Episode 012 with Roan Lavery, Co-founder and CEO at FreeAgent, a leading online accounting system

Speaker A: This special episode of the Broadtek podcast was filmed in front of a live audience at the user Testing annual conference in London. This is so exciting. Literally this is like a reunion. Just like seeing all my ex colleagues and everyone here today. It's so, so cool. And uh, hopefully from the trailer you can get a bit of a taste of what it is that we're building. I obviously cannot take any credit for how good that looks. That is Louise Mather over there and Jamie over there who make it look and sound so good. But we ultimately started the podcast because when, whenever you ask someone you know, what do you think of when you think of Scotland, Nobody says tech. Everyone says bagpipes, haggis or something like that. So we wanted to go on a mission to change that and just shine a light on so much of the tech innovation that's happening in Scotland because there is a lot of cool stuff being built and I bet most of you don't know about it. So we thought let's go on this mission, let's tell these stories of these incredible founders and really start to get the word out there globally. Uh, so we have actually been um, engaged with over a million people so far worldwide. Our top markets are actually the UK and the US that are engaging in the content, which is really nice cause we are a very new podcast. So with that said, a huge thank you to user testing for giving us this platform today to actually bring the broad tech down to London. So Rohan actually came down for four hours and is flying straight back up to Edinburgh. So we've both come down from Edinburgh but we're really, really excited to be here. So this is actually a bit of a full circle moment because as said, I was the first marketer here in EME, uh back in July 2019 when we're launching here, uh, in the UK and Europe. And Rowan was actually our first guest at our first event in Edinburgh. So it is really exciting. It's awesome. So thank you so much for being here. Rowan, how are you?

Speaker B: Thank you so much. I'm very well, thank you. It's been an early, early morning for me, but it's good to be here.

Speaker A: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. And we are recording this live. This will go on our channels and we will be posting this as a podcast. So if you want to get in front of Louise at some point when she's going to put the camera, then you'll be on our podc. So great. So let's just jump in and ah, just first for everyone to get to know you a little bit before you were the CEO of Free Agent. A little bit of background on your own please.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I mean, so I've had a pretty odd career I guess. You know, um, if I go back to. Even before I got into tech, I was a scientist, I did a PhD in condensed matter physics, um, and then decided I didn't want to do that one to become a designer instead. So it was a little bit of a pivot there, a career change. Um, but I think for me it was a guy I made this real wanted to do something that was, and I could be part of a team and I could build something that was going to have an impact and I could see that impact. And it was actually quite difficult to do that as a scientist working in a very sort of niche specific field. And so around the sort of like Millennium 2000, which is a really interesting time in the Internet, obviously it was just around the sort of like the burst of the first sort of dot com bubble, but there was still a huge amount of momentum in the industry at that point. There was a lot of exciting things happened and that's really when I sort of transitioned into I guess being a web designer. That's what it was called, quite an antiquated term. So these days. But it was the good old days of HTML and CSS and Photoshop. Photoshop is what we used to design websites and like back then and Flash and Dreamweaver and all those types of things. And so I worked for like a small agency, um, the training and web design. And I think I was there for like about seven years. And that's really where I learned my craft as a web designer. You know, the front end development and then sort of design and increasingly so where I think my passion sort of moved towards was into ux, what became known as user experience. And so I got really into that and around the mid 2000s you could see that there was this uh, shift in industry where it was no longer just people designing websites. Web applications were also becoming a possibility. Things like the uh, broadband had gotten good enough so that you could deliver fairly complex web applications over a browser. Browsers were becoming more sophisticated. You had these frameworks like Ruby on Rails, which is what free agents still built in today, which were starting to become viable so that you can build these quite complex applications. So that was something that around that time I became really interested in. And then myself and other two co founders of free agent back in 2006, 2007, uh, we met and we just Sort of like came together with this idea of creating free agent because we were ourselves were working as either freelancers or contractors or consultants. So just, we were also like one person away businesses. I was doing freelancing on the side, the other two guys were working as contractors, as programmers in London actually. Um, and so you know, we thought well okay, we need something that would help us manage our own finances. So we set about building free agent. And then the idea was that well you know, we find it useful, then maybe other people will find it useful as well. So we started on down that path and in the first, you know the early days for me it was all about being a designer. I designed uh, and built the front end of the, of the web app. And then over time I sort of like as a company grew and scaled I transitioned into more of a product role and then like eventually I was, I was a CPO, the uh, organization at that point. And in 2021 um, Ed who was a previously he was a CEO, he stepped down and that's when I moved into that CEO role. And I've been there for like four years now.

Speaker A: Amazing. Honestly when I think back to three years ago when I left ut, I basically thought I'll start my own business. And the worst thing about running your own business is the finances. I can't get my head around it, I genuinely can't. But um, can you tell us a little bit more about free agent and how it works and you know, what is the core problem that you're SOL in a different sort of way?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I mean, so we were online accounting for small businesses. Original. We started off and it was very much uh, geared towards freelancers and one person businesses. Nowadays we're kind of broadened out the appeal of the product a little bit so we catered to more of the small business market. Um, we sort of like talk about our four main high level jobs to be done and that's helping people sort of nail the daily admin, be better at business, relax about tax and connect their finances. And they're the highest level sort of like jobs to be done that we're essentially trying to meet with the product. And then it goes down to all the like, the things like invoicing expenses, taxes, accounts, all of that complicated uh, boring stuff that people are scared of. But fundamentally we try and tie it back to like what are the, the main things that people are trying to achieve in our business.

Speaker A: And when we're talking about customers and you know being at the user testing conference today so many People that are in the product design UX world. It would be great just to hear a little bit about how you're keeping the customers at the center of that build. You know, thinking back to the beginning, but then all through this evolution because it's been, well, how many years has it.

Speaker B: So in 2007 the company forms 18 years and obviously the company's grown uh, quite substantially in that time from the three co founders to nearly 300 people today. I think what I would say about that is I think that essentially is probably one of the most difficult challenges that a, uh, business faces as you grow and scale is how do you maintain that real customer focus as you grow your organization. Because when you're a small company like three, but even like 10 people, 20 people, it's almost like inherent in the business that everybody in some way is customer focused because you're either speaking to customers on a sort of frequent basis or you're sat next to somebody who is, or you're talking to them at lunch. And everybody in that early phase of the organization tends to be quite mission oriented. They're joining an early stage startup partly because they believe in the mission of what you're doing, which hopefully is to help customers in some way. I think what I've definitely observed is as a company grows and scales, people's motivations for jobs joining your business change a little bit. That's not a bad thing, it's inevitable. But people join a company that's larger or more mature for reasons like, you know, they've heard it's a good company to work for, it's got a great company culture, it's got, you know, it pays well, it's secure and they can master their craft and they can invest their, in their craft, in their own career progression and they're not bad things at all. But you can't lose sight of that other aspect which is like, okay, but all of that good stuff. How are we doing that in service of the business and in service of our customers? And so that is really one of the big challenges you have is like how can you support all those other motivations that people have when they join your org, but at the same time not drift so far away that you lose the ultimate sight of the mission and the purpose of the business. And you know, I think there's a bunch of ways, you know, obviously we've talked a lot about some of those ways, um, already they solve like today I'd maybe just highlight a couple of things which I think are really important and Essentially it's all about trying to elevate the voice of the customer within your organization as much as you can. And uh, that means trying to elevate the voices of people within your organization who talk to customers as much as possible. Now clearly that user research, uh, is one of that. And I think there's a lot of ways in which you can amplify the voice of user research across your organization. A couple of things that we do, all of the user, uh, testing sessions that we run, anybody from the organization can drop in on those and just listen in and they can sort of hear what's going on. And we'll regularly do sort of video playback of insights that we've had to the entire organization. So we do a company all hands meeting on a Friday afternoon. I'm sure most folks do a variation on that. And um, we'll regularly bring in sort of like uh, insights we've got from those testing sessions and play them to the whole business just to remind everybody that here's something that we've learned. But I think the other thing is that there are people in your organization that talk to customers all the time, like your support team. There's probably nobody else in your organization that uh, talks to as many customers as your support team. You know, our support agents will talk to dozens of customers every single day. The most user researchers don't talk to that many customers. Right. And they get incredible valuable insight into certain aspects of the customer experience. It's not every aspect, but certain aspects. And so one of the things that we do is we um, really try and foster and formalize the relationships between design and product and support. So we have regular meetings between our support team and we have dedicated people that do this within support and our product managers and our product designers as well. And there's really a sort of a two way conversation. Partly it's about the support team saying, hey listen, we've heard about this thing from customers. Everybody's banging on about this thing's a nightmare. They find it really difficult. They're getting frustrated about it and likewise the product side of the org and say, well we're thinking about building this. What do you think about that? Do you think that would solve the problems that uh, customers are talking to you about? And so trying to sort of build those relationships between, that's really important. And we do a similar thing with sales. So sales are another sort of part of the org that's always out there like talking to customers so that we have that similar dynamic. So I think that Is one of the things which I think is sometimes overlooked is there's not often those great relationships between product and design and customer support or with sales. And we've worked really hard to sort of like, I guess break down those barriers.

Speaker A: Yeah, getting out of those silos is so important if you're actually wanting to tie everyone into the voice of the customer whenever compared to people like, no, this is specifically my job. This is exactly what I do. I don't do anything else. Whereas having that alignment and just like shared vision of it obviously just must make such a difference.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's realizing that everybody is working towards the same goal ultimately. And even though people may have different priorities or, you know, KPIs that they're going to be measured against is trying to break that down and just realize, listen, we're all here to help customers at the end of the day.

Speaker A: And going from product designer to CEO, that's a bit different, you know, So I think in terms of, you know, that just that, you know, specialism that, you know, you're focused on that when you get to CEO, you are running a business. It's all business, you know, vision, uh, objectives, making the money, hitting the targets. What's that been like for you, Rowan?

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I mean, it didn't seem particularly weird to me. I mean, bear in mind like, that journey is mirrored by. We went from three people in New York and I was like, you know, building HTML and css, like web app pages, to quite a large company with like hundreds of people in it. And so. But I think ultimately having that passion for customers, I, uh, really believe in what the mission of the business was and I really believe in ah, things like design, thinking about user centricity. Those are concepts to me that uh, as I sort of matured in my own career, I just wanted to sort of broaden the impact of stuff that I want to have. And I think that's really sort of one of the things that I think is crucial about a, uh, career trajectory where most people go on is that essentially as they get, uh, more senior in their careers, they want to have more leverage, so they want to have a bigger impact. And for me that was like going from, okay, well I can do a really good job of designing this particular feature or this workflow to deciding on what type of features and workflows we would do as a company to deciding what the overall product strategy is to deciding what the company strategy is. And so it was just a natural evolution of taking the things I really, really cared about, but just applying them to a bigger sphere of influence. And that's the sort of the advice that I try and give everybody in my organization that uh, as you mature in your career, you should be looking to have more leverage in your role. You should be looking to have a bigger sphere of influence, whether that's just maybe within the design. Org you're doing work that shapes the future direction of the business because you brought in some crucial insight that's going to unlock a new strategic path or a new market or a new opportunity or something like that. So it's constantly trying to like push over that ambition.

Speaker A: And what about any big mistakes?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Have you made any over the, the 17 years? Any big, big ones you want to share?

Speaker B: Yeah. It's just funny because people, people always ask this question. It's like, you know, you build a relatively successful business and nobody's like, I

Speaker A: know, I just want to good things.

Speaker B: Like what you most proud of. What was the worst mistake you. What, what do you bitterly regret? And I think, well, I think, uh, maybe I'll answer it back to front in terms of what were the learnings, because I think somebody's in, uh, that last session that we had talked about this idea about one way and so like two way doors. And that's a really, really interesting concept. Um, I'm not sure if everybody's aware of, and I think it was originally came from Amazon. And the idea that we, you know, most of us here, right, we build software. We're not doing brain surgery, okay? If we make a mistake, we get it wrong. It doesn't really matter a lot of the time. Okay? And that's the thing. I think within organizations we spend a disproportionate, proportionate amount of time worrying about stuff that doesn't really matter. Like you launch a feature and it maybe doesn't get the engagement that you want or you do a, uh, marketing campaign and it doesn't land as well. You don't get trash. It's not the end of the world, man. It's always fighting. You just rework it. You know, you iterate, you tweak it, you try something different. Okay? And you know, most things, most decisions that you make, most things that happen in your organization fall into that category where it's like, you know, you actually probably spend more time worrying about them, um, than just doing them and then rating on it. Uh, and we call those things two way doors because you can go through and you can just come back. The alternative is that there are some things that are one way doors and there are some decisions that you make that once you've gone through that is very difficult to come back or impossible to come back. And the trick in being a leader is to understand what is a one way door and what's a two way door and worry less about the two way doors and probably worry more about the one way doors. Right. So when we talk about big mistakes, it's those things that when you've done it, it, that's it. Uh, in my experience those things tend to be something where you sign something, right? So it's an contract, it's a contract or it's an investment deal, maybe even some hiring decisions. They are the things that if you make m those things, it's very, very difficult to back out. In our case, at free agent, relatively early on in our social, we took some investment. It was quite a large amount of money for us at the time. Not by today's standards. Um, it took a little bit of investment money. But this was with a large SW software distribution company who basically operated in the target market that we were going after, the accountancy, uh, market. And they had years, decades of experience of selling into that market. And as part of this deal, as an investment deal, they were going to have exclusive rights to sell our software into that market. And that seemed like a win win. We would get the money, but we would also have this great distribution channel of people who had dozens of salespeople who had years of experience of selling into this market market. But the problem was this was sort of like maybe 2010, something like that. They'd never sold SaaS software before. They were a desktop software company and as an organization they just couldn't wrap their heads around it at that point. It just didn't fit their model of sales and so it just didn't work. But we'd signed this exclusivity deal which was three years and so we basically had to sort of like sit on our hands for three years. But uh, we could see the market taking off in order. Competitors were coming into it and we just couldn't really do anything about it. When those three years were up, then we could actually start doing ourselves and doing it properly. But that was one of these things where we just didn't think about like, okay, what happens if this goes wrong? Because we were just like, oh yes, it's great, this is going to be fantastic. And it was a one way door. We couldn't come back off.

Speaker A: Oh gosh, that's a bit heartbreaking. Isn't it?

Speaker B: Well, I mean it's like, you know, we managed, we survived, you know, but it's one of these things. It just is just that lesson of thinking, okay, I think somebody mentioned the pre mortem idea of like, okay, what could go wrong with this and what could we have done differently? Which is, I don't. Maybe we had some breakpoints based on performance of the partnership or something like that would have been a way that we could have mitigated that.

Speaker A: So one of our biggest audiences are tech founders. Um, all over the world we get really nice messages from people that have listened to some of the episodes and actually learn specific things that they've brought into their business. We've also had really nice messages from people that have been inspired to start businesses, which is great. So I think, um, it'd be lovely just to share some advice with any fellow founders that would be watching. Hello. When we published this. So it'd be great to uh, get some advice from you, Rohan.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, um, so this is maybe a little bit of a different piece of advice and I think this one is more relevant for founding teams. So if there's like, you know, two, three, four founders, however many is at free agents. I mentioned none of the co founders knew each other before we started the business. Like, I was literally introduced to Ed because he was looking for a designer. We met our CTO at uh, a, uh, tech conference down in London. And so we didn't know each other. Right. So one risk of that is you're gonna hate each other. And believe me, there were points where we did. Right. But I think the most important thing is that early on as a founding team, you need to have a conversation about why are you doing this and what are you hoping to get out of this sort of endeavor that you're going on. Because a lot of this, uh, focus and energy in those early days is on building the product. Right? You get a cool thing where to get out there, get to market, do the, whatever it is. And there's a lot of focus, focus on that. And understandably there's maybe not as much focus on what is the long term aspirations in this. And so I think it's really important that you have that conversation early on. And I think it's really important that you check in on a yearly basis on that conversation as well. So just make sure you sort of say, right, okay, we said we were doing it for this reason. This is where we thought it was going to go. And there may be loads of different reasons you might want to build a lifestyle business. You might want to just build something, scale it rapidly and sell it as quickly as you can. You might just want to like, you may want to run a small company, you might want a big company. And the crucial thing about that is that sometimes people's views in this change. You know, over the 15, 18 years that we were together as co founders, you know, I had like three kids, uh, all the co founders. That you have different phases in your life and your personal life impacts what you want out of your professional life. You know, when you're, you know, maybe single and don't have any kids, you're prepared to take more risks and you take more chances. But then when you've got a family depending on you, you're like, actually, you know, I mean, I probably have to think about this a little bit more carefully. And so it's really important that you're able to sort of like check back in with each other as you go on and say, right, listen, do we all still want the same things here? And if you do, then that's great. Then you're just kind of like, you know, it's plan A. If you don't, then, you know, you need to think about what the alternatives that are. So I think making sure you're talking about the, the overall aspirations as a business.

Speaker A: So one of the things that we always ask our. And thank you for all that great advice. I think that's really, really important, the co founder discussions, super, super important. But um, one of the things that we do always ask our guests on the Broadtech podcast is to give a shout out to someone somewhere else in the world so that we can take ourselves out of Scotland, which we obviously has done physically today, which is really nice. But we would um, yeah, just like to see who your shoutouts for for.

Speaker B: Um, so I think mine would probably be, um, a guy called Kristof Yance. Uh, so Kristoff, um, was a very successful founder of a E commerce business in Europe and Germany in like the 90s, like they were literally the mid-90s, like proper OG in terms of engineer entrepreneur. And he exited that, I think it was in the late 90s. Then sort of became an angel investor. Um, he was our first ever angel investor back in Life. So by 2009 he also invested in Zendesk, which, sure, um, many will know as well around the same time. So he did considerably better of the Zendesk deal than he did one, but that's fine. Um, and then he then went on to Found, ah, Point Nine Capital, which is a vc, uh, firm based in Berlin. Ah. And so, you know, he was a brilliant founder. He was a board member of ours for many, many years, and just a really great advisor as well, because he'd been in the trenches, he knew about tech, um, and he was able to bring that to us, to advise us on that early part of the journ. And now he, you know, he's obviously scaled that significantly to, to many, you know, other companies, um, and businesses around the world. So, yeah, that'll be crystal, I think.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Ron. So the last question I have for you is if you had one word to sum up your founder journey. And I know in the vt, actually Jamie Anderson did take about five or six words, but you just get one. Sorry, Ron.

Speaker B: Um, I get more to explain why. So the word would be transformation, you know. Oh, um, wasn't sure how strict one word was. Um, I think it's because I always say that. So being a founder is this incredible privilege, and it's not something that I take likely at all. Because if you're a founder that has the privilege of going on this journey that I went on, of going from like this little scrappy side hustle to a big company, you have the opportunity to be part of this learning experience that, uh, 99% of the population will never go on. And that can be an incredibly demanding journey. It will ask a lot of you and it will test you a lot. But if you're able to stick with it, the growth opportunities for you personally are just, I would say they're unparalleled. Like the experiences that I've had around growing a business, doing the funding rounds, taking a company public, being acquired, all of these sorts of things are just, uh, I do not take that thing for granted. Granted at all. And so, you know, you look at a lot of time, you think about the company's growth and the company's transformation, but that, uh, has to be mirrored by the individuals and the founders as well. And you know, sometimes, like, you know, uh, you know, I always say sometimes people outgrow companies and sometimes companies outgrow people. And both of those things can happen. But at the same time, if you're able to match the demands of the business as it scales and grows, there is such an amazing opportunity for you there to sort of like, develop. And you know, I think the things which, um, which my career now and what m. I'm able to do now, I simply would not have been able to do if it wasn't for the journey that I've gone.

Speaker A: Amazing. That's so inspiring to hear that, Rowan. So thank you so much for sharing all of that. So that's everything that I've got. Um, I just have a, uh, big thank you to our friends at User Testing. They really have. There's not many employers that once you leave, they still continue to support you so much. So I do really want to say a massive thank you to all our friends at User Testing, having worked in the marketing team and at. They've just been running their third event, San Francisco, New York and London. So they've worked really, really hard on this. A massive shout out to everyone at User Testing. As I said, Jamie Anderson was on episode six, if you want to check that out. Um, but yeah, so thank you so much to Rowan for coming all the way down from Edinburgh. Thank you to all of you for your attention. Please go onto LinkedIn, go onto YouTube, find the BroadTech podcast, please support us, please share. We're pretty new, so any support you can give would be amazing. And, um, you know, as mentioned earlier, I'm also the co founder of Flux, so if you're women in UX and design leadership, please come up, chat to us about that. I've got all our lovely ladies with us today, so please come and say hello. Uh, but yeah, just a last thank you to Rowan. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone.

Speaker B: Thank you.