Leading With Agility: How Can Agility Can Make A Difference With Kieron James
Today's conversation explores the journey of a leader who thrives on embracing the unexpected. Kieron James, CEO and Co-Founder of Wonderful, shares how his career path zig-zagged across industries, from teaching economics to web design and even domain name registration. Through it all, Kieron honed his skills in selling digital services and cultivated an adaptable mindset. This agility proved crucial when his initial charitable donation platform idea faced high processing fees. Instead of being deterred, Kieron's team discovered Open Banking; it pivoted their business into an innovative Fintech solution, now offering significantly lower fees than traditional transactions, benefiting businesses and charities alike. Kieron's story highlights the power of leading with agility. Learn how he fosters a company culture that empowers employees, embraces change, and ultimately aims to create positive social impact through technological disruption.
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Leading With Agility: How Can Agility Can Make A Difference With Kieron James
Welcome to this episode of the show. This is the show where you hear the real stories of normal people just like you who have become extraordinary leaders. You'll learn some valuable lessons from their lives, lessons you can apply to become the best leader you were created to be. When you become an intentional leader, lives are changed. Thank you for joining us today for our episode. I am pleased to introduce our guest for today, Kieron James. Kieron is the CEO and co-founder of Wonderful and you're going to hear all about that. He comes to us from Spain. Kieron, thank you for joining us today all the way from Spain.
Thanks for having me, Sean. It's my pleasure. Enjoying the sunny climes of Spain. My time was split between London half the time and Spain the other half of the time. I have to say I probably prefer Spain.
That makes sense. I'm sure our listeners sitting here are going, “He does not have a Spanish accent.” Nobody has that English accent, doesn't he? We're excited to have you here. Kieron every show, we begin with the same question. We want our listeners just to tap into our guests and to understand that we're normal people. You are a fantastic yet normal person who's done incredible things and learned leadership. Give us a walk through your professional life, but more than that, the leadership lessons learned along the way that brought you to this point with Wonderful.
Very happy to do that. It's been an interesting and probably quite securitas route into FinTech, which is where I find myself today. Started out initially in a trade association. I did my degree in economics and worked in a trade association in London for probably about four or five years. That was my first job just to pay the rent because my other interests were playing in a band. The streets of London were going to be paved with gold and I was going to make my career a mark on the world playing the drums. Lessons learned from day one, but there we go.
Do you still play drums today though, just for fun?
Early Leadership
I do, but I actually enjoy probably these days doing more electronic music. That's how I got started. Move from there into high school teaching. I think that was my first real opportunity to do any leadership. Very early on in that career, I sought promotion to become head of the department, probably after the first term as a teacher, which was completely fortuitous, the head of the department left the day I started. She had a term's notice, and then she was on her way. I thought, let's be ambitious and see whether I can apply for the job. Luckily enough, I was accepted and took that job, which was amazing. Left that and ran a training institute in the Middle East for a little while. That was quite a big change geographically and culturally in every sense.
What type of training was that?
It was vocational training. My teaching did a degree in economics, taught business studies and economics, and then went out to the Middle East to teach vocational business courses. That was an interesting one in the sense that it was probably the wrong qualification for the market. Vocational qualifications that were being taught by the institute that I was working for were all delivered in English in the interior of the Sultanate of Oman, right in the interior of a fairly small town where English certainly wasn't the first language.
They were delivered and assessed, and everything was in English. I think it was challenging for a lot of the students. In essence, that funding got pulled and I ended up back in the UK. From there, a number of different businesses. That was my first start in running a business. After running the Training Institute, I came back and I was on my ear thinking, what do I do next? I set up a web design business. Since then, I've been involved in information technology businesses for the last 25 years, I guess.
What was that transition like? Going from being an instructor to being behind the computer screen instead of in front of people.
That was weird because I've been out there, and I guess some teachers will say this, it's almost like being on stage. You've got an audience, you're imparting knowledge, hopefully, and facilitating learning, getting people enthused, and then suddenly to be on your own in your dining room, effectively with a laptop, building websites for clients was quite a cultural shift for me. I had ambition, even straight away, to try and grow that business and bring on some additional developers. That was always in the back of my mind. If we could make this work quite early on, then I'd be hiring staff quickly. That was always the plan.
Did that happen? Did you bring it on, build it up?
It did. There was a nervousness. When you're hiring your first person, there's always that nervousness about paying their wages. It's okay not paying yourself, but not paying somebody else is a bit frightening.
It doesn't work as well.
I remember a conversation actually with one of my co-founders. He said, if you're thinking about hiring somebody, you probably should have done it three months ago, which I thought was sage advice because I think often founders wait too long to hire that first employee. I brought her on reluctantly and nervously thinking, “I'm going to give her two days a week and at least I can cover the salary for that.” I think it was within about 3 or 4 weeks, she went full time because I just needed that person. That was great.
Leading With: If you're thinking about hiring somebody today, you probably should have done it three months ago.
Obviously, she brought value to what you were doing. That's the interesting piece I found with a lot of founders that I've talked to, and being one myself, we always underestimate how much work others can do until we let them in and let them share what they think they can do.
You're completely right. I think it's also recognizing as founders that you don't have to be good at everything because that's another mistake that's often made. I'm not particularly strong in the financial area, ironic, given that I'm running a FinTech business these days, but it's not my strength. I'm not a numbers guy. I remember, and this happened quite recently after many years of often having that Imposter syndrome and feeling like a charlatan because you feel like you should know everything. I was asked a question by our head of finance. I didn't know the answer. I said, “I'm sorry. I've not got that to hand.”
She said, “That's fine. That's what you pay me for.” I thought it was great. Those six words were important to me in just making that, you're absolutely right. That is what I pay you for. I don't need to be good at everything. It was the same thing going back all those years with that very first hire. She was a fantastic all-rounder, so a brilliant developer, a good coder but actually good in so many other aspects of the business that it just felt a strong extra pair of hands whether that was meeting clients, making outbound calls, doing the coding, or doing some SEO back in the day as well. She could turn her hand to pretty much everything.
Tell me about the growth of that company. I know you ultimately exited. Tell me about the growth of it, but then even more than that, how your role changed with that growth.
The growth came, we brought on more clients, and we brought on more developers, but it's quite a tough gig and I'm sure it still is. I found it quite hard in the sense that from first pitching a job to getting paid could be quite a long time with quite a lot of changes along the way from the client, which meant it was pretty intensive work. A lot of it, you thought you were at the finish line and often you weren't, so you'd still be negotiating and still talking, “Can you move this here? Can you change the color of that? Can you add three more tabs or whatever it might be?” There was always a bit more work to be done.
I think part of the skill of finding the right people was also getting good client managers on the team too. People who were again, multi-skilled could do the sales piece, but they could also manage those relationships with customers as well and make sure that was smooth. I think that was one of the kinds of epiphanies for me. I was also working at the time with somebody who was providing domain names for our customers. We had a third-party provider of domain names. Obviously, web clients need domain names for their websites.
It was that moment when I realized, actually, in terms of the work that's been done upfront, all that groundwork in terms of building that domain name registration process, once it's done, it's done. Effectively, there is no longer that long client negotiation piece. The person comes onto the website, chooses the domain name, pays for it, and the domain name registrar has been paid. That's it. I think that for me was an important lesson in everything that we've done since.
It's been, can we produce something where we're working hard to make the process of finding us quite easy through SEO, to make the process of using the service or signing up for the service easy? Again, good user interface design and that thing, slick process. Then can we make the process of using the product easy as well? If we can do all of those, then we can automate it and become a mass market. I think that was one of my real key moments in terms of business development was recognizing that that was a strength that I wanted to use and deploy in any of the businesses.
Recognize the strength you want to use and deploy in your businesses.
You've got that critical thinking, strategic thinking, thinking ahead, and thinking at scale. That's probably one of the greatest faults of founders. We think incrementally and we're scared to make big bets or think, “This thing can scale,” but you're strategic about how we can scale and automate from day one.
I think we've done that from that business forward. We've always done that. It's been one of the key questions with all of the developers that we've hired over the years. That's fine. It's great at the volumes it's doing. Will there need to be a pause for us to get to the next step in the ladder or will we be able to do that seamlessly? If there's going to be a pause, we've got a problem. That's a challenge technically to do that because you don't want resources that align their redundant completely just waiting for that growth. You've got to manage that in an effective way but with minimum downtime and as seamlessly as possible.
Leading With: You've got to manage your business effectively with minimum downtime and as seamlessly as possible.
You ultimately exited that company?
Yep.
Then what was next?
I joined the domain name registration business. The domain name that the guy we were buying domain names from, who's mentioned before, is now our co-founder with this business. We've worked together for the last 25 years. He basically offered me a job working for him. I joined that business and sold him the web design business and its clients. My only wish in taking that job was that I could go and work in South America. I've always been keen to travel. My wife is Spanish, hence being in Spain, and I wanted to explore a little bit more. That domain name business was growing rapidly in the UK but looking for international markets, and Latin America is one of the ones that we wanted to explore.
This was about probably 1999. I joined and basically took the whole model that we'd developed in the UK and applied that as best we could in Argentina and Brazil. That was interesting as well. Again, huge lessons were learned there from going out and thinking, “I've got some Spanish language. I've also got a Spanish wife. We can hire a team on the ground and we'll translate the existing UK site from English into Spanish and into Portuguese, and it will be fine.” That's all there is to it. How naive you can be. 2020 has that in there but I've realized now that so much of this is about, it's not translation clearly. It's a full localization and tailoring of the product to suit the market and so on.
It's interesting talking about that. I want to sit on this topic for a second about international. The majority of our audience is in the US. although we have an audience around the world, probably 80% in the US right now. I hope that keeps shrinking as the international audience grows. Most people are absolutely afraid to go international with their business. It's just a fear factor. The fear I feel oftentimes is based on ignorance. Like we're afraid of doing it, but we don't know why we're afraid of doing it. What would be your one tip to go after it and what would be your one caution for them to not go after it?
I think the caution I've probably already mentioned and that was the lesson learned is don't treat every market as the same and just assume that you can translate your website and then you'll be good for Germany because it ain't that simple. In terms of the positives, I think it's just about doing the research into that market, understanding how that market operates, and understanding how the buyers operate. When we went into Latin America, I think in a number of the countries that we were looking at, credit card penetration was at around 13% or even lower, and yet we were trying to sell services online using credit cards.
Don't treat every market as the same. It isn't that simple.
It's just that you look back now and think it's such an incredible gaffe, and we had to rethink that and come up with other solutions about how we might approach that problem. I think clearly like anything, like a domestic market, thorough research, and as much as you can find out about how the market operates before you go. Have a go. It's like anything. There's no harm in dipping a toe as long as you can do that with some caution and not throwing all caution to the wind and spending a fortune on it.
I love it. What came after the domain company?
Domain name registrations, I left. We did a stint shortly after that and also before where I'd been involved in co-founding a business, then backed out for a while and then rejoined, which was company formations online. Again, we started that in 1998. I think from the research we did at the time, we were the first online company formation agent in the world. That was quite an interesting one for us as well, taking all that paper-based activity and putting it into what was actually a single form online.
You can imagine how onerous it would have been to complete by today's standards of being able to save it. As you go along, there was none of that. It was all of the directors, all of the addresses, all of the registered office addresses, all the details in one form. If you lost it halfway through back to the beginning. We did that. After the domain name registration business, I then went into telephony which actually came about during my return to the company formation business. You can imagine with company formations, everyone sees their clients or the clients of the company formation business as being a real opportunity.
We were approached all the time by people looking to sell to this newly incorporated business and wanting to partner with us. Interestingly, again you look at that with clarity and you think, they're newly incorporated businesses. They probably don't have very deep product pockets and therefore there wasn't a great deal of opportunity. It was where cost savings could be made was the biggest opportunity. One of those at the time that we were doing was around telephony services for small businesses.
We were able through some regulatory changes to introduce some services that were effectively free of charge for the business and paid for via the caller and we could do clever things with the telephony, like deliver calls to mobiles during the working day, then voice to email in the evening, set up multiple recipients and hunt groups and all of that thing through a web interface. That was where I went next for a little while. Then we sold that business in I think, 2012. Stayed in telecoms for a while, but then went to the complete opposite side. We were doing all of the outbound call communications for UK call centers. Very different audience. We've gone from an SME market with thousands of users to a handful of very large UK contact centers.
You have been jumping around regularly. What drives that in you? Is it just that serial entrepreneur spirit? Is it just taking advantage of what's in front of you? What drove that?
The Transition Towards Wonderful
I think it's interesting and listening to your podcast and the whole intentional leader thing, it made me think a little bit about what's happened in my career and how much of it is intentional, how much of it is serendipity, how much of it is opportunity that then you create the intention from. I look back and I think there's been a lot of that. There's not been an intention to go into telephony that came about through seeing an opportunity in terms of the services that we could offer to those company registration clients.
Similarly, the business that I’m in now might be a reasonable segue into that is being completely serendipitous. I guess one of the common themes has always been around it being, I describe it as zeros and ones. Selling digital services, effectively, whether they might be from forming a company, registering a domain name, or making a telephone call, through to the FinTech payment services that we're doing today. It's all got that same theme. Can we deliver it online? Can we make it easy to find, easy to register, and easy to use? That definitely is a recurring theme, but in terms of the intention of starting the business, that's often been serendipitous.
You'd never backed off either.
No. We're definitely pretty relentless in terms of making it work. This one came about. This was probably the most interesting though, because we were running that telephone services business back in 2016. Shortly prior to 2016 starting, my son decided he was going to jump out of an airplane for a charity to support one of his friends who had terminal cancer. He did his parachute jump and we thought that was probably going to be the most interesting part of that day, him jumping out of the airplane, but actually what turned out to be the most interesting part of that day was his absolute outrage when he understood how much of the funds that he'd raised, by asking his friends and family and whoever else to donate to this parachute jump were being lost.
He was using an online giving platform that was a for-profit giving platform. There were deductions to cover card fees, deductions to cover platform fees, and deductions effectively to pay the shareholders at the end of the year, deductions from tax incentives that are aimed at benefiting charities. He thought all the money he was raising, probably quite naively, was going to charity and was going to support that. That was again, one of those moments when you think, I wonder whether we can do something about that.
I wonder whether there were very talented engineers in our telecoms business and developers and all of those people wouldn't mind turning their hand to doing something during the coffee breaks and lunch hours and weekends and see whether we can build a competitor platform that's completely free for the charities. That every single penny goes to the charity with no deductions whatsoever. That was how we got started with Wonderful. It was looking at the virtuous circle of donors, fundraisers, and charities and thinking, is there room for a fundraising platform to sit in the middle and serve those amazing people? That was the starting point for it.
That's an incredible story. There's a part of your story that you just shared there though, that I want our listeners to catch. You had your telephony company. You had all these computer engineers and developers. I'm going to make the assumption because of your heart for people and because of what they've seen in the culture of the company, you said, “We're thinking about this. They were doing it on their own time.” Then ultimately, did they transition from that company into wonderful?
That's exactly what happened but along the way, I have to say that it was such a rewarding thing for everybody to do. There've been a couple of moments along the journey, where you've realized that they're probably enjoying that work far more than they're enjoying their, in inverted commas, day job. Similarly, we employed external agencies, like we had a PR agency that was paid for by the telecoms business. Of course, we weren't paying anyone from the charity-giving platform because that was the way it operated. It didn't pay anyone, we didn't get salaries from it, we were all paid by the telecoms business and every penny went to the charities.
Funnily enough, frequently they would win awards for the work they did on the side for the fundraising platform and not win many awards for the telecom service that they were being paid for. Everyone loved it. It was a great thing to be involved in for obvious reasons. It's clear that you're motivated by a greater purpose and that you're doing something that gives back your talent and skill. We had some amazing engineers. We had some amazing developers and amazing marketing people, and they were all happy to turn a hand to that.
Success Paradox
It was Wonderful Global today. Who are the typical users of the platform?
What happened along the way? We started this, we often call it the side hustle without the hustle. It was very much a philanthropic project that we did in our spare time and more and more we found that the customer service team that was supporting the telecoms business was probably spending more hours supporting the charities, donors, and fundraisers. What also happened is we created effectively a success paradox. People said this from the beginning. They said it's fantastic. It's well-intentioned, but you won't scale.
The reason you won't scale is the cost of processing the donations is always going to outstrip your corporate sponsorship. Initially, we funded it through the telecoms business. Then we found a high street bank to become a corporate sponsor and more and more, what we were doing was turning around to that high street bank and saying, we need more money to pay our card processing fees. That was the only hard cost of operating that business. It was the only one that we couldn't sync somewhere else.
Hosting was fine and the developers were all giving their time free but we obviously had to pay, we had to pay someone to process those payments. We were then overtaken by events because COVID hit and something had to give. We were providing telephone conferencing services. A large number of NHS, the National Health Service Trusts, were clients of that. Clearly, everyone's conference calling.
We said, “Let's pause the fundraising platform until we can figure this out.” What happened next was actually again, this penny drop, serendipitous moment that created the business that I'm involved in today. We paused the platform about three weeks later, I was on LinkedIn and I saw somebody who was having their head shaved during lockdown. I think very creatively they call it locks off for lockdown for charity.
I like that phrase.
They posted a link to make a donation and I clicked the link and made my donation and it was through this thing that I'd never heard of called open banking. What happened was the money effectively securely went directly from my account to the charities. There was no card. There was no debit card, no anything. It just looked to be a secure thing. I was basically authorizing this in my mobile banking app. It was all very secure, super fast, easy to do. It was that moment when you think, actually, we can restart the fundraising platform, reopen, remove cards completely from that donation flow, reduce our cost instantly by 90% in terms of processing payments, and therefore increase our reach and impact massively.
We did. Within six months we were back open with an open banking provider in place. Again, using that term, probably a little too much during this episode, but penny drop moment again, you suddenly realize that if that's a problem we're solving for the fundraising platform, then that problem exists everywhere. The cost of moving money is just becoming prohibitive through cards. That's how we got started with this and effectively shortly after that we sold the telecoms business. Moved the entire team into this new FinTech and started to get our licenses in place to be a payment processor.
That payment processing and open banking like in the US, that's the equivalent of Venmo, Cash App, Zelle for banks. Similar to that?
No, it is similar. In terms of the process, it's very similar. The money's moving from your bank account directly to the recipient's bank account. The difference is this has been mandated in the UK and in a lot of countries. The banks were obliged to open up their APIs to FinTech because obviously the FinTech needs to be authorized and that's no walk in the park. It's a very involved process, but once you've completed the authorization, effectively that gives us permission with your consent as the payment service user to move that money into a third-party account. The beauty of it is you're removing probably a dozen intermediaries in a card transaction.
They're just being removed completely. There's no pie to slice up anymore. There's just one provider sitting in the middle, which is why we can drastically reduce those costs. We've moved into commercial space, and the charities never pay. The charities will never pay. We always provide that service completely free of charge for them. As I mentioned now, our corporate sponsorship budget is no longer required effectively. We can do that for free and it doesn't cost us anything. In terms of a commercial client, then we're reducing those fees, which are typically with a card in the UK, 1.4% plus 20p per transaction, we're taking that down to a penny with no percentage fees. It's literally a penny to move money.
Then your corporate transactions are funding your nonprofit transactions, your charity transactions. That's a great business model. Great business model. I love that. I want to tap into you for a minute. I know you don't talk about yourself. I know you're humble in this sense, but to have people following you from thing to thing like that, I know that part of it was the mission and the heart of the mission and then giving back to charities and things like that. I totally appreciate that but people follow leaders and you've been the leader. When I listen to your story, I'm wanting to know what has Kieron done intentionally for the people in his organization that they want to follow.
Providing An Opinion Space
I think one of the things that we do intentionally is give everybody's opinion space and genuinely believe that. I mentioned the telephone conferencing service, that was born out of an idea that came from one of the developers at the time who came into the office and said, “I've just had this great idea about how we can use this new number range, O3 number range,” which the regulator Ofcom had introduced in the UK and had a very different pricing model attached to it.
He'd gone away, stepped away from the coding, and just thought commercially, is there something we can do with this? That's a little bit different and brought that to the office. We actually ended up creating an entirely different business because of that. I think that recognition that you have a voice and a voice that's going to be heard and opinions that are going to be used and built upon is important. I know these days we talk about active listening, but it is active listening taken to the next level. Let's make sure we act upon that. I think that is the key.
It's actually hearing them. It's not just listening to them. It's hearing them and what they want to do with that. You have used the words penny drop and serendipitous a lot, but you're also showing there, there's intentionality behind it. It's being open to the fact there's something else out there. Even with open banking, you recognize it. You didn't say that's competition. You said, “How do we take advantage of that?”
I'm with that. Again, the word disrupt, disruptive is probably a little hackneyed these days, a bit overused, but we want to use this opportunity to properly disrupt because for the first time in 60 years, there is a different way to move money and we can make that a huge benefit for everybody that's using it. Turning back to intentional leadership and that listening and all of that, I think the other thing that we've always wanted to do is give people the sense that they can go in any direction within the business. We're a fairly small team, so that gives people huge opportunities.
Meritocracy, again, I think is a word that's overused, but we absolutely do that. We would much prefer to promote from within than bring in somebody above whenever we can do that. We've also employed people whose degrees in marine biology have gone on to be moved from product management into doing some SEO work, then into project management, into marketing and just followed their desire within the company. Then seeing abilities emerge from that and move on and move out to other jobs. I think that's important is just letting people have some space to find out what works for them. I know that's not always possible, but if you can do that, I think that's a great thing.
Let people have some space to find out really what works for them.
I think it can be done more often than people understand and in the end, the heart of that is it's about you wanting them to be successful. If they're successful, they're going to be successful with your company. Sometimes success means it's not going to be with your company, but that's still a win-win.
Definitely. I've always viewed it that way. You'll hear people saying, “Do you not worry about spending money on training?” Then they're just going to take that training and get another job. No, absolutely not. We want people to come into the organization and feel that they can make a difference for sure.
Fantastic. I appreciate it. Wonderful listeners. You'll be able to see through the links in our show notes today, how you can tap into that organization and Kieron and all those different things. Kieron, we finish every show with the same question. It's a practical tip. What is something our listeners can do intentionally today to lead more effectively?
I think one of the things that we've done that's quite a simple thing. This is one practical thing, it's probably the wrong time of the year now for most of you listeners, but here's a practical bit of advice for a small business. We wanted to give people some headspace and actually look after themselves. In those dark nights, those short days, and long nights in the winter, one of the things practically we did was give people time to take a walk during the day when it's still light. It was the simplest thing to put in place and actually one of the most appreciated.
Leading With: Give people some headspace and look after themselves. Give people time to walk during the day when it's still light.
In reality, it costs us nothing and everyone's coming back from that. Maybe they go for a jog, maybe they go for a walk, maybe they do anything. Sometimes in London, when the day's finished and it's already dark at 4:00 and it's rainy and wet and miserable, the last thing you want to do is go out there for a walk. A very simple bit of practical advice, but if that's something that your business can afford its staff. Whether it's 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, whatever you can do. I think it's massively appreciated for those autumn nights and winter nights.
I love that tip. I love your phrase about that with headspace because it's just that time to clear and come back with better thinking and processing.
You step away from it and give yourself a break. Again, I think the people who appreciated that more than anyone were the coders and developers because often you just need to step away from the keyboard, and you'll come back feeling much more refreshed and able to solve that problem.
Kieron, it's been fantastic to have you on the show. We appreciate you and your leadership and what you're doing to help out, especially with charities, processing, and listeners. Again, all of his links will be in the show notes today, so you can reach out to him if you would like to. Kieron, thank you for being a guest, and we hope you have incredible serendipitous moments throughout the rest of the year.
Once again, many thanks, Sean.
Important Links
Kieron James - LinkedIn
Kieron James - Instagram
https://www.renogize.com/podcast-1/fearless-minds-fearless-leadership-overcoming-limiting-beliefs-with-colin-kingsmill - Previous Episode