Harry Hanlon, COO @ Homebox

Hi, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

If you could just start off by telling us a little bit about your company and your role within it.

Yeah, sure. So I'm Harry, I am COO at a company called Homebox. Homebox is effectively a bill bundling company. It was founded 6 or 7 years ago by our two founders, Will and Jack, who were at university, lived in, I don't know, 6, 7, 8-bedroom houses and had that horrible pain of trying to manage utilities amongst multiple people. We have sort of grown organically from then to the size we are now, which is around sort of 70 employees. We'd never done a fundraise until earlier this year, which we're sort of still slightly going through. And that is kind of the company at its core. We manage, we set up, bundle, and manage all of the utilities for tenants in households. So energy, council tax, water, TV license, broadband. We are effectively a sort of fintech company. We create a bank account at a per-household level. Tenants pay their share into that bank account, which we then automate the payments out to the individual suppliers. I think that's sort of where the company is today, and we've been scaling, scaling really well. I think we've got, you know, several thousand households, tens of thousands of tenants on the platform, looking to sort of crack on and scale with that. Where it becomes really interesting is sort of the— where we go in the future. So my role is Chief Operating Officer. I came in in December last year from a background in really retail banking and finance. And I think that's where the future of the company lies, to be honest. I think in banking, we're seeing— I might go on a bit of a tangent into the world of banking and then bring it back to where Homebooks sort of fits in. So I think over my time in banking, I saw a sort of disaggregation of retail banking, by which I mean probably 20 or 30 years ago, most people would have a current account with a high street bank. They may have their mortgage there, their car loans, and they really used that current account as an anchor product from which the bank would then cross-sell other financial products to them. We're starting to see that disintegrate a little bit. The sort of job to be done of a bank account being a current account or savings as a sort of store of money with various liquidity thresholds and various pricing depending on, you know, do you want your money today or do you want to lock it in for a set amount of time? That the banks have sort of relied on those current accounts as that anchor product to sell other products to. But 10 years of fintech innovation have really decentralize that model. So if I look at my own sort of landscape of finance today, I've got a current account with a high street bank, my mortgage with a different high street bank, I've got a car loan with John Lewis, I've got sort of several challenger bank like day-to-day spending accounts, I've got insurances with, you know, car insurance with one company, home insurance with another, contents insurance bundled with my home insurance, but I've probably got contact with 8 to 10 financial institutions. So that sort of high street hegemony of owning the financial landscape is starting to disintegrate. Where things like open banking enable companies like Homebux sort of massive scope is down the embedded finance route. We can be much more valuable to customers and have a much better customer experience. By offering financial services closer to the product that they're trying to do. So in our case, we— everything we do is around the home. If we can build trust with a customer paying their rent through our platform, paying their utilities through our platform, we tie open banking data to that. If we can build trust over several years from them being a student through to their, their early stage career, you know, they might move to London, work for a big company, have to pay their rent, then, you know, by the time they're in their late 20s, they're looking at buying a property, getting married. We've got that track record of data. We've got the trust of those customers and we can offer much better tailored solutions than the banks, which effectively have zero stickiness and somewhat controversially, I mean, they're pretty undifferentiated. It's almost a commodity product at this point. They're kind of only differentiated by brand. There's a big green bank, a big blue bank, a big red bank. The, the offering is, is relatively indistinct. Yeah.

And so your background is in finance, and obviously for someone who studied finance university, like, the pinnacle of that when you're there is like the big banks. Yeah, you know, the likes of HSBC. And obviously you came to realization that maybe you wanted to be part of something a bit more disruptive, part of a startup, doing something different. Talk me through that thought process and why you did it. Yes.

Why did I do it? I think I've always been a bit of a contrarian. I think when you're in these institutions, I spent 5 years at a big high street bank at senior manager level, you realize there's a lot of sort of fluff that goes with that work. You're not really moving the needle much on a day-to-day basis. A desire to do more, to sort of have real ownership of the work you're doing. These sort of seem quite clichéd reasons, but it does sort of take a somewhat heretical view to jump out of a very safe finance job and all of the social signaling that sort of comes with that. It's hard to throw that to one side. Interestingly, I've got a 7-month-old child. He was born in January. I The bank I was at introduced a 20-week full-pay paternity leave, and I quit my job there 1 month before I would've had 20 weeks on full pay doing nothing. And I think that sort of stands for just how much I wanted to get out and do real work. Obviously, everyone goes into startup life with the big vision. I think there's You know, there's an attraction to that. I've got equity in the company that I'm at, so it's, you know, I took a pay cut to go to it, but you sort of, you look at the long term and think the long-term dividends pay more than a career sort of turning up and it just being another Tuesday at the office, and it's sort of more of the same every day and having the same conversations every day. I think That being said, like, there's massive, massive comfort in working for a big company. There is a strict hierarchy. A lot of people are best served going into that world. I think there's a— as much as there is social signaling going into a big company of that I sort of maybe slightly threw some shade at just then, you know, for a lot of people, they want to go through that very linear progression of they went to a good university, maybe they got a master's, They take the job in management consultancy, then they go and work in-house at a financial institution. And there's as much signaling in doing that as there is in negative signaling in standing against the system and saying, I'm going to work in a startup and I'm going to wear a t-shirt to work and the social cues that that gives off. I'd like to think I'm not in startup for the just the appearance of working in startups. It's definitely more glamorous from the outside than it is on the inside. When people tell you it's— all the clichés are true for a reason. All of the, it's long, hard hours, it's a slog, it's stressful. It's because that is incredibly true.

First of all, congratulations on the baby. Thank you. And second of all, obviously you found Homebox maybe later on in your career, and I wonder for our audience listening, when was it that you realized that startups was even— like, when were you even educated about their existence and that being a feasible route?

So I think it's very easy to— if I was to lay out my progression in life, a sort of state primary school, Then I went to a private secondary school. I think once you're in a private secondary school, privately educated, or yeah, I think there is that expectation then that you go on to university. It's almost unsaid. If I look at my classmates at school, I could probably name on one hand out of 150 people in my year, those that didn't go on to university. So undergraduate degree at a Russell Group university, master's degree at a former polytechnic university, and then into working world, as I said, sort of spent some time in management consultancy, spent some time in finance. I think it looks very linear and predictable if you sort of lay it out like that. But I think most people are obviously more complicated than that. I come from a relatively middle-class background. My father was in the Navy, my mother worked in hospitality, I'm the first of my direct family to go to university. So not from sort of masses and masses of money, but certainly not from working-class background. I went to private school based on massive parental sacrifice and scholarship. That makes a big difference. My father, he left the Navy, worked as a pilot at Felixstowe, docs, so had a lot of time to do other endeavors. And he was pretty entrepreneurial himself, whether that was sort of trying to do property development, he got involved in startups, and always sort of, I was exposed to that from a young age. I think a lot of people in entrepreneurship or in startup world have had that exposure at a young age to sort of even know that it's possible. I guess what I sort of haven't laid out in my career was I founded a company before I went to university and ran that whilst I was doing my undergraduate degree. In hindsight, it was a great idea, we had a great opportunity. I ran it for 3 or 4 years and worked with some massive companies, but I just did not have the level of knowledge or ability to do that anywhere near justice. But I think you have to sort of fail as you go. Did my master's to try and sort of give myself— I spent too much of my undergraduate degree running my company and having a good time at university rather than probably focusing. I did my undergraduate degree in English literature, which does, you know, people say sort of do what you love at university. I think university has a great way of killing the thing that you love when you're forced to do it. Day in, day out, and you're being forced to read books that you don't want to read. So how did I get into it? I think I've just— I had that exposure to it at a young age. I think unless you know that it's possible and these jobs are out there, it's very, very tough. I think films like The Social Network presented a whole generation with this vision of what startup life is like and what's possible. I mean, I'm 30 now, so that probably came out when I was around that age of looking for it. And I think it's almost embarrassing to say, right, but those big cultural moments can sort of inspire people. So yeah, I think that was probably my exposure to it.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about your time at university then and actually starting something while you're there, because Yeah, I, I can relate to that. I, I feel like there's obviously spring week, summer internships, but in terms of like actually gaining career experience, you kind of have to make it yourself or, you know, look in places that most people don't normally look. And yeah, I want to— in that process of, of building something, did you— is that when you really learned that I can't deal with the red tape and you'd prefer more streamlined, like, actually get stuff done attitude towards your career?

I think so. I think that university itself was a wake-up call. I might not be the best guest for your audience. I have relatively negative views on higher education. I'm not sure. I'll go on a tirade against university for 5, 10 minutes and then bring it in. But I think a lot of university education today is sort of driven by sort of mimetic desire, a drive to present yourself as an educated class of person. I think there is a lot of smoke and mirrors in the actual quality of the education it provides, the exposure to real-world practices. I'm speaking very generally. I think there are 4 or 5 universities that are exceptional no matter what course you do. There are clearly courses at universities like STEM subjects, like those very vocational subjects which are exceptional. But sort of my experience as a humanities student at a Russell Group university was like a few hours a week for an insane amount of money and very little value add out of it. I think the reading that I did, I very much— I'm turning to Good Will Hunting here, I could have got myself from just going down the library and taking out the books. And I think nowadays, I really value that autodidact, that self-taught person who can be somewhat contrarian and not go to university. I think that's very powerful. That said, I think there are instances where experiences during university present themselves as someone hiring. Your experience at university can be very valuable if you do more than just simply turn up and do it. And I think that was probably what I looked— I wasn't getting what I wanted out of university. I had the urge to do something for myself. I didn't really have exposure to the working world as a sort of I didn't know what opportunities were out there. I think had I known earlier on in my career more about the world of banking or stuff like that, I probably wouldn't have done English in the first place. I would have been a little bit more focused and driven. I think as with most people, you sort of end up in where you are in your career almost by accident. Yeah, and I think you're never going to have time like you have when you're at university to do something for yourself. It's very hard to appreciate that in the moment because what's in front of you, your coursework, your exams, your lectures feels like the biggest thing in the world, but you're never going to have that much time between those things ever again.

Yeah, I disagree strongly with one of the things you said and wholeheartedly agree with everything else. The thing I disagree on is that you're not the ideal podcast guest because—

Thank you.

This is the exact reason I did the Graduate Guardian, right, is that authenticity of voice. And I don't— I feel like we're fed so much career advice where they say what you think people want to hear instead of saying what you actually, yeah, genuinely think. And that isn't helpful to anyone because, you know, one thing I've learned from doing this podcast is that, you know, like you said, university is for some people, but there are a lot of people like me and like yourself. And, and then it's like, what do those people do?

Yeah.

And, and who's giving them that career advice. Um, so yeah, and I think my sort of own personal opinions on university, having just been through it, is like, see, having gone to UCL, it's a very good university, and, and some subjects get more education than others, whether it's counter hours or investment into classrooms or whatever it is. But generally, the name that you get from it, it's something that you can't generate like, yeah, by yourself. And like having UCL on my LinkedIn or whatever, like, that's a superpower. And people can create that superpower from, from a different thing, start on something themselves. But it does just help being given that. Um, yeah, so I want to ask a little bit more about Homebox and your journey within that. People, when they think about startups, there's less— it's less obvious the steps to grow within the company. Like, in big companies, it's like you work 2 years and you get this, you qualifications. How did you actually grow from your first role to where you are now?

I joined as COO, and that was purely because I knew the founder pretty well. We'd already had a very shared vision of where we wanted the company to go, and I'd spoken to Jack for several years before coming on board. And when it started to scale, he sort of called me up and said, now's the time, would you like to jump? And, you know, then you can take that more like balanced view of I kind of knew deep down in my heart that I was, I was at the bank because I had got married, I had two children. I, you know, you wanted that safety net of, of a corporate life, um, which will probably sort of hint at where I'm going with this.

The—

so, so I joined, I joined as COO, and I think that was, uh, a massive wake-up call. Like, within my direct remit, I've got marketing, operations, obviously customer service, Finance, most legal things fall under me. A lot of the sort of day-to-day running of the company falls under my remit. But in terms of the progression, we're very, very quick to promote in the company. I think it's part of our obligation, actually. Those joining a startup take on massive, massive personal risk. Like, I hope investors aren't listening, but like, we could go bust tomorrow. We're not going to, but you're a startup, you're operating at the edge all the time, you're trying to balance growth and operational excellence, and which do you prioritize? Where do you invest? It's really tight a lot of the time. And those who are willing to give it a shot need to be rewarded. It's very safe to go and join a big corporate company, one of the Big Four accountancies, a bank, any of these sort of clichéd, let's say, city-based jobs, or even in other towns, but those graduate jobs where there's a defined graduate scheme, as you say, it's a hierarchy, it's a progression, it's almost like military in its progression. It's you do a certain amount of time at this rank, then you climb with a sort of ever-decreasing pyramid. If someone's good enough, they are old enough. I think if you look at the people we've hired, we've hired people in at the bottom rung of the company and promoted them to heads of within 6 chance. It's not purely done on a charitable basis. I do think we have an obligation to reward good behavior, but we need to look for those areas that we can compete unfairly. And if someone is not going to get a chance because of their age or their experience, and we can give them that at an earlier age and get more out of them and try and sort of foster that loyalty, then, you know, why not? I think you and I have sort of spoken before about international students and hiring of international graduates, and that's another area where we think that we've got an unfair advantage. There is a perception in the— and I'm not really sure why. I think after Brexit, there's this 2-year graduate visa that's been brought in. There's a perception amongst many employers that it's just difficult to hire people on visas or expensive, and it's just simply not not true. And whether it's sort of lack of awareness in hiring departments or probably more likely just sort of laziness in that they just don't really look into it, that they don't want to hire international graduates. So we have a massive unfair advantage there in that, you know, we've hired 6 international graduates in the past 6 months, 2 of them have been promoted in that time. It's a channel for us that is just so obvious and logical. It's not, you know, it's not some sort of great political statement on my behalf to say, I'm going to go and hire international graduates rather than British graduates is just purely out of self-interest. It makes more commercial sense to us to go for that audience. I think it's trying to just be more logical with things than a lot of big company behavior is driven by formality or these sort of perceived rules of not putting yourself forward, paying sort of being quite deferential to your boss and not sort of putting your head above the parapet and waiting your turn and doing it. But in the kind of, you know, when you've got to survive, you just want people who can turn up, do the job, and go home at the end of the day and it's done. You don't really care about their age, their background there. So we've sort of got this phrase around like a radical apathy to someone's background, which is just Doesn't matter if they come through the door, they can do a really good job. Don't care of how old they are, where they come from, what job they've done before. We've got Oxford graduates and we've got people with no formal education who have come straight out of school and they're working at the same level. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to pick up on two things you said there. The first being that when you started as COO, you said it was a bit of baptism of fire in that, like, you go from, like, this finance background having to do more than just that. So, um, see, that's, that's, you know, potentially a bad thing about startups and, like, maybe not prepared, but also a good thing because that's the best way to learn, is kind of being thrown in deep end with a supportive team around you.

Yeah.

And then the next thing is that with that being said, international students will hear what you're saying and they'll think, oh, well then I'm just going to apply to Homebox, like, you know, they support us, but you can't hire everybody. And given that you're hiring people from formal education and different backgrounds, you must have a very specific idea of who you're looking for and how they can stand out. So what is it they can do to stand out if they are applying?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think one I think something probably I didn't refer to in the last one, but just being an international graduate in this country is a signal in itself that you have, above other graduates, you have taken it on yourself to travel away from your home country, to probably go to a country, a city where you're probably not speaking in your first language every day. You're being taught in a language that maybe you know, but it's not your own. You're being examined on that to a high level. If you're a master's student, an exceptionally high level. You have had to set yourself up in a country and, you know, sort out all the things like bills that we do, but all the other bits that go with that in a different culture. And, you know, there's a degree of autonomy that comes with that, which is very, very desirable in a startup anyway. I think the real behaviors that we look for are proactivity. So you've sort of got that slightly ticked by doing it, but how do you come to the interview armed with really in-depth understanding of who we are as a company, what we do as a company, where we're growing as a company. It's watching things like this, sort of understanding where we as the leadership team are driving the company. Um, look, is it that valuable to you when you actually get, get down to the job? Like, probably not on a day-to-day basis, but again, it's a, it's a signal to us that you've, you've put the work in and you're that type of person that's going to, to do it. I am a big, big fan of people who, I sort of said about that self-taught nature before, those that can not just expect their degree to give them everything they need when they turn up for a job. I think if you want, I would say even rather than doing an undergraduate degree for most people, if you're 18, go and you want to work in a startup, go and look up what free SQL courses are out there. How can I get into business intelligence and data analysis? Learn the skills that startups are looking for, particularly in operations, those sort of things are fascinating. So, go and look at database design and how you can interrogate databases. And then come armed with those skills, because they will serve you. They might not be the core of your job, but they're going to be those skills that you just demonstrate that I understand what the company is looking for, it's what I want to do, And I've gone out of my way to show this. I think, so we sort of, it's a bit cringy sort of resorting to these little like phrases, but we call it 3 Ps. So it's proactivity, professionalism, like by and large graduates that we encounter in interviews are pretty professional. You know, for as much as I've sort of slagged off universities, graduates compared to non-graduates, as a cohort are pretty dependable. There is a self sort of strictness that comes with having to go through university and go through it that maybe younger candidates don't have if they're coming straight out of school or from a career where they haven't sort of had to demonstrate it. So just professionalism, can we take you to an industry event and you stand up and represent the company? More applicable in some roles than others. Productivity. No, sorry, productivity, professionalism, and then pride. Like, how do people— very hard to demonstrate in an interview apart from sort of talking about experiences you've done outside of work, but how do you actually take pride in your work? How are they the type of person that is not going to stop a job until it's done and done very, very well? I don't love interviews as a means of hiring. I think it's very easy for exceptional candidates to interview very badly because they're not always the most confident or the most, just depending on your background, some people just don't present themselves in a way that lends itself well to interviewing. And then you get some people, and not to generalize too much, but I find men are particularly bad at this, very confident, they look very assured in an interview, and just can be rubbish at the job when it comes to it. So it's tough. We try to set tasks, we try to set presentations to sort of get people thinking deeper about the topics. Ultimately, you probably do have to interview. Quite often in interviews, you know within the first sort of 5 minutes whether it's a, "Oh, I quite like this person," or the worst of the sort of, yeah, this person is, is not going to get it, and you've got to at least stay there for the next 30, 30 minutes.

But, um, yeah, yeah, I think weirdly a superpower of mine, um, is that I actually never found in education, both at school and university, something that just came really naturally. Like that, you know, I didn't have that innate ability to do timetables or maths, or so I didn't just get science, like. So I ended up doing history because it was something that, like, is within your means to work hard and you can produce results. And yeah, and that's kind of what essay subjects are. But for the startup world, I think, um, why it suits me is if I had to be curious, I had to think about other ways to find out what I was good at. And I really believe that everybody can do that, but people that do have those innate abilities sometimes struggle to actually— like, the comfortableness of just operating within what you're good at, like, it stops a lot of people from even considering other career routes when actually I think, you know, startups are disruptive. And, you know, as much as big companies can sometimes do big things that startups can't, like, we as startups, we fill a void that needs to be filled. So yeah, I, I really encourage any student listening to this, just have a think about any other skill that you might have that's not a traditional one. Like, are you good at speaking to people? Yeah. Are you good at building a team? Like, all these things you won't know until you try. Um, and I guess for you in, in your, in your job and, and in your company How do you like to manage your team and cultivate your team to bring out those new learnings and make sure it's not just that one thing they're good at that they're learning?

Yeah, that's a very good question. And I think there's— I could probably be quite philosophical about it, and I tend to be on a bit of a daily basis in that it is our duty to train people up. And to help them progress, or are we sort of more utilitarian than that? And actually, do we need defined good people in defined good roles, and we want them in that role doing their job? And I think it depends on what you want to do as a company. Are you running a company for 2 to 3 years to sell and maximize the amount of money you make? In which case, there's probably not much point in going and hiring young people, training them up, developing them, because you just haven't got time. You might as well just go out and hire you know, 18 players from day one, have them come, come in, do a job for 2 years, and, and happy days, you all sell out and make millions of pounds, hopefully. Uh, I think rarely is a startup that, that, that clear. I think most of the time you're, you're sort of planning for the long term and, and seeing what happens when you're there. Uh, I would say one of my, my strengths is, is my ability to, to delegate. Um, It sounds like one of those sort of like fake strengths that people go, "Oh, it'd be brilliant to delegate because you don't have to do any work." But actually, when you care about something deeply, it's really hard to not micromanage and dive in. And you really have to sort of force yourself to stay out of the weeds, trust the people around you. I think hiring very good direct reports who can pick up the job, you can give a high level. Again, I think leadership have to be strategic, and then you can rely on the sort of people beneath to be more tactical and pick up the day-to-day work. I've got exceptional direct reports who luckily, they were already in place when I came in, and I haven't had to go through that very painful process of hiring in people. I have in one area, marketing just didn't exist, so sort of went out and got someone that I'd worked with before who I knew is very, very good. And sometimes it is just better the devil you know, just go and find good people. In terms of nurturing talent, I think one, just being in a startup environment does that by default because you're exposed to so much breadth of work on a day-to-day basis. We're about 70 people. That is still small enough that when everyone's in the office, you're overhearing conversations, you're naturally getting involved with projects that span multiple functions. Very rarely is any particular task isolated to one one product area or one subdivision of the company, you're normally, you know, if you're in operations, you're normally working with product or data or the tech team. Customer service will be sort of dealing with marketing. And there is this cross-fertilization of skills within the company all the time anyway. And then I think it's just being very open. I try to have some contact with nearly everybody in my team, whether that's direct reports or their direct reports. And I think then it's about— it's sort of that like Andy Grove's— have you ever read High Output Management by Andy Grove? But like a bit of a Bible. It's not easy to find in print, but you can get like digital versions of it. And he's got this thing about like management by walking around. It's just like going around the company, seeing what people are doing, hearing the problems people have, And again, it's like one of those fake things. You're like, "Oh, my boss is just walking around not doing anything." But you kind of got to think of like the big picture. And then it's giving people like horizontal opportunities as well as vertical. We've been hiring for a team lead position this week, and there's only, you know, there are limited spaces to go into, but then all the candidates that want that, it's about, well, actually, you've got skills, but are they better served elsewhere? Can we give you some time sitting with this team over here. Like, within reason, you've got to balance the company needs against their own needs. But I think as long as you are thinking deeply about these things and not just expecting people to turn up, turn out 8 hours of work a day for you and go home and treating them like— I wrote an essay on my blog about sort of human resource seeing people as resource. And something that really annoys me about big corporate companies is that actually you're just a cog in a machine and you've got to look at people being more rounded than that. Then humans are not logical beings. There's sort of— I sort of spoke about mimetic desire earlier and that kind of philosophy of— I won't spend ages going into the obscure French philosophy around it, but people are not obvious. People desire status and signaling as much as they desire, like, just financial reward. And you've got to accept that people are rounded and everything that goes with that.

Yeah, I also think that delegation is just incredibly important, but I think, like, one of the reasons why it doesn't happen, um, even in corporate companies or in any walk of life really, is because of that lack of empowerment you get when, when you're young at university. You know, in, in corporate companies, they don't give you those tasks that you feel empowered, like, yeah, a bit like, I can actually do what I want in this job, I can do what I want this role. And you don't really get it at university either. Like, it's quite a hard thing to just find yourself. Um, but, you know, I'm building this, this team with the Graduate Guide, and a lot of the That's what I'm learning, is that delegation is definitely amazing because there are people who are far better than you at a load of things, and you don't have to put all the time and effort into learning what they could do much better than you anyway. However, I think the most difficult task is how do you hold them accountable in the way that you want? Because, you know, you can empower them, they can be good, whatever, but they've got to stay aligned with how you see things. That's the real frustration. Delegation? Are they going to do it as if like your brain would do it? Yeah, I think generally just accountability is a difficult topic. I mean, how are you, um, making sure you're keeping yourself and your team accountable within the business?

Yeah, um, I think at a, at a C-suite level, you know, we've, we've got a C-suite of 4 or 5. We don't, we don't set KPIs because ultimately our job is, is share price and growth. If we can continue to grow, you know, revenue increase, growth of customers, just if the company's moving in the right direction, that's generally it. And that sounds reductive, and we do obviously have sort of ways to hold ourselves to account more granularly than that. I actually don't like KPIs across the board. I think KPIs are very, very easy to get wrong. KPIs are a step, as I said, to sort of turning people into a cog in a machine, And I'm quite big on incentive design, and if you get the incentive slightly off in KPIs, you can absolutely kill a culture. So we have OKRs, objectives and key results, which sort of waterfall down from what are the— we've got this framework of objective, strategy, tactics. So what's the company objective? What's the strategy to get us there? And what are the individual tactics that sort of ladder up to that strategy? So that waterfalls down from that to a degree, but we try to keep it a blend of quantitative and qualitative metrics. So yes, we, you know, customer service team, for example, yes, we expect you to do a certain number of inbound tickets. We're not absolutely sort of fascist about that. And if you don't hit this, this, you're out. It's a little bit more of a range. But then the qualitative stuff around, is your telephone manner very good? If a customer phones in, are you answering punctually? Are you going the extra mile for people that like much more intangible stuff. I think where the incentive design bit comes in, if I just gave my team KPIs around, you've got to do this many tickets in a day and then you go home, we'd lose all those soft skills around, people go out of their way to train other members of the staff, people don't know how to do it. That wouldn't happen if I said to staff member A, just hit 50 tickets a day, and staff member B comes up to them and asks for some advice, they'd be, well, no, I'm not helping you because I've still got this many tickets to do. And it seems logical, but when things aren't going well, it's very— that's when it's hard, and you get into that micromanagement piece of, come on, work harder, churn out this many things. So it's sort of sticking to your principles on that. You inherently know, managers inherently know which one of their team are pulling their weight, which are sort of not quite turning up for time, who are leaving at 5 o'clock dead on. Like, very— this is my first exposure to a C-suite sort of level of this, this company, and, and we are sort of figuring it out as we go. Yeah, I think most startups, there's an element of that. I'm amazed the visibility that we have as senior leadership to actually what goes on in the company, that I think when you're a staff member or an employee, you, you probably don't know they, your boss knows quite as much about you as you do. Obviously, if it needs to get into like performance management and things like that, we have a very good people team. One of our co-founders is our Chief People Officer. They're exceptional at then putting in that more structured like performance management piece, making sure people do it. I'm operating much more on a, yes, I want data, yes, I want to sort of know that the core is being covered to fulfill our objectives. But there is, you know, I'm sort of parroting myself, but people are more complex than that, and you've got to understand that different people perform differently. Also, if somebody is exceptional and then they don't hit their potential, I'm far more annoyed with that than someone who's not quite as talented, but is working beyond themself. It wouldn't be fair, I don't think, to, to judge them all to the same standard in that and, and have one person working at 40% but hitting their targets, another person working at 110% and hitting those same targets. It's just you've sort of got to just accept it's a balance.

Yeah, so we've now been through what is Homebox, we've been through why and how people can get into Homebox, and we've been, been through what to expect if you actually do work at Homebox. But as we come towards the end of the episode, if I'm somebody thinking, oh, should I sign up for Homebox? Should I actually use it as a consumer? A quick trailer of why someone should actually sign up.

Sell Homebox. Wow. Yeah, marketing reports into me, so I should probably be better at this. I think so. Homebox is As I said, it's effectively at the moment a utilities bundling tool. We're really set up for convenience. So it's, I'd like to get it within the coming months to one-click set up your property, put in your postcode, set up. There's a little bit more today. We need to, you know, you need to select what tariffs you want, who your energy providers are, who your internet provider is. But I think, look, if you want convenience, it's all your all your payments in, in, in one. So you've got that, that peace of mind each month that, that what's going out the bank is, is there, it's done. You haven't got sort of a direct debit for your water going out that you forgot about in, in 3 days' time, and you don't have to spend that time dealing with, with bills, setting up— am I on the right tariff, am I not, have I got exit fees? We do lots of, of other really, really lovely things, um, offset the carbon from your home Uh, we've got a partnership with a company called Canopy whereby we bundle your payments in the form of a subscription. So paying your utility bills, um, and soon rent— we're about to put rent into it as well. So paying the rent and bills actually contributes to your credit score. Right now it doesn't, so, um, as you start to build that credit profile for future— if you're a student, we provide contents insurance with Ensley at no extra cost. So just by being a customer, you've got, I think, £7,000 worth of contents insurance while you're at university, um, life, life perks. So we've got discount codes at high street places. I mean, I— how compelling that is, I'm not sure. I think lots of, you know, most of these deals are available everywhere, but it's in one place. Um, so that's the offering now. I think where we want to go with it, we, we're working with Zoopla at the moment. We've just built a new app, um, whereby we're pulling in all of the Zoopla listings in the country So, and then, and then sort of layering on top the Bills price for that. So when you, when you're actually doing that property search, you've got absolute transparency on how much that, that property is going to cost you, um, which is, you know, I think really valuable. You see the rent, but then you've got to do that mental exercise of what's council tax on top of that, what is, is energy. And we can, we can pull historic usage of energy for that, for that property. So you've got a very, very clear understanding of actually how much it's going to be. Um, and then, yeah, as I say, we, we want to build those long-term relationships with customers. So we are doing a good job for you, we're giving back that little bit extra, we're removing a massive burden from your life. Um, we've been working really hard the last couple of days to try and get the best fixed energy tariff in the UK. I think I'm sort of waiting to hear when I come out of this that this time tomorrow we will have the cheapest fixed energy tariff in the UK. I'd love to get to the position where we are offering both convenience and the prices that come with economies of scale and passing those economies of scale on to consumers. Right now, we're, we're probably— we're not the absolute cheapest in the market. You could probably go out and get cheaper on, on most of the products, but we're very much about the convenience and taking it away from you. In time, we will continue to drive down those prices. So hopefully we can be the easiest and the cheapest. And then it just becomes a, you know, it's a no-brainer then. Why, you know, why wouldn't every property set up their bills with Homebooks?

Yeah, there's someone who's lived in London for 3 years now as a student. I'm sold because it's not easy to work out all these things. And yeah, just, I would pay that little bit extra just to make, you know, it again, that convenience, like, you know, you've got so much going on in your life anyway, like these are this is not one thing that you should have to worry about. Yeah. And a final question to you. Yeah. Which I ask all of my guests, um, what is your definition of success? Because when you first, like, graduated from the university and you're going into finance, it's a big bank, you would have had some idea of what a successful career would look like to you.

Yeah.

Now with a baby, CEO of a company, like, what is your idea of success and fulfillment in your career?

Um, I don't know. I think, uh, if you'd have maybe 5 years ago, I would, it would have been very financially orientated. Um, I think as a, as a, as a young person, especially, we're in this like constant cycle of competition and, and you're competing for the best A-levels for the best university place. Then you're competing for the best internships, the best job. And kind of a side product of that becomes, I think, salary or bank balance as a performance indicator, right? And I think it's very easy to fall into that trap. I think probably a lot of the listeners are probably looking at that, you know, you inevitably get drawn into which graduate scheme has the higher salary, which law firm is the best. I think there's a point in life where I think salary and ambition are obviously important. I think I'm probably a little bit more philosophical. I think what's important to me is that I have something to strive for. I think it's that acknowledgement that the chase is actually more important than the end goal. It's such a cliché and it's almost cringy to say, but the journey is the is the fun rather than the destination. It's the, you know, pre-drinks are often better than the actual night out. So as long as you've got a big picture, even if it doesn't really come to fruition, the camaraderie as well, like startups working together for a shared goal as part of a team, is almost success in itself because I wake up and I don't ever get those Sunday scaries and you're never thinking, I mean, obviously there's meetings that I dread, there's obviously like times that you're nervous, but you're never there on Sunday night going, "I just can't face waking up at 6 AM and getting the train into work tomorrow." So it's not like a clear definition of success. I'd still love to exit this company for a really good amount of money and maybe be externally deemed as successful, but I know then that it would just be— that barometer of success would just shift further down the road, and then you go, "Well, actually, what's the next one?" I'm not secure enough to just go, I want to be happy. But yeah, I think it's a process, not a destination.

All right, thanks so much, Colin.

Thank you very much.

You've been great.

Cheers. Thank you.