In this episode we learn from Kerry Linley how to build a business that puts relationships and customers first, building a sustainable business that as it scales does not lose sight of the value of continual learning and evolution, putting the customer experience at the heart of everything they do.
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Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd, and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, and executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers in the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders, and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever-growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses.
Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Today really pleased to be joined by Kerry Linley from Rubitek. Great to have you here this warm Friday afternoon.
Kerry Linley
Thanks very much, Matthew, I’m excited to be here.
Matthew Todd
Cool. No luck was really looking forward to this conversation. And I’d like to kick things off the same way as we do with other guests is I’d like them to introduce themselves and their business, I always like to hear the elevator pitch as it were, straight from the guests themselves. So over to you tell us a little bit about yourself and Rubitek.
Kerry Linley
So I’m Kerry Linley, I am the founder and CEO of Rubitek. And I founded the business in 2018. Because I recognize that technology had a role to play in supporting and improving apprenticeship outcomes. So a lot of the platforms that exist out there at the moment are about managing the process of delivery of training.
And there was a lack of technology that could really help to bring all of the stakeholders together in an apprenticeship. So when you think about employers, learners, and training providers, so bringing all of those stakeholders together to improve the outcomes for apprenticeships, and that’s why we be tech exists. And I’m delighted to say that we now have version two of our software. We’ve got a number of training providers on board and employers and we’ve built a really good team around us are quite an agile and still young business.
Matthew Todd
Fantastic, I look forward to finding out more as well, for those people that maybe haven’t, maybe they’ve heard of apprenticeships, but not you know, gone through that process on either side of that. That equation, can you just give a little bit of background about what a successful apprenticeship looks like?
Kerry Linley
Sure, yeah. So a successful apprenticeship for me is one that is tailored to the needs of the learner, but also the employer, the environment that that learner is working in. And the reason that’s important is if you have an apprentice who is working towards a qualification, and as part of that qualification, they have to demonstrate competence against a number of knowledges skills and behaviors. If that learner isn’t getting the experience that they need within the workplace, to be able to demonstrate that competence.
There’s a mismatch for me between what the learner is experiencing in real life in a real working context, and what they’re learning in a training environment. And the whole idea behind an apprenticeship is you put into practice, what you learn. And then you gather experience and knowledge and skills over time. And then at the end of the apprenticeship, you demonstrate competence. So for me, it’s about making sure that the apprenticeship is right for the learner and the employer at the outset. And it’s about good quality delivery, and timely completion and achievement.
And a really worrying statistic in England at the moment is that only around about between 50 and 60% of all apprenticeship starts actually complete and achieve Okay, well, so if you think the cost of apprenticeships, and the vast majority of employers in one way, shape or form will pay that cost. There’s a huge loss of investment when 40 50% of your apprentice learners are not achieving and completing because they don’t go on to realize the skills and the qualifications that then stay in your business as the employer. So a successful apprenticeship for me to summarize results in completion and achievement and it’s tailored to the needs of the learner and the employer.
Matthew Todd
I see. No, that makes sense. So it’s making sure that match is right to start with but then almost not losing sight of it. What they’re trying to put into practice and need to be able to prove at the end of that as well.
Kerry Linley
Absolutely, because otherwise the apprentice won’t achieve that qualification. They weren’t past the end point assessment. So they weren’t actually getting the benefit from having studied for 2345 years in some cases.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. So big-time investment and commitment. So yeah, it’s obviously, you know, super important that they do get a benefit from that experience.
Kerry Linley
It is by all parties that are that have a stake in that apprenticeship.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. So what was it that led you then to, I suppose, firstly, kind of seeing a problem in this space that needed to be sold? Firstly, and then secondly, you know, why was technology important in solving that problem as well?
Kerry Linley
It’s a really good question. So I spent a number of years running what’s called a shared apprenticeship scheme. And that was specific to the construction industry. So the way a shared apprenticeship scheme works is the scheme itself is the employer of the apprentices. And it works with a number of external organizations who effectively have the apprentice for a fixed period of time. I used to call myself a professional jigsaw puzzle. Because through the scheme, we would effectively pieced together fixed-term placements to make more apprenticeships possible.
So it wasn’t designed to displace traditional apprenticeships, it was designed to complement and make more possible. And in running that scheme, we had an 85% completion rate in an industry that at the time had something like a 59% completion rate. So we were doing something really well. And because the apprentices themselves were placed with contractor organizations, so construction companies like Morgan Sindall, galliford, try Kia, some of the big names that were familiar with. It gave the organization I was working with, at the time, a really unique perspective on the challenges faced by those apprentices who didn’t complete or didn’t have the best experience.
Because we weren’t bogged down with and I use the term bogged down loosely. But we weren’t bogged down with the day-to-day supervision of those apprentices, because they were on a placement with a supervisor who was responsible for that. So we were able to see a disconnect between the training provider and the learner, and the training provider and the employer. Yeah. And all three parties very rarely came together to explore some of the challenges that a learner might be having, or some of the reasons for learners disengagement.
And, to give you an example of how that manifested itself, we would sometimes have learners that didn’t go to college or their place of learning. But it would take us six weeks to find out that they hadn’t attended that place of learning. By which time we had paid the apprentices wages would invoiced the contractor for the apprentice. And when we discovered that the learner hadn’t gone to college, we’d have to roll back payroll for hundreds of people, refunded invoices, you can imagine the size of the problem. And it just made perfect sense that technology had a role to play in improving the communication across those stakeholder groups. And also identifying moments of disengagement before they became real problems.
So technology’s much better at spotting things than a human being is, and, and identifying patterns in behavior. And we figured that we could harness technology to help us understand and predict before a learner actually became disengaged and left the apprenticeship early, contributing to those high non-completion rates. So that’s why I formed the business.
Matthew Todd
I see. No, that’s really interesting. And I think, yeah, sounds like it’s kind of a couple of different factors that play into that is that apprentice themselves and how engaged they are. But I was kind of especially interested as well through personal experience in that disconnect between the learning provider and the employer and the apprentice is the kind of the common point between them I imagined in in many different areas. on different types of employers as well, there can be quite a disconnect. And I imagine it could be difficult for that training provider to be even aware of that.
Kerry Linley
Absolutely. And if you think about the different age categories of apprentices, so you have your 16, 17, 18-year-olds, you then have sort of the 19, to 24, age bracket, and then 24 blocks. When you’re dealing with 16, 17, 18, 19-year-olds, you’re perhaps helping them understand how to be in the world of work for the first time. And those learners may, and I’m not saying everybody does this, but we certainly found those learners would tell their training provider one thing and tell their employer something very different, okay. And by improving that communication process, and linking up the triangle, if you like, we were able to demonstrate real transparency, in communication, everybody was on the same page, everybody understood the issues.
But we were also able to identify that sometimes it wasn’t the learner that was a problem. It could have been that there was a clash of personalities on site with the supervisor, or the learner didn’t get on with the tutor. So we were able to identify other things that contributed to the disengagement of the learner,
Matthew Todd
I see. Yeah, that’s really, really interesting kind of new factors and things could become evident. So I guess with that, then that perspective on some of those communication challenges and seeing technology as an opportunity to address that, how did you then validate that and take that forward to, to start to get Robotech off the ground.
Kerry Linley
So we started to build a platform. And we started to build a platform that would improve the communications process. But when we first started to look at this, we’d had, I’d certainly had a lot of experience personally, looking at this from an employer’s perspective. So one of the first things we did was, go and get a training providers perspective on this. And that really helped us to broaden the scope of the tech that we were building.
Matthew Todd
Okay.
Kerry Linley
So we got some early adopters brought some people onto the platform. So some learners, some training providers, and also some employers started to test the theory that we were trying to prove. And then that culminated, I’m obviously condensing Robotex history into a very sort of short conversation here. But that culminated in sort of the first version of our platform.
And from there, we’ve been able to see those positive results as a result of improving the communication. Yeah. And we’ve, we’ve just rolled out version two of that platform. So things have moved on, we’ve learned from those early conversations. And we’ve grown up a bit in the process, and obviously broadened our understanding of the issue was by having the input of the training providers as well. So we actually started off thinking we needed to build something, and it’s turned into something really quite different.
Matthew Todd
Okay. And I guess a couple of things I’d like to unpack first. Yes, luthier, what some of those differences are, and challenges were but before that, we speak to a number of people, you know, with different types of startups scale up SaaS businesses that they’re building, some of which come under the broad kind of category of marketplace, broadly speaking, that there’s more than one party involved in relationship that they’re using the platform for.
But I think this is probably the first person we’ve spoken to where there are kind of three of those different parties coming together on the platform, the training provider, the employer on The Apprentice, how did you? Where did you start with and how did you get enough of those on board to make the platform viable? Was it a challenge to do or was there kind of a single route to entry for you?
Kerry Linley
Again, a really interesting question and it reminds me of a few different conversations I’ve had with training providers where we have walked away from doing business with them. So because we have this sort of ethical underpinning to what we were trying to achieve, which was improved completion rates. Rubitek was never about getting bums on seats in a SaaS platform or a PaaS platform. We were about making sure we had the right relationships with the people on board so that we could prove this theory that was the right technology and the right wraparound support for a learner.
Kerry Linley
More apprenticship completions would be possible. So we’ve actually walked away from conversations where the training provider has been about bums on seats. Apprenticeships are funded. So they arise are funded through levy contributions that employers pay, or they’re funded through government funding. And the ESFA, The Education Skills Funding Agency is the custodian of that funding.
So this is an industry that is littered with compliance and regulation and rules and things that you must do as a training provider. But because apprenticeships are funded, we found that in some cases, particularly where we were seeing poor results for completion.
There were training providers out there who took a bums-on-seats approach. So we didn’t work with them, we chose not to work with those providers, and getting the three different stakeholder groups on board was relatively easy, because in order to complete an apprenticeship, there are those three different stakeholder groups involved, whether you like it or not.
And by showing employers some things that they didn’t previously have access to, so that they could see and understand the progress that the learners were making. That very quickly snowballed, and their thirst for information became evermore apparent. So whilst there may have been some resistance from them, at first to log into yet another system to see what’s happening with their learners, based on the information that we were presenting them within the platform, they were very quickly able to see how this could benefit them. terms of managing learners and getting those positive outcomes.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And in terms of kind of your business model, then who, who was ultimately paying for for the platform? Is it all three of those stakeholders? Or is it just one of them? Or how does that work?
Kerry Linley
In terms of the commercial model, we operate a per learner per month license fee. Now, this is really important, because if you think about those different stakeholders, and if you think back to the shared model that I described earlier, you could have an apprentice who is managed by 5,6,7 people in an employer organization.
That apprentice may also have 3456 different contacts at the training provider organization. So whilst there are platforms out there that exist, they may have a per user licensing model, okay. And if you think that’s a huge barrier to entry, when somebody has to pay for a license to a platform or seat in a platform, in order to make sure that that learner has the very best experience.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Kerry Linley
So our we have a number of different clients, and they are either training providers. And there are three different types of training providers, you have what’s called a main provider. And that is the provider that is responsible for the contract with the education skills funding agency. And they are responsible for the training, although they can subcontract elements of it.
So college is independent training providers. The vast majority of them are main providers, you then also have supporting providers. So these are people who subcontract to a main hosting provider. And then you have employer providers. So some employers have decided that they are best placed to deliver the training to those learners, and they’ve registered as employer providers. And we have customers in each of those three different categories.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I see.
Kerry Linley
But because of the model we have, there are no barriers to putting all of the support in place for the learners that go through the platform. And we felt that that was really important. So a training provider can buy the licenses and put in as many of the employees supervisors as they need to, to support that learner.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that’s really, really good. And I think that’s, you do see some cases of platforms that in a bid to charge more seats disincentivize people from actually getting the value that they can and should be able to get out of the platform Should I think can sometimes be a bit short sighted because then they don’t invest into it, they, you know, try and save a bit, don’t get the value from the platform and ultimately leave anyway. So you’re not getting, you’re not losing out on revenue, you’re losing more revenue because people can’t use the platform to get that value.
Kerry Linley
Yeah, you end up with models where you’ve got five users sharing one login. Yeah, it’s just it’s not convenient. It doesn’t work in a long term. It’s a poor strategy.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Agree. So you mentioned then that the platform that you’ve got now the version two is not like, version one, I’m interested in hearing what are some of those kind of differences and learnings when and what led to, to that evolution?
Kerry Linley
I guess the biggest evolution for us has been the production from using the platform to produce the information that then ultimately draws down the funding for the training provider. Yeah. So we started off building a platform that was about improving collaboration and enhancing the learning journey, so that the learner would have a more positive experience and would ultimately go on to complete and achieve. And what we actually learned by working with the training providers was that they tend to be working from a number of different disparate systems.
So an MIS System, a Management Information System, an LMS system, which is a Learning Management System, an E-Portfolio system, which is ultimately what builds the learner’s e-portfolio to demonstrate that they’ve got competent, and so on, and so forth. And by working with the training providers, we were able to pull all of those elements into a single system and produce the information that they need to generate their funding claims. So I think in the in the few short years that Rubitek has been a business has been alive. Our, the the expertise and the knowledge that we have in the field of apprenticeships has grown exponentially. And we’re very grateful to our training provider partners for the opportunity to get to get that knowledge.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that sounds like some great learnings based on what was already, you know, some pretty good kind of foundations in that problem domain. But yeah, like with many businesses and platforms, it sounds like you’ve really been able to kind of listen to, to those stakeholders and design something that’s really problem-focused, rather than, you know, whatever fits into that kind of initial solution vision that you saw.
Kerry Linley
One of the conversations we have with all of our clients is, when you join the Rubitek family, you become part of this development cooperative. And it’s the only term I’ve been able to come up with, really, but it’s about looking at the needs of those clients collectively, because they’re all they’re all trying to do the same thing.
Kerry Linley
And one of the conversations we have with all of our clients is, when you join the Rubitek family, you become part of this development cooperative. And it’s the only term I’ve been able to come up with, really, but it’s about looking at the needs of those clients collectively, because they’re all they’re all trying to do the same thing, ultimately, looking at the needs of those clients collectively. And making sure that Rubitek’s development roadmap really speaks to what the client’s needs are, and not what we think we should be building as a business, we need to listen to our clients.
And in fairness, the SFA dictates a large part of what we need to build, because their requirements change every year. Because we’re now producing information that the SFA needs, it has to be compliant. So yeah, it’s this sort of idea that there’s a development cooperative, and everybody has an input. And a say in what room protec does next?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s really interesting. And, you know, from that kind of product perspective and technology perspective, as well, then, you know, what, before we were tech, what background did you have in in technology yourself?
Kerry Linley
So I’ve use technology every day of my working life in in some guys or another. I’m quite old and learned to type as a 16 year old with an orange tied under my chin with pin sticking out of the orange it sounds archaic. And the pins were designed to make sure you didn’t look down at the keyboard so you became a touch typist. Okay, that
Matthew Todd
Sounds an extreme way of learning that.
Kerry Linley
It was an extreme way of learning. I sound absolutely ancient don’t I. But so I’ve used those skills every day of my working life. And I still do today and I you know, I’m maintained that it was probably the best grounding. Someone could have leaving school. It’s really helped We’d be focused and organized. But in terms of coding and development and building technology, no, I had no experience doing that. And it really took a leap of faith and a huge amount of encouragement from a very strong network that I had around me, to give me the confidence to take the plunge to do this. I am a mum of five.
So I have a very busy home life, lots of children, lots of responsibilities. You know, so the thought of leaving what was a well paid, solid, successful career, to start a business with all of the uncertainties that come with that was really quite daunting. But I had some great support around me. But yeah, in terms of building the technology, I have some very clever people in my team that do the coding and translate what we’re looking for, as product owners into something that satisfies the needs of those clients.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And how did you find that, to start with early on in that, that journey, that kind of managing those technical people even evaluating which ones were good or not good.
Kerry Linley
That’s a really, I found that to be really challenging. I didn’t. I didn’t underestimate how much I didn’t know. But I didn’t quite realize the enormity of what I didn’t know. Yeah. And one of the things that we did very early on was start to build the MVP was an organization that we’d been involved with for quite a number of years. And I’d had a long track record with them. And they were a good resource for us, they built quickly. But what I didn’t do is look at the wider market and start to think about future-proofing. Yeah. I went to people that I knew that I had experience with and built, we built together what we thought was the right thing at the time.
And with hindsight, I, what I should have done is gone out to the market looked at what was available, seeing the sort of the more modern development practices and built with that in mind. Because what happened quite quickly was, although we had this great product, and it was demonstrating the thing that we were trying to prove. So it helps with that proof of concept. We had to rebuild it. So we had to get additional investment to rebuild the thing that had I done it a slightly different way at the outset, we may not have had to do. So managing those challenges, I think was was quite difficult, but a huge, huge learning curve.
Matthew Todd
And I’m kind of interested in what was it about what they done. That meant it wasn’t like a solid foundation for you to build upon.
Kerry Linley
So if I can just highlight one particular thing that I think was a real challenge, and would be useful for other founders to take away. We built the platform, and we hosted it. And we had the tin that it was hosted on with the same organization. And what that meant was when something happened when something went wrong, if that organization had a an attack on their server, we had all of our eggs in the same basket. And that organization was may have been busy trying to resolve a problem. But it meant that anything else that went wrong, they couldn’t free themselves up to fix because they were so focused on the one problem. Yeah, had we spread our support network wider, we would have had more resilience in that. So I’m thinking about one particular day where the hosting site was subjected to a DDoS attack and that took our platform down. Fortunately, it wasn’t us that had the attack. It was but it was the the organization that was hosting platform, but they were also building the platform and managing our physical infrastructure. So that one problem for them, took them away from resolving or managing our services. I see. So I think having a broader network of organizations that support you is really important. Not having No all of your eggs in one basket. Yeah.
Matthew Todd
So that kind of distributed risk rather than that single point of failure reliance on one point, which can seem like a bonus when you’re trying to go quickly. But then as you start to get into production at scale things matter more if if something breaks.
Kerry Linley
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And we, you know, we learned huge, valuable lessons from that. And and we now manage things very differently.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. I see. And in terms of kind of growth of the user base and the platform, how, how have you approached that.
Kerry Linley
So we are still quite a small and agile team. Most of our customers, most of the growth has come from word of mouth. So we’ll work with a provider. They, it’s a very incestuous industry, as you can probably imagine, they then talk to the subcontractors and their other local providers and our customers, but customer base has largely grown in that way. It’s interesting, we’ve just literally closed a deal that we have been talking to an employer provider for three years. Wow. So three years and what we’ve done, and I think this is where Rubitek really comes into its own is, we’ve walked the journey with that provider, and we’ve got really gotten under the skin of the challenges that they were facing. And we, in the three over the three year period, we really made ourselves useful to that provider, so supported them in the period. And ultimately, that’s, that’s come to fruition. And we’ve we’ve just onboarded them, they’re, you know, a big name for Rubitek, we’re very, very excited to have them on board. But I think that speaks to resilience, really. And just making sure that you keep going and you keep having the conversations and don’t close doors, because you just never know when something might turn into a real opportunity that’s going to bring revenue into your business.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s interesting. I like what you said as well about you kind of being useful and adding value to them as well, during that, that time, what did that look like in practice, you’ll have examples of that.
Kerry Linley
And it was, so if the particular provider that I’m talking about wasn’t a provider at the time when we started to have our conversations. So it was a case of making sure that we passed on any knowledge that we gleaned from the industry. Yeah. As we sort of went along the journey, and kept in touch made sure that if they had any questions that we knew we could help with, that we were on hand to help with them. And that’s something that we do with all of our clients. So is making sure that when a training provider cut or an employer comes on board with Rubitek, they’re not just buying a product. That’s not what the business is about. It’s about making sure that I’m a very hands on founder, but as a founder, I keep in touch with all of our clients personally, and making sure that the team that support the clients have the right knowledge for those clients. So we you know, we don’t just offer the software, we offer a consultancy service, I sit on the advisory board for some of our training provider clients. And in doing that, you know, a bit like the unique position I was in with the shared apprenticeship scheme. It gives you an insight into the different issues that the providers are facing, which gives them all a way of sort of sharing the knowledge that they each have without necessarily talking to one another because some of them are competitors of each other.
Matthew Todd
Yes. No, I think that’s really interesting is definitely an approach I would advocate for as well. And I think it shows the difference between the founder which has spotted an opportunity in the market and is now looking to capitalize on it almost as quickly as possible. So very transactional in nature, versus one that’s genuinely trying to solve real problems for a specific type of audience and willing to kind of foster those relationships and that deep understanding and then as you say, the more you invest in that, the more you get back and the more you learn, you know, by just trying to support those people, even if it isn’t directly supporting them with the platform itself.
Kerry Linley
That kind of goes against what some investors are looking for in a founder. Yeah. So it can be a difficult balance to strike. But I think, if that is in your nature, and investors don’t just buy into products and services they buy into the team that sits behind the business, then that will shine through anyway. So hopefully, you will only attract the types of investors that can work with you in that way, you know, understanding that you’re not in this as a founder to build big and sell quickly and, you know, make your fortune and run away into the sunset, it’s about building something that’s going to be there for a long time to come and has the right foundations and culture behind it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it speaks to trying to actually have a sustainable business and sustainable growth in more than just the short term. And I think a lot of people kind of go wrong when they’re trying to, you know, either get things started or scale and they adopts purely transactional kind of marketing activities and don’t focus enough, if at all, on some of these elements, that kind of trust and authority building that, I think actually these days with social media and everything else is, is being shown to be a way that a lot more people buy anyway, is because information is so much more accessible than it ever has been. So people share things on emails, on slack on teams in conversation, whatever it may be. So you kind of have to respond to that and, and do the work of truly connecting with that audience.
Kerry Linley
I think, for me, technology, the quality of technology is almost a given these days, people expect technology to work. And that is it’s of good quality, and it does what it says it says it’s going to do. And therefore customers need to experience something more than that. If you want to differentiate yourself from the competition, so for us, our customers are not just buying the software platform, they’re really buying into the knowledge and the expertise that we have. And we share that with them willingly and freely. It’s part of doing business with Rubitek.
Matthew Todd
No, I think that’s, that’s fantastic. I love the way that you phrase that is just how Rubitek works. Yes, yeah. No fantastic. Are there any other kind of challenges you’ve faced getting things to where they are now that you think are worth, you know, kind of sharing with our audience.
Kerry Linley
You hear a lot about the lack of women in running tech companies. And whilst I can understand that I’ve never experienced any kind of sort of discouraging remarks or sexism, or I haven’t actually seen this as a barrier or seamless as a problem. But I have experienced the loneliness that there is involved in being the founder of a business. Yeah. You know, so when you, you’re managing a team, and I’m sure your other businesses will have found this as well. You’re the one who lies awake at night worrying about how to solve the next challenge or, you know, worrying about employees. So I think, I would say, surround yourself with positive people and so that you can call on that network when you need the support. Yeah. The other thing that I did quite early on in Rubitek’s journey was I secured a place on the whist accelerator program.
So WIST is Women in Social Tech. And we the, the cohort that I was in involved with started just before locked down. So we had quite a number of sessions where we were able to meet up in person in Harringay in London. And that was really invaluable because it’s so easy to get entrenched in the day-to-day operation or running of a business. And just sort of being given the permission if you like to take a step outside of that and work on the business once a week to resolve some of those early challenges with other people who are going through similar things. So you know, dealing with that loneliness issue, you’re in a group of other people going through a very similar challenges. Having the time to take a step back and do that was invaluable and I would really recommend an accelerator program. On to other founders, I think there’s a statistic that if you take part in an accelerator, you’re twice as likely to succeed. So the results speak for themselves. But yeah, I would really recommend that as well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And I think that’s interesting that it’s, you know, a safe space to kind of gain that personally forces you to kind of try and get that perspective. But also, you know, it is somewhere where you can share those challenges, because you can’t share it internally with your, your team, you. So it’s good to have that kind of sounding board and place to look for advice, as well. And I think those accelerators might not always teach you something you don’t know, they might, you know, force you to do a business model or customer avatar definitions that you feel like, you know, inside out or whatever it may be, but actually probably the most valuable part of of many of those is that network and providing that environment, I think.
Kerry Linley
Absolutely. And I think if you, I would slightly disagree with your last comment because I think there is learning to be had in everything. But you’ve got to turn up for it. So there’s always an opportunity. But if you’re not there in the right place at the right time, you can’t take advantage of that opportunity. Yeah, and you’re right, you know, some of these accelerator programs is just let’s let’s regurgitate what a business plan should look like. And let’s look at what a software as a service model might look like. And let’s look at a pricing model. But very rarely, does two people teach the same thing in exactly the same way. So if you’re sat listening to that presentation, there’s always something that you can take away from it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. If you’re receptive, and I think, like, you might know, like, a, you know, a large amount of the theory that they’re teaching them, let’s say, but I think then what it does do, it forces you to put it into practice. And that’s when the learning starts, then is when you actually do that, and then ask questions, you know, based on what they’re talking about, and what you’re experiencing?
Kerry Linley
And how many times have you watched a movie or read a book, and then you’ve rewatched it, or you’ve reread the book, and you’ve learned something a second time that you didn’t quite pick up on the first time. And that’s the same with business processes and strategy. You pick up new things each time you revisit something? Yeah. I was I was reading something this morning by McKinsey. And it said that startups rarely fail because they have a bad product. And I just they gave 10 reasons why startups fail, and I just picked the top three. So businesses run out of or failed to raise the cash that they need. They have insufficient demand for the product. So the product is good. Yeah. But the market might not be there for it. Or they got get caught out by the competition. And I think one of the things that an accelerator program will force you to do is deal with those three things. Yes, early on, and head on, you know, so if you make sure that you’ve got a good eye on the competition, and you have got the right product-market fit, and you’ve really focused on your business plan, straightaway, you’ve removing those three biggest issues that could be the difference between success and failure?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think product market fit is probably something a lot of founders convinced themselves. They have probably a little bit too early before they genuinely do.
Kerry Linley
Yes, I would agree. I would agree. And you’ve got to go and speak to the people who might one day be using your product and get their input.
Matthew Todd
Absolutely. And I think don’t be scared of talking to people that don’t want what you’re currently offering. Because if you’re truly problem-focused, than actually all that is doing is uncovering another opportunity where you just need to go a bit deeper.
Kerry Linley
Yeah. And that’s exactly what we’ve discovered. So by talking to organizations that we thought would be a good customer fit, we realized that they perhaps didn’t want these elements of what we were offering. But wouldn’t it be great if we could solve these problems for them? And that’s exactly what Rubitek has done?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, fantastic. And, yeah, I want to be respectful of your, your time here on the call as well, because I’m sure we could, we could certainly talk for a lot longer in terms of Rubitek and where it is now than what are the priorities that you’re kind of focusing on, on now as the business.
Kerry Linley
So we’re currently out for a second round of investment. And that investment is will help us build our team. Okay, so but we really need to be focusing on now we’ve, we’ve revamped the technology we’ve grown up, I use the term grown up a lot, we’ve grown up a lot over the last sort of 18 months, we’ve rebuilt the platform. We’re now hosted in AWS. So in terms of security, scalability, future-proofing the business, we’ve invested in those things. And we now really need to sort of build the team to manage the onboarding of new clients, and manage the management of those new clients once they’re on board. Because of that collaborative approach that we take with them, so we do things like hosting focus groups with all of our customers. And we need to grow the team to really harness the knowledge that our customers have, so that Rubitek can build bigger and better and meet those needs. So that’s the sort of the next big thing on the radar for us is bringing in some additional investment and growing the team so that we can onboard more customers and keep doing the positive things that we’ve been, we’ve been doing over the past couple of years.
Matthew Todd
No, that’s, that’s great. And I like what you said about growing the team to continue that learning process and engagement process that you’ve got going on, I think, you know, I’ve seen some scale-ups make the mistake of almost thinking they’ve either done that part or don’t need to continue to invest in it. Okay, now we know, all of these things, we’ve got all these ideas about what we what we should build, let’s focus purely on the building, or let’s focus purely on the marketing and acquisition and they almost go through cycles of we need to invest here. Now we’ve done that bit, let’s scale that back and invest over here. Whereas you know, what you’re talking about sounds like a far more sustainable approach, or no, we need to build the team to do all of what we’re doing just more often better.
Kerry Linley
Yes, or no, you know, I’m not suggesting that organizations should continue doing things that don’t work. But you hear all the time of organizations, when they start to struggle, the things that they cut as the things that can make all of the difference. So usually, the marketing budget goes out of the window. When and marketing is one of those things that it’s a slow burn, and it’s a long-term investment, you don’t see the results of marketing overnight, very rarely. And having spent 1218 months investing in that thing, why would you then stop doing it, you have to keep investing in it. So some things it makes sense to stop doing. But you’re absolutely right. I see far too many times when some of these things are almost seen as projects, and we finished that project. And now it’s on to the next thing. And you’ve really got to make sure that these that continued learning always is a part of the ecosystem so that you’re bringing that knowledge in and then enhancing what you’re doing. And if we yeah, we are not just not just in one area.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s definitely something that I hope a lot of founders, and execs listen to this takeaway from it is that importance of, of continual learning and building for the customer and changing customer and customer needs as well.
Kerry Linley
But I think my just to wrap up, I think my final point for founders of any tech business would be, make sure that the team that you have building, the thing that you are selling to your clients, is made up of a mix of people who will be using it. So roughly 50% of apprentices are female. Yeah. So it’s important for Rubitek, that we have a really good balance between male and female developers building our platform. Because otherwise you just end up with biases built in not because that’s been done by design. It’s, we can’t help it. We’re human beings, and we’re flawed. So I think really make sure that if you are building technology, your developers are representative of your user base.
Matthew Todd
No, I think that’s a really interesting point that a lot of people don’t talk about. Enough or think about in the right way. I think, you know, there are many aspects to diversity and we’ve had people on the podcast talking about platform specifically engineered for kind of helping organizations with diversity, but I think it’s one of the first you’re the first person that said the importance of having a team that resembles your customer base and I think that’s definitely something worth we’re thinking about for founders.
Kerry Linley
Yeah, it’s, it’s something that we have been focused on right from day one, it, it sort of runs through. It’s that silver thread that runs through everything that we do from a development perspective. And I’m very lucky, I know I am very lucky to have a team with the right balance with the right mix. We don’t always have the luxury of that. So, yeah, it I think it’s the one takeaway thing I would pass on to any founders of any tech businesses try and make sure you get that sort of silver thread running all the way through.
Matthew Todd
Absolutely, I think that’s a perfect place to leave it. So thank you very much for taking the time this afternoon. Really interesting conversation. And yeah, I wish you the best of luck with that kind of next phase of Rubitek, and for anyone interested in finding out more, we’ll make sure we share links back to your site as well so people can find out more for themselves. But no, thank you. Thank you for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Kerry Linley
Thanks, Matthew. It’s been great talking to you.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the Scale Up. Remember for the show notes and in-depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from.
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