This episode welcomes James Fuller, the CEO and CoFounder of Hnry, who turned his and partner Claire's everyday conundrums into a smart business idea that's now a category defining business across Australia and New Zealand.
In the episode we cover the challenges of moving from being a Founder to a CEO and Board member, the toughest elements of scaling and even working alongside your spouse.
James and Claire's hard work and energy is an inspiration to founders looking to build something really special and that can solve a problem for a large number of people worldwide.
You can find James on LinkedIn or at Hnry Australia or Hnry New Zealand.
Coal Mine Rhythm - Short Version B by Dan Ayalon
This episode welcomes James Fuller, the CEO and CoFounder of Hnry, who turned his and partner Claire's everyday conundrums into a smart business idea that's now a category defining business across Australia and New Zealand.
In the episode we cover the challenges of moving from being a Founder to a CEO and Board member, the toughest elements of scaling and even working alongside your spouse.
James and Claire's hard work and energy is an inspiration to founders looking to build something really special and that can solve a problem for a large number of people worldwide.
You can find James on LinkedIn or at Hnry Australia or Hnry New Zealand.
Coal Mine Rhythm - Short Version B by Dan Ayalon
James Fuller, co-founder and CEO of Henry. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks, greg, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:It's a real delight to have you here. It's funny because when I was thinking about me chatting to you this morning, I actually thought back to a funny little incident a couple of years ago where you thought you might have accidentally left your garage door open and I got a phone call from you. But we won't get into the joys of whether the garage doors have been left open or not.
Speaker 2:It's honestly, everyone's had that panic once in a while and it's just. It's so nice having somebody popped around and went no, no, you're all good, you shut your garage door, but you know when your brain goes and nags at you, so yeah, much appreciated the fact that you popped around and checked that for it.
Speaker 1:That was kind of funny. Actually, somebody suggested it might be. A good startup idea is to solve that problem worldwide.
Speaker 2:Honestly, if my garage door could be connected to WiFi and I could, you could just tell me that it was closed. That would just be so much easier.
Speaker 1:That's right. So there's an opportunity out there for anybody that's listening, that's looking for a problem they wanna push on. Hey James, your story with you and Claire and how you've built Henry is a pretty cool story, but I'm keen, before we get into the origin of Henry, just to talk a little bit about your origin. Are you one of these guys that grew up sort of super entrepreneurially, super sort of inter tech, like a lot of startup founders?
Speaker 2:Yes and no, yes and no. I've always been quite motivated by sort of I suppose, working. That sounds really terrible Like I'm a workaholic, but like I was sort of I always wanted to be involved in things. So you know, my dad used to play for a sort of a sort of minor sports club at the weekends and growing up they had a whole bunch of sort of polo shirts and sweatshirts that they would look to sell on behalf of the club. And I got really stuck into doing that one year and would kind of follow people onto the court and try and sell them sweatshirts and things. Not because I got like a cut of anything, but it was just like the feeling of satisfaction, of like I don't know sales when you're eight and you know, but it was the stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So it sort of went from there to you know just work it almost going into the workforce as soon as I can, like I could, and I think Claire was the same thing of, like, you know, saturday jobs, you know, working for five pounds at a local deli just stacking shelves. It was always just that motivation to be, you know, to be doing more stuff, and I think I would have never considered myself entrepreneurial Like. This is not a you know, I'm not a serial entrepreneur, and neither is Claire. We're just people who are very driven and very motivated, who happen to find ourselves with a really good idea at the right time.
Speaker 1:And tell us a little bit about that idea and how Henry came to being. You were sort of working in and around Wellington, the two of you, I think. You come back from the UK.
Speaker 2:That's right. So Claire had been over in the UK on her OE and we met whilst we were both working at a software company over there and got married, had our first daughter, and when Isabel was about a year and a half, claire sort of said look keen to go back to New Zealand for a little bit. You know, as is the usual way with Kiwi's going overseas and then coming back with partners and experience and other things, and so, yeah, we moved over to New Zealand and that was sort of 2012. And Claire just naturally fell into contracting roles. You know she's got such sort of broad range of skills. She ended up doing some contracting roles in and around public sector.
Speaker 2:I was doing some kind of tech consulting roles at the time, but it's sort of the genesis for Henry kind of originated out of mostly sort of Claire being a contractor for the first time, not really having too much context of even things like ACC or income tax or GST and having seen that frustration when I eventually became a contractor as well. We then had two of us who we were dealing with this stuff for and naturally, being sort of you know, people who are quite driven by improving things or efficiency, we created a couple of spreadsheets just to kind of work out for ourselves how much tax we should be keeping aside and sort of. The idea was not to you know, which is why I say we're not in that serial entrepreneurship camp. The idea was not to create a massive global business. The idea was oh, this thing is annoying, let's solve something for ourselves. And that's kind of really how it all got started.
Speaker 1:So you had the idea. You obviously had some skills, because I think you had a degree in computer science. You presumably had some ability to do some coding and build something.
Speaker 2:I would call myself a lackluster developer.
Speaker 2:Like I see our engineers now and they're all such talented individuals Like I knew enough to be dangerous. And so between Claire and I, we sort of we had our spreadsheets. We ran those for a couple of years and when we realized by some friends that they wanted the same thing, we said, well, maybe we can automate some of this and maybe we can make something out of it. And so, yeah, it started off with some very, very basic code which was literally, you know, in a spreadsheet, you know the old VB macros to try and make things easier on ourselves and sort of. I suppose that kind of escalated to a point where I peaked in terms of my coding ability and we needed to get other people in who had far more modern skills, who were, you know, able to deliver things that we needed. But we ran for probably the first year and a half of the business of just Claire and I, evenings and weekends, just kind of cobbling together things that we needed just to be able to deliver the service to a handful of customers.
Speaker 1:And from that, did you solely bootstrap it or did you go out and raise, you know, angel funding?
Speaker 2:We bootstrapped. So 2017 to 2018, early 2018, was all bootstrapped. So Claire and I put a bit of our savings into the business and sort of said, oh, we'll give it a go, and it was, you know, very minimal at that point. And then around the sort of middle of 2018, early 2018, we went out and did around. That was our first kind of capital raising, I suppose, which was us kind of going out to angel groups and by net words and friends and family and looking to raise a bit of money to say, look, we think we've got something here, we think this could be potentially quite lucrative. You know, who can we get that will help us, could hire our first staff, you know, put a few people on the ground to kind of make sure that wasn't just Claire and I working 60 hours a week, doing everything manually ourselves.
Speaker 1:And you know that would have been sort of the first time you'd raised capital. I guess was that an experience that you relished.
Speaker 2:I think naive would be the word that I would use to describe us Like, and I tell the story a little bit but if you never raised capital before, your only context of raising money probably comes from things like Shark Tank and Dragonsden, where people walk in and they say this is the amount of money I need and this is the amount of my company, I'm willing to give away, and then someone makes them an offer and it's just absolutely not that process. I remember the first time one of our like earliest investors.
Speaker 1:If not, I think our first ever investor saw.
Speaker 2:saw, I think, probably a pitch night, saw us present and he came to me and he said you know, I'd really like to invest $10,000 as a convertible note. And I had no idea what a convertible note was and I just remember saying to him for what percent and he sort of gave me this look like that's not how it works. And then I, very quickly, claire and I had to go away and study up on what all of these terms were.
Speaker 2:What's a convertible note? What's a safe agreement? What's the difference between the two? You know what is capital raising and like, honestly, it was a baptism of fire.
Speaker 1:It would have been yeah, it would have been a huge baptism of fire. So then you raised a little bit of money through. Was that angel funding? Was it initially?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a bit of angel funding, a bit of kind of local high net worth, a bit of friend and family.
Speaker 2:It was a real mix, but it started off very, very small. We kind of raised probably our first $100,000 was all just kind of very small high net worths. And then, once we'd shown that we had that and we had some traction there, we were able to go out and actually engage with the angel groups and say, hey look, this is what we've got in so far, here are our plans for what we would do. And yeah, we just sort of raised more money in from there, which was, you know, that was what late 2018, by that stage and sort of by that point, we were sort of we had some staff, a couple of staff, we had a small office in Wellington and we were really starting to build out the sort of, I suppose, that product market fit, really starting to establish ourselves. Even, you know, we had literally probably 150 customers at that point, but it was still clear the kind of secret source of what we were doing, as it is today.
Speaker 1:So in that phase, aside from raising capital, what would have been the toughest part of that phase? Do you think you know what was the greatest surprise in that period, or the hardest thing you had to ensure?
Speaker 2:The hardest thing that we came up with was it's a pretty couple of things. So, number one you know no one. When we started, henry, no one was Googling for is there an all-in-one service that does all of my accountancy, all of my payments, all of my tax and gives me bright sized software? Like no one Googles for that stuff? No one was looking for the thing that we were. And so you know, when you're sort of and our investors use this term, so I'm gonna use it, but I understand how cringe-worthy it is. But when you're category defining, you know it's a really weird thing because you're not naturally attracting people who are just looking for the thing that you have. And when they do find you, they say, oh, surely this is too good to be true, surely this thing can't exist. What's the catch? You know? Hang on a minute. Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:And so building trust is the most important thing for us in those early stages and by virtue of that you know, being able to show to potential investors this is the roadmap for where we're going. This is where we think we could be. But I think you know, we all know, when you go out and raise investments and you're a super early stage, startup. Everything is like this is where I think we could be. This is, with a wing and a prayer, what we could be doing. And so some investors wanted to very much nail you to the wall on your numbers. And then others, the more pragmatic type, were like well, actually, we all know that it's kind of made up and these are the things that we really look for in a business to see whether it's gonna be successful and it's not a three year financial plan that you're gonna stick to, and so that almost that early VC involvement.
Speaker 1:Was that something that you led you and Claire started to look for institutional investors, or did they start to approach you?
Speaker 2:They actually our first VC investor. So from EVP over in Sydney they actually approached us. We up until that point we'd just taken local New Zealand angel money and high net worth and friends and family and that had got us as far as I believe. It was the New Zealand high tech awards where we were nominated somehow for high tech service of the year and, as if people are aware of these things, there's a sort of big dinner and you go along and you can buy a table for 10. And so we thought we had no assumption that we would win.
Speaker 2:But we were like hey, well, why don't we do it as a wonderful team building experience? We had about seven staff. Let's fly everyone up to Auckland. Let's go to this event. We'll get a table, get dressed up, we'll have a team building day. So we went up there and we, I think we did an escape room with the team and then we went for dinner and then we went across to this awards thing and we'd had to get a couple of ring ins from our investor base because we didn't have enough staff to fill a 10 person table, and so we sat there and we had the most wonderful evening, obviously didn't win.
Speaker 2:I think we lost out to some kind of underwater prosthetic arm deep tech thing.
Speaker 2:It was unbelievable, like the quality of companies that were there, and there is literally seven of us on a table.
Speaker 2:Whether you know, at the time we jokingly called the fancy tax calculator, but it turns out that watching the live stream were EVP, because one of their portfolio companies was also up for an award. So they heard the nominations, they obviously had done a bit of research and they contacted us the next day and said we're keen to have a chat. You know where are you at on your funding journey, and it kind of went from there. So they approached us and we were lucky enough that they did take an interest. But also, I think they as investors were incredible at asking some very insightful questions and demonstrating right from day one that they truly understood the market that we operated in, which is very, very difficult for a lot of people because they don't know the sole trader market. They don't understand the mechanics behind what we do, and so we used to get from investors a lot of not very intelligent questions, whereas the EVP guys they came straight in with some of the best questions even today, some of the best questions on that first day that we've ever been asked.
Speaker 1:And, aside from the great questions, how else does having a VC on the cap table and potentially around the board table change how you run things? Does it make things dramatically easier? Does it make it more challenging? I appreciate it's a sensitive topic because you've got your VCs there but what does that mean from how you run things?
Speaker 2:I think it constantly evolves. So we went from board meetings that were back in the day where Claire and I would basically we would go for dinner, and usually it would be we'd go for a date night dinner where we weren't going to talk about work, and then we would descend into work, chat within two minutes and spend two hours talking about work, and by the end of it we'd go should we just call that a board meeting? And so we went from there to suddenly you've got members of your investment community on your board. You have to suddenly put on different hats. So this is the thing and look, investors themselves struggle with this sometimes which is, when you attend the board meeting, you're there in your capacity as director. You're not there as CEO, co-founder or COO co-founder, and so you're wearing a different hat, which means you need to have a different take on things.
Speaker 2:And so for us, that was probably the biggest culture shock, if that's what you want to call it was moving from a place where we operated in exactly the same way, regardless of who we're talking to to suddenly once a month, as it was at the time, we would get in a room with a few other folks and we would have to put completely different hats on and we would be peers to these either investor directors or others and so that was a big shift for us. So it very much changed the way we ran the business at a board level. But I think it was positive and I think actually by really owning that process and taking control over how we ran the board as opposed to having it just happen to us, I think it stood us in much better stead going forward.
Speaker 1:And at a management level, you're going from a team of seven of you where you know everybody. There's the two pizza test. You pass the two pizza test, you can. Another way I've looked at this in the past is you can throw everybody in a small van, right. But then you start getting a little bit bigger and you can. You start to maybe not necessarily know everybody as well and you've got layers of management. How did you find that transition? I mean, you've always been the CEO, but how did you find building the size of the team and the challenges around that?
Speaker 2:I mean, for me personally, it's been a really interesting journey because you go from doing it as the CEO, coo. You literally split everything down the middle, whether that's setting up the marketing campaigns, to writing presentations, to filing tax returns. You split the whole thing right down the middle and then over time you bring in other people to do those roles. But you've done them before. You have the context, you know a lot of the decisions and one sort of a really weird thing that happens when you stop being a founder and you start being a CEO and that's a really it's a really weird thing and I realized that I realized this a couple of years ago that I'd never thought of myself as a CEO and Claire was the same in her role. These were just job titles we made up at the time, mostly because we wanted to get business cards printed, and we were like what?
Speaker 2:job title do you want? I'll be the CEO and you can be the COO.
Speaker 2:But there's a point where you know, there's a point where that kind of shifts where actually you suddenly recognize that, oh, I am actually the CEO of this company and you're suddenly the role that you do as CEO is what CEOs do, as opposed to I'm a founder that's in the weeds and I'm doing all of this stuff and I'm manually processing payments or tax returns. There's suddenly you go, actually the decisions that I take are more strategic, and so Claire and I have had to, over the course of what is six or seven years now, constantly reinvent ourselves on a fairly regular basis.
Speaker 2:And we can look at some of the other folks who work for us and say, yes, they've progressed and they've grown in their career, but they haven't had to fundamentally pivot. You know who they are and how they present themselves, based on the longevity of having been in the business.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting challenge because I think a lot of founders, people who love to solve problems, they love to solve puzzles, they're often reasonably technical and they like to get in and shape the product and almost become the chief product officer and I had a conversation with Andrew Tokley obviously you'd know him well and an absolute master in the product space how have you found that transition from being the founder to being the CEO, which is the role that you naturally prefer? Because they're very different roles, aren't they? They're very different.
Speaker 2:They are very different, but I think, actually I think for us and our business, having CEO and a COO who are still wanting to talk to customers, wanting to understand the depths of the product, that is a massive, massive benefit. Because actually, back to the thing you're talking about, those problems that we need to solve. Sometimes we need to be solving problems in the detail and that's a good thing. What we don't want to do is to become those founders that get onto the CEO, COO thing and they're like I don't want to talk to customers, I don't want to get into the weeds or whatever, but we equally don't want to be not empowering the fantastic people we hired to actually deliver on the job we've hired them for.
Speaker 2:It's a real mix of those things that push, pull of. Where can we give people a huge amount of slack to go and innovate and to go and make decisions that we would make? How can we also make sure that they've got accurate expectations around? Hey, this is the box to play in and let us know when you hit the sides of it. It's not a one size fits all across. I don't know product or finance or engineering or whatever it is, but it's very much like a constant thing that we're very aware of in that, yes, we want to empower people to make all these decisions, but sometimes it takes us coming in and going.
Speaker 2:It's okay to take that risk or it's okay to make that decision. So I'm more than happy to say that we probably will never get to a stage where we're not trying to talk to customers, we're not trying to get into the product, because actually that's what value?
Speaker 2:we can provide and actually I think the team appreciate that when the time is right we will get stuck into that because sometimes it just helps solve those problems and unblock things and comes from a place that has almost a bit more freedom to think and a bit more freedom to not be, maybe, constrained by some of our team. How can we spend this money? Can we take this time? Is this the right direction? And for us to come in as founders and say, oh, no we actually back you to go and do that.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it's just about unlocking other people.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because I think the founders out there that are yet to build any sort of scale in their teams will be able to pull a bunch of lessons from that. Those that have already built and started to scale their teams will be listening to this and going, aha, I get that. I get the challenges that James has had there. So shifting tax slightly. So a few years ago you made the entry across into Australia. How has that gone? What was the biggest sort of change from operating in New Zealand to operating in Australia?
Speaker 2:Yeah, australia has gone really well and is going really really well. So we've got about 35 staff out in Sydney at the moment. We officially launched there two, three years ago and I think the most interesting thing about the Australian market is that, as with a lot of Kiwi businesses, you look to the moves to Australia and you go look, it's culturally similar. There's so many things that align. This is going to be a fairly simple transition. We can take a bunch of the stuff we do here and just wonk it over there, job done. But I think the nuance of the Australian market is so much more critical to understand. And so, you know, whilst we thought, hey, well, aussies will like Kiwis, you know there's natural affinity. There is also ingrained culturally in Australia a real want to buy Australian and to buy Australian made. And so having to kind of go into that market and sort of present ourselves as a local company became the most important thing.
Speaker 2:And I know you know a lot of times we talk about sort of particularly in startups, we talk about the value of having a local presence in markets that you're in.
Speaker 2:But I think Australia was that was certainly a learning for us over the first few months was actually.
Speaker 2:You couldn't take an image that looked like it was on a Kiwi street and put it into Australia for your Facebook advertising, because Australians are too smart, they'll see through that and they'll say that's not an Australian street or whatever.
Speaker 2:So we literally got the point, got to the point of we would have to get photographs taken of freelancers standing in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and then put that on our website and be like Australia. And I think that's the, you know, the big learning there is how you need to specifically tailor to the markets you're going into and you can't underbake it. You can't have assumed, like God, that'll be fine. We'll just roll out even the way that we do advertising in New Zealand, the way that we talk to customers. You can do different things in Australia and you need to do different things in Australia to get cut through. You can't take those same messages, you can't take those exact same things, and so over time, over the last three years, the New Zealand and Australian businesses have kind of diverged in a fairly big way, not in terms of product, but just in terms of articulating the value proposition or in the way that we talk to customers or the way that we sort of operate generally.
Speaker 2:Whilst there's a core that remains the same, we've got far more specificity now in Australia and we're seeing that in terms of, you know, some of that growth, you know it's just been phenomenal in Australia in the last couple of years and continues to be, which is great. But it took us a few months maybe five, six months, really early on in those beta tests, to sort of throw away a bunch of our preconceived ideas about Australia and truly get in and understand the culture, because a lot of Kiwi founders and even a lot of large, established Kiwi businesses fail in Australia and perhaps because they underestimate the cultural differences that are actually present between New Zealand and Australia.
Speaker 1:There's a sense. Well, it's only a three hour plane flight, it's a two hour time zone difference. They are exactly like us, they celebrate Anzac Day. But actually there's a uniqueness to Australia and I had somebody who's sort of near and dear to me recently say to me that in New Zealand they feel a little bit too big If they're in a room. They feel a bit too loud, a bit too sort of boisterous, whereas in Australia they just kind of fit in. What's your assessment of those cultural differences? I mean, you're a Brit, but what's your assessment of the differences between the Kiwi and Aussie culture from a business perspective?
Speaker 2:From a business perspective. I mean, I think that certainly there are some massive similarities. So the need to maintain good relationships is a fundamental tenet of both countries. I think it's so ingrained in our nature around the side of the world that prioritising relationships is really, really important, I think, for our business.
Speaker 2:We look at it almost from somewhat of a technical lens, right, when you look at what are the cultural norms or the sort of accepted practices from a technical perspective in New Zealand and what are they in Australia. So Australia has kind of like real-time payment capabilities in their banking. They have a prevalence of banking as a service providers. They have a level of sort of fintech literacy that is slightly more established than New Zealand, let's say, or fintech acceptance. I would say Like I always used to talk to our team and say you at the time this is maybe a couple of years ago you could fly into Sydney and get in the back of a taxi and by the time you've got to the CBD you've probably seen ads on the backs or sides of buses for about six different fintechs.
Speaker 2:Whereas if you do the same in New Zealand.
Speaker 2:You fly into Auckland.
Speaker 2:You're probably not seeing a lot of fintech advertising out in the wider world and I think a bit of that has changed over the last couple of years.
Speaker 2:But there was a time where it's so ingrained, particularly in the big metro centres in Australia, that when you're going and taking a product to market, there's already an understanding of what is a neobank, what is peer-to-peer payments, because actually in New Zealand you have to almost go out there and start a bit further earlier in the process, and so when we look at it, the way that business is conducted is probably about the same, but the things that people are used to, the user experiences, the expectation of service, is different between both those countries.
Speaker 2:We've certainly found that in New Zealand, particularly with our Kiwi roots people because we're kind of a homegrown startup here people are more forgiving, more understanding. Back in the day in 2018, I remember when someone phoned us up and said that they were trying to enter their date of birth into our system and the date picker stopped at 1970 or something and they were like are you not catering for people over the age of 50 something? And I remember being on the phone and getting our engineer to update it, and the person on the phone had no answers or graces about it.
Speaker 2:They were like it's not a problem, you guys got it fixed, I've got signed up, blah, blah, blah, whereas I think nowadays in Australia that would probably get onto. Reddit or get onto Facebook and one would post it and they'd be like blah, blah, blah, blah blah, whereas actually in New Zealand people just phoned you up because they're so local and they're like hey, just notice this thing, have you noticed that? And we say wow, we'll just go change it, and they go cool. Thanks bye.
Speaker 2:Whereas I think in Australia there's a very different culture around your people's relationship with businesses, and there can be and it's very prevalent in other countries as well. There's a tendency for people to, rather than contact us, they just jump straight on the social media, and so you have to be so much more careful about how you approach a market or the sort of the quality of what you put out there, because a lot of this stuff whether it's correct or incorrect, a lot of this stuff lives on social media permanently and maybe highly inaccurate, but you can't get rid of it.
Speaker 1:And you also play on both sides of the Tasman. You play with the regulators. So, New Zealand, you've got the Inland Revenue Department and in Australia, you've got the Australian Tax Office. Have they been willing partners in this?
Speaker 2:The ATO have been fantastic, but I think they were very benefited from the fact that we were already established in New Zealand when we went there. I think again back to that category defining thing. In the early days in New Zealand, I think Inland Revenue had never seen anything like Henry before, so for us to turn up, we had to spend a lot of time with them, helping them understand how this didn't work and what we did, and so I think it was a longer road with Inland Revenue to get them to a place where, as they are today, when they're incredibly comfortable, supportive, very big fans of what we do, but that maybe took a couple of years of working with them in the early stages.
Speaker 2:Whereas, because we had that relationship, we went to the ATO and we said look, we are this size in New Zealand, we're one of the largest accountancies in New Zealand, we do this, this and this and they went. That's amazing. How can we help?
Speaker 1:That's incredible. And what about accountants? So I know a few things about the accounting community. They're near and dear to my heart, but they, from what I understand, have been a little bit resistant to what you're doing Because, as you said at the beginning, you're basically this is a category defining startup. This is something that the world hadn't seen in this particular way before, and you're challenging some norms Dare, I say it even some ways that some professions make their money, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So how's that?
Speaker 1:gone. What's your experience been there?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's been. It's been really interesting because I think it kind of falls into two camps. And I think in the one camp and you know, we're starting to see more of these folks in the accounting industry, which is fantastic Because, as being part of that industry, it's fantastic to see people embrace this. But the one camp is the progressives, and the progressives have always looked at what we've done and said this is great for our industry. We, as accountants, we also don't want to be sitting there churning through paper receipts and, you know, doing categorization, et cetera. What we want to do is shift towards value add for our clients, whether that's through business advisory services, whether that's through other value add. And so these progressives are big, big champions of Henry, which is fantastic because they see it as a great thing for the industry.
Speaker 2:And these were no doubt the folks that adopted accounting software very early on, when they saw it and said this is going to be great for our industry because it will maximize efficiency. And then you have the traditionalists in the accounting industry who look at this as being some form of aggressive disruption, who you know. These are the folks who kind of phone up radio stations and complain about us, or they put fake Google reviews on Google, or they complain to IRD or you know. All of this kind of all of this nonsense and a lot of it is just out of fear, in that they're looking at it and saying, if the world is changing and you know, henry is the first, but will not be the last of these kind of services that come in they're saying how do I change my business?
Speaker 2:I don't know how to do business advisory, or I don't know how to provide that value add, or I don't know how to compete with from my service perspective, to make sure that I've got that longevity, and I understand the sort of the concern that they have about their own business, but the thing that I don't understand is that the need that some of them have to almost try and and and chop the legs off our business in order to save theirs, and that's what I've sort of, you know like.
Speaker 2:I saw there was a comment from and we get, you know, accountants. Often other accountants will comment on our Facebook ads, and so there was when I saw the other day where one of our customers had responded to one of our ads and said oh, my God, love Henry, you completely changed my life. You know, it's amazing, the team is great. And this, this fella posted underneath and said and said you know, I, I see that you really like this thing. What do you like about it? And user came back and wrote this really nice little sort of glowing review of Henry and he said hmm, yes well, I still think there are some things missing.
Speaker 2:You know, I appreciate that you quite like this, but I think there are some things missing. And then that's when you you have a look and you click into their profile and you're like, oh, you're a traditional accountant from, you know, new South Wales somewhere.
Speaker 2:And I think this is the problem is that often the traditional side of the accounting industry looks at this as being a bad thing, in the same way that they did with the accounting software providers, you know, 20 years ago. And now they're the ones down the front of the conference waving the flags and saying how amazing this stuff is, and I think they've you know, they, the, the traditionalists love innovation when their favorite color of accounting software is doing it. They don't love innovation when it comes from outside that bubble.
Speaker 1:And for any startup founders that are building startups that are somewhat, you know, category defining and they are, by their very nature, disruptive. There's going to be the, the accountants, there's going to be the taxi drivers. You know, if you're, if you're, Uber, there's going to be people who do feel disrupted. Have you got any sort of thoughts or tips around? You know how do you handle that noise, Because it can get quite loud and it can be quite a, you know, an opposing force. Is there something you'd suggest to founders on how best to deal with that?
Speaker 2:I think you learn to wear those scars as resilience and I think that the amount of times that we've been told by various bits of the industry that we can't do this or we're not allowed or that's not correct or whatever it is, even though we know that it is and regulators are more than happy with what we do.
Speaker 2:You just, you just get a bit desensitized to it. But there was a great, you know, because we because we play in three different camps, right, and in in kind of payments in that space we're sort of payments and accounts, we're playing in the kind of tax calculations and accounting space, and then we're also playing in the software space. We take sort of all of the hits from all three of those and so each of the different players in those industries whether it's the accountants or the accountants and software providers they are all trying to discredit what we do. And one of the greatest things I can't claim this as my own, but one of the greatest things I did see recently was a post on Twitter and I can't remember who put it out there, and it was a guy saying if you are a sort of disruptive startup and you're looking to basically disrupt a market against larger incumbents, you have to put into perspective what the what is going on at those larger incumbents.
Speaker 2:Therefore, you're not going up against the entire 100 or 1000 employee organization. That is the incumbent. You are probably going up against one product manager in that organization and they have to deal with budgetary constraints. They have to deal with compliance or bureaucracy or whatever. They've got their own career aspirations. You need to put into perspective that it's not your company versus the entire sort of industry of accounting. You're going to those people who are sort of motivated to kind of solve one part of the problem on behalf of that business and when you put it into perspective, they also these product managers will have budget constraints and they'll have internal politics that they need to get around. That's your kind of winning formula is to say, well, if we don't have those things and we can genuinely focus on solving the problem, we don't have to feel like we're out there battling these big behemoths. We're literally going, we're just going to solve that one part of the problem way better than anyone else in this market can.
Speaker 1:I think it's a great thing for people to remember they're not taking on a giant organization in reality. So just sort of changing pace a little bit here and just talking a little bit more about you guys personally and how you go about sort of looking after yourselves and running a startup. So you work with Claire, claire is your wife, you do dinner with Claire at night and your children, et cetera, but she's also your COO and works heavily in the business. How does that work Because that's quite rare, right Like having your spouse as essentially your co-founder and your co-executive. How does that work?
Speaker 2:I think.
Speaker 2:well, I mean firstly, the best way to think about it is I don't think it could work any other way, and actually it's interesting because we look at founder teams that are not married partners and we're like how have you survived, like how have you picked yourself up?
Speaker 2:Or how does your partner feel at their job when you're out doing your startup thing or whatever, and your partner is like peripheral to this thing. Maybe they're in a startup of their own, maybe they're doing something else. But one thing that's fantastic about having a co-founder and fellow exec who is in the same business is you literally have all of the context of everything. I remember when Claire worked even when we worked in the same business and Claire worked in the finance department and I was working in like internal IT I remember we would talk about work and I would talk about the things that were going on in my day, and even the same company, claire, would have zero context and there's nothing the other person can do but sort of nod along and say, yeah, I guess that's pretty tough. And then you swap and then they talk about their day.
Speaker 2:You nod along, going yeah that sounds difficult, whereas when you've got two people who are in a position to actually solve the problem that the other person has, so that true thing of a problem shared is a problem hard. Suddenly, when you have work conversations and someone says, oh, this is a difficult thing, and you say, well, hang on a minute, how do we solve this? Let's try this, this and this, and suddenly the two of you are then able to cut through issues as a business, and so again, I think it's something that's been really powerful for us is actually to have two people whose skills are equally weighted in different areas of the business, who solve problems in different ways, who have different ways of articulating things, and that's actually been a huge strength to us as a business.
Speaker 2:But it's funny how I think, traditionally people have always said I mean, you referenced it yourself, right, like it's unusual. I remember some investors would say, oh, we don't really know. You know husband and wife founding teams, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like look at the number of businesses, the successful businesses that have been started by partnerships. You know, you look at the guys at Canva or Mr Yum, or Shares, where you go. Actually, some of those founders are married, slant-related, whatever that's gonna be, and they are hugely successful businesses.
Speaker 2:And so I always looked at it the other way and say, like how are businesses growing when one person is coming home from the startup, work like 60 hours a week or whatever and bitching about I don't know investors from the UAE or whatever, and the other person's like, oh I'm, you know, business analyst at whatever you know? It's just like the difference between the two. I just think we would have you know the whole bit. One of us would have walked away from the business long ago if it hadn't been the fact that both of us are in it, and fully in it.
Speaker 1:You referenced, actually, some really good examples there of the likes of Shares, is and Canva, both with co-founding teams that are together in their personal lives as well, so there would have been a time, I'm sure, that you had a sort of head-in-hands moment, a time that was super tough. Has there been something in the Henry journey where you've gone? My God, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 2:Week this month, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's a regular thing. I love the way you're like.
Speaker 2:There has been a time when there's A. You had a time Like I think you know, the interesting thing I don't think we ever realized going into this was just how hard it gets, and we have to remind ourselves. We often say to ourselves like you know, if this was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Speaker 2:You know if having a startup and having a high-growth business was easy. Everyone would be going and doing this but it is. It literally takes over every aspect of your life and I think those people who are embarking on this journey will be, or some way into it will understand just how much of yourself goes into this thing. And you know there are, there are. It was like head-in-hand moments could be. Anything from a member of staff that you really believe in has decided to go somewhere else, you know, not because they're unhappy, but they've got a great opportunity. And we had a junior member of staff who came through Summer of Tech that we thought was gonna be just a long-term staff member who, coming out of COVID, decided to do their IOE.
Speaker 1:And we're just like there's nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 2:They're leaving on fantastic terms. But those moments where you're like you have to pick yourself up and go okay, we can kind of move on with the next thing we can.
Speaker 2:You know it will be okay, the sun will come up tomorrow and you kind of you know there have been numerous times where and I've kind of talked publicly about this where it's got so bad with stress or it's so bad with, you know, the tests of our resilience that Claire and I have individually at different times gone, that's it, I'm out, you know.
Speaker 2:And then you wake up the next morning and you calm down and you go back into work again and you're like, okay, let's go do this. But I think if it wasn't like that, I think it would be a very, very unusual startup experience. I think your resilience is tested right from day one and you know small problems that you have in the early stages feel like massive problems and then in the later stages, you know massive problems feel like small problems because you've been so accustomed to these things coming out of the woodwork. But I don't think there's a you know there's not a month that goes by, let's say where there's not something that tests that resilience, where you just have to learn to respond to it.
Speaker 1:Do you think aside from your ability to handle resilience, you know that grows. Do you think it gets easier as the team gets bigger and you've got more resources and more specialists, or do you think that actually it gets harder because the complexity, the problems and the weight on your shoulders is greater? Well, like what's if you're a founder, if you're talking to a founder who's just setting out, is it easier at the beginning or does it get easier as things go?
Speaker 2:Ooh, I think it gets different Because I think that you know, if I think about super early stages maybe you've just taken on your first investment a lot of that is weighted on product market fit. It's about understanding your responsibilities to your investors. There's a lot of pressure that comes with that and then over time that maybe changes where your pressure is more around. You know how do I build a team so that I don't have to be in the weeds of everything every day, and then sort of you get to these later stages where now you know my responsibility is so weighted towards the people and same with Clare, the people who make up this organization who could work other places if they wanted to, but they choose to work at Henry and our responsibility to them to make sure that they are taken care of, that.
Speaker 2:we have a working environment where they feel valued and respected and heard, and by virtue of that, how do you then go and achieve your goals as a business? So it doesn't. I don't think it gets any easier. You maybe get more used to the rhythm of things, but I think the challenges that you face just adjust over time and I would probably say now oh well, I feel sort of more comfortable now than I maybe did in those earlier stages, but I don't think that's because the challenges are too much different. I think I'm just more used to it now.
Speaker 1:And do you think you are uniquely a place to solve this problem? You've got a pretty cool background. You've got a background in almost adjacent fields Over the sort of 10 or so years, 15, 20 years before you started, henry. Does that make you uniquely positioned to solve this, or is that just a bit of good luck?
Speaker 2:I think it helps, but I think the way that we do things is fairly unique, and I think that is ingrained in the way that we do business. But I don't think that Claire and I as individuals are uniquely placed to do this thing. I think that the interesting thing is that a lot of people, I think, look at what we do and they say, oh, that's quite easy to replicate. But I think over the last six, seven years, we've learned very quickly that there's huge amounts of complexity behind the scenes, and I can't remember whether it's Steve Jobs quote, but it's making something appear simple is one of the most difficult challenges in design, and so a lot of people will look on the surface of what Henry does and go, oh yeah, that really makes sense, it's very simple. But then behind the scenes, in order to make that simplicity work, there's a huge amount of complexity, and so I think the role that Claire and I play is actually being able to play both
Speaker 2:sides of the simplicity and the complexity coin. And yes, I think our backgrounds have helped, but I think there's a lot that it's less about your background and more about the way you solve problems, the way you go and attack different things, and I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be. I spoke arrogant enough to say that Claire and I were unique in the way that we solved this problem. I just think we have been very motivated and very driven by some core values and behaviors that have helped shape a service that customers genuinely love.
Speaker 1:And if you were to look at the success of Henry and obviously you guys, it feels like you've got a long, long way to go to even to build something really globally special and you've done incredibly well to date. Would you put the success of Henry down to the market, the product or the team? Like, obviously it's tempting for CEOs and founders to sort of talk about the team, but what is it? What is it that is the unique sort of ingredient for your success here?
Speaker 2:I think team is.
Speaker 1:I know it's like that is the temptation.
Speaker 2:But I think the sole trader market existed before Henry. We did not create that market product, and I think this is the trap that a lot of people fall into is that they prioritize product overall else and they say, well, if we build it, they will come. And everyone knows that's not the way that it works. You can't just kind of you end up in that product death cycle where you ask customers what they want and then you build it and then no one uses it and so you ask them what they want again and then you build the next thing.
Speaker 2:But I think for us, having assembled the team and continuing to assemble a team that is right at the top of their game and really understands the problem that we're solving and who we solve it for, that's the most important thing. And anyone can go out there and build a software product. It's so easy these days to go and build a software product and what we know is that that's not the key to success. And certainly I wouldn't even look at what we're doing now and say, oh, henry is very successful. I'd say we are on a fantastic trajectory, but success feels like an endpoint that you reach when you're binary either you're successful or you're not, whereas actually it's not as black and white as that is.
Speaker 2:We have grown significantly, we've got a fantastic product in market, we are expanding to different countries, but to me, success is basically a relative term. I would say there's a lot of things that we could do better than we're doing today, and there's a lot of things that we already do very, very well, and so I feel like we're probably in a situation where it's more about the value of the team that builds the thing and the way that they execute. And when you talk to a lot of VC investors. They invest in founding teams. They don't invest in product and I think the more that you can take that sort of mentality and scale that amongst the team, the better your chances of potentially getting to a success point are going to be.
Speaker 1:And one of the things about founders in the first five or 10 years, particularly those first five years, I suppose that you need to be able to be your energy needs to be fully engaged and fully on. How do you look after yourself and your own energy so that A you feel like you've got energy and that you feel inspired around what it is that you've got to tackle? Because there's always problems, there's always challenges, there's lots of head and hands moments. So how do you look after yourself in that regard?
Speaker 2:I would say, up until maybe a couple of years ago, really badly, really, really badly. You know, both Claire and I work two long hours, would not take time for ourselves, would not prioritise mental health, All of the things that you shouldn't do. We went and did those, but I think you kind of reach a point where you have to. You almost have your hand is forced into sort of taking better care and taking time for yourself, and so you know whether it's anything from.
Speaker 2:You know having some time during the week where you go and pick the kids up from school, normal time whether it's, you know, finding time for exercise or downtime, or you know prioritising turning off all the notifications on your phone, like finding all of those different things, is almost part of the personal journey. You know there's certain things that I've lessened, you know on, in terms of notifications that I get in real time, and then there are other things that I just have to put some time aside to go through them later. But you sort of almost need to sort of adjust as you go to say you know what is required of me at which point and you don't want to get there too early. Right, if you're an early stage founder, and you're, I don't know, six months, eight months in you just got your latest investment funding. You're not going to sit there and go. Do you know what? I was going to? Turn off all the notifications on my phone. I'm going to prioritise coming in late and leaving early for my mental health.
Speaker 2:Like I just don't think that's conducive to being able to achieve what you need to achieve. Like there is going to be hard work required upfront and you're going to have some downtime, but almost you're sort of I don't know. I kind of feel like you earn your downtime over time, like with that grit and determination. And if your first thought when you first start out is, how do I bake in enough time so that I can take breaks and I can go on lots of holidays or you know, I can go and I can go and not work 25 hours a week on this startup thing, then maybe you're not as committed to it as you need to be, because in order to make something out of nothing, it takes effort, it takes time, it takes all of your, as I say, grit and determination to get something across the line. And if your priority is instantly, how do I do less of that stuff and more me time, you know you're going to get you're going to get that balance right in order to grow something.
Speaker 1:And what about inspiration? Do you read? Do you listen? You know, look at blogs, you listen to podcasts, like what's your way of feeling inspired?
Speaker 2:That's a very good question. I am a terrible reader. I would love to be one of those CEOs that has like a stack of books and I'm like, hey, I've read all of these books and I've absorbed everything. The last book I tried to read was the culture code, which I would thoroughly recommend the first half of, because that's as far as I got, and then I ended up having to listen to it on an audio book because I'm terrible at sitting. Still, I'm pretty sure I'm undiagnosed ADHD, which a lot of founders like all founders yeah.
Speaker 2:I just I cannot sit still long enough to read a book, and so I'm terrible at reading. I used to listen to podcasts a lot when I was traveling, but now I tend to kind of work when I'm traveling if I've got that downtime.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I think and this is going to sound really, really corny, but I genuinely believe, is a lot of the inspiration that we get. A lot of the motivation comes from seeing the problem that we solve for our customers, because we had this problem ourselves, because we understand it firsthand what this feels like. So, seeing customers who are in need of help, or seeing the benefit that comes to them from having that support, having that help, that's the motivation, that's the thing that says, you know, this is why we get up in the morning, is because you know and we've engraved this in our team, which is, let us celebrate the times when customers come to us and say this changed my life.
Speaker 2:Henry has absolutely changed the way I work, and that's such a positive thing that gives us the motivation I'd love to you know, it'd be great to say that I read, you know, tony Robbins book and I suddenly got motivated to do my job. But actually it's far more like I'll go and do something at an event and someone will come up to me and say thank you for starting, henry, because I was, you know, freelance, creative or whatever. I was a tradie and I didn't know what I was doing and I was in a whole mess with my tax and I've been using Henry for a couple of years and it's fundamentally changed the way I work and my anxiety levels have dropped and I'm having a great time with my family.
Speaker 2:That's the motivation and that's the thing that keeps you going and it, you know very much, keeps you grounded when you talk to customers and hear their experiences and know that's why we're here, that's why we do what we do.
Speaker 1:And where to from here for Henry. You guys have just built an incredible business here and in Australia New Zealand and Australia and you've built a brand that people love. You know, if you meet people in New Zealand, australia, and they're self-employed or they're contracting, everybody raves about Henry and I think hats off to you and the team for doing that.
Speaker 2:But where to from here? So we always look at what we do as being a global problem.
Speaker 2:It's not a you know, the problem that we solve is not localized to Australia and New Zealand. This just happens to be where we started. So you know, yes, we're looking into other markets and saying where else has similar problems that we can go and solve those there. We're also looking at, you know, closer to home, at what we can do locally to solve other parts of the problems in the similar space that self-employed people have. And how can we look at other places we can help. And our customers are fantastic because they come to us and say do you know?
Speaker 1:anyone who does?
Speaker 2:blah, can you help out with X, y and Z.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, for us it's about, yes, expansion, but also about really listening to the customers that we've got and listening to our local markets here in Australia and New Zealand, because we there's so much more that we can do and so much more we can do for our customers.
Speaker 2:You know, we've started doing a bit more kind of advocacy work on behalf of our customers, started to talk a bit more about raising the awareness of the sole trader market and sole trader economy and how it's made up and what those people do and don't like. And again, it's kind of it's a great responsibility to be given by our customers to say, actually we're going to go and try and represent these folks in a way that they've never had before, because they've never had any organized representation, they've never had anyone who can pull together data and insights and can pull together thinking to. You know, go and talk to government directly in Australia and New Zealand and say how do we help educate government, banks, public and private sector about who sole traders are? So there's, you know, there's less of a less of a stigma around being single self-employed.
Speaker 1:James, this has been such a bit of a masterclass, actually, and just listening to how to solve a problem that is let's be honest, it's a bit of an unsexy problem. You know, solving people's taxes right, but it's a grudge purchase. People don't want to have to deal with tax authorities In all reality. Often they're a little bit scared of the tax authority. They want the problem solved, they want to make it simple, they want to make it easy, but you've had to do that with, you know, regulators on both sides of the Tasman.
Speaker 1:You've had to deal with it with incumbent players who haven't necessarily liked it, but you've built a customer base that absolutely loves what you do and I think a lot of founders listening to this are going to get inspired not only by the ability to, you know, build a business in quite a tough regulatory environment, but also to do that with a co-founder who you're married to, and also the ability to just kind of be really resilient and build something that's really really special. So you deserve all the accolades that you've had and I really am quite excited to see where you guys take this in the future. So really appreciate your time, james.
Speaker 2:No worries, thanks, greg.