Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers, I’m Elliot Moss and today we have a very special Encore Edition of Jazz Shapers. That means, alongside super music from the shapers of Jazz, Soul and Blues, we are welcoming back a past Business Shaper, no less than Alex Depledge, Co-Founder of both Hassle.com, the home cleaner booking website and Resi, the home improvement platform and it’s much bigger, you’re going to hear all about that than even Hassle.com was. Alex last joined us in April 2017 so there is a fair amount of catching up to do. The spur to starting both these businesses came from first-hand experience. Alex’s friend, now business partner Jules Coleman, couldn’t find the local service provider she needed. Alex and Jules launched their online platform connecting customers with 27 types of local services, later narrowing their focus, as Hassle.com to reference vetted cleaners. After growing Hassle.com internationally and selling it in a multi-million pound deal in 2015, they had a second major lightbulb moment while finding their experience of home renovations painfully unsupported. They launched Resi in 2016, an all in one home improvement platform covering design, planning, building regulations and project financing. “I came back into business,” Alex say, “partly because I wanted to prove I wasn’t a one hit wonder but most of all to carry on this journey of redesigning what work should look like for men and women in the 21st Century.”
Alex Depledge is my Business Shaper here on this Encore Special. As she walked in the door, it was like four years just melted away. You are very…
Alex Depledge
Such a charmer.
Elliot Moss
I am. You’re such a memorable person, I mean, you’re very opiniated if I recall, or rather you’re vocal.
Alex Depledge
Yeah and I’ve also got quite a broad dialect that carries so you put all those things together and I’m like a foghorn basically.
Elliot Moss
A very effective and clever foghorn because this foghorn in front of me has not created one business but two and exited one already and five years ago, set up number two which was actually, as we look at it, Resi, which I want to talk about a lot today but more generally the… I think there’s all sorts of things around what Government’s doing and what private businesses are doing and I know historically you have been very involved in that intersection but you only actually spent a year not working between one sale and another startup. Is that about right?
Alex Depledge
I don’t even know if it was a year to be quite honest. We sold July 2015, I left that business Christmas Eve of the same year so not even six months later and then, yeah, the whole of 2016 I only didn’t work for maybe like four or five months because then I started working part-time at Index Ventures just, you know, doing a bit of deal flow analysis and generally just mincing around the office, technically.
Elliot Moss
You were called Entrepreneur in Residence.
Alex Depledge
I know.
Elliot Moss
That sounds like a proper title.
Alex Depledge
It’s so grandiose though isn’t it.
Elliot Moss
What does that actually mean?
Alex Depledge
I dunno.
Elliot Moss
You still don’t know?
Alex Depledge
No, I mean, basically I used to just go to a few meetings, meet interesting companies, like chat to the guys who were like super smart, I mean it was great for me because it gave me a chance to sit on the opposite side of the table so instead of being like invested in, I was considering what investments Index might make and that was really interesting to see the way those guys, you know, for and just see a broad variety of businesses that I wouldn’t have like had a chance to because I’m very consumer focussed. So I did that and I think broadly the idea of an Entrepreneur in Residence is you sort of think and come up with another business. You just do it inside someone else’s business but so I guess in that sense I was very successful because Resi did come out of that time of sitting in Index’s offices.
Elliot Moss
And before the sitting in the Index offices bit, at that time when we met you’d exited from Hassle.com…
Alex Depledge
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Just remind me about Hassle and how you got down from the massive focus of what Hassle.com was about to a very singular one. Is that a general theme in your life now as an entrepreneur and somebody who has done this a few times that actually the focus is what makes things work?
Alex Depledge
Yeah and I mean I can come onto like how that differs at Resi but yeah, I think ultimately when you lose focus that’s when things always go wrong so with Hassle we broadly wanted to be a marketplace, a bit like Amazon is for goods, we wanted to be that for services but like local services, like you know tutor, gardener, cleaner so we had like twenty different services when we first started and it’s really hard to understand the consumer problem twenty times, I mean it’s hard to figure out once but to try and do it for every single service and then market and speak to that, I think we were just very naïve and it was really a lightbulb moment when we looked at our web traffic and what was actually converting on the site, we found that, you know, one in four customers were searching for a cleaner, we didn’t have any cleaners because they are really difficult to come by because they exist in the black market and even now it’s still true and that was like the uh, ah moment, you know, people need good cleaners, they’re difficult to find, let’s build a solution that tackles that and, you know, it doesn’t sound very revolutionary now we sit here in 2021 and everyone’s getting Ubers everywhere but, you know, back in 2011 when we first started, there wasn’t really, you know, the iPhone was in it’s infancy. Do you remember when you used to get Zero and E before you got 3G? I mean, that’s like how long ago it was so, you know, at the time having a platform where you could book a person to come to your home and do a said thing was, I swear, quite innovative.
Elliot Moss
Well I want to talk about innovation and the pressures on the innovation world to come up with new stuff, especially with the technology and speed of technology as we’ve been witnessing in that ten year period.
Alex Depledge is my Business Shaper. She’s back for more, four years after we first met and you were an MBE then, which we just discovered, you’d already been made one. You were doing a lot at the time apart from being busy running businesses and all that and focussing and pivoting and all the clever things that end up meaning that you get a, you know, you get to enjoy your life after you stop being on the merry-go-round, you were doing a lot of things which I think struck me then and it strikes me now again as talking about you being interested in the world and people beyond making a buck, so the things like Entrepreneur in Residence, we talked about that but that’s more commercial, the Chair for the Coalition for Digital Economy back at the time you were a Board Member of the Sharing Economy in the UK and I remember, I think what you said then was, look we’re trying to educate the Civil Service, we’re leaving the European Union which of course at that time, 2017, was happening and now it’s happened, we’re going to need to be ready and the Civil Service need to understand business and I’ve spoken to a number of people sitting where you’re sitting now about the interface between Government and between business. We’re now in 2021, we were just mentioning technology and its pace, the Government produced a White Paper in the summer on innovation, everyone is talking about the next thing, whether it’s crypto or whether it’s AI, whether it’s data science. Where are you in all of that? You, personally, Alex now in relation to how you feel and how invested you are in still trying to make the Government understand what great policy looks like for entrepreneurs?
Alex Depledge
Look, I’ll be really honest, I absolutely 100% withdrew sort of 2017 onwards from that world. Really I think because I just got exasperated and realised that the challenge was so much greater than me and like what could I actually achieve and I actually instead refocussed my attention more locally so I ended up joining Sadiq Khan’s Business Board, so the London Leap, or LEP which is basically, essentially there’s lots of them all over the country and they’re there to encourage good growth and you get, you know, a budget every year and you invest it in CapEx and revenue type projects to drive growth and community and cohesion and things like that, so I joined that Board, I actually left in March this year before Sadiq got re-elected and I really enjoyed that actually because it was A) political, like I know that Sadiq’s a Labour Mayor and doesn’t really matter what you think about Sadiq but what I liked about that Board is it was 50% business, 50% politicians or local councillors but everyone had the same mission and it really was to make London a better place to live and do business and so I can walk round London now and, you know, go down to Battersea or go down into Peckham and point to theatres or mobile kitchens or small community projects that we funded and it felt really good so I spent my time doing that to be quite honest because it felt like, and I still, and I feel like we’re just coming out of it now, it felt like we needed that whole Brexit thing to wash through. Do you know what I mean by that? Just like kind of let everyone get it out of their system, stop being so bitter and divided, whatever side of the fence you were at, and like then come back around the table and like let’s actually focus on the UK. Sadly that kind of got lost when Covid hit because then we got another crisis so that the reason I say this now is I feel like, hopefully, there are no more crisis coming our way and we can get back to governing, like, and you know the things, the structural things that actually matter like the NHS, like infrastructure, like building houses, you know better planning, better education, because that stuff, basically has frozen since 2016 and that’s what five years ago, that’s a long time to miss out.
Elliot Moss
But Alex, the conversation we are having, what you’re saying now is all about how important it is to you that Government and governing is done properly, that you can make a local impact, you can do whatever you want. You still, to me, have a very public oriented view of the world. Many entrepreneurs will just say, I do my thing and I’m very happy and my business has a purpose and I will go and do it. This is much broader. Where, I don’t remember asking you at the time – it’s quite hard to remember a conversation four years ago but I have a relatively good memory – where does that publicness come from in you? Where do you think… who inculcated it in you?
Alex Depledge
Um, I don’t really know, I just think I’ve always had a really, really strong sense of fairness, like what is right and wrong and I guess, as I was doing Hassle and then onwards, you start to realise that if you have a slightly public platform, you’re wasting it if you don’t use it but also you are, you are being a quite selfish person if you don’t use it for a better end and to be quite honest, money has never, ever driven me but making something better does drive me and so everything that I’ve done, I’ve done it with some sort of social purpose. With Hazzle, bizarrely, you know you can kind of say how exciting can you get about cleaning but for me it was really all about the vast majority of people who clean in the UK and the world over are women, the vast majority have children and find it hard to work and maintain some sort of childcare and they’re living you know on minimum wage so, for me, it was all about creating, you know, a fruitful, save environment that they could operate outside the black market so that they were safe and they were getting regular income. With Resi, for me, it’s you know, I love this, every time I open the paper, somebody is commenting on the fact that we don’t manage to build 250,000 new homes in UK and I want to scream and I mean this, it’s not about new homes, there are 26 million existing homes in the UK that no one seems to care about and yet they are one of the heaviest emitters, you know 40% of our emissions come from our homes because they are leaky, they are old, that’s more than the airline industry and yet we’re going on about the airline industry all the time and the carbon emissions so that’s the first thing. The second thing I found absolutely fascinating when I started Resi is, there wasn’t one data driven or scientific investigation into what makes a good design of a home. So, not does it look good, not is it valuable to, you know, cheap and sturdy and safe but actually like how do you make someone’s home a happy place to live, like enhance their wellbeing, get the right amount of public and private, tranquil and social space, light, all that sort of… there just wasn’t anything done on it and that made me think that like, we’re not building very good houses at the moment so do I care about the 250,000 that we don’t seem to build every year? Not really because they’re not up to much cop but I do think that we should focus on refining and reforming the way and the design of houses, including the existing stock so that… because the stand for 150 years and if we’re getting them wrong now, that building’s going to be around for a long, long time and so that’s my mission with Resi, is to bring good design to homes up and down the country that people actually enjoy living in because I think that if I could say that, even if I just changed 2% of that housing stock, I’d feel like that’s a fairly decent legacy to leave behind.
Elliot Moss
She’ll be doing that by 10.00 o’clock. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper on this Encore Special with the incredibly outspoken and articulate Alex Depledge and she’s coming back in a couple of minutes.
All our former Business Shapers await you on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have got a smart speaker you can ask it to play Jazz Shapers and you will be greeted with a taster of our recent shows. But back to today’s guest, Alex Depledge returns and boy it’s been quite a return already. She was last with us in April 2017. She’s the Co-Founder of both Hassle.com, the home cleaner booking website, and Resi, the home improvement platform. You are quite passionate. That passion…
Alex Depledge
I feel like that’s an accusation. I feel like I’m at school, Elliot. I’ve got a D on my report card.
Elliot Moss
Now listen, I’d like to talk to you about your recent behaviour. Um, you’ve still got the fire in the belly. I mean that, again, where is it from? It’s not… it’s really focussed on big issues. We’ve just… you’ve just traversed housing, you talk about local impact versus doing other stuff and floating around, we’ve talked about public spiritedness, you talked about entrepreneurs can be selfish if they don’t use that platform. Where’s that energy come from do you think? I mean, do you wake up in the morning and go right, is it ongoing, is it like a sort of a voice saying what are we going to do, what are we going to do, what needs to be fixed?
Alex Depledge
Oh my god, this feels like therapy because I actually don’t know the answer to your question, I don’t think I’ve ever asked myself like, why, I just know that, I just know that if I do things, I do them a 100% or I don’t do them at all and, you know, I have two little kids, so I’ve got a 6 year old and a 3 year old, and if I’m going to get out of bed and leave them every single day, because it is still harder for women to go to work, I don’t know what we do, all the subtle signals that we send in society to kids that mum is the person that you need when you’re ill, and like, my kids never give my husband a hard time about like not being there. Like, you’re laughing because your kids are exactly the same, it’s just, it always is the woman, you know, ‘Mummy, why are you the boss?’ Like, what a question. So, if I’m going to get up and I’m going to leave the house and give something my all, it has to mean more than money or mean more than my own success, it’s got to be for a wider or greater purpose otherwise it would be so much easier to just stay home and look after the children, so much easier than trying to juggle everything because I find it really hard work and very exhausting, as any woman who tries to do that will but, I don’t know, it’s just, just there I guess.
Elliot Moss
I guess I’m… I was laughing because of course I think that you’re right and however, and it’s not right that you’re right but you’re right however good at a dad you might be, I think you are absolutely right that children do do that and it’s through your actions, right, it’s through the roles that we play. You’ve talked a lot about that generally and you talked about, you touched on cleaners being 99% women and so on. Have you seen a shift at all, positively, towards genuine gender equality or at least equity? Has there been a change?
Alex Depledge
Er, I mean look, if you look at the funding stats, no. You know, less than 3% of venture capital went into female founded businesses last year. I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess, but you know, so the stats would tell you no. I think for me though, I think the argument becomes a bit too polarised and a bit too simplistic and it’s a lot more nuanced. You know, I’ve never in my life felt that I couldn’t do something that I wanted to do. I’ve never felt that a man has held me back, I’ve never felt that I couldn’t attract the right employees or the right level of funding or, you know, I was existing in a man’s world, I’ve never felt that but the one time that I do feel like I really have struggled and I’ve seen lots of other women struggle, is like when you choose to have children and I think it, you know, it speaks volumes that until Jacinda Ardern had a child in New Zealand, there had been no real female leader, not Nicola Sturgeon, not Angela Merkel, that had had children, right, it seems to be this choice you have to make and so it is the one thing that I really try to do at Resi is create a very positive parenting environment where both men and women get equal maternity and paternity leave because I think that until we give men a seat at the table and have, you know, 50/50 share of childcare but more than that, stop seeing the woman as the primary care giver then I think this is always going to be a very difficult game for women to traverse, just by that single factor, not because we are a weaker sex, not because, you know, men are more powerful or stronger but just from the simple fact that raising a child takes a lot and it, you know if you’re the main one at the table trying to carve out a career at the same time, it’s just, I’ve seen so many people really want it and just give up in the end because it is so, so difficult and I guess I’m really lucky in myself because my husband is incredibly supportive of what I do and is quite happy for me to have the big job so, yeah, I feel lucky but I know there’s lots of other people out there that really do struggle.
Elliot Moss
I know we talk about big issues here and I know we should be talking in much more detail about Resi and I promise we will but, you know, as we’ve just been…
Alex Depledge
Or business, broadly.
Elliot Moss
Or business or just, but it is broadly things because these issues that we’re talking about, you talked about societal issue or a commercial issue of fixing the 26 million houses which emit 40% of our carbon dioxide and we’re talking about men and women. These go to the heart of how business operates and the relationship with Government and so on. Just in your case, you said you’ve been very lucky and your husband’s very happy for you to have the big job, how else do you manage? What are the practical things if someone is listening who is in your shoes or is thinking about doing their own thing and they’re a mum, what is it beyond obviously having a supportive partner that makes it work?
Alex Depledge
I mean, I think for people in that position, the one thing that I would say is do it before your maternity leave. I often see people kind of, you know, they work their job, they’re not loving it, they don’t know how they’re going to make it work when they come back with children and the answer is they won’t and so they probably won’t come back after maternity leave and then they think that, you know, in the fug of having a kid that they’re going to think clearly and be able to start their own business and it don’t work like that so I think before you start to have a family, if you think you can’t make it work in your current job, you really need to think about what changes you need to make prior to having that child, not once you’ve got the child has arrived and you’re not sleeping and all the rest of it. It’s a bit like anything, like if you’re going to go on holiday, plan it. If you’re going to start a business, plan it. It’s the same with maternity leave, plan it. And so I think that’s the number one thing and I think you need to have that conversation really, really early with whoever your partner is about how that’s actually going to work. Not in theory, not in a, ooh shall we be 50/50 but in a okay…
Elliot Moss
Who’s going to do what.
Alex Depledge
Let’s get out a spreadsheet, who’s doing what and I think that, you know, that’s you hold… look, a marriage is just like a business, you need KPIs, you need a plan, right, it’s just, it’s true, like it needs to be written down so people can’t renege on things and that’s just, I mean it makes me sound…
Elliot Moss
Did you do this though? Did you do this with?
Alex Depledge
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Did you?
Alex Depledge
Oh my god, my therapist told me to do it. Genius woman. It solved so many things and so like, I know you’re laughing at me like oh my god she’s like…
Elliot Moss
No, I’m not, I’m amazed because…
Alex Depledge
…is she even spontaneous and…
Elliot Moss
No but I… but the reason I’m laughing is not because it’s not a good idea, it’s because most of us bump into life and then you end up, you know, you haven’t had that conversation and you haven’t actually done a proper, you know, the rigor that you go through to get, to go into business with your business partner or to employ somebody is generally not the rigor that you go into when you are looking for a life partner, someone that’s going to, you know, share children with you and that’s why I think you’re right, plan it, whatever it is. Of course you’re spontaneous Alex, I wouldn’t doubt it for a second. The Resi business, the Resi business and all these different pieces, as you said, the gaps, whether it’s the project financing or whether it’s the using technology to design a place which has actually got enough light and things are facing the right way and it gives you all that, that’s taken time to build, right? That’s not what you came up with Day 1.
Alex Depledge
No.
Elliot Moss
And how have you then found those things out as you’ve gone along the way to construct what is now Resi?
Alex Depledge
We followed the consumer on this one actually so, you know, originally I was the consumer, I did this side return and it wasn’t’ that bad but it was very long and non-visual and not very clear what everyone needed to do or what the process was and so, you know, I kind of said to Jules, I was like this is an industry that is geared up very much for big, elaborate commercial retail, big buildings, that’s what architects enjoy doing, they enjoy doing the fancy, big, bold, award winning projects, they don’t really enjoy doing the basements, the lofts, the sides and there wasn’t any investment in it and it’s shown, right, the you know the productivity levels in that sector have been the same since 1950’s so it’s you know 70 years’ worth of not much improvement and not much innovation and so we just started really small by saying right, if you’re buying or selling a home or you have a home, what do you want to know about it? You want to know is there any latent value so, what could I do? How much will it cost? Do I need planning permission and how likely am I to get it and what will it be worth afterwards? So we just started with that very simple concept and did a lot of conceptual designs just to help people bring their ideas to life and from that, people came back and were like, ooh I quite like my design, can we get planning so then we became like the agent of records, so we started applying for planning around the country and we’re now the second largest user of the Planning Portal, behind Savills who do all their research through it, and then after that people were like great, now I want to build it so I need some technical drawings which is your BREGs packages, your Building Regulations, so then we started doing that and that’s the bit that’s a bit dodge, right, because you know, that’s when you can get sued if you don’t do a good job so I was a bit nervous about that but, you know, turned out that was fine too and we just, you know, we digitised the journey, we made it quicker, we made it slicker and we made it hopefully more transparent so people could understand and very visual so you could see the space and experience it and then people were like well that’s great but now I need to build it, do you know any good builders so that’s where the market place came from, like where you basically the five people you need to get build ready, your contractor, your structural engineer etcetera, etcetera, so we built that and then I realised about two and a bit years ago that 85% of people who came to Resi, they needed to finance it in some way, right? And you know, not many people have like a hundred grand lying around in savings and also there is a dance between what you can afford and what it’s going be worth and the best people to advise on that are us because we’ve got the data, so that’s when we set up our own Resi Finance arm which does, you know, mortgages, re-mortgages, bespoke financing, build loans, all that kind of thing so, we kind of tried to become very much like a full service suite for people who don’t do this very often, like 92% of the people we interact with on a monthly basis have never done this before so they’re really looking for that person that they can trust and that can show them what that journey looks like and how much it’s going to cost and like what they could do and that’s really the whole premise of Resi, it’s not really about architecture, it’s really about people’s homes and making them fit for purpose and the pandemic has shown that, I like that even more than ever that the home is this like sacrosanct place where we retreat to when we need to feel safe and it needs to be multi-purpose, multi-generational, multi-faceted and our homes right now are not that and so, you know, that’s what we try to do and that’s the mission, I guess.
Elliot Moss
That is the mission and that is how you build a business, you follow the consumer, as Alex was saying. Much more coming up in my final chat with her, I hope. It’s Alex Depledge, she’s my Jazz Shaper, Business Shaper Encore today. We’ve also got a great tune from American saxophonist, John Handy, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
My Business Shaper, my Encore Special, Alex Depledge, she’s the Co-Founder of Resi and it sounds like you know what you’re doing and you sold Hassle.com way back in the day. You’ve got lots of plaudits, Alex, and I haven’t seen you for a while but it sounds like you’ve sort of kept your head down as well for the last few years so I’m just going to big you up for a minute. Financial Times 30 UK Female Entrepreneurs to Watch a couple of months ago, Computer Weekly 2021 Most Influential Women in UK Tech and Business Leaders 2021 Top 32 – that’s a very specific number – isn’t that weird…
Alex Depledge
Isn’t it.
Elliot Moss
Lucky you weren’t 33. Top 32 Female Tech Leaders in the UK and of course you got your MBE back in 2016. Doesn’t matter, right? You don’t care about this stuff. What’s the truth? Is it nice to be recognised? Is it nice to see your name there with other influential people?
Alex Depledge
It is and it isn’t, like look, everybody’s got ego and we treat egos as this really bad thing, I think you do need a bit of ego to do anything, right, and it’s not a bad thing so, it’s nice, I’m not going to lie but it’s also not nice because I definitely have to hassle, there is a lot, there’s a lot of people that won’t you give you the time of day before and then suddenly like, you know, you sell a business, you are in the FT or The Times and something and everyone wants to be your mate and you are a bit like, err, it just feels a bit disingenuous and to be honest, I’d rather get thanked by an employee than I would have my name in the paper.
Elliot Moss
But you’ve done… but that reputation you’ve built, the fact you’ve done it before, we talked about the fact only 3% of businesses that are run by… 3% of all funding is women and their businesses which is a ridiculously terrible, ridiculous number beyond, you’re that one though, you’re another one because you’ve done it before. Surely there’s the plaudits and the recognition externally must drive the self-belief that you have, are you a more confident person now than you were when you set up your first business or is that an illusion as well?
Alex Depledge
No, I think I’m less confident. I think the more you know sometimes, the worse it is, right? And the plaudits, like, you know what that’s good for is showing the way, I think unless you can see it, you can’t be it and so I’ve always felt a bit of this like reluctant – and Jules definitely does because she really does not like to talk in public or anything – but, you know, we, I guess we’ve got a duty to pass the baton to the next generation and, you know, pull the next girls up or women up behind us and so that’s kind of what that stuff does I think but in terms of, you know, do I need it? Is that what you asked me, do I need it?
Elliot Moss
Do you feel more, do you now feel more confident?
Alex Depledge
Do I feel more confident?
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Alex Depledge
Erm, god no, like that’s the thing, you know, whenever you ask somebody, like I go to the, you go to these events and you meet other business leaders and it’s always the same, you are always like oh how’s business going, oh it’s great, and I’m just not like that, right, because business is never great, there’s always something on fire, I always feel like I’m out of my depth and I’m making it up and I think everybody does, like the best advice my mum ever gave me, bizarrely, right and my mum’s not a, you know she’s never run a business or anything but she just said to me when I was about fourteen, “The minute that you learn that everybody else in the room is pretending, you’ll be fine” and I have to, I hold onto that a lot because most of the time, no, I definitely feel out of my depth and Resi is a much bigger business than Hassle ever was, which is, you know, saying something because Hassle was quite big and I genuinely am terrified on a daily basis, especially because the last two years, I mean have been like no other, right, you know you think about Brexit which was actually a walk in the park compared to last year with Covid and actually what is bizarre is, I’ve actually found this year really, really, really hard, much more than Covid because Covid was like lock everybody down, everything stops and you’re like, okay right, so conserve some cash, don’t inv… you know, work out, that was actually relatively simple to get through compared to this year, you know, this year March onwards went bonkers once we got the road map, it was like we went from having you know a hundred applications per open job role to having one, like I mean the contrast was that big, like the labour shortage just came out of nowhere, didn’t expect that, did not expect inflation, did not expect energy prices to go through the roof and did not expect supply chain issues, you know like windows right now are currently on like a six to eight month lead time, like you wouldn’t believe it would you, like a sofa is on a six month lead time, like and this stuff is not going to ease up quickly, it’s going to be twelve months more so, do I feel more confident? God no.
Elliot Moss
In that environment, just before I let you go to your song choice, I mean, you are absolutely right in everything you said, it makes perfect sense and sometimes the more you know and then the more that’s thrown at you, the less you feel like you’re capable of doing it. Very briefly, how do you cope with all that uncertainty, with not having the answer, with knowing, and I totally agree with you that the more I work, the less I think I know and the more I feel like I’ve had to make it up because it’s a new thing and it feels like the changes keep coming, the developments keep coming and yet you’re meant to come up with and lead people through that. How have you maintained some level of sanity and what would you advise people to do in order to just hang onto that?
Alex Depledge
I think you have to build a support network and I don’t mean like friends, family, I mean like a specific person for a specific thing. Oh god, I am so, I am so going to walk out of here and be like, oh my god that girl lives her life by a spreadsheet but I don’t. But I do believe like everyone should have a therapist, everybody should have a business coach, everybody should have someone that helps them organise their life whether that is a housekeeper, a cleaner or like you know and EA at work or whatever it might be and look, I’m speaking from a position of privilege like I don’t sit here thinking that, you know, everybody can have these things but I mean, you know, if you are asking how does a businesswoman cope, you’re going to have to have these things and then you need people that you got to, like so you might have someone that’s like your commercial mentor, you might have somebody that’s your kind of people mentor but you kind of, you pick off that list, I got a Chair, I appointed Tim Weller as the Chair of Resi at the beginning of this year and that has been absolutely monumental for me in terms of like a support network so you just have to think about what are the five things that you need that you are not sure about and then you go and find a specific person for that and that might be paid or unpaid but you, it’s not like a generic thing, it’s like oh I’ve got my friends, yeah of course you need your friends but you need people in all areas of your life to cover your blind spots.
Elliot Moss
I need to do many of those things. Thank you so much, it’s been fab having you back.
Alex Depledge
Thanks for having me back, Elliot, I’ve really enjoyed it.
Elliot Moss
It’s brilliant, it’s brilliant and I think a lot of people will get a lot of value from that and I was going to say inspiration but I didn’t want to just throw words around like that but maybe they will get that too. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Alex Depledge
Okay, so maybe not strictly Jazz but you guys are quite loose on this and this is one of my favourite songs, which is Janis Joplin, Mercedes Benz and I sing this to my little girls every night before they go to sleep.
Elliot Moss
Janis Joplin with Mercedes Benz, the song choice of my brilliant Encore Business Shaper today, Alex Depledge. She absolutely in everything she said exhibited her strong sense of fairness, including how she treats parents, positive parenting environment she wants to create in her business, and our overall conversation around gender and the importance of much more equality. She talked about building her business by following the consumer, how Resi had built up its various elements of what it offers. Importantly, on a personal level, plan it, whatever you’re doing plan it properly, get the support that you need, be very, very strategic about what it is that that looks like, whether it’s a business coach, whether it’s a therapist, whether it’s someone to help at home. And finally, the words of advice from her mum, don’t forget that everyone else in the room is pretending that they know what they’re doing. Really good stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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