Meet Rich Westman, founder of Kaido
Rich Westman is the CEO and founder of Kaido, the leading Culture Platform for business. Prior to founding Kaido in 2016, Rich worked as a Sports Scientist in professional Rugby Union and Tennis. With a fascination for what it takes to build high performing teams and a strong desire to help more people proactively take control of their health and wellbeing, Rich founded Kaido in November 2016 and launched Kaido as a product in January 2018.
Describe your business in three words.
Creating connected teams
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?
When you start out, you think the most important thing you need is money, but it’s amazing how much you can achieve bootstrapping and having a passionate and driven team around you. It can be easy to be swayed by investors and their differing opinions, but staying true to your vision and purpose and keeping the needs of your customers at the forefront of your mind is key. If you stay true to that, the rest will follow.
Another lesson I’ve learnt is to let go of mistakes - a business is always changing and growing and things are going to go wrong. The real lesson is in how you learn from those mistakes and remembering that a mistake is only a mistake if you make it twice!
How did you fund the business in the early stages?
Ahead of the launch of the business in November 2016, we received a £50,000 investment from Creative England and that was matched by friend/ family investment. We were also awarded EIT Health’s Headstart and Proof of Concept award and received a convertible loan from the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust to support the development of a health and wellbeing application for NHS employees. We recently raised a Seed round of £400,000 from Longrow Capital, taking our total investment to date to £600,000.
What is your day-to-day role with the company?
No one day is the same, but as a founder, I tend to take more of a lead on the business development side of things, bringing on new customers and ensuring they and their employees have a fantastic experience with us. We’ve recently gone through a brand refresh as well which saw me work closely with the team on messaging and marketing, helping to nail down what we stand for as a business, which will be important as we look to grow and expand.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
One of the biggest problems our clients face is a disconnect between their teams. While hybrid working is here to stay, it has led to a divide emerging between those at home and in the office, with 65% of workers saying they feel less connected to their workers. We’ve lost many of the in-person moments that helped build teams and culture and this has naturally had a knock-on effect on people’s loyalty to their company, valuing relationships and a sense of belonging above anything else in a job. With so much in the news around the Great Resignation and people changing their job, businesses are searching for ways to reconnect teams and create a healthy, happy working environment.
What does your business offer its target audience?
We help hybrid and remote companies build a great place to work by providing them with the tools they need to build a culture from within. After the last few years, teams are crying out for a sense of shared experience, looking for an environment that unifies them. The Kaido Platform helps companies plan out a year's worth of activities made up of our Challenges and Experiences to create this. In addition to the activities, we provide the necessary training for the companies so that they can have their own culture champions who can help identify barriers to meaningful connections, and actively tear them down.
How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
There are a lot of wellbeing companies out there, but not many specialise in team culture. A lot of wellbeing platforms take a ‘self-service’ approach, placing the onus on individual employees to engage with the app / website in a way, and at a time that works for them. This can lead to a high attrition over time and doesn’t positively influence some of the more social elements of wellbeing that have been severely impacted by the move to hybrid and remote working.
Kaido takes a team based approach, supporting employees to connect and collaborate around group activities. This not only supports employees to make more informed, preventative decisions across their physical and mental health but also brings teams together and provides a sense of belonging, something teams are crying out for.
What plans do you have for Kaido over the next two years?
Kaido has ambitious plans to become a market leading culture as a service platform, supporting businesses and their people to build great places to work together. Over the next two years, we want to recruit and train 100,000 Culture Champions across our client businesses who are empowered to create a company culture that they are proud to be part of. To achieve this we will be looking to close a Series A funding round at the end of 2022 to help further accelerate our scaling journey. This round will be between £3m and £5m depending on traction and progress.
How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?
Company culture consists of different things—a company's mission, its vision, its values, its people. The place —the physical building where people gathered—used to be a natural unifier, a culture builder we took for granted. But as more companies become distributed, there's a gap in how to bring people together. In fact, a recent report from Microsoft revealed that 60% of workers felt less connected to colleagues in our new hybrid world, as it made it ten times harder to maintain and build relationships and led to an increased sense of loneliness at work.
Without a strong company culture, you lose social capital, which is responsible for breaking down barriers, inspiring new ideas and contributing to employee retention and career growth. Therefore my top tip would be to make building social capital your priority. Be both creative and intentional about bringing your people together no matter where they are, and create meaningful shared experiences that encourage both virtual (online) and real (offline) interactions.
Any new product launches we should know about?
We’ve recently launched our new Kaido Culture Platform which encompasess our Wellbeing Challenges and our new Experiences offering which are one week digital team building activities designed to get people energised and talking to one another. Our first Experience is the Plastics Experience which is designed to get people talking about the environment and working together to become more sustainable both personally and as a business. The best part about Kaido Experiences is that we link them up to a company’s CSR objectives and create a really strong tie to a company’s values.
What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?
Get Started
Put the ‘problem’ or ‘customer need’ at the heart of everything that you do
Create an MMVP (minimal minimum viable product) to rest your assumptions and identify a ‘need’
Talk to your customers and or potential customers - embrace customer feedback from the word go
