Kathy Harvey (00:07):
Welcome to the application, the podcast series from Saïd Business School, featuring some of the extraordinary personalities who were offered a place on the executive MBA here at Oxford University. I'm Kathy Harvey as Associate Dean, I've been involved with the people who've embarked on this journey for over half the 20 years since the programme was established. This is my chance to reconnect with them and to hear more about their struggles and their achievements, personal and professional, and to learn the leadership lessons we can all take from these inspiring alumni.

Lucy Mullins (00:45):
Be energising but not exhausting because that is feedback I get a lot. So strong, kind, energising, bold at all important things in leadership, but not overplayed.

Kathy Harvey (00:59):
I'm delighted to be joined for this episode of our podcast by Lucy Mullins. Lucy is co-founder of two businesses, and they're both quite different from each other in some ways. The first is Stepladder, which is a FinTech platform for banks to give people new ways to save money. The second is a consultancy focusing on training, on coaching a new generation of professional coaches, and that's called Ride the Wave. Lucy, you describe yourself actually as an executive cheerleader, so what does that mean?

Lucy Mullins (01:37):
I do. It's lovely to be here, Kathy, and it's really something I've landed on as a bit of a personal brand for myself, a cheerleader, and also because when I trained to be an executive coach, many people didn't understand what the word coach was. They said, what are you going to coach me in? And having grown up in quite a sports world, everybody thought of a sports coach of some kind. So for me, coaching was about being a cheerleader and about cheering people on, cheering people up and cheering people forward, being in the boat with people and helping them achieve their goals. So that's where I came up with cheerleader.

Kathy Harvey (02:15):
Well, it's very well thought through, and I know that in both your roles actually as co-founder of a business, you have to be constantly selling yourself your services and everything about the business itself. So let's start by talking a little bit about Stepladder, because Stepladder was a company that you joined after you had completed your Executive MBA at Oxford, and I think it's fair to say that you didn't start your career in finance, let alone in FinTech. So how did you come to join Stepladder as a co-founder?

Lucy Mullins (02:57):
This is a great story actually linked to the EMBA, it was my classmates' wife's friend's, husband was the original co-founder of Stepladder with my current co-founder Matthew. So it's really one of those seven degrees of separation, and in this case it's four degrees of separation. And I was asked to go and have a chat with my current co-founder, Matthew. He was in the very early stages of setting up, stepladder had just registered the company and they were trying to go out and talk to the customers about these new saving circles that were being offered to help people buy their first home. That was the go-to market use case. And I was asked to go in and have a chat about how I might be able to help using my sort of cheerleader skills to rally the business along in the early stages and chat to the public about how these saving circles worked.

(03:46):
So I went in and it was effectively a consulting sort of coaching gig. For the first six months. I got on extremely well with Matthew and got very involved because of my background on the EMBA in the strategy, the fundraising, the whole go to market plan, and stuck my nose in everywhere. Within a year of doing a bit of that work alongside a portfolio of other coaching and consulting work, Matthew had asked me to become his co-founder. And so in 2017 I became his co-founder at Stepladder, and we've been on that journey together ever since.

Kathy Harvey (04:20):
It's interesting because people come to entrepreneurial roles from very different backgrounds, don't they? And I suppose it's difficult to imagine how you go down that road unless you have a burning passion to solve a particular problem. What was the problem that you and your co-founder at Stepladder were trying to solve?

Lucy Mullins (04:42):
Here in the UK it's very hard to buy your first home and raise your property deposit. And Matthew had seen in Brazil these amazing saving circles which are used all over the world. He had seen them and thought this would be a fantastic way for people to come together in a really collaborative way to raise money. And I'm sure we'll get into it later in the podcast, but we've just done quite an exciting pivot to a business to business model from a business to consumer model.

Kathy Harvey (05:06):
What do you mean by a saving circle?

Lucy Mullins (05:09):
A saving circle is where a group of people come together to reach their financial goal faster. And the best way to explain it is with an example, say, let me give you one. If you needed to raise 10,000 pounds, it would be a very small property deposit here in the uk. But say you needed 10,000 pounds and you decided you could save a thousand pounds a month, that would take you 10 months saving on your own. What a saving circle does is puts you in a group with nine other people, so there are 10 of you saving together. You all put your thousand pounds in the first month between you, you have 10,000 pounds, and then there's a random draw which allocates that 10,000 pounds to one member of the group that continues for the 10 months until everyone has their 10,000 pound property deposit. And in that way, nine out of 10 people get their deposit or their savings goal faster than if they'd saved on their own.

Kathy Harvey (05:55):
Raising money for a startup of course, is always extremely difficult and takes a long time and a lot of endurance and determination. I think the concept of saving circles is just not known in the UK, as you say. So how hard was it to get going with that scheme and to convince people about your idea?

Lucy Mullins (06:14):
You're right, Kathy, saving circles are not necessarily known in the UK unless someone has grown up in South America, Africa or Southeast Asia where they're absolutely huge. So there's about a billion people around the world using saving circles offline. But here in the UK when we first launched, we were faced with some questions of what is this and how does this work and what is a saving circle? But we could quite quickly shortcut that by using words like agile, stockville consortio, which are words for these saving circles in Nigeria, South Africa and Brazil respectively. So that was very, very helpful. And then in terms of raising money, I think we have been lucky and we've also worked hard and raised money over our six years, just over 4 million pounds over six years. And so yes, whilst it's a slog and you do have to be a cheerleader to yourself and others through the process, I think people can see the potential in this idea. And then we were encouraged by board and our venture capitalists and with our own ideas as leaders that really the place to take this, to make this big is to go global and make this a B2B platform. So selling into banks as a white label platform. So we've honed the platform here in the UK and it's been very successful. People have been able to buy their first homes, but there's so much more potential because people need to save money for things more than just their first home. And so we've been able to expand the platform for people to save money for anything from having a baby, buying things for the home, going on holiday, paying off debt, and able to launch it in different countries around the world as a digital offering.

Kathy Harvey (07:52):
So that's quite a different business model, the business to business as opposed to business to consumer, which of course is always a really hard nut to crack. At what point and why did you realise that really you had to make that pivot to accelerate your growth?

Lucy Mullins (08:09):
I think it's something Matthew and I have talked about since the beginning as big idea entrepreneurs and this idea of how can we make the most impact? We both care deeply about making an impact. And so I think it is been something on our mind since the beginning. But there was some financial regulation changes here in the UK about two or three years ago, which meant that it was just harder and harder for people that wanted to save money to join a saving circle without going through lots and lots of hoops. So it still works, but it's regulated as a peer to peer platform, and that just makes it a little bit trickier for the consumer to sign up to something that is effectively a simple savings product. So what we decided to do was really focused on these markets where we had banks coming to us saying, oh, you run digital saving circles, don't you? Can we use your platform? And so it was an obvious hook into us focusing more on a B2B platform play rather than a direct to consumer.

Kathy Harvey (09:15):
I just wonder, looking back as you were growing up, whether you ever thought that you would do this, how you thought of yourself and your future before you decided to take time out to study for the executive MBA?

Lucy Mullins (09:31):
I think I was living in a small box, a very happy box. I would call it the Oxford Box. I actually lived in Oxford at the time I applied to and got into the executive MBA. And so there's a great book that has influenced many things I've done over the past 10 years called Untamed by Glennon Doyle, and it's this idea of a cheetah that lives in a zoo. She's called Tabitha and she's been tamed. She lives within her bounds. She's not in the world and she's not untamed. And I would describe myself as being tamed and living in a box prior to doing the executive MBA, I saw the world in a particular way. I've always had an entrepreneurial spark. I set up a business when I was 10 years old, organising children's parties called Organised Chaos. And then as soon as I got my first car, I set up a business called Flab to Fab teaching aerobics classes.

(10:22):
But this was firstly in my village and then in the surrounding villages in Oxford. And I was very, very happy doing that. But that's what I mean about seeing the world in quite a small way. And then coming to Oxford to study for the executive MBA meeting my classmates learning all of these different things about social entrepreneurship, which obviously Saïd is very famous for, really opened my eyes to a world outside. And very quickly I think that entrepreneurial spark turned into a flame and suddenly, somehow I'm sitting here as the co-founder of a global FinTech business.

Kathy Harvey (10:57):
I wonder what your parents would've imagined you doing at this stage in your life. Would they have said yes? We always knew that that business Lucy had when she was 10 was going to lead her into bad ways of entrepreneurship when she was grown up or they've thought something entirely different because you started in, I think in university administration and before that you studied sports science. So it's quite an interestingly varied career.

Lucy Mullins (11:28):
It's an eclectic little path, isn't it? And I think that's something I'm probably proudest of is I like to do things differently. I think in my twenties and probably most of my early thirties, I definitely felt that imposter syndrome of, oh, I'm not this, I'm not that. But as I've got older, I am very proud of the slightly eclectic path. And I think to your question on my parents, I think really I'm not that different at all to how I was when I was a little girl because ultimately I've always been a cheerleader. And the consistent thing through everything I do is energy and passion. I've always done everything with energy, everything with passion. And if I get to talk and inspire people or work with people and ask them questions and then I'm happy and actually through all everything I've done, whilst they seem very disparate, I think that's the kind of cohesive thread through them.

Kathy Harvey (12:25):
Your positivity is really infectiously Lucy. Where do you think you get that from?

Lucy Mullins (12:30):
Yes, relentless positivity is something that I always talk about needing, and I'm lucky to have an abundance. It's a combination. I think I'm lucky with my genes. My family are all, we're very grateful as a family. I'd say it's a big family trait. I think it's partly genetic and then it's topped up with a very healthy dose of endorphins from exercise. I think exercise is my medicine.

Kathy Harvey (12:56):
You really believe that exercise is what helps you top up that energy. That's really interesting.

Lucy Mullins (13:03):
Absolutely, absolutely essential. If there's something wrong, most things can be cured with a good night's sleep, a large bottle of water and some exercise. So that's my magic prescription for health and energy.

Kathy Harvey (13:15):
You are very positive and optimistic as a person, but I know that you must have had your own challenges and failures along the way, and there may still be more to come of course. But looking back so far, how do you reflect on the failures that made you what you are as well as some of the successes?

Lucy Mullins (13:35):
And there have been many failures from the smaller ones where I think I've had a great idea for an email campaign and we send it out to 70,000 people in the database and nobody opens it. And actually that hurts, even though it doesn't seem that important. That's failed. We've wasted time. I had this great idea to print all these amazing cards to wish everyone happy 2020, and you can imagine what happened to those. I gave them to my nieces so they could draw pictures on the back of them so they didn't get wasted. But every time I see those cards, I just think this was what a stupid idea. So smaller things like that through to something I failed at very young, which I think has had a big impact on my life in an unexpected way, is that I went to ballet classes as many little girls do when they are five years old. And I dropped out after two classes because I didn't like to have to perform or do anything on my own. And the person I am now looks back and thinks how crazy I love to perform, but I was very, very shy. And so I dropped out and I actually love dancing and in a different life, I would love to be a dancer. So I go to the West End a lot, I watch people dancing, and I think, wow, you failed. I think you could have been on stage. I would love to have been on stage, but I didn't pursue that and that feels like I failed on that side, but it's given me this whole other life in which to experiment with and fail in different ways. So of course it is always exciting to fail and see where you end up. But I guess that's something I sort of slightly hold onto is, oh, could I have been on stage?

Kathy Harvey (15:11):
Well, there's still time, Lucy, there's still time, but you never know. The other thing we talk about a lot at business school is leadership, different kinds of leadership. And I wonder whether, for you, what is it for you that you think about when you think of a good leader or somebody that you really admire?

Lucy Mullins (15:34):
So I think there's really two types of leadership today, and one element of this I love is that anybody can be a leader. You can get a social media account and you can be a thought leader. And leadership for me is about inspiring people. And anybody now can inspire, and I love that you don't have to be in a position of power or old fashioned authority to be a leader. And then I think there's an elevated level of leadership where you're also taking responsibility. And for me, my co-founder Matthew, is incredible at that and is a shining example of how to really take the pressure off of people and lay your head and heart on the line alongside inspiring people is to really take the weight and shoulder the weight of responsibility. So I think on one hand it's the inspiring and that's easier to do, but then there's the making the really hard decisions and sticking by them.

(16:26):
Something I keep to the side of my desk for leadership is be strong but not overpowering. Be kind, but not soft. Be bold but not arrogant and be humble but not timid. I think they edited it. It's not originally how I read it, but I sort of added to it. And then I've got another one in brackets, which is specifically for me is be energising but not exhausting because that is feedback I get a lot. So that's my kind of little cheat sheet when I think how do I need to be? And I think strong, strong, kind, energising, bold at all important things in leadership, but not overplayed.

Kathy Harvey (17:02):
So this is all good advice for all of us I suppose. But if you look back to the kind of person you were before you became an entrepreneur and you were now giving that person advice, what would you say?

Lucy Mullins (17:18):
I think be bold is the first thing that comes to mind. I think that's particularly important for certain personality types. I'm sort of tempted to say women there, but I think we can get into an interesting conversation. I think women more often have a personality which may suffer from imposter syndrome, but that's not to say many men can as well. So I think be bold. And also something that I've really lent into in the last seven or eight years is know your superpowers, know your strengths, things that come easily to you don't come easily to others. And so it's easy to look at somebody else and say, oh, they're really good at that. I wish I was good at that. But you forget that what you are very good at, you don't think it's hard, and actually what you're very good at is probably very hard for many other people. So I think the sooner you can lean into your superpowers and know what you're good at, the faster you can accelerate what you're meant to do in life.

Kathy Harvey (18:13):
This is all very good for a coaching conversation. Of course. I'm thinking what you've learned most from the conversations you've had without obviously giving away any confidences, but many people seek out advice from a coach now, and I wonder if the issues can all be put in two or three buckets or whether the issues are as varied as the people who bring them to you.

Lucy Mullins (18:38):
I think at one level the issues are as varied as the people, but ultimately it's ourselves that get in the way of ourselves. And so in that regard, it's removing those self-limiting beliefs. And I always come back to understanding where is it you want to get to? And then very simply, how are we going to remove those obstacles? It's like sending a rocket to space, Kathy. It's how do you fuel it up with all that sort of positivity, motivation and want to go somewhere, but then also how do you remove the friction so it can get there? And so that's often how I think about a coaching conversation.

Kathy Harvey (19:16):
Well, this leads on to my final question for you. So I want you to close your eyes and think back to when you filled in the application form to become an executive MBA student at Oxford, because I don't know if you remember it, but you were essentially giving us an idea of how you wanted to view your future. So imagine now that you are writing your application form for the next 10 years of your life, what will you write?

Lucy Mullins (19:48):
Wow, how long do I have to answer this question? I need to think about this. I think I would come back to three of my core values, which are freedom, impact, and passion. And so it's bringing those three things together to, I talk a lot about joining the dots, not only with people, but ideas. And so I think for me, the next 10 years is about I've met some amazing people, many of whom did the executive MBA with me and had some amazing opportunities. And I think it's about drawing those things together and innovating into something new. And I'm not sure where that's going to take me, but one thing for sure, it's going to involve cheerleading and energy as the sort of continuing thread.

Kathy Harvey (20:39):
When you were part of your executive MBA class, we now have a much higher proportion of women in the class, but in those days it was mainly male. And you were in a sense, from a background, quite different from many of the people in the class along with the gender differences. How did all those differences affect you? What did you get from them? How difficult or how easy did you find it? For many people going into a situation like that would be extremely daunting.

Lucy Mullins (21:12):
I think day one was extremely daunting because most people were a bit older than me, and in my mind, everyone was much cleverer than me and had way more experience that more so than the gender thing, I would say was very intimidating. And in terms of the gender thing, I think really there were 55 different personalities. You could say it was 50 men and five women, or you could say there were 55 different personalities. And as you do in any group, there were certain people that I just got on immediately with and others that were a bit more standoffish. And I think that was completely unrelated to gender and much more about personality. So I tend to come back to that sort of personality as who is this person? How do they see the world? Do we gel and say, what I really gained is sort of 50 big brothers. I often say from the course, and we are still all great friends to this day, so 13 years later, and yeah, it was an extraordinary experience.

Kathy Harvey (22:13):
Lucy, it's been a real pleasure talking to you, and we will watch Stepladder and your journey as a leader with great interest. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Kathy. You've been listening to the application from Oxford University's Saïd business school. You can catch up with all our episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to know more about Saïd Business School, take a look at the Oxford Answers section on our website or check out the programme pages for more inspiring stories about our executive MBA alumni. The Application is produced by Philippa Goodrich and Oxford Digital Media. I'm Kathy Harvey, Associate Dean at Saïd Business School. Thank you for listening.

(23:05):
What's your favourite form of exercise?

Lucy Mullins (23:09):
It has to be Barry's Bootcamp, dark room, flashing lights, somebody shouting loudly at me. Most people's idea of hell, but it works for me.

Kathy Harvey (23:18):
I think I might leave that one to you, Lucy.