From Fired to Founder

Rog How (00:01)

Hi everyone, I'm Roger How and this is The Nugget, where we're unearthing business gold for founders. And today I'm joined by Molly Johnson -Jones, who's the CEO and co -founder of Flexa, which is an employer branding and job platform which focuses on companies who are offering more flexible working. And before we jump into your journey with Flexa, I'd like to ask Molly about the basics of employer branding and flexible working. So first of all, what is the employer branding?

Molly (00:30)

It's a good question. think it's a word that people see all the time. And I think it's kind of banded around quite loosely. But at its simplest, employer branding is just the marketing behind or in front of showcasing your company as a great place to work, whatever that might look like. So just the same as obviously we do top of funnel marketing for our products and our services. It's doing that, but showcasing your company as a great employer and what that can look like is

built on what's your culture like, what's your working environment like, you know, what are your employee stories, who's thriving there, what benefits do you offer, what opportunities do you offer, and bringing that to the very forefront of your marketing.

Rog How (01:12)

And what do you find some of the most valuable things to focus on when thinking about employer branding?

Molly (01:19)

I think transparency and honesty are super important. A lot of companies tend to toe quite like a corporate line and say, you know, we're a very inclusive and safe place to work. We're flexible, using all of these buzzwords that don't necessarily mean that much to people. Whereas actually what people really want to be able to understand before they apply or start working at a company is, is this an environment in which I can thrive? And that will look very different from one person to another.

So being super upfront, like if you say you're flexible, what does that mean? Does that mean three days a week hybrids? Does that mean fully remote? Does that mean flexible hours, a four day week? Being super clear about that. And same with if you say, you have an inclusive or supportive culture, are you fostering diversity? Have you got representation within your company? Like really backing up with what's actually going on rather than just using buzzwords because it needs to be authentic because you want your employer brand to put off.

as many people as it will attract.

Rog How (02:19)

Yeah, that's a great way to think about it. And you mentioned flexible working and obviously Flexa is called Flexa. you know, flexible working is really big on the list of employer branding. I guess the sort of tick list that people might be looking for. Why offer flexible working and what actually constitutes flexible working? Because it's pretty broad.

Molly (02:46)

I actually controversially really hate the term flexible working because it's too broad, it means something different to everybody and I think it's also still got quite a lot of stigma attached to it. think a lot of the sort of common conceptions around flexible working are that it means working less hard or being less committed to your job. So at Flexa, like we've tried to expand the definition of flexible working into

all elements of the workplace in terms of, you know, is there some freedom and choice within that company that could be a dog friendly office because if it's dog friendly, that's hugely advantageous to somebody with a dog, they're saving money from putting them into doggy daycare. Same with four and a half day week, know, you get Fridays, Friday afternoons off. So we look at location flexibility, hours flexibility, benefits that add to flexibility. So enhanced parental leave, enhanced sick leave, enhanced annual leave.

The cultural elements as well. So senior leadership role modelling that, you know, are they in the office five days a week at their desk 12 hours a day, in which case obviously the role modelling is not signifying that autonomy and flexibility is okay. The cultural elements around autonomy, trust, lack of micromanagement, being able to get your job done however you see fit. And different companies want to shout about different bits of that. So some companies won't offer location flexibility, but they will have

flexible hours, amazing benefits. Some companies will have really autonomous cultures, but they won't have other different bits and pieces of it. So it's a bit like a pick and mix, I think, which is always my favourite way of looking at flexible work.

Rog How (04:21)

Out of that list of pick and mix options, are there a couple of things that you think that all companies can do which will be guaranteed to make staff happier?

Molly (04:34)

The autonomy piece and the trust piece, definitely. Ultimately, you're employing people because you, or hopefully you're employing people because you think they're going to do the job well. So you should afford them trust from the very beginning rather than making people work to earn your trust. I think that's a very backwards way of looking at it. And I think even in roles where there can't be hours flexibility or location flexibility, you can trust somebody to get their job done well without micromanaging and needing to have constant check -ins and feeling like they're being watched by a hawk.

So that's definitely the major one that I do think makes a massive difference to employee satisfaction, engagement and happiness. And then the second one is I think that there is always the ability to offer some form of freedom and choice around when or where or how you get your job done. You know, if it's that you can't offer location flexibility, can there be a little bit of flexing hours or can there be a bit of extra holiday in return for that, you know?

having to be in the same place, the same time every day. So I think there's always something that you can give in return for people being more engaged and happier, which is the ultimate consequence. Like that's why we're talking about it, is to make the world work a better place.

Rog How (05:50)

I've seen you talking recently about call hours and you're quite an advocate for that idea. Can you expand on what that actually is and why it works well for companies?

Molly (06:02)

Yeah, I'm a big advocate for it because I'm not a morning person at all. So core hours, you know, we traditionally, depending on your industry, we've traditionally seen work is happening between the hours of sort of nine till five or nine till six, maybe eight till six, whatever it might be. And actually, the kind of reasons for that happening are less and less important. Like who's based on daylight hours or the stock market opening. Like we're not all tethered to that now.

And so core hours is where you can sort of pick a time where you want everybody online and working and collaborating. at Flexa we do 11 till three. Lots of companies have 10 till three or 10 till four, which just means that people can start a bit later if they are more productive in the evening or start a bit earlier and go and pick up their kids and then come back on. It's enabling people to shape their hours around those core hours so that they can be more productive throughout the day.

you know, speaking from experience, if I used to work in a job where I had to be in the office 6 .30 till late, like 7 .30, 8 .30, and for me getting up at five in the morning, I was a mess. Like I was so unproductive. Whereas if somebody told me, you have to work till midnight, I'd be fine. Whereas there are plenty of people where they'd be completely the other way around. And so core hours leans into the fact that, you know, not every single human is the same. We're productive at different times. We have different circumstances in our lives.

we're all able to get the job done if we're given a bit more freedom to shape our time and core hours gives enough rigidity for the business that like not everybody's everywhere all at once and you can't get hold of anybody so you've still got that really collaborative time but you're giving people that freedom to make sure that they are productive inside and outside of work.

Rog How (07:48)

And how about moving on to Flexa and the business that you've built? Can you give us a little background as to what it is and how you've built that business? I guess starting with maybe the business model and how of ins and outs of it works.

Molly (08:06)

Yeah, absolutely. So we launched Flexa in February 2020, which was three weeks before the pandemic hit. So that was obviously an unusual time to start a business focused on what was very much pure flexibility in terms of location and hours. But obviously, as I talked about, we've expanded it out. And that was because of quite a personal experience where I, so I have an autoimmune condition. It means that I'm technically classified as disabled.

And sometimes I can't walk, like my feet swell up, my hands swell up, my face swells up. Like it's not something that you can really commute with very easily. Thankfully now, because of being able to manage my time, that happens really rarely, maybe once a quarter. But back when I was working in investment banking, it was about once a week. And I kind of struggled through for about 18 months. And one day they said to me, hey, we're actually really open to flexible working. And I was like, news to me. But you can request to work from home one day a week. And I was like, wicked, that sounds great.

put in a request to work from home one day a week and ten days later they put a supplement package in front of me, sacked me and told me to leave immediately.

So I was obviously like, you were not open to flexible working, fair enough. And was plunged into the job hunting process like everybody else has gone through. But I really wish that I could just cut out all the inefficiency of having to go through interviews, get to office stage, say, can I work from home one day a week? They'd then go, no. And just put on a filter and all of those companies come up. I was amazed that nobody had thought of it, to be honest. And I was talking to my now husband.

And it was actually his idea in the beginning. He was like, why don't we just build? Why, why hasn't somebody built this? It was never why don't we build it was why hasn't someone built this? And then kind of snowballed. We met Tim our CTO, and we started building it, we were all still working. And we ended up getting quite a lot of early traction, raised a pre -seed round and got our jobs and here we are four years later. From a business model perspective.

We've actually had a couple of iterations of it. feel like when you're an early stage startup, you're always testing what could be better, how can you adapt, how can you make your customers happier. So we started off as a pure transactional job platform where a company would pay to post a job. Certain flexibility, people would apply, realize that actually that was a really saturated market. The process was already broken and doing it past consideration phase and somebody had already...

found the company and then was looking for a job was actually not where the demand and the need was. So then we pivoted to a bit more like a subscription, like a bit like a glass door where you have a profile and you're at consideration phase. So you're one step up where you discover companies based on those criteria like you would on Airbnb, where you put like dog friendly cottage with a hot tub and all those properties come up similar in terms of working environment or culture. And move to an annual

of tenancy fee with like two different tiers and we've tweaked that over time but that has definitely been a huge success in terms of both retention and conversion for sales because it's very easy. People who kind of just paid to be on flexo they can reap the reward, they can see what the annual cost is, there's nothing hidden.

Rog How (11:27)

And how did you get to that point? How did you decide, okay, this isn't working, we're have to change because there's so many decisions you have to make with the startup all the time, assessing when you need to pivot. Was there something that pushed you to do that or was it just a gradual process where you have discovery and realization?

Molly (11:49)

But probably a bit more than that. I feel like so many of these things when it's your business and you're so immersed in it are gut feel. And obviously it has to be backed up by something. But the first inkling, I just had this really strong sense that we didn't have it quite right. Not because things were going badly. We were growing lots of interest and loads of users on our site as well. But when we were speaking to customers, the reason that they were with us was for recognition and

perception change, they wanted to be seen as an employer of choice and you don't do that job description by job description really. And the more time that I spent in the HR industry and the talent industry, the more I noticed that there was no top of funnel marketing going on. It's all middle of funnel job descriptions and then bottom of funnel trying to convert into hires. And if you look at marketing, no one would ever do that because it's incredibly inefficient, incredibly expensive. And so I really saw

an opportunity to turn hiring into marketing because that's ultimately what it is. And obviously, employer brand marketing has existed. But five years ago, it wasn't as big a thing at all. And I think a lot of companies sort of saw employer brand marketing as like, posting a job description as a LinkedIn post from an HR person, whereas actually, it's very, different. So it's through seeing that gap, realizing that

actually the USP was recognition and marketing that really pushed me to rethink what the business model should be. And so we developed what we called flexification at that time, which was verifying companies based on their working environment. created like a weighted index to score them, which took off and did incredibly well. we ended up now had hundreds of people go through that and we're constantly adapting that to make sure that we're keeping up with the market trends.

Hence expanding beyond flexibility, diversity into culture. And that making sure that we're kind of keeping up with the zeitgeist of what it means for, what candidates really want, like the demand side of things, because that's where we've always had that edge, is building something that is for the demand side of the talent market, rather than always focusing on supply.

Rog How (14:09)

Through the growth of Flexa so far, would you say that there's been a most difficult hurdle to jump?

Molly (14:18)

I would say that the last like, probably kind of Q4 of last year and then the first couple of quarters this year, as like there was obviously natural macroeconomic slowdown and one of the first budgets to be cut are HR budgets. It always happens because companies aren't hiring, there was so many redundancies, right? So you have to really ride that wave and use that as a time to focus on the other side of the market. So you're focusing on DTC because it's a time when people really need good job hunting resources. So we focus

we're obviously about business. So thankfully, you know, we have money behind us and time to be able to focus on both sides of the marketplace, even though only one generates us revenue. Which actually led to us making those pivots and really making quite a lot of product changes because we had that time and we had the sudden influx of obviously due to see users. And we're thankfully coming back out of that now out of the summer with a lot more B2B interests. So that was scary when you

When you're a two -sided platform and only one side is going really well, like trying to balance that complex is hard.

Rog How (15:23)

side that's not actually pulling in any revenue. Interesting though because you need both of those sides to make it valuable so guess it's seeing it as a period of investment which is always a sensible thing to do in a downturn. How about was there some kind of unlock catalyst moment that catapulted you from one level to the next which you can remember through the growth period?

Molly (15:25)

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Exactly that. Yeah, exactly that.

Definitely moving to like an annual subscription basis and ripping up the manual of a job platform was huge for us, really moved us massively in terms of ARR, hugely. And then also for us, like we kind of broke into the enterprise space about seven months ago from a pipeline perspective. And when you're suddenly 20Xing your ACV, obviously that's...

game changer. And what we realized was that we'd really been building a product that was incredibly well suited to enterprises, which was a really fortunate position to be in because I've heard a lot of horror stories when people get one enterprise and then they end up building a whole product for that company because it's so much money on the table. Obviously, we've had to tweak and much more investment in terms of like CS and everything. But that was a real game changer for us was when we started getting household names. You we work with Mars.

BT, Verizon, Microsoft now, to name just a few. And that pipeline just continues to grow and grow. So for us, that's where the majority of our future revenue will come from.

Rog How (17:00)

And are they clients who have found you or have you gone out and actively marketed to them?

Molly (17:05)

Bit of both. So we do a lot of demand generation from like a awareness marketing perspective. Same with events and like speaking events that I'll do and actually my LinkedIn as well generates quite a lot of leads just through awareness and talking about what they care about. So I'd say about 50 % of our leads are inbound, whether that's directly like they have filled out a form and said I want to get in touch, or they've reached out to one of me or the team. And then around 50 % are outbound.

But because of the amount of demand gen that we've done, the majority of once we've out -bounded them have heard of us, which is really helpful. So the response rate is quite high. And I remember being told by one of our early stage investors, they were like, you're spending far too much time focusing on awareness and marketing. They were like, it's going to take ages to reap those rewards. And it did. But we are reaping those rewards now. And for us, our cost to acquire a company is incredibly low.

Rog How (18:03)

I mean, it. Brand is always difficult to persuade people to spend on brand marketing and brand awareness, but actually it's the most valuable over time. So yeah, amazing strategy.

Molly (18:13)

Yeah, same with SEO.

Those two foundations have been incredibly important.

Rog How (18:18)

Great. And is there something that you were really surprised to learn along the journey as well? Something that you just weren't expecting to be the case? I guess interesting. I was going to say you've come into a market that you didn't necessarily know much about. it's a theme that we see with a lot of founders that we speak with a lot of the time they've come from a different world into a new market. And because they're thinking about things differently, you know, they have a completely different approach, which seems to crack some...

Molly (18:28)

Everything.

Rog How (18:47)

new and solved problem. But yeah, interested to hear your experience.

Molly (18:52)

Yeah, I definitely think that coming into it with limited experience was both a blessing and a curse in the sense of a blessing. As you said, you kind of look at things a bit differently. And I've always found marketing and psychology very interesting and kind of applying those same principles to hiring and talent acquisition, I think was very helpful in the way that we design the product. But it's also been hard in the sense of like, you don't know, like learning to sell because as a

as a founder, you have to sell in the early days and I still do. But I'd never sold anything ever. So that was a really big learning curve, let alone doing that in a market where I had never been that buyer, I had never worked alongside that buyer. So it took probably longer than it would have done for somebody experiencing the industry to be able to crack that. But also really interesting, like probably one of the biggest learnings that I'll ever

of learning periods I'll ever have apart from when I was at university or school, right? You don't learn a new skill, totally new skill very often. But so much as, I mean so much as surprised me on this journey. I think probably the biggest one and I've got recency bias because naturally you forget, I'm sure there are others at the time where I was like, I really wasn't expecting that. But I think probably the biggest surprise for me has been like the role

how the role of a founder changes over time and how much you have to adapt yourself. I think it's really interesting. Like when you're really early stage, you are in the weeds, you are building, you are the one onboarding people. You you've got a million and one hats on and of course those hats remain, but you're not in the weeds anymore when you go through and you hire a team. And then when you, there's that first stage where you've hired a team, but you're...

directly managing them and you've hired more junior people to kind of execute the tasks that you don't have time to do anymore. And then there's the next stage where you hire managers, where you're no longer directly managing people that aren't managers. And how your role shifts and how you move from managing to leading has probably been the biggest surprise to me in terms of, I think I just took that idea for granted and thought it was just a natural evolution. But you really have to think about it. You really have to think like,

What impact am I making here? How am I leading this team? Am I doing it right? All the time.

Rog How (21:21)

It's quite a lonely place sometimes as well, isn't it?

Molly (21:24)

So I really am lucky to be running this business with my husband. I don't think I could do it alone because although it totally dominates our life, you've always got somebody who totally understands what's going on. Like obviously we have different roles, but there's never a point where, you know, I'm really stressed about one thing and he's like, I don't get why you're so stressed about it. Like we're in that together every pub trip. The first half is probably talking about flexor.

Holidays, takes us a good few days to try and switch off from it, but from a mental perspective and a loneliness perspective, at least we get to feel that together.

Rog How (22:04)

Yeah, I can really relate because Kat and I run this business together as well, the branding agency. But yeah, it's funny because you're very efficient because you can talk about stuff as soon as it comes up in the car or on the way to school or whatever it is. But at the same time, you're never away from it. So I sort of feel like our work and life.

worlds are completely intertwined, which, you know, if you're okay with that, then, you know, that's fine. But yeah, it's true. You're never really alone.

Molly (22:39)

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And I do, you know, I think for different people, their idea of how work and life should coexist, it really varies. And some people do want that true balance where you have work time and you have home time. I've never really thrived in that environment. Like I like being online, getting in a bit later, being able to go to the gym at lunchtime, and I don't mind working at night, I actually quite enjoy it. So I'm more likely to be online for, you know.

15, 16 hours, but going about different tasks during that time. And that's always suited me. So the sort of total integration that you spoke of, think, I sort of that's the environment in which I thrive, which is probably why I felt very, I feel very comfortable, you know, working alongside my husband. But if you need that separation, then it definitely wouldn't work.

Rog How (23:36)

And how do you find, it's interesting, we always find that it's one of the things people are most interested to hear about actually is working with your spouse because a lot of people can't imagine doing it. There's always two responses to see the, that would be amazing or there's no way I could possibly do that. How do you manage that? How do you manage the kind of relationship side?

Molly (23:54)

No way, yeah.

I don't... We haven't really had to think about it until Flex had got very serious. And I know that sounds like a really odd thing to say, but I feel like we call it the fuck around and find out axis. And when you're a real, real, real start -up is in like, you're three people, there's not that much risk involved, right? So you can really spend loads of time fucking around and probably not finding out an enormous amount.

But you can kind of work at it and there's no linear relationship that has to happen. And yet as you employ more people and you bring on investors and you've got customers, like you have to find out a lot faster than you fuck around. And I think that in the early days of things, there wasn't an enormous amount of stress. So I don't think we had to consciously manage like our relationship or how that stress was affecting us. But as things get more serious and you really have to move along the find out axis.

I think that's why we've had to be a bit more conscious of how stress impacts us. Because you've only got a finite amount of emotional and physical energy and there's only so much that humans can do with stress and naturally you're going to take it out on people because especially the people that you're closest to because you feel most comfortable with them. So you're just making sure that we're both consistently aware of that. I we're both quite introspective people so I don't think we'd ever.

go a long period of time, actually, like a ticket, but there have definitely been periods, I think, where we've had to kind of sit down and have a chat. mean, like, are we happy here? Like, are we doing the right thing? And the answer is always yes, but you know, maybe a couple of these little things need to change. having that consistent dialogue, I think, is really important, both about work, but also about your life and your relationship. But there's also, ultimately, once you're in it.

It's not very easy to just leave, it's not like a job. So you have to constantly, you have to come at it from a solution finding angle. You can't find problems. That's just not an option.

Rog How (26:13)

Yeah, it's interesting. We found that we've become very efficient at arguing. You you just have an argument and then you're like, okay, it's done. Now we just got it. You know, it's inefficient for us to be annoyed with each other for a long period of time. So you just have it out and then move on to the next thing and be like, we've a meeting now.

Molly (26:20)

Yeah, it just happens. Yeah.

Yeah.

Because you have to, Exactly, because

you have to. There's no other option. So yeah, it's that finding solutions, right? You can have a problem for 20 minutes, but then someone has to do something about it.

Rog How (26:44)

And do you have very defined and distinct roles in the business?

Molly (26:50)

We didn't used to in the early days, now it's like, I think naturally just like as businesses grow, the amount of stuff that you have to do really grows. So we do now. We've also got quite different like skill sets and personality types. Like I'm very, slightly like chaotic ideas, always want to be moving things forwards and getting involved in lots of stuff and I'm a real like act now.

otherwise the world's going to end kind of person. And I love doing the, you know, the awareness side and selling and speaking to our customers and helping direct product strategy as a result of that. So probably a bit more, a bit more ideas and strategy. And then Maurice is much more methodical, considered, logical, rational. So Maurice is much more of the like operational and finance and legal and people stuff.

which actually suits us really well. I definitely feel like he got the short straw though, because I get all of the glory and the interesting stuff and then he's making sure that the business carries on and survives. But I think the story that I had behind it all was what made it very interesting. think startups that have stories are interesting and that's why we chose to have those two roles along with our personalities.

Rog How (28:15)

Yeah, interesting. We found that the more defined and separate our roles are, the less we kind of step on each other's toes and whereas where the conflicts can happen, right, when someone's not sure who should be doing something and, you know, and then it might not get done or, yeah, it gets, you know, forgotten or not delegated properly or whatever. So, yeah.

Molly (28:36)

Yeah, exactly. And

I'm definitely a toe stepper because I just love being involved. it's definitely good for us to have those defined roles. Because as you say, think that's one of the main places that conflicts can arise.

Rog How (28:51)

Yeah. And how about hiring for Flexa? Has it been really valuable to... Sorry, my thing is reconnecting. One second.

Molly (29:06)

I can still hear you, Bob.

Rog How (29:10)

Weird. One second, it's just saying it's reconnecting on my side, so I'll go back to that question.

Molly (29:15)

No worries. Mine's still uploading at like 99%.

Rog How (29:16)

There we go.

Yeah, cool. Yeah, it's running again. So coming back to Flexa and how you went through the growth of Flexa, presumably it's been really useful to have all that experience of other companies hiring and having to market and do their employer branding. Have you been able to borrow a lot from other people when you're going through your own hiring process?

Molly (29:46)

a huge amount. And also just having a platform that enables us to do all of that. We've never spent one pound on hiring. Everyone has come through Flexa, whether they saw a LinkedIn post, whether they came directly to site because of paid search, like we have pretty much in the company now, we pretty much have a use case of every single type of marketing that we do leading somebody to our platform, which is really, really cool.

And it just means we have, like, we've got a pool of, I about 7 ,000 people who have saved the flexor profile that wants to work for us. So when we open up a role, suddenly you've got hundreds and hundreds of amazing applications of people that know exactly what it's like to work here. And hiring is hard, it's incredibly time consuming, and when you get it wrong, it's catastrophic. So I'm definitely an increasing fan of the mantra of hire slow, fast.

Rog How (30:45)

Yeah, for sure. And I guess, do you guys have the most flexible working environment known to the planet? know, what does that look like for you guys, the actual kind of benefits and flexible working scenario?

Molly (31:01)

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we have the most flexible in the sense that lots of people would think about. Like I would say our work -life balance probably isn't amazing. Although having said that, we have a four and a half day week, like nobody works on Friday afternoons and we would never expect people to work over the weekend. So you get two and a half days fully off, but the four and a half days that you're here are quite full on. And naturally, I think just because of the nature of our core hours, like we do often have people working in the evenings and things.

but we trust people to manage their own time like nobody has told you have to be online at 8pm. But I also think that's one of the, I don't see it as a negative, but I think it's one of the potentially negative thing side effects of flexible working is that there is this like blurring between work and life and some people would argue that that means less work -life balance. Whereas I would actually find that a good thing but you know, varies between people. But as well as a four and a half day week, like we have 45 days of holiday in total because I think it's really important that people

switch off so 25 days of normal holiday like most companies and we also do like two company shutdown periods where the whole company is off which is the only time that we really take holiday because it's hard to otherwise. At least for longer than a long weekend it's very difficult to not be around and we also have those core hours of 11 till 3. We're remote first so I'm obviously sitting in an office I haven't decorated my house in flexor branding.

Rog How (32:13)

You

Molly (32:30)

and about half of the team come in at least once a week, but that's not mandatory. We have some people in three days a week, but everybody has to come in once a month. Or you do like a big team day thing, which works really well because we managed to hire across the country. And there's all sorts of other bits that we do. People can work from anywhere in the world a month, 45 days of the year. As long as they come back for the team meetup, there's all sorts of other little benefits like dog friendly office. Yeah, loads of different bits.

Rog How (33:01)

And through the journey of growth from inception to where you are now and looking back, is there anything that you would do differently which you think would have made a really large impact to your growth?

Molly (33:08)

you

That's a good question. Learning the lessons I've learnt now faster is obviously a very boring answer. I think interestingly, so we didn't use to do the once a month meetups like we were fully remote. And I'm now like a huge advocate for remote and in person being really highly complimentary. I think people are happiest when they have regular social interaction with their co -workers.

And so I would have probably started that sooner. And I do think that makes a difference to performance. The people that, not the people that are in the most, like there's no direct correlation like that, but the people that, you know, come in and catch up and build those bonds are often the top performers. Like that's no coincidence. But that's not me saying everyone should be in the office five days a week. It's just saying that, you know, meeting at once a month is super important and maybe coming in one other time each month or so I do think makes a difference to people.

but it wouldn't need to be hugely regular. So I think that in -person contact I overlooked in the first couple of years. And I do think that would have made a difference from a team perspective. And then I think in terms of the growth side of things, I think when you're early on in your journey, there's a tendency to just move incredibly fast and not...

everything and analyse everything and I think have we done that as well as we do it now in the first couple of years we would have learned some lessons faster.

Rog How (34:50)

And as a fellow female founded co or co founded company, you guys share a lot of our values like a dedication to closing the gender pay gap. And I wanted to talk a little bit about female founders and the challenges they face. And in your view, you know, why are there less female founders?

Molly (35:06)

so many.

It is an incredibly, incredibly complex topic. So there's a kind of misconception that women are like less predisposed to be founders because they're more risk averse. more, you know, we are less like confident and assertive and all of these things. That's a product of society and how we bring children up. It's not.

women's brains, like we dispelled that myth a very long time ago. So I think that the issue is systemic. It starts from birth of shaping women into what we believe them to be. actually posted about the sort of way that women are perceived on LinkedIn today. And you know, if you you display traits that are not commonly associated with women,

There are really negative connotations around that. So like if you're assertive, you get called aggressive. If we get frustrated, we're called irrational or emotional. If we're confident, we get called arrogant. If we're really resolute about something, we get called cold. You know, there's all of these things where if we display male characteristics, we're really, really heavily judged for it. And yet founders probably do have to display more male characteristics than the average person because it's a really, really hard.

job where you have to be assertive and confident and take big risks and take no bullshit as well. So I think there's a natural tension between those two things that I think that is very difficult to overcome. And that's sort of embedded by what VCs look for when they invest as well. I think one of the most interesting

I could talk forever on this, but like one of the most interesting studies that was done was by, I think it was Stanford, where they got an AI driven model to analyze pictures where they did over a thousand pictures. Some were just men, some were mixed and some were just women. And what they surmised at the end of all of this was that a woman's presence on a pitch to a VC is neutral at best.

And the only time it is neutral is when we display female characteristics. So we're smiley, we're warm, we're not dominant. We take questions passively. And if a woman displays male characters, male in inverted commas characteristics, their presence is negative to the outcome of that VC pitch. And so then obviously that means that there are

there are a smaller proportion of women that are founders, but down the funnel it gets even worse because you've got fewer, an even smaller proportion of those women getting funding versus men. So only 2 % of funding going to female founders obviously doesn't make any sense because I don't know further up the funnel, it's very, hard to measure, but the proportion is higher. And I think it's because we have this inherent bias as society and particularly in those industries that women aren't meant to behave like that.

And so then we end up in those positions where we tend to be asked like really like risk and like risk averse sort of preventative questions around like, but couldn't this go wrong? Or couldn't that go wrong? Whereas men get asked opportunity based questions of like, how big could this be? What have you experienced? And they're open questions that enable you to, you know, really bring the best out of your pitch and out of yourself. And so we're just not seen in the same light in those scenarios.

There's so many reasons that drive that and it's such a difficult one to unpick, but more representation and more visibility is the fastest and education is the fastest way that we can solve them.

Rog How (39:11)

And finally, would you have any words of wisdom and advice for other female founded startups or female founders themselves who are at the beginning of their journey? What would you tell them to help them along the way?

Molly (39:30)

I always give the same piece of advice because another thing about being a female founder is that everyone will have an opinion on what you're doing. Everyone. Everyone will tell you that you should be doing it differently or you should be doing this or you should be doing that, particularly in the early days. And I kind of erroneously followed too much of that advice from people that didn't actually know what they were talking about, but they just sounded like they did. So my piece of advice is don't listen to everybody's advice.

or anyone's advice actually, until multiple people are telling you the same thing.

waste of time.

Rog How (40:08)

Thank you so much for your time and your words of wisdom. You're doing great work and I'd encourage everyone to follow Flexa. Is LinkedIn the best place to follow you? I've got quite a following there. Fantastic. Great. We'll put all the relevant links so that people can jump on and follow. Thanks again for your time and all the best with your future.

Molly (40:21)

Yeah, yeah, I'm only on LinkedIn really.

Super, thank you so much.

Rog How (40:35)

Thank you.