Rachel Carrell, CEO @ Koru Kids

Welcome back to another episode of The Graduate Guide. Today we're joined by Rachel. Rachel, welcome to the podcast. So, you're the founder of Coru Kids, and there's so many different ways that we could take this interview, you know, both from the parent lens on careers and your amazing career. But I think I want to just start off by explaining what Coru Kids is, is about, what you do and what it means to you.

Yeah, sure. So we're all about childcare. We're building the world's best childcare service. And so we recruit nannies and we train them, match them, manage them, and through doing that, we help parents solve this incredible problem that they have, which is that childcare in the UK is super expensive, very, very exhausting, and hard to manage.

And was the intention behind starting it, was it the problem that you really wanted to solve, or do you think it was more you were so passionate about the, the solution you were building?

I was definitely drawn to the problem. So when I was the CEO of a health— healthcare company, I had my first baby. I've got 3 kids, and until then I really didn't understand what a problem childcare was. It was only when I had my first baby that I started to realize how exhausting it was and how hard it was to piece together. And so my first reaction was I looked around to try and find who was working on this, and I kind of thought, oh, I'll go and join them. And I was just amazed to find that almost no one was working on this from a kind of tech and product perspective.

Why do you think that was?

I think, I think a big part of it was that it's a very female industry, and this was in 2016, so the sort of tech product scene wasn't quite so developed and was a bit more male-dominated than it is now. But childcare is almost entirely created by women, as in that's who works in the industry. And also it's overwhelmingly the mums, the women who are purchasing, making the purchasing decisions. And so there was this, these kind of two worlds. There was the world of childcare and then there was this digital tech investing startup world, and they just didn't have any overlap. Like, they just didn't know that each other existed. And I was kind of coming from the tech product world and looking at the childcare world and thinking, what, what is going on? Why is no one doing this? And then I realized I had to do it myself.

Yeah, and I think your background into building this company, obviously you need to have identified the problem, but you need to have done adequate experience within the business world to pull it off because it's such a complex thing you're building here. If we can go back to the beginning of your career journey, so you studied at Oxford, studying politics and philosophy, what did you see your career as going on to be at that stage while you were still at university? Like, what did you expect of your career?

I wanted to be a diplomat. Okay. So I'm from New Zealand, and I think coming from a smaller country, we don't really have big businesses in New Zealand, sadly. A lot of the big businesses are run out of Australia. So if you want to stay in New Zealand, which I did want to, I didn't end up staying in New Zealand, but I did want to. If you want to kind of have a really great, amazing career, it's hard actually to do that in business. And so I looked to government, and I thought the most exciting part of the government— I don't think I would think this now, actually, but when I was kind of 16, 17, 18, I thought being a diplomat was the thing. And so I applied to the New Zealand equivalent of the Foreign Service. I actually did get an offer from them, which, you know, had been the— for years it was my dream. It was quite hard to get an offer. I felt very, very lucky to get one. And really unexpectedly, at the same time, I had also put in a kind of a chance application to this weird place that I'd not really ever heard of, but someone I happened to have known kind of worked there, and it was this place called McKinsey.

Yeah.

And now I think, you know, in my world McKinsey is somewhat famous and known, but I grew up in this small sheep farming town on the south coast of New Zealand, and no one I knew had ever heard of McKinsey except for this one guy. And he called me up one day and he said, oh, I work, I'm working for this. I remember how he described it. He was like, oh, I'm, I've got this really weird job. It was like how he described it because he knew I wouldn't have heard of it. And he told me about McKinsey and it sounded kind of cool. And so he said, would you just put in an application? And so I put in an application and, and then the more I got to know McKinsey, the more I liked it. And so I ended up with these two offers and I had always dreamed of being a diplomat and now here was my chance. And I turned it down. And I remember at the time that was quite a big deal because my family didn't know what McKinsey was. They knew what being, what being a diplomat was.

Yeah.

And they knew that I'd always wanted to do it. And they, they and everyone else, my old teachers, everyone was going, Rachel, what are you doing? This was your dream. But I, but I chose McKinsey.

And it's so interesting hearing you say that about your parents or people around you maybe not understanding how you're going to make that first step in your career. Being a parent yourself now, so your kids are a bit younger and you maybe don't think about this quite yet, but when you, when you look at careers, you know, with everything you've learned, I think a lot of people get attracted to the titles or the brand names and, you know, they struggle to just purely go through the curiosity route in their career. But what do you think were the benefits of sort of taking a leap of faith into something that just sounded exciting and different at such a young age. Are you glad you did it?

Very glad. So I have always been led by what sounds fun and interesting and what will open up options and create interesting, exciting serendipity in my life. I've never been someone who kind of strategically plans things, and I waited very late in my career to spend specialise in anything at all. And for me, that's actually been, I think, really important. And the job that I now have, which is a CEO, that actually pulls together a whole range of different things. Because when you're a CEO, you're doing something different every single day. And I mean, not just every day, but multiple times in a day. And you're talking to someone about finance, then someone about marketing, then someone about tech, then someone about product. Then you're going and selling something to an investor. Then you're doing, you know, talking to a customer, doing user research, you're really doing a little bit of everything. And so it's actually very helpful to have a huge variety of different experiences that you can kind of draw on. Although that's not why I did it, it just turns out to have been a really good choice. And so I would, I think I would be very supportive of whichever way my kids wanted to go. I had friends at school who went the other direction and they specialized really early they did, they knew, my best friend knew she wanted to be a doctor, and so she studied exactly the right things in high school and university, and she became one. She's always wanted to be that, and she's very successful. And if one of my kids wanted to do that, I would say fantastic, more power to them. But if they want to take the kind of more open-ended, flexible, I don't know what I'm doing role, I think that's, that's great too.

Yeah, and as in your role as CEO, I think It's interesting, sort of alluding to this accumulation of skills that maybe aren't as traditional, or like, you know, what in an interview you'd go like, oh, I've done this, I'm an expert in this. I think you'd call it more like emotional intelligence that you're building, and in all your posts on LinkedIn, especially with how you manage your staff and the people that work for you, it seems more of an empowering mission than a just like a purely like delegation for the sake of delegation. And from a student perspective, I think we're always looking for opportunities to be empowered. I think it's quite difficult to find when you're young, but I know you are a big hirer of graduates and young people. What is it you look for in the team you're building and the people you're looking for so that you can actually go like, here, like we want you to excel and do the best within our company?

Yeah, it's very true. I do want that, and I do want to be able to give people as much responsibility as they can possibly handle, but no more, because sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming if you get too much as well. So as a CEO, you're always thinking about that balance of support and freedom. I think what I want to see in students, above all, I want to see a fast learning style, fast learning trajectory, is so much more important that if you think of this sort of— there's the place where you start and then there's the slope of your learning, and the slope is so much more important than the place you start. I really don't care much what you— what knowledge or skills you arrive with. I care extremely much how quickly you learn. And then you think, oh, okay, so what, what makes one person learn faster or slower than another? Some of it is just like, are you really smart? Does your mind work quickly? You know, that like, that is a raw reality. But a lot of it is also about your openness to feedback. And so the best people that we hire, and we really look for this, they, they don't just take feedback. I mean, that is an essential to take feedback, but they don't just take it. They actually actively seek it and they seek it out everywhere. So the best people are constantly thinking about how could this be better, how can I get feedback from this person, and the slope of their learning curve is so, so steep. And one of the things I'm really proud of at Chorus Kids within the team is that we have many examples of this, of people joining in the most junior role and then getting just promoted, promoted, promoted, promoted, and now they're some of our most senior people, and it's amazing.

And I just want to dig a little bit deeper into how they can actually sort of show off this ability to to learn and fail and experiment. And at university, I think everyone sort of focuses on, you know, ticking boxes, get into the right uni, do a spring week, do a summer internship, and I think they can lose sight of different places they can just throw themselves into. Have you got like a case study of, you know, you're talking about somebody who started as a junior in your company and grew, just somebody that really stood out to you from completely out of the park experience that they did while as a student?

Yeah, I think I've got a few examples. I mean, one person that came in as an intern, I was just with her earlier today, her name's Romilly. She joined straight out of university. One of the things I loved, one of the reasons I hired her, was because she not only did well in university in her studies, but she also was a producer of plays, and during her studies she produced 17 student productions. And you hear that and you're like, wow, this is someone who can cope with, you know, all the disasters that I'm sure she had to cope with. And, you know, when you're a producer, you think through logistics, you have to deal with people, you have to— she has to be persuasive. And she was so under— she's so understated in her manner. She's not a dominant person. She's a She's a very calming, quiet presence. And when you kind of put those things together, you think, wow, this person is quietly effective. And I was so impressed by that. And that's one of the reasons that we hired her, apart from she's very smart, very nice. And anyway, so she joined as an intern and then we gave her a full-time offer. And then what she has, what she has done is she, she's been a model of what I was talking about before, just quietly but constantly seeking feedback. And every, you know, Every 3 months, every 6 months, you can see that her skills are just getting better and better and better. She takes on every piece of feedback that anyone ever gives her. And she managed to move from being an operations associate into a product manager track. And then she's just been promoted and promoted. She's now actually our most senior product manager. Wow. Within the space of just a few years. And I recently did her review. And, you know, I said to her, I can see you being a superstar chief product officer. Someday. I think she's got an incredible career ahead of her.

What is it you think that attracted and drew her to your mission as a company? And then the follow-up from that is, what do you think kept her in your company so long? Because I feel like so many people start off in a company and then look to jump around in order to, you know, grow their career as quickly as possible, but clearly you adopt this approach that everybody grows within the company. So how do you cultivate that culture as well?

Well, I'd love to ask her what her answers are to that, but we do try to make KoreKids a place where everyone can, can succeed and grow. There's a lot of different ingredients to that. You know, we try to make it a very positive culture, but one that is very focused on learning and development. So we have real regular feedback sessions. For example, we encourage people every 3 months to have a formal feedback session where they invite people they work with to come in and they can ask specific questions of those people and really, really get the reality of the feedback. We try to cultivate a real sense of team, even in a hybrid world, we're trying to kind of make it feel social, which can be hard honestly, it's an ongoing challenge. We try to have a real kind of rule of transparency around the company, so We are very open and honest about things that are going on, and we make sure that we have not only the leaders like me are approachable. I would like to think that anyone could DM me, but just in case people don't feel like that, we also have multiple anonymous ways that people can talk about things. Because I think it's— if people are going to be thinking, you know, or have questions on their minds, I would rather know what those questions were so that we could talk about them. And so, for example, every week, every Wednesday afternoon, we have an all-hands meeting where we update people on how various different projects are going. And right at the end of that meeting, we have, we have a live screen and anyone can ask an anonymous question and it appears immediately on the live screen. And then I'm put on the, on the spot in front of everyone in the company to answer the question that's on the screen. And sometimes I might ask someone else to answer it. And what I think that means is, what I think that means is there's— I feel confident that there aren't secret questions, secret worries, because if they had, if anyone had any worries, they would ask it. And it means that people know, you know, if they ask me a tough question like, you know, what are we going to— like, is this something— some project's not going well and they might ask a question about it, or what's going to happen with this thing, you know, and they can see my face, you know, I'm not hiding anything. And so it shows, the reason I love that is because it just, it really shows how transparent we are, we don't just say it.

I love that, and I think it's what we try and bring out of the people we have on this podcast, because I think students and people junior in a company can often look at, you know, managing directors and CEOs as people that they could just never relate to, you know, they put them on this pedestal, but really they've all been in the same position, they've had the same thoughts as you, and I think the more you can just increase that transparency there, like, yeah, the more you can just, both within the company and within the industry and the working world, you can adopt a, you know, a place where people can produce exceptional work and really grow together.

That's very true. I mean, another principle of the way we operate is We try to bring our whole selves. I say to every new starter, we didn't hire a robot that looks like you, we hired the actual human you, and I see no reason for you ever to pretend that you're a robot because you're obviously not a robot. And so we try to cultivate that sense.

Yeah, I love that. And I read a post of yours recently about how you went back to work so quickly after giving birth Obviously a lot of the people that you work with, your customers, will also have maybe tried to work straight after, maybe not taking that maternity leave. And this is a slightly weird angle to look at things for students, but I think there's actually probably a lot of lessons that we can learn from yourselves in that process of, you know, what is it that really motivated you when, like, to to really push through what was a very difficult period of your life and just keep coming back. Was it, was it that working with passion that kept you coming back, or was it a different inspiration?

I think it definitely was the mission. I really, really want to change the face of childcare in the UK. I think it's incredibly important. Childcare in the UK is so broken. It's so much worse than pretty much every other European country. The only country who's whose childcare system is worse than ours is Switzerland, weirdly, but it's really bad. But every other country has a better childcare system than us. And this has real consequences, you know, and I know so many people personally who have spent years and years and years working up their careers, you know, and they've worked so hard and then they can't, they can't do it anymore because of a lack of childcare. I know so many people who would like to have another child and can't because of a lack of childcare. I know so many people who had to move out of London back to nearer their family because it was the only way that they could manage childcare. And these are not like light decisions. This is not what kind of earrings am I going to wear today decisions. These are some of the most profound choices of a human's life, you know, like who's going to be my family? How many kids am I going to have? Where am I going to live? What am I going to do with my life? What am I going to achieve? These are fundamental questions, and I think it's a real tragedy that our childcare infrastructure is so poor that these decisions are taken out of our control. So I do feel really, really strongly about that mission, and that is like a burning fire for me that just keeps me going even when it's really, really hard, which it often is. I mean, I had a baby in the middle of a fundraise. It was really hard.

Yeah.

But there's been lots of other hard parts too, you know, building any business business is so, so hard. It's like pushing water uphill, and so you've got to really have that burning fire to keep you going.

You are taking on such a massive problem, as you alluded to there, and I think there's also a lot of other spaces that there's big problems, and I think it can seem so overwhelming to the point that you think, I actually can't do anything to change this. But, you know, for students that may be looking at an industry, or, you know, for me even, I'm kind of taking on careers, which I think is quite broken at the moment right now as well. And, you know, how do you actually start segmenting where you can have your influence? And, you know, what was your process when you identified that problem of, okay, there's actually something here? What did that look like?

Well, the first thing that we tried was a proposition that was aimed at babies and toddlers and parents for babies and toddlers. And the funny thing that happened was we kept on getting people signing up who wanted care for older kids after school. And this was for kids aged like 4 to 10. And the problem that these parents had was they finished work at about 6 or 7 o'clock, but the kids needed care from about 3:30. And this was a huge problem, and they kept on signing up even though we weren't selling that. And so that was our clue that there was this huge huge, huge, huge problem to be solved. And so the first thing that I did was I thought, well, who in the world is available to look after kids from roughly about 3, 3:30 until roughly about 6 or 7? And the answer, which to me was kind of obvious, was university students. And so the first thing I did was I put an ad. I think it was actually in the UCL job board.

Oh yeah.

And you— I put a free ad, so I only had like 20 words, I remember. And anyway, I got some incredible applicants and then I started matching them and just basically started manually seeing whether I could do this. And I thought, well, I need to train them. So I hired a freelance contractor who could do first aid training and they came in and we did a whole day of training and I used to make them pizza and pasta and we used to go and sit outside on the lawn and talk about their lives. And that was really the That was the start of KoreKids, and from there it grew, and we really grew on university students. And still today, university students are 50% of all of our nannies are university students. And last year, to put that in context, last year we got over 120,000 applications to become a KoreKids nanny, which blows my mind.

Other than, you know, the money a student might get from it, what do you think they're really gaining from doing this? Because I imagine there is so many things that, like, refreshing that you can learn from doing, you know, working as an au pair.

Yeah, so much. I mean, a couple of ones that, that people who've done it always talk about to us. One is they get, they actually get a lot of informal kind of mentoring connections from the parents, because remember who these parents are. They tend to be like lawyers, doctors, civil servants, you know, and they're in their kind of like mid to late 30s. They're kind of like 30 to 45 kind of age, so they're in the like at the peak of their careers. And often they, you know, if you do a good job and you get a good relationship with these people, they'll do anything to help you. And they're incredibly connected people. And so often people have said, actually, do you know what, I didn't expect that, but that was a huge thing that I got actually. You know, I got my job, I got my career out of this unexpectedly. Another thing that I think is unexpected is a lot of students tell us it's amazing for their mental health. Because they're often under a lot of pressure with their work and, you know, exams and all of that. And then they come along to their after-school role and they just get to bounce on the trampoline with a 5-year-old, you know, or they get to read a book or, you know, play shops or do Play-Doh or finger painting or, you know, whatever it is. And they get to, to some extent, decide what they're going to do that day. So I think the fact that it's so different as well. And, you know, the cuddle of a child, really, I can say from personal experience, can solve almost anything.

Yeah, I think it brings out like a playful curiosity in you that I think is really important to take into your approach of careers as well. And I think that, you know, you've alluded to how hard it can be to build a business. You know, in your post you talk about how hard it can be to be a parent, and I think careers can seem very daunting and difficult at times as a student, and you just think everything you're doing, like, it's not adding up to anything, you're not getting any clarity. But having that curiosity, you know, and that sort of youthful naivety that, you know, maybe a kid helps you bring out, I think is such a necessity. And clearly you've kind of embodied that in your career journey. What do you think your message would be back to your younger self or the younger generation about Yeah, just really pursuing your interests even if you don't know quite where it will lead to in your career.

I think, I think that can be fine. I think there's a bit of an argument about whether you should pursue your passion or pursue the things you're good at. And Scott Galloway, I don't know if you follow this guy, but he very much argues you should pursue the things you're good at. So if you're really good at, I don't know, numbers and like detailed logic, you should become a tax attorney, for example. And not because you're totally passionate about it, but you should do that and then, you know, you will find the interest in it. And I think there is actually something in that. I think sometimes the advice to follow your passion, it is wonderful. You're incredibly lucky if you can work in your passion. I get to work in my passion. It's a huge privilege. I do though think it can be a little risky, like, you know, you can then get, you can get a bit trapped in industries that are unbelievably competitive because everyone else has a similar passion and really insecure, really underpaid, and you can end up in actually not as good a situation. So, this is probably an unpopular opinion, I think it is easier to say follow your passion, but I would, I would think about that, honestly.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting lens to look at it through, and I think if I look at sort of my own journey doing a degree like history, it's for those people that the education system struggles to reward you for showing what you're good at, I think it might be less difficult, but your point about Really, it comes down to the misallocation of the wrong person to the wrong job, and I think that's a big— like, it's how I've started to reframe, like, the work I'm doing. Like, I actually agree that saying just follow your passion is— it is the easy way out, you know, and it's almost, uh, it's very unattainable for so many people. So I think my sort of follow-on question from that then is Have you always lived and worked with passion in your career? Because I know you were at McKinsey, the big corporate, and you were so glad you did it, you love the company. But, you know, what was the difference? Obviously you're working your passion now, between working with and without it.

Do you know what, the more I think about it, I think the real skill is being able to find passion in anything. Okay. Um, I think if you can find a purpose in anything, then you can kind of square that circle. So I remember when I was working at McKinsey, I did a project on supermarkets and it was about making the bakery more efficient. And you might kind of look at that and go, well, you know, what's the mission there? What's the passion there? But I remember at the time being actually quite passionate about it and saying, do you know what? 'If we can, if we can, if we can reduce, if we, if we can make this bakery more efficient, then we can reduce the environmental impact of what's happening. We can serve more people with less energy going in. We can get more people out on the floor helping, fewer people behind the counter, more people out helping.' So there's actually lots of great benefits that can come out of this, and I was actually able to connect with that, and I, I did find quite a lot actually of purpose in that project. And so I think that's what I would encourage people to do. I remember I went to a talk many years ago by the CEO of Dropbox, and, you know, Dropbox is the file-sharing app, and he was talking about their mission, and I remember kind of sitting in my chair going, well, this will be good. Like, what the hell's the mission of Dropbox? What's your purpose? It's like a file-sharing app. And the way he talked about it was so beautiful. He'd obviously like done this many times and prepared it, but it was about how Dropbox saves you these tiny amounts of time. And it was about how when you add up all these amounts of annoyance and friction and time, you can devote them to other things and you can make your life more joyful and you can go on. And he told the story about the mission of Dropbox in a way that I was like, oh, 'Okay, actually, yeah, I do see that. There is great purpose in that.' So I think that's the skill, actually, rather than— I think that the danger is everyone kind of goes, 'Well, I love football, so I'll be a footballer.' And it's— the problem is such a tiny percentage of people can make their living like that. And it's the same with writing, you know, right? It's such a tiny— so many people love to write and such a minuscule number of people can make a living, and there's a lot of phenomenally great writers who really, really struggle just because of the structure of the, of the industry. It's the same with a lot of arts. So I think it's actually more useful to be able to find a purpose.

Yeah, so I think you've sewed that all together really nicely, and I guess it all comes back to having the right mindset towards everything, you know, not just looking at something very blankly and actually digging a little bit deeper into what it could do to the world and what it could mean to you in your career. And it leads us nicely on to my final question for you, which I ask every single one of my guests, which is: when you first started off in your career, you know, hoping to become a diplomat, you would have had a certain idea of what a successful career would look like to you then. Fast forward with everything you've learned and done in your career, what is your definition of success in a career?

Great question. I, I think it's about joy and fulfillment and happiness. For me personally, it was also incredibly important that I have a family. That was very important to me, and that I get to spend enough time with my kids and that they grow up happy and healthy. And, you know, so far, touch wood, I think we're on a good track. And so I think it's the balance of those two things. And then I also always wanted to make an impact on the world. I don't think that needs to be everyone's definition of success though. That's, that's what it is for me, um, but I think you can— I, I really think this is a place where you can make up your own definition.

Rachel, thanks so much for coming on. It's been great.

Thank you.