Trailblazer turning children into SAVVY savers
When her kids started spending her money online, Louise dreamed up a brilliant solution — and made millions
The idea for Louise hill’s multi- million- pound children’s bank card business came to her as she stood on the side of a cold and windy football pitch, watching her eight-year- old son, Mackenzie, play in a school match.
‘It wasn’t a particularly riveting game, so I turned to the other parents and said: “how much has your child spent on your iTunes account, then?” ’ recalls Louise, who is from Lymington, hampshire.
‘It was 2009, the year everybody was getting iPods. In all innocence, I had given Mackenzie and his older sister, Isabella, my iTunes log- in and they were merrily downloading music and racking up bills on my card of about £3 or £4 a week. It wasn’t the sum so much as the principle.’
Parents on the touchline recounted tales of how their children had spent money on Xbox or PlayStation games and on Amazon using their parents’ cards — hundreds of pounds in some horrifying cases — and it got Louise and two dads there thinking: why are we still giving children their pocket money in cash when most of their spending is now done online?
‘ Not only were we giving them our passwords and therefore access to our credit cards, we were missing a chance to teach them how to spend digital money responsibly,’ says Louise, 56.
‘We wanted to create a tool to help kids be good with digital money in a safe “walled garden” environment.’
She and the two dads, Mark and Doug, agreed to meet for a curry every Thursday night to see if they could turn this germ of an idea into a viable business (at the time, Louise was operations director at several home-shopping catalogues, including The Cotswold Company).
Within five months, they had a business plan (and waiters at the Indian restaurant knew their order by heart). But it wasn’t until two years later, in 2012, that their children’s debit card, gohenry, was born.
It’s a pre-paid, contactless Visa debit card for children aged six to 18, but controlled by parents, who can cap the maximum spend and set rules on where the card can and can’t be used. It costs parents £2.99 per child per month.
PARENTS
are notified when the card is used, and children can set savings goals. Parents can also give children paid chores; say, £1 for tidying a bedroom (a common stipulation, says Louise, is ‘ my tidy not your tidy’). Children get a reminder of the task, and if it is ticked off, they get the money on the agreed pocket money day.
Louise’s idea seems like a pretty easy sell now, but it took the founders a frustrating 20 months to raise the £650,000 they needed to launch.
‘I wore down a lot of shoe leather,’ she says. ‘ Lots of people didn’t really get it, possibly because they didn’t have children that age, so the problems we were talking about were foreign to them.
‘Sometimes, I’d have four or five meetings with a group, then they would say no. We had a yes from one bank and were just signing final documents when it fell apart, so we started again.’
She feels she wasn’t always taken seriously by would-be investors, but, as a woman with a business background, she was used to it.
‘My first job after university was as a floor manager for house of Fraser. Suppliers would come to the floor and walk straight past me to an elderly chap called harold, who was one of my parttimers. I’d have to say: “Actually, I’m the manager.”
‘ Later, when I ran my own e- commerce business — a catalogue and website called Manners — with a partner and I
was heavily pregnant, while out fundraising I would say: “I may be eight months pregnant, but I still have a brain.” ’
This time around, Louise thinks investor reluctance wasn’t necessarily to do with sexism. ‘We were a brand new product in a new space, so we had to explain what we were and why people needed us, which wasn’t something we could do in one sentence.’
And there were two other problems: they had named the card pktmny, short-hand for pocket money, but no one could pronounce it, and it was contactless at a time when hardly anyone was using the technology.
Within a year, they had changed the name to gohenry, after their first customer, an 11-year-old boy from Bristol called henry.
It was a tough time for Louise. After recently getting divorced, she was a single parent and was working ridiculous hours for less than half the money she had earned in her previous job.
‘It felt like everything had been thrown up into the air,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been the breadwinner, so I was used to juggling, just like millions of other women, but now I couldn’t afford childcare, so I used after-school clubs.
‘I had supportive friends and made use of overseas friends’ teenage daughters in the holidays as au pairs. But, of course, you do feel guilt.’
She admits there were a couple of times in the early days when she felt like giving up, especially when her co-founders threw in the towel in 2014. ‘ They found it just too long and slow a process. They’d given up their jobs for it, and had financial and family pressures.’
But she doggedly pressed on, spending her days in shopping malls, theme parks and at school sports tournaments trying to drum up interest — until, at last, in early 2015, the business began to take off, largely by word of mouth.
Interestingly, Louise didn’t take the CeO role; she remained as chief operations officer and hired online ticket agency Viagogo’s Alex Zivoder, who had experience in rapidly scaling businesses.
Surely, most men in her position would have snapped up the top job? ‘Perhaps, but I was thinking of what was best for the business. We were planning to launch in the U.S., and I don’t have experience internationalising companies, whereas Alex does. We have a stronger business today because of that decision.’
She thinks it’s this logical, modest side of her — qualities often noted in women entrepreneurs — that’s key to her success.
‘I don’t see the point of ego, and I don’t like face-to-face conflict. If I’m not winning a battle, I might stand back, but it doesn’t mean I’ve given up. I will go away and then come back to argue the point more convincingly, or adopt a different tactic. Is that a result of a female brain or just me? I’m not sure.’
Gohenry has been growing ever since: by 2016, there were 70,000 customers and now there are more than 700,000 in the UK and U.S., where it was launched last year.
And fundraising is easier: in 2016, the firm broke records by reaching the crowdfunding limit of £4 million. ‘We ended up with a queue of people wanting to invest, which was an incredibly emotional experience after everything we’d been through.’
LAST year, the firm raised another £6.2 million, and still has some of the original backers on board. In 2018, it had a turnover of £8.2 million. In addition, it has 130 employees, including Louise’s daughter, Izzy, 21, and Louise is determined to keep the company’s friendly, team-working ethos.
Staff are encouraged to do the school run and attend their children’s sports days, and men to take paternity leave (two dads are currently off).
‘It usually makes little difference if someone is not sitting at their desk at precisely 9am. This has a massive payback in terms of loyalty,’ says Louise.
her advice to female entrepreneurs is to have faith. ‘ Trust your judgment. I launched this business without a background in banking, and I asked question after question until it made sense. You have to believe in yourself.’