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Reigniting growth in a VC-backed company
85 Plays2 years ago
Ian Jones is Managing Director at Care & Independence Limited, a venture-capital-backed company which provides a range of products to aid mobility, independence and improve daily life for the elderly and less able. Ian is a qualified Accountant and experienced Finance Leader by background, and in this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast he shares how and why he chose The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to underpin his efforts to lead Care & Independence to sustainable growth.
Interested viewers or listeners can reach Ian via https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-jones-91878313/ ) and Rob (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/) at Rob@mission-group.co.uk
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Transcript
Introduction to Ian Jones and the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the First Time Founders Podcast, the show where we talk about how to start a business from nothing and grow it into something meaningful. Today I'm talking to Ian Jones, who's Managing Director of Care and Independence, a healthcare products manufacturing business that he'll tell you all about during the episode. The reason Ian's on is we met at an entrepreneurial operating system, EOS, a UK conference, where various entrepreneurs, visionary founders,
00:00:27
Speaker
integrator MD types come together to talk about how they're running their businesses using this common management system.
Turning Around a VC-backed Business
00:00:35
Speaker
We bumped into one over coffee. And what I found so fascinating about Ian is that he leads a VC backed business in a kind of real world physical deliverables space, which is quite unusual for VC backed companies. And he turned that business around
00:00:52
Speaker
took expenses out, which a lot of VC-backed companies are having to do at the present moment, and then got that business onto a growth flight path with the back in a VC majority controlled board using EOS. So hopefully this will be really timely and useful content for a great many of our listeners. So without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Ian Jones.
00:01:18
Speaker
Ian, welcome to the First Time Founders podcast. Thank you for doing this. You're very welcome. Great to see you. Great to see you. I feel like we're old friends now. So for our viewers and listeners, we actually don't know anything about that world, but we met at a EOS entrepreneurial operating system conference, didn't we? Which it does feel a bit like a cult, those things. It did. And it's difficult to realize it was only a few weeks ago, as you say. It feels like there's a lot of water going under the bridge in the meantime. We really know enough about each other to think this has gone more than just a few weeks in terms of us knowing each other.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, it was brilliant. So why don't for people being listening, before we get into EOS, be useful to just tell them a little bit about the business that you run now and how you came to sit in the seat you're in. OK,
Ian's Journey to Managing Director
00:02:03
Speaker
so I'm now managing director of current independence. I've been in this business five and a half years. It was my first MD role, actually. Up until that time, I was heavily focused on finance and operations.
00:02:19
Speaker
all in the same industry. So I've been in the medical device healthcare industry for 30 years now. I'm a charged accountant. That's where I started my grounding, but I've always had an interest beyond the numbers. And that's where my digging got into and took me into more operational role. And I was fortunate enough to be promoted for the first 15 years of my career and through the same organization up to the point where I led finance and operations for 130 million pound division.
00:02:47
Speaker
and 700 people, employing 700 people. It was a great move for me into where I am now, into an MD role. I pretty much had every discipline and responsibility under my belt, except development and marketing.
00:03:08
Speaker
otherwise i want to tell me if you don't know it just make sure you get somebody who doesn't know it so it's common sense and then get good teams around you and you can't be an expert in everything and that's and that's why i learned i've got good people around me so yeah i moved into general management
00:03:26
Speaker
And I've had this MD role. And I've always, I started life in this industry in a small business. It was a four or five million pound division of a 200 million pound business. And I loved it. I felt as though I could contribute at that level. So it's not a surprise that I've now found myself as an MD of a five, six, seven, eight million pound growing business. Because that's where I feel I can add most value.
00:03:56
Speaker
And what is it that attracted you to the current business?
Care and Independence's Mission and Products
00:03:59
Speaker
What does it actually do? So we manufacture and we design, manufacture and distribute medic equipment for those who aren't able to help themselves. So it's moving and handing equipment.
00:04:13
Speaker
Typically, the majority of our end users, not our customers, the end users are disabled people who need help and assistance with their moving, whether that's out of bed into a bathing facility or out of bed into a chair. And that's what we help them. We improve their lives. We help them too.
00:04:35
Speaker
do things they wouldn't otherwise been able to do themselves. And as I've been in this industry for 30 years, it's just so rewarding I've had.
00:04:44
Speaker
family members who have used medical equipment, not ours, over the years. And when you get a real empathy in that, and probably every person has got a story about somebody within their family or close friend who has needed help with medical assistance. And when you're in it, you're in it. And you never want to leave the industry. That's why I've been doing it for 30 years.
00:05:08
Speaker
You know, it's interesting when we met at the conference and, you know, you're an integrator, finance guy, they say he's not in sales, man, you know, lead sales. But you said to me, it really spoke to, I mean, look, I'm soft and cuddly, sort of want to be visionary type. But you said to me, you know what, when people buy our gear, we put the care that's deserved into that product, because if someone's being lifted out of a bed X times a day,
00:05:36
Speaker
It matters whether that experience is...
00:05:39
Speaker
optimized or not. I can't remember the words you used, but I remember thinking, fucking hell, that's pretty powerful. Yeah, it's comfort and dignity. Everyone deserves it. We all do things in our life where we can make ourselves as comfortable and do things as dignified as we want. They can't. So whether somebody's sitting in a chair for three hours a day and they can't move themselves, they deserve, they have the right not to end up with a pressure sore on their sacrum. You and I can move around in our chair to make them not happen.
00:06:09
Speaker
They deserve, if they're being lifted for 40 seconds, you and I, when we get up out of our chair, we do it in a dignified way. They can't do that. So our product has to be designed in a way that one is most comfortable for them and secondly, it's dignified for them because they can't do it themselves. And that's our mantra behind everything we do. So we put a lot of care and time and effort into making sure that's what we do. And by the way, that goes beyond the user as well. That goes to the healthcare professional.
00:06:39
Speaker
So a healthcare professional deserves to be able to manage that client, manage that user in a dignified way. They don't want to necessarily be stood there thinking that the user is compromised or is uncomfortable. I mean, it's rewarding enough being a manufacturer, but if you're a worker within a healthcare professional, we all know during COVID,
00:07:05
Speaker
what they did for this country. But they do that every day. They didn't just do that during COVID, they did that every single day. They do it now, they did it before. So we try and play our pie in that.
00:07:20
Speaker
You know, it's funny, I already knew that story and it gave me goosebumps again. I don't know if it's because I connect with the end user story or if it's just you love talking to business leaders that give a shit, you know, and can articulate why they care. So all right, awesome. So finance, get why you understand the sector. So how did you discover the entrepreneurial operating system? And then
Implementing EOS for Business Growth
00:07:40
Speaker
we'll maybe spend the rest of the time talking a bit about sort of the before and the after and why it is you're such an advocate for that now.
00:07:47
Speaker
So the discovery actually first took place in, of all times, July 2020.
00:07:54
Speaker
really slap bang in the middle of COVID when we were going through a fairly significant and major business reorganization. The business was in the turnaround at that time. So it was introduced to me by my sales and marketing director who had experience and he knew an integrator, sorry, an implementer. So we had that first call in July, 2020. And I remember thinking, this isn't for us right now. We're right in the middle of a major turnaround.
00:08:24
Speaker
One year later, when we'd stabilized the businesses and we really, I would say the business was turned around, we went into a growth mindset. And we realized that both of us, we'd been in growing businesses, but we didn't really have that proper skill set and that proper discipline in order to be able to do that. So we reconnected with the implementer that we knew, a guy in the States, Dave Feidner.
00:08:48
Speaker
and said, we think you've got something that's useful for us, but it's got to help us grow because we've got to change the culture in this business where everyone was used to firefighting for a number of years. So anyway, we had a second meeting with him. I liked what I saw. I got an indication as to what one year costs were going to be to implement that for us. I went to the board, persuaded the board that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
00:09:15
Speaker
And we haven't looked back since. At that time, I was conscious that we were doing a number of good things anyway. So we were starting to do good things around our people. We were starting to do good things around our culture. We just didn't really have the umbrella under which to do it all under. And this, for me, provided that perfect umbrella. I mean, I'm glad I made the decision when I did, if I knew
00:09:43
Speaker
then what I know now, I'd have rushed this through so much quicker. So it was untrue because it's just delivered so much more than my expectation. Yeah, I found the same thing in my business. And it's interesting because like you, I'd come through the legal track. I wasn't clever enough to be a numbers guy, but I knew in some form or another, everything that's in the entrepreneurial operating system, everything that's in traction, I understood the principles.
00:10:12
Speaker
I think I'd maybe just confused myself. I think sometimes the more studied you are, the more vulnerable you are to overcomplicating it. Isn't that one of the key skills, simplicity? You're absolutely right. There's no rocket science in EOS, but you know what? There is discipline and there is simplicity in it. It's not just for the
Clarifying Vision with EOS
00:10:34
Speaker
likes of you and me and the senior management team. It's something that in order for it to work properly, it's got to be a tool
00:10:41
Speaker
that everyone in the business can understand and work to. And that's the beauty of it. And that's the real, real good beauty of it. And I'm not there yet as a business.
00:10:52
Speaker
But a key, this year, one of our goals was to ensure that every employee benefits to the full from the US process. And we're not quite there yet. It will be a further goal. We've moved leaps and bounds, but that journey will continue next year. That was one of the reasons why I went to the conference day. It was because I wanted to understand that I went to all the sessions that were going to enable myself and James to embed this deeper into the business. So we got some real good takeaways from that day.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, no, and it's interesting, actually, as I've sort of got to know the implementer community, like what a lot of people will say is that nobody ever gets to 100% strong across all of the components. That's kind of the fun, the fun of the journey. So when you did the eight questions, so for those that aren't EOS aficionados, eight questions are just the questions that EOS teases out of leadership team to get really clear on their vision.
00:11:44
Speaker
we won't go through them necessarily in, but you know, like core values, core focus, 10-year target, marketing strategy, three-year picture, one-year plan, quarterly rocks and issues. There's plenty more to be asked, but that's kind of the starting point. How much of that was already known to the leadership team at the point that the implementer come in, or were the vision-building days painful in some ways? How quickly did you get to answers to those eight questions, and how long did it take to iterate on those answers?
00:12:14
Speaker
I would say we didn't have a lot of those answers. Really? We need it, by the way, actually. I don't know why I'm sounding surprised. No, a little bit now. Our ownership structure, so we're VCO and our ownership structure, it's not a secret that at some point the ownership structure will have to change.
00:12:41
Speaker
But what it meant was that we were more focused on the here and now, one year, two year, three year at the very most. So we weren't really looking beyond our nose. So the first thing we did as a business and we certainly didn't have a, we'd started on the values piece. So we didn't have the answers for our core values.
00:13:01
Speaker
Those two days were just the best two days for Senior Management Team, because we got to all those answers within those two days. We hadn't considered them, but we got to all those right answers. And one of the first things we, apart from the core values we did, we set out, we set our 10-year area of scope.
00:13:17
Speaker
and ours was to grow in 10 years, six fold. So yeah, we were a five million pound business and we said, 10 years, we want to be a 30 million pound business. And we have this, our tagline is improving lives. That is our reason for being. So that was one of the things that came out in the day, we'd already been using it, but that's what we said to everyone, the whole business. Our reason for being, CNI's reason for being is improving lives.
00:13:46
Speaker
And today, or at that time, we're improving 125,000 lives a year on the way we measured it. And at the time, we didn't say we want to grow our revenue six-fold. We said we want to be improving a million lives a year in 10 years' time. We didn't talk numbers. We didn't talk revenue. We didn't talk profit. We didn't talk number of people. We just said we want to be improving a million lives a year. That's a nice thing to do. That's a nice legacy to leave. That's a nice ball to start rolling.
00:14:16
Speaker
And so I was, again, talking about value, I've blown away the clarity we walked out of that two-day planning session with all those eight questions I'll answer. He hadn't done it, but clearly, yeah.
00:14:31
Speaker
I found exactly the same thing, sorry, I didn't mean to get excited and jump in, but I found the exact same thing because we were investor backed. It is your duty as a leader to get those investors a return, right? Like that's how risk capital innovation happens. If they never get a return, then no more risk capital, right? So society sort of depends on it in the way our society's configured, if you want to get highfalutin about it. But it does make it a challenge. Did you,
00:15:00
Speaker
I mean, did the board just sign off the money because they trust you? Or did they understand that you, therefore, were going to declare and lead the business towards a vision that was definitely going to go beyond their tenure of ownership? Because I never really had that conversation with my investors. I wish I'd been running EOS upfront so that I could have sold the investment vision
00:15:21
Speaker
completely aligned with the internal vision. I kind of discovered EOS after I'd raised the money.
Gaining Board Approval for EOS
00:15:27
Speaker
And so I slightly wrestled with that 10 year aspect of it. We did it, but it was a struggle.
00:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, there's a couple of interesting points in there. So one, sharing with the board. It was clear to me that the ownership change was going to take place quite early on within that 10-year cycle and early on, not five years. So we knew a significant part of that. We shared it with them. In truth, how much that resonated with them, I don't know.
00:16:01
Speaker
So, but going back to how I persuaded the board, they trusted me. So I had had the benefit of a business turnaround. This business was losing money, breaking even in my first year. It lost money, broke even in the second year. I had turned it around to a profitable business. And I had said, and the key thing for them, I said, in every structure we are now focusing
00:16:29
Speaker
and we are putting all our time and effort and energy and all our traction, some careful words here, into the areas of the business that we know work. In order for us to make that happen and grow at the pace that you want us to grow at, I believe this is an ideal opportunity and an ideal investment. And for the sake of that investment,
00:16:52
Speaker
£25,000, £30,000, they signed up on it. But it all came from a position of trust. Now, again, we know that's at the core of all business processes. You've got to have that trust. You've got to have that trust. If they didn't trust me, they didn't let me do it. I would have questioned whether this was the right business for me. So anyway, that was where it came from.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, they approved it and they wanted to keep a tight lid on it and thankfully things started to happen.
00:17:24
Speaker
I mean, I guess what makes sense as I kind of reflect on it, like being able to say to investors, listen, the 10 year vision might be beyond 10 year target might be beyond your plan period of ownership. But if you're going to maximize value for your ownership, the next person that comes in as the owner or next entity that comes in as the owner has got to buy into a story. And of course, the new owner is their prerogative to maybe change the story. But
00:17:50
Speaker
Nature impores a vacuum, right? I can understand why. If I was a VC-backed leader trying to persuade my board or investors to go on this journey and commit to this 10-year target, I guess that would be the way I'd think about doing it and say our three-year picture, which is relevant to their ownership horizon, is sort of going to be informed by that vision. So it's something you might want to be invested in.
00:18:11
Speaker
And that's a really important point because we crossed that bridge with our implementer at the time where we went through that process of saying, look, I understand the one and three year in the context of the board, but I don't understand it in the context of the 10 year, which I fully subscribed to with being through the process. And they said exactly that. They said, okay, the ownership may change. And by the way, that might be me. I'm the majority exec shareholder in the business.
00:18:41
Speaker
Um...
00:18:43
Speaker
If you don't have that 10 year vision, you don't maximize the EV of that business at the point where a change of ownership happens. So as he described it, the world's not going to stop. The world's not going to stop. And the business is not going to stop when the ownership changes. So think beyond that. And that was a very easy thing for me to get my head around and realize that actually that's 10 year goal. Well, it's certainly enabled us to get to where we got to today. That's powerful. Yeah, it was.
Focusing with EOS
00:19:14
Speaker
And then you said that you've become really disciplined and accountable through EOS. I mean, obviously you're a brutal numbers man. So I bet you were somewhat disciplined and accountable before this. Like in what ways has it impacted the operation and or the customer, which has sort of driven growth? Are there any kind of tangible things that come to mind? Yeah. I mean, I talk about two words and I've already mentioned them. The two big things for us were focus and traction. So you,
00:19:44
Speaker
having simplified things, you discuss, you make decisions. For a while, I've learned, probably for a good five years now, I've learned to not be afraid of making the decision and getting it wrong. Don't get it wrong twice. So the action is make a decision, revisit it,
00:20:02
Speaker
Hopefully that decision is the right one, if not go back and change that decision. That's the traction, but it's also the focus, so the whole rock-setting process setting your goals. Every business does this. It's the distraction. The amount of times I now talk about, guys, that's just the distraction. That's not going to help us get to where we want to get to.
00:20:23
Speaker
in the way we want to get there, which is, okay, yes, it will be one brick in a cathedral, but it's not going to lay the foundations of the cathedral. So to me, the two big things and the two big disciplines that enable us to go on this growth path has been the traction and the focus, and they are the two most powerful things. Is that because of the world you operate in?
00:20:49
Speaker
It's a very, very big market. They're huge appetite for, I'm sure it's very competitive, but that market does need products and services. Is that what creates that sort of magpie temptation to keep trying to grab revenue doing random stuff? That is exactly it. I mean, if you look at a typical tender for us, there's some 320 lines on an equipment profile, on the framework.
00:21:15
Speaker
we might bid for about 30 of them. The temptation of an unfocused business is to say, oh, I could do that, I could do that, I could do that. And all of a sudden you find yourself bidding for 60 or 70. And actually, one, you've not got the infrastructure to be able to do that or the skill set. And you end up spending 80% of your time trying to chase those other
00:21:38
Speaker
30, 40 SKUs as opposed to focusing on the ones that you know you're good at and you can demonstrate to the customer that you're good at. So yeah, there are hundreds and thousands of medical devices out there. So when we set
00:21:57
Speaker
the scope of where we want to get to when we're improving minion lives. We have
Core Strengths in the Medical Equipment Market
00:22:01
Speaker
deliberately chosen our words to say we want to move, we're happy to add moving and handling equipment that is an assessment and it's a specific type of thing that we are very good at. We're very good at going with an occupational therapist and helping them assess the user's needs.
00:22:21
Speaker
So the very simple thing to do is to say to the OT, when you're going in, you're not just assessing for our products, you could be assessing for something like a zimmer frame or
00:22:33
Speaker
or a tin opener. So it's looking for those opportunities that when you go on a single call, you've got a maximum potential return. Now, that's not to say we're going to start selling products for 50p or a pound because there's some very competitive market spaces. So it's got to align itself to our commercial goals as well. But there's a lot of stuff out there. But again, it focuses us and our attention on
00:23:02
Speaker
on what we're good at. And that's the most important thing. We realized what we're good at setting our marketing strategy, we know what we're very good at. And this is all the EOS stuff, you know, and, but again, we went through that place and realized that and we said, okay, this is where our future time and efforts should be. How have you found this concept of the visionary and the integrator and obviously James isn't here to defend himself, but like, I'd just be fascinated in, because I
00:23:29
Speaker
I have some integrator characteristics. I guess it's the sort of the reformed lawyer thing. I have struggled to shake that off entirely, but I definitely biased towards visionary traits. I'm a better visionary than I am integrator probably. How have you found working in those seats? What advice would you give to others working in those two seats together? The first important thing we did when we implemented EOS is we did not have a visionary
00:23:54
Speaker
in our accountability chart.
Visionary and Integrator Dynamics in EOS
00:23:57
Speaker
James was not the visionary and that was because we come from a position of a business turnaround where we basically learned to walk again and we said right we need to learn to walk before we start to run and do hurdles and go mountain and that's where the visionary comes in.
00:24:16
Speaker
So once we had created a real stable environment, that's when, I mean, James was always trying to be the visionary. And in the early days, I was constantly saying, look, we've got enough within our product portfolio. With his 20 ideas. But now I let him loose. Now I let him loose. And we discussed him as a team.
00:24:38
Speaker
We went through the Colby scoring, another EOS tool, and Jay and I couldn't be more opposite in terms of our profiles. And in fact, our implementer turned around and said that you two need to be wary of that, because that doesn't work sometimes. Completely opposite here. Again, that's down to trust and respect. And we've both got mutual trust and respect. And I think as some advice for anyone in that environment,
00:25:07
Speaker
that relationship has to exist. So if James comes along with 20 ideas and I'm not 19, back.
00:25:15
Speaker
he doesn't get offended by them. Again, we will have a meaningful discussion about it. And equally, I mean, last year, he came to me with such a harebrained idea about something. And you know what, I just laughed at him first of all. And this was a service related potential as opposed to a product. That's not what we do, James. We're products. And anyway, I went away over the weekend and thought about it. And I came back to him and said, you know what, that might be brilliant.
00:25:43
Speaker
And it was all around the training of what we do. And it sort of opened my mind up to say, well, actually, we do that already. We do it free of charge as part of our service.
00:25:59
Speaker
Part of our growth has been some of the fantastic training we do. The investment in training has led to our growth now. So all of a sudden, this visionary comes to me with an idea that I think is a harebrained scheme, and I think, you know what, that makes sense, with a broadened training offering.
00:26:16
Speaker
it opens up, there's 40,000 OTs out there. We sure as hell aren't hitting them all every year. If we got abroad and training, not only does it open up our products to more people, more users of the equipment, but actually it opens up other potential products as well. So that's the sort of visionary thing where we might clash and lock on to begin with, but actually we work it out and sort it out and talk it through.
00:26:44
Speaker
But you've got to have that, I'll go back to you, you've got to have that respect and that trust in each other as integrated and visionary and be able to have those hard discussions. Oh, have we lost you?
00:27:02
Speaker
No, I'm back. I'm back now as I've moved out to this, moved out to this country location. I find it very relaxing, but not necessarily as reliable. I think we're okay, we're back. The visionary integrated relationship, I agree, is so important how you have mutual respect in both directions. Because actually, you're right, it is very difficult when you're on the visionary side of that equation.
00:27:32
Speaker
understanding that those 19 rejections come from a good place, not a bad place. And they, a good integrator wants you to keep pushing the boundaries and thinking laterally and asking, do we think this is where our next opportunity comes from? I mean, just as you were talking, I was thinking, we think how well it worked for Rolls Royce, right? Selling engines and then also actually making probably more money, more profit from servicing said engines. And then I was thinking about your uniques and this injecting, this care
00:27:59
Speaker
into something that could feel like quite a kind of cold product.
00:28:02
Speaker
what better way to do that than educate what are your key stakeholders around the care that's gone into that product? So I can see why it makes sense, but why it wouldn't have been obvious, particularly coming out of a turnaround mindset. Yeah. So the real good thing about those 19 rejections is that you don't just reject them. And by the way, that hasn't happened. He hasn't come with 20 ideas and I'm rejecting 19. But even in one, even if you take 19 on and reject the one, you learn from that. And that's been another real good thing of,
00:28:31
Speaker
the process where you go to your rocks and you miss rocks and you don't you don't do your to do this on a weekly basis you sit back and you learn from it you say why and how does that impact the business and what can we do differently and we've done every step of the way and that's no different with it with a potential idea that a visionary brings to the business you say well okay,
00:28:52
Speaker
Let's actually understand, having spoke, talked it through, why we don't think it's a good idea because you learn from it and you make sure next time that the one that comes along is the one that hits the money. That is a really important part of the US process, is the learning. It's not just a tick box exercise where you do your weekly meetings and you set your quality box. It's got to be an improvement process. It's got to be an opportunity for the business to improve.
00:29:19
Speaker
I agree. No, we found it like therapy as well. Actually, one of the things me and Meg, the operations director, he absolutely played the integrator role for us. One of the things that, um, one of the things that she, she did, we had to do same page meetings was critical for us because I needed a vehicle to tell her where I was worried about something in the customer population where I had this idea. And I was very vulnerable to vulnerable, very prone to blowing my organization off track.
00:29:46
Speaker
because I was the founder CEO. So I also had a sort of an actual and an implied authority. I didn't always fully understand and you could come in and say something, shoot from the hip and you can derail your organization pretty easily. For me, it was about having structured time with Meg.
00:30:03
Speaker
to download onto her to then bring that into Level 10s as appropriate, the quarterly sort of, you know, strategy sessions and the like. And it meant I found the OS less frustrating than I think I'm otherwise might have. So I think for entrepreneurial people listening, that's something they need to take away that you've come out from your relationship with James.
00:30:21
Speaker
Yeah. Look, I think the other really good thing about what we've got, I'm not going to blow my own trumpet here, but any leader, and certainly in my position as MD, they need to know their numbers, they need to understand their numbers, because too often if you've got a visionary who doesn't know his numbers, and
00:30:41
Speaker
And actually, as the MD and a visionary, they start chucking ideas and saying, we're going to do it regardless without discussion. If they don't know the numbers, that's where there's a risk of destroying any good work that has gone on before. So know your numbers, or have a good person who knows your numbers, have a good trusted advisor who knows their numbers.
00:31:02
Speaker
I wasn't expecting us to go there, but one of the things that was really bruising for me on my journey was learning the difference between abdication and delegation and numbers was something that I abdicated for a long time, which I am ashamed to say. It definitely impeded my ability to be a good executive, generally speaking.
The Role of Finance in Leadership
00:31:21
Speaker
Do you find yourself coaching non-financial leaders to be more equipped with a number? What's your approach? Do you just tell them that it's important and then expect them to
00:31:30
Speaker
kind of get up the curve, just curious. No, I think I talked about the journey that I've been on as a numbers person. I always, I dug into everything. So I moved into operations as a reason for explaining my numbers. So now it's very easy for me to share my numbers in the context of an operation or a commercial background to the senior management team, to any member of the business. So,
00:31:58
Speaker
Yeah, I don't deliberately go out on my way to coach, but I guess it's just my second nature that I'm always explaining things anyway to people when I'm talking about numbers. I'm always explaining it in the context of the business. So for me, it's second nature. I would say that's something that I've developed and grown with over the years. It's not true of every accountant. Not every accountant is able to take that leap from the numbers into then saying, okay,
00:32:26
Speaker
How do we use that and how does the business benefit from that information?
00:32:30
Speaker
I hadn't thought about that, but actually, for entrepreneurs watching this that recognize the need to up their financial game, and they were thinking about just hiring a finance seat and forgetting about it, maybe they should consider bringing someone that's got a finance background, but has also done a term in operations, so there's just less distance to travel between those seats. Yep, absolutely. Interesting. And before we let you go, can we just talk scorecard briefly?
Using EOS Scorecards Effectively
00:32:52
Speaker
So again, for those listening, scorecard's a key part of the data component of EOS. You run your business on a
00:32:59
Speaker
on a weekly meeting that Ian's referred to and you look at a scorecard that's supposed to give the leadership team an absolute pulse on the business. I know you can't give anything that's commercially sensitive. In terms of actual leading indicators that determine the forward-looking health in your business, Ian, are you able to give some examples of the sorts of things that you've realised the organisation needs to be paying attention to? Because, of course, we're not going to talk about any actual numbers, but just the sorts of measurables that are important.
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah, so probably not surprised to anyone who knows me, but so our cost base is quite tight. I'm a chartered accountant and I run as tight a ship as I need to. So for me, this business is all about revenue. So our scorecard contains a number of
00:33:46
Speaker
top line drivers that are and enable us to become better critics as well to see where we are in here and now. So I alluded to going out with occupational therapists and doing assessments. So we've got a team of assessors who go out. So their levels of activity we know through history drive our future business.
00:34:06
Speaker
So we know if we maintain a number of assessments a day over a long period of time. So that's a key activity-based item that is on our scorecard. But also in new business, so that's established business, in new business, we're developing pipelines. And again, so our pipeline activity and our conversion rates is another important aspect for our business growth.
00:34:32
Speaker
And then we've got the obvious one which is we monitor our order intake on a weekly basis and thankfully it's all moving in the right direction. So they're very much top line driven, top line growth oriented items on Scorecard. We then look at our performance.
00:34:55
Speaker
our industry. When somebody needs a bit of equipment, they don't need it in three weeks time. When assessment takes place, they need that bit of equipment there and then. And we often say if the occupational therapist has that equipment in the car, they give it to that user straight away. So for us, our delivery time is key. So we measure that. So that's a really interesting one because that's
00:35:17
Speaker
In our business, it goes through cycles. It goes through cycles of quality, price and delivery. I think the one that in my mind over 30 years has always been at the top and that's the speed of delivery of
00:35:34
Speaker
from the moment that equipment is prescribed, how quickly can we get that equipment to the user? Now, some of that's out of our control because there's processes within the healthcare sector that they need to go through, some hoops they need to jump through, but we need to make sure that we play our pie in that way. When we get the order, we deliver it in the critical system. So that's a really important metric for us. We've then got things like warranty and customer complaints. Again, that's all driven. So one, the commercial, which is top line,
00:36:03
Speaker
We don't have any other. We don't look at costs. We don't look at profit. It's top line. And then it's how we're doing in delivering that top line in terms of customer service, speed delivery, complaints, and warranty returns. So that's very much how we're geared.
00:36:18
Speaker
I think what's so fascinating about you is a great story anyway. I love the way you talk about your business, business generally, and then EOS. But it's the fact that you're doing something that I think is quite unusual for a VC-backed entity. But
Reflection on EOS in a VC-backed Business
00:36:32
Speaker
I think there's an awful lot that other founders backed by VC, and dare I say, their investors can learn from your journey. I know we're coming up on the time that you've got allocated. Are you happy for people to reach out to you
00:36:43
Speaker
if they're interested in what they've heard, whether they're investors, operators or just EOS intrigues. Yeah, look, I couldn't talk enough about EOS. I'm happy to talk to anyone about it. I can deliver a real message of how it's made a difference to our business. And what I'd say to anyone who's thinking about it, have a look. Have a look, make an inquiry because
00:37:12
Speaker
It is common sense, but how many people are sat at the breakfast table thinking, oh, this is common sense. I need to do this today, but never get around to it. What this does, it drives that discipline of you do get around to some stuff, even though it's very simple. I had an example when I was young and just qualified. People used to come knocking on my door saying, I can save you thousands of pounds on expenses.
00:37:35
Speaker
No, I don't need you. I can do it myself. You never get around to doing it. And this is no different. I'm 30 years old and a lot wiser. So this is definitely something that I would say is worth having a look at as a minimum.
00:37:48
Speaker
Oh, that's very generous. Well, listen, I'll put your your LinkedIn and your your email in the in the show notes and folks, if you're listening and you found this useful, then Ian's happy to give you a 10 minute five, five, 10 minute chat. And thank you so much for doing this. It's been amazing. Well, you're welcome. It's great meeting you on the day. And do you know what? It's actually reenergized me even having this conversation today. So thank you as well.