Chris Eastwood is the co-founder and CEO of Penfold, a London-based digital pension provider for auto-enrolments.
Eastwood left a career in M&A and corporate consulting to found Penfold after observing what he considers overly complex pension providers putting people off saving for retirement.
Penfold says it has grown to more than 62,000 savers with over £350m of assets since its 2019 launch. Companies that offer Penfold for auto-enrolment include Brightpay, Deel and Pento. The company recently closed a new funding round, taking its total funding to £19m.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Eastwood shares his tips for boosting productivity while avoiding burnout, reflects on early mistakes with Penfold’s minimum viable product (MVP), and explains why mission focus, transparency and culture are key motivators.
1. What one thing do you wish you’d done differently when launching your company?
Chris Eastwood: We made a few early mistakes with our MVP which we’ve learned from. The core problem Penfold has always been trying to solve is that too few people are saving enough for later life – this was reflected in our MVP which had lots of educational flows as part of onboarding to help people understand the basics of pensions before they completed their setup.
We quickly realised, however, that there’s a more fundamental problem to people not saving enough, which is the high friction of getting started. It was too hard to even open an account in the first place with many providers, and for our initial target audience (the self-employed), there was too much inflexibility with payment amounts and frequencies.
Had we simply focused on the most straightforward onboarding journey of getting someone set up and paying in however and whenever they want, we would have saved a lot of development time (rolling back the previous flows), and got to market sooner. As an aside, five years later, we’re now looking at building these educational flows back into the product (although taking a far more advanced approach!).
2. How do you motivate your team?
CE: For me, this falls into three main areas – mission focus, transparency and culture.
Mission focus: Penfold’s mission is easy to understand, identify with and get behind. We work hard to make sure everyone in the company knows how their role directly contributes to achieving our business goals and our wider mission. Every quarter we take a day out with the whole company to reiterate our mission and make sure we’re all on the same page.
Transparency: We aim to be as transparent as possible with everyone in the business when it comes to Penfold’s strategy, fundraising, future plans and hiring, so that our people feel they are treated with respect and understand what is going on and what’s important
Culture: I think people do their best work when they enjoy coming to work every day, so alongside flexible hours, unlimited holidays, and regular socials, we try to build a friendly, low-ego culture that promotes collaboration, hard work and accountability
3. How do you prevent burnout?
CE: I’ve come close to burnout before and I now work on maintaining a positive and productive frame of mind, despite the ups and downs of startup and personal life.
I start every morning with a cold shower and a meditation and I exercise every day before starting work. It’s easy to eat junk food when you’re on the go, but I try to eat well and take supplements. I prioritise sleep making sure I never have my phone in the bedroom and I leave work at the office (or home office!) wherever possible.
It sounds like a lot, but I’ve built these up gradually over three to four years into daily habits which make me feel like I’m wearing a shield of armour during stressful times.
4. Do you have a productivity hack?
CE: I have a piece of paper on my desk, and every time I break focus to check email/slack or start a different task, I put a mark down on the piece of paper to keep count of when I’ve been distracted.
I find this helps me to maintain focus and find my flow!
5. Excluding your sector, which nascent technology holds the most promise?
CE: An obvious answer is AI, it’s incredibly exciting to think of the gains that will be made over the next 10 years with AI. We are seeing some big advances in productivity today driven by large language models, ultimately freeing up human brains for exciting and creative innovation and scientific discovery.
Founder in Five – a UKTN Q&A series with the entrepreneurs behind the UK’s innovative tech startups, scaleups and unicorns – is published every Friday.
The post Penfold founder: Here’s how I would change our early MVP appeared first on UKTN.
