through your own career path and journey. Without further ado, let's meet this week's guest. Today. I'm joined by Lisa Eton, who has recently recognised as one of the most 23 influential women in 23 by Startups Magazine in Women in Tech Female Founders Issue. It's also a non-technical founder and public speaker. A non-technical founder, that sounds very technical. Anyway, hello, lisa.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Welcome to the pod. Hi Simone, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:32

It's great to be here it was great to meet you before Christmas. Actually, you were over in Liverpool at a Female Founders event, weren't you? Which was a brilliant, brilliant panel. Sometimes you don't find the time to go to everything, especially now we're full on back into face to face stuff. I thought it was a really powerful panel.

Speaker 2: 1:53

It was. It was a brilliant event. Female Founders Rises has been really instrumental for me over the last year, but it was very Southern based Shocker.

Speaker 1: 2:02

I've been here for a long time about.

Speaker 2: 2:04

Can we get it up north? We need it up here. The event you and I met at was the last of the Northern tour we've done. We've done Edinburgh, newcastle, leeds and Liverpool. There's going to be a lot more of that coming this year, so it's really exciting.

Speaker 1: 2:16

It's really important, isn't it? It's really important because everyone has challenges in their own roles, but actually the challenges of building a company from nothing. It doesn't come with this toolkit, does it? Or guidebook? How did you approach building your company from the ground up?

Speaker 2: 2:36

Well, fabric isn't my first business. It's actually my third business, so I'd had a little bit of experience prior to fabric in terms of building a company from the ground up, growing it and making sure that it was a sustainable business. I guess this was a very different type of business to what I'd been used to and, quite naively I guess, I went into it thinking it would run very similarly to the other businesses I'd had, which were service-based consultancy marketing agency businesses. It did not. It's a very different type of business. It's a SASS tech company. So there was a lot of learnings around that, almost the learnings that I'd had over the last 10 years in the other business, kind of unpicking them and starting again.

Speaker 2: 3:20

But yeah, I guess for me, one of my massive passions has always been taking something from nothing this idea, this concept and building it into an actual product or a brand or a business. So it's what I really love to do and there was a real need. I'd seen a real gap in the market for fabric and what we now offer. So it felt like a really sensible route to build a new business in COVID not necessarily the most sensible time, but it worked in our favor actually. So yeah, and I guess for me it was just following those steps that I'd done originally make sure you there's a need in the market there. Make sure you understand your audience.

Speaker 1: 4:00

Make sure you've got product market fit and build from there and just tell us a bit about fabric. Like you said, you've created it, or the idea came during COVID. So why was it so important to create? Yeah, well, we're an online training platform.

Speaker 2: 4:14

So we work with businesses around the world to help educate, upskill their marketing teams. The reason fabric came about was I was actually not intending on building another business at all. I had enough on my plate with the business I had. But one of the challenges I had in that marketing agency was recruiting really good strategic marketing talent. So not marketers who could just tactically deliver, but marketers who could understand a business's ambitions and growth plans, pick apart that business plan and then build a marketing strategy to activate that growth. And that was on niche service in the agency. That's what we were well known for.

Speaker 2: 4:51

And this lack of skill in the Northeast I thought originally it was the Northeast regional area but this lack of skill set around strategic marketers was really starting to hinder our growth. So initially we were building a training academy for the agency as a recruitment talent pipeline, but realized very quickly doing a research piece that what education was, teaching and marketing was just really out of date. What was being taught by CIM was quite misaligned with what industry really needed for marketers to succeed, and so it felt really obvious to just build this product that we felt would really fit the market and equip marketers to be successful in their roles. So it was a bit of an organic journey, if I'm honest around. You know, there's a problem, we know how to solve it, we can solve it for ourselves, but in fact actually there's a much bigger and wider need for this, not just UK wide but globally. And so that's how the idea came about, really kind of trying to serve that. That missing alignment between I guess bridging the gap between education and industry was always our plan.

Speaker 1: 5:56

And you're? Would you identify as a serial entrepreneur?

Speaker 2: 6:00

I guess. So Probably not a type that I would give myself, but this is my third business and I've also had property businesses and things as well. So I guess, yes, probably so, and what so?

Speaker 1: 6:09

what was the challenge that surprised you most about fabric? And setting fabric up other than COVID was a challenge for us all.

Speaker 2: 6:18

Yeah, I mean, covid was great for fabric in a sense because it was very quiet in the agency and I therefore had some brain space to really think about building and getting a new business off the ground. Had COVID not happened, I'm not sure we would have ever made the progress we made early days with fabric. I think it would have been a lot slower. But I think for me one of the big challenges is when we took the MVP to market, we knew we had something great. I don't think we quite knew how vast it could grow and how quickly it would grow.

Speaker 2: 6:54

And of course, we were right at the very beginning and there was me and one person part time, so there was a one and a half of us and it grew quickly and we weren't quite set up for that. You know. You know you want, you want growth in the business, but you want sensible and scalable growth at times and milestones where you're ready and set for it, not where it will break you. So it it ran quicker than we were ready for in the early days and that was a challenge to then try and make sure we were protecting the reputation, protecting the product, protecting the brand, but we bootstrapped the business. So we didn't have unlimited amounts of cash to suddenly, you know, staff up. So that was a real challenge balancing, you know, the demand for the product with the resource that we had at the time.

Speaker 1: 7:40

So what did you do? How did you solve that challenge? We worked yourself into two probably.

Speaker 2: 7:47

We worked phenomenally hard. The person I had in the business with me at the time. She eventually came in full time and she was a phenomenal team member. She, you know, she just got it. She worked at such a pace. She was really great. So between her and I we were really able to accelerate what we wanted to do quite quickly. Once we realized there was a real demand for this, I made a really tough decision about a year in to actually step away from the agency altogether and focus my attention full time on fabric, which made a big difference. I knew that if I really wanted to make a success of fabric, I had to be in it full time. So so I stepped away from the other business to run this full time and we used every tiny bit of revenue that we got to invest straight back into the business and very slowly started to build. But there is only so far that you can go with bootstrapping before you start to hinder that next growth milestone, and that was the prompt at that point actually for us to raise investment.

Speaker 1: 8:48

And there's so many reports out there, aren't there about? You know how much harder it is for women to raise investment in, particularly in male dominated areas as well, and I know this is absolutely a topic that the panel that I watched you speak on last year was was really very much focused and signposted to this. But how did you sort of tackle that, that whole challenge around gaining investment.

Speaker 2: 9:13

Quite honestly, it was like a baptism of fire, simone.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Was that the first time you'd gone through investment? Absolutely, because that was something that stood. You know, I've been running a business for quite a few years, but you talk about raising, don't you? You talk about raising, you know, and it was this language I was thinking. I've heard this talked about before, but actually it was great to have two people on the panel who'd kind of been through this. But what was your? How did you get through that?

Speaker 2: 9:39

back to I was really lucky in the early days that I had a really early stage investor, an angel investor, who'd prompted me to start thinking about investment, and there happened to be an accelerator that was launching up in the northeast just at that time which I applied for and I got a place on. So the accelerator was brilliant for just really quick and intense learning over a 12-week period and I was exposed to all sorts of different founders, investors, vc's, p's. I went overseas and had some time in San Francisco to see what the investment world looked like out there. So it was a really great way to learn. But it was a steep learning curve. I mean the language, what you said there is. The language is so very different you know the acronyms that half of the time I didn't understand what people were talking about or when they were asking me questions. The metrics that I was being asked about was so different to the businesses that I've been in before. So it was a steep learning curve. But I think I learned most of what I did with my investment on the job as such, like whilst I was physically in the raise.

Speaker 2: 10:53

So I did the accelerator from the September through the December and then opened the raise initially in the February, and you know there was lots of mistakes made along the way.

Speaker 2: 11:04

It wasn't plain sailing by any means and when I look back now in hindsight there was so many obvious things I could have done differently. But when you're doing something for the first time, you've got. You know. You, like you say there's no guidebook for this, there's no science behind it, you've just got to go and try and make it work like grown a business. So for me, it was very much a case of find a number of angel investors that I thought aligned with our mission, that could fill some of the skills gaps that we had currently in the business. So it was very much about added value, expertise, networks and cash, not just cash, and I was very picky and choosy about who I went to speak to. I was quite strategic about the angel investors I went after, if you like, and so for me that was the start of it reaching out to those people who I thought could be aligned with the mission and help us get there quicker, both by their kind of expertise or past experience and, you know, bringing some money to the table.

Speaker 1: 12:01

What advice would you give to anyone listening out there today who thinks that investment might be something they want to do, but they don't understand the lexicon of gobbledygook that's out there.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Three bits of advice probably here. One just make sure investment is right for you, first and foremost. Not every business needs a cash injection and you are giving away equity of your business to get that cash in. So for my last couple of businesses they were service-based businesses They've had very little upfront costs so we were able to build them organically and bootstrap them. If you have a product that needs manufacturing or a tech product that needs building, often you do need that cash up front and the only way to get up and running is to take investment. So I would say, just do your homework around. Is investment right for me in my business and do I really need it? There's a great book on this called the SAS Playbook, which talks about building a tech business and predominantly bootstrapping it, and there's lots of different ways in it, but it's a really great. It's pros and cons around investment.

Speaker 2: 13:12

My second bit of advice is probably I learned from one of the mistakes I made know who you're going to and what type of investment you want. So I spent a long time in the beginning thinking I was going to go to VCs and go for VC investment and, quite honestly, we weren't quite prepared or in the right space for VCs. We should have always gone the angel route first, but I was in my head I had that we would go on VCs instead of doing the kind of proper planning around it. If I'd gone straight to angels I would have done it much quicker. So just know the different types of investment you can take and try and figure out which one is right for you in the early days and then go full force with that one.

Speaker 2: 13:53

And I guess my last bit of advice is just it takes a lot of time to fundraise. There is absolutely no two ways about it. So trying to juggle running the business with fundraising is extremely difficult. You need Ideally most people will have a co-founder. They can keep the kind of wheels turning in the business. I didn't have a co-founder. I was lucky that I had a really excellent team, but they were a very young and inexperienced team, so leaving them for really long periods of time was a worry to me. They absolutely smashed it and they did phenomenal, but you are out of the business for long periods of time. So just be aware of that and plan for that, because that can also have an impact on your growth, on your finances, on your team on your customers. So just plan for that period of absence as well.

Speaker 1: 14:45

I'm literally taking it all in now, taking all the finance. What do you say to people out there who suggest that women need to be less feminine in the investment-seeking world in order to succeed? I've heard some horror stories over the years where people said oh, I've had to add, I've had to make sure I've got mailboard members who've actually gone in and pitched instead of me, because otherwise I wouldn't be taken seriously. What do you say to that?

Speaker 2: 15:11

Am I allowed to say this that it's completely bollocks Like is that okay? Absolutely. I mean. There is conflicting opinions on this right. Of course there is, and I was told a lot that I wouldn't get funded because I was a solo founder not necessarily a female, but a solo founder. So a lot of the advice I got from VCs was go and find a co-founder. They were most definitely favourable funding bids made to mail counterparts.

Speaker 2: 15:40

But quite frankly, I truly believe you have to be your authentic self. You are going to pitch to these people in an early stage of a company. They're buying into you the founder or the founding team and if you're trying to be less feminine or more aggressive or more masculine or more, but like you're not your real self, it's really difficult for them to get a feel of who you really are and if you're capable of doing what you say you're going to do. So I genuinely believe you've just got to go and give it your all you know give, put everything behind it, but be who you are, truly who you are.

Speaker 2: 16:14

And for me, I think that really worked in my favor because the angels that did buy into me and came in into our initial round they really did buy into me and I didn't put this pretense on. I was very open, honest, transparent, vulnerable, excited, ambitious, like all those things that a good mix of a founder should be. But you know, these people are real people as well. They're not expecting you to be super human. They want to see you know that vulnerable side as well. So I would say don't, don't change who you are, and just that. That way you'll find the right type of investor who really will back you and, you know, fit with your vision.

Speaker 1: 16:53

And you clearly are somebody that is positive and has that positive outlook, even when things are a little bit tricky or unknown. Is that something? Is that authentically who you are? Or sometimes do you have to really kind of put a brave face on some time?

Speaker 2: 17:12

No, I think that's really authentically who I am. You know, like that's not to say, I don't have my moments of worry or panic, or you know crap, are we going to make it another day? Like you know that stuff comes with the job, doesn't it? But I tend not to over worry. I always think that you know there is a solution to almost every problem out there. You've just got to be willing to find it, and some are easier to find than others.

Speaker 2: 17:35

The pandemic, for most people, you know particularly I mean the business I had in the pandemic we lost 83% of our revenue over that first three month period. And you know, I had the biggest team I'd ever had. I'd had fixed overheads that I couldn't move. You know we weren't a particularly cash rich business, you know. So we had a buffer, but not that lasted us the whole period.

Speaker 2: 17:56

And for me, I kind of thrived in that strange environment of, you know, initial panic, bloody hell, what are we going to do here? And then, right, how are we going to fix this? What are we going to do to fix this? And so for me, I've always believed that you know, you will get yourself into a problem at some point. Something will you know, there'll be a curveball throne that you just weren't expecting, and nine times out of 10, it's a curveball you've never encountered before and you've got no idea how to navigate yourself out of it. But you will and you can. You've just got to be willing to find the way out. So I think I've always had that mindset from being very young, and I think that served me probably quite well through my business journey.

Speaker 1: 18:36

And you are. You speak at a lot of events, podcasts. That is something that doesn't come naturally to everyone. Is this something that you've always enjoyed doing, or you know you're really using that, that, your power for good to pass on your knowledge and guidance. What doesn't come come that way to everyone? What advice would you give to people out there that think, oh, I couldn't do that?

Speaker 2: 18:58

You know, again, this is not something that I've struggled with a huge amount, but I think it's because I've been doing it for such a long time and not always public speaking around business or my specialism, which is marketing. But my very first business was a salsa business and I used to stand up in front of 100 people and teach salsa and, madly enough, I think that has prepared me a lot for public speaking. So, you know, it was an environment which was very relaxed. It was a passion of mine. It wasn't, you know, although I was running a business, the teaching of the lesson was a passion. You know, we had huge groups and I was constantly switching between different mindsets, men's steps, women's steps, couple of steps to to teach in a public environment. So I think that early foundation served me really well.

Speaker 2: 19:45

I also just think I genuinely love going to see speakers, like it's one of my absolute favorite things to do.

Speaker 2: 19:50

It's something that I've always done, from being really young, and I'm constantly inspired by people's stories. I love their stories, that ups and downs and all the in-betweens, and it's helped me on my business kind of path so much. So I genuinely think, no matter what what you think about your story, somebody will be interested and it will help somebody overcome something that they're facing. And therefore, I just think you know, even if it feels scary, you know, we're all just people, at the end of the day they're people who have come to listen to you. Somebody will be interested, somebody will take something away, and that's all you need to gain from it. And I guess just the more you do it, you know, the more comfortable you get, the better you get. So, yeah, for me, just put yourself out there and think about it as giving back. If you can tell somebody something that would save them doing something you did further down the line, or if you'd had that advice early on, it's a really powerful thing. So, yeah, I'm really passionate about sharing that knowledge.

Speaker 1: 20:50

Absolutely, and I'm so glad you have today and I've seen you speak on that panel. That's why I wanted you to join us on the podcast today, lisa. Thank you so so much for sharing your time, your insight, your positivity with us today.

Speaker 2: 21:02

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been brilliant and I love Northern Power Women. You're doing a phenomenal job, so keep doing what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 21:10

Oh, bless you, Thank you. Thank you so much and thank you all of you for listening out there today. Please do keep the conversation going on. All our socials at North Power Women on Twitter and Northern Power Women on all the other socials Check in via our digital hub. We are powernet for all of our webinars, our podcasts, our virtual mentoring sessions that we have as well, so please do stay connected. My name is Simone. I'm a host of Northern Power Women Podcasts and what goes on media production.