“Followership is a core skill for a leader’’: Lessons in leadership with the ManyPets former CEO
Welcome to ‘In Good Company’, a series that aims to share insights and lessons from the pioneers who have built successful companies.
At the end of last year, we sat down with Stuart Jackson, CFO and co-founder of Octopus Energy, to hear what he’d learned from almost a decade of extraordinarily rapid growth. You can catch up on those blog here and here.
This month’s interviewee is likely to set tails wagging for his pioneering work in revolutionising the insurance industry. Steven Mendel is the co-founder and former CEO of ManyPets, the award-winning pet insurer.
In 2012, Steven and his co-founder, Guy Farley, founded Bought By Many, with a view to helping the millions left underserved by standard insurance offerings. From brokering insurance deals, the company pivoted to providing them, specialising in pets and rebranding as ManyPets. Today, they represent well over half a million pets around the world, with operations in the UK, Sweden and the US. Over the years, ManyPets has raised $483m, including $350m at Series D, putting the business at a valuation of $2.4bn.
Not content with improving life for pet parents (and their animals) around the world, ManyPets has also won plaudits as an employer. In 2022 the business was ranked second on Newsweek’s list of the 100 most-loved UK workplaces.
We sat down with Steven to learn a little more about his philosophies of leadership. He also shared his thoughts on recruiting a top leadership team, setting a strong culture and making a company an irresistible place to work.
The importance of ‘Followership’
SM: I think if you asked any of my direct reports, they’d say my leadership style is ‘Open, but challenging.’ I’m a big delegator.
It’s really important for everyone to feel motivated. If you control somebody’s space it doesn’t feel good for them, which is why I much prefer to err on the side of over-delegation – giving people freedom. Focus also matters, working out what’s important and not doing the other things. I’m also big on holding people to account.
I think mentorship is really important, but so is followership. Followership is a core skill for a leader. It’s something that I learned at McKinsey, where everyone is assessed on five metrics, this being one of them, every six months. Leadership is best done from the front, but it’s hard to lead if you’re spending the whole time looking over your shoulder to check that everyone’s behind. You have to know that the team has your back and that their team in turn has their back.
Resilience is also a core skill. It’s not just about business resilience; it’s about team resilience and personal resilience. And that personal resilience piece is vital in leadership. Somebody who can withstand a lot of knocks and remain focused and pointing in the right direction.
And so, for me, all of these things, focus, memory, mentoring, followership and resilience all become part of this skillset of strong leaders. And critically it’s important to be able to flex them up and down at the right times.
The last thing is just being seen. It’s important to be present. Present and approachable.
Leadership is also about storytelling
SM: We’ve never taken any advice on how to pitch our business. I’m not saying that there’s never a role for it, but it wasn’t something Guy and I needed.
One of the reasons for that was that we genuinely believed in our story and our way to communicate it. Communication is an important skill in that regard, and if you don’t have the ability to tell your story in a succinct way, you probably do need some external advice.
Founders can fixate on detail, which is understandable, but you need to be able to take 20 or 30 steps back, to look at the bigger picture and communicate it effectively. Storytelling and how you draw in listeners is a really important core skill for a founder, for both fundraising and recruitment.
Two founders are stronger than one
SM: Whenever I talk to new entrepreneurs, and I do this on a near-daily basis now, I always advise people not to go it alone.
The data suggests that co-founders are more successful than sole founders, but more than that I think complementary and different skills are important in teams. I always encourage people looking for co-founders to find people who are materially different to themselves.
If you find people who are too similar, it’s hard to find a space for both of you. Ideally, you find people who are different and for whom working together feels natural because you don’t tread on each others’ toes. You also want someone challenging, who doesn’t just accept what the other person says.
Guy and I were very much in that space. We’re different people, but we work very well together. And, critically, we trust each other implicitly and explicitly.
Yes, we’d worked together previously, and yes, that really helped with trust, but I think trust can be built up between individuals relatively quickly. I don’t think you have to have worked together already. I think it’s useful, and I think it’s constructive, but I definitely don’t think it’s a prerequisite.
Guy wasn’t involved in our first fundraise. I was adamant that he had a job to do, and that was not fundraising – that was my job. In those early days it was about dividing and conquering, and trusting each other. If you’re both trying to do the same stuff when there’s just two or three of you, there’ll be loads of other things which aren’t happening but should be.
Early-stage hires need complementary, technical expertise
SM: Employee number one, who effectively joined us right at the very beginning, was someone with digital marketing expertise.
I knew very early on that for this idea to have legs, it needed insurance expertise, it needed tech expertise, but it also needed digital marketing expertise. And neither Guy nor I were going to bring the digital marketing capability, so I spent time kissing a lot of frogs until I found the right person to join us and own this space.
In an early-stage business, you’ve got to have people who bring different skills to the table and are happy to be in their space. If you only recruit for attitude, you will struggle to achieve what you’re looking to achieve in a technical space. In some spaces technical skills aren’t as important, but there were few more technical spaces than the insurance industry.
I agree that mindset and attitude do feel important. But people who can stand on their own two feet from a technical ability standpoint are important too in the very early stage – people who can manage with little guidance, because there isn’t time for much hand-holding.
And so, in my ‘I’m not prepared to compromise’ bucket, I always put technical skills very high up on that list.
In those early stages we were still working out what our culture was. I don’t think it was fair to say we recruited people who were a good culture fit, because I don’t think we had one.
A strong culture offers a host of benefits – and needs to be set at the top
But we soon needed to work out what we stood for.
For me, building a culture is about embodying it. It tends to fall to the CEO because otherwise it often doesn’t happen. Language is critical when defining values and explaining them.
We were only about 40 or 50 people when we set our values. We picked a group of people from across the business to discuss our culture and how to create a set of values for our business. One of the things we settled on was this idea of becoming an irresistible employer. The upside isn’t just good for individuals in the company – economically, it’s colossally attractive. The economics of a strong culture, and the economics of a pervasive mindset of a business really do work.
It also has an impact on retention rates, which is a mixed blessing: on one hand, you want people to stand by you as your business goes through the usual ups and downs. On the other hand, you face difficulties if, like many businesses, you’re trying to implement more tech and as a result reduce headcount. Most businesses do this through natural attrition, but it becomes more complex and expensive if you’ve got very high retention rates. So, I won’t say that high retention levels is always a blessing, but I’d much prefer to start from that position than somewhere else.
And our culture also helped with recruitment, which is another economic advantage. We were always over-subscribed when we advertised roles and when offered our success rate was also very high.
Open and honest communication can yield unexpected rewards
There’s an expression (that I didn’t invent): ‘Bringing your whole self to work’. I think this became more possible and important during COVID than ever before.
During the pandemic, we ran an all-hands meeting every day, eventually dropping to Monday and Friday. Monday was all about the business, hard and concrete, and Friday was always something that was softer. We called it ‘Many thanks,’ so you got an opportunity to give shout-outs to your team.
In both of those two sessions we encouraged people to talk openly about who they were. So I did something which I’ve never done in my career before: I started talking about being Jewish. And out of that came this idea of an ‘Inclusion council’. The idea was to enable people to feel that we were supportive and inclusive and that everyone should feel supported at work. And we did this on so many different levels, it was quite amazing; honestly, I don’t think any of us could really have understood how it was going to play out. I learned enormous amounts and we had members of staff talking openly about themselves in front of hundreds of others.
It became a seriously big deal; we ran these sessions once a month in a formal capacity, sometimes externally facilitated and sometimes not but always as part of one of our all-hands meetings. And that was one of the ways in which we worked to become an irresistible employer.
Giving people a stake boosts an ownership mentality – and improves the customer experience
At ManyPets, every single member of the pack has a stake in the business. Now, that’s not the same as saying everyone is in the option plan – that would be an administrative nightmare! Instead we created something that was, pun intended, called Pups. And every single member of staff who wasn’t in the option plan got a number of Pups, which was basically like a phantom share scheme, with radically reduced legal and administrative complexity.
I feel strongly that businesses need to make it economically attractive for everyone to want the business to be successful, over and above salary. This is particularly important if you’re not a top compensation payer.
We wanted people to want us to be successful. We’re a B2C business, so if the customer is ringing up, frustrated, we want our staff to say, ‘I really understand this, I will make sure that we go away and work out what has gone wrong here, and I will come back to you’.
Some of that is possible without compensation structures, but a lot of it isn’t. There’ll always be some people who work this way regardless, but if you want everyone to do this, I think you’ve got to find a way of incentivising it. Not a founder mentality, necessarily, but an owner mentality. ‘This is in my interests to be good here, so what does good look like for this customer?’
Our thanks to Steven for his time and insights. As many founders know, recruiting and retaining top talent is a key challenge. From considering equity, to a commitment to building an inclusive environment, Steven’s strategies at ManyPets have seen the company go from strength to strength, as it has consolidated its position as both a key disruptor in the insurance space and one of the country’s most loved places to work.
Here at Octopus Ventures, we built our People + Talent team because we recognise that every world-changing idea is underpinned by incredible people. Our commitment to supporting the pioneers who are shaping tomorrow extends to those we haven’t met, which is why we’ve got a wealth of resources for early-stage founders (including our recent interview with Octopus Energy co-founder and CFO, Stuart Jackson) to explore on our website.
