Meet the co-founders of Loytech
Urchana Moudgil and Craig Unsworth co-founded Loytech – the company behind Mór – in 2021.
Mór is the members-only platform for finding independent brands that match your values – with discounts and exclusives from hundreds of brands across the UK (and soon to be Ireland), each focused on shopping consciously. Female-owned, POC-led, vegan, LGBT-friendly, zero waste, sustainable… It’s all there, and all (always) independently-owned.
They’d worked together several times before, each brought nearly two decades of experience with them, and both came with varying skills that mesh together to produce a strong duo.
Urchana is an accountant by trade and Craig has spent his career helping companies digitally transform. Completely different personalities, they add to the “opposites attract” theory!
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?
It’s no secret that it’s hard work. It’s a different type of hard work – there is much more freedom, autonomy, and the ability to say “this is what I / we want to do”, of course, but that comes hand-in-hand with the fact that the buck really does stop with you.
A lot of investors shy away from investing in solo founders and we definitely see why. It needs more than one of you. Running a business is incredibly lonely at times and we’d definitely say it helps if there are two (or three, etc) of you pushing together from the front.
Working with a co-founder can be tricky, so understanding and compromise is important. How have you both found the process of building a business together? What makes it work?
We haven’t found it tricky actually. But that’s probably because we had worked together first, became friends, then worked together again. That’s a nice balance as it comes with boundaries from the outset.
We both have our own distinct roles, remits, and responsibilities – all of which we agreed in the beginning. We don’t step on each other’s toes; we don’t overlap other than strategy which we attack together.
We even had a Venn diagram in the business plan showing our own areas and our shared areas. There’s a lot of sharing involved – success, highlights, wins, advances etc. Not much is ‘your own’. But the flip side of that is that everything is shared – the late nights, failures, mistakes, and tough times.
What are your thoughts on failure?
We know about failure. Prior to setting up Mór we spent two years building an app for airline and hotel upgrades, only for it to be killed off entirely by COVID-19 in 2020.
We lost everything we’d built, overnight, and we were completely powerless to do anything at all about it. And it wasn’t just us – the team we’d built and the investors who’d backed us all felt that pain too.
But you can’t let failure stop or slow you. Indeed, if you look at most people who have “made it” they’ve almost all got a story of when it all went wrong too.
Failure is about learning from mistakes. For us we learned the cruelty of timing, the need to diversify your product strategy, and the fact that even the best plans are just that… plans. They’re all valuable lessons
What does your business offer its target audience?
We have three audiences, each unique in what they need / we offer them. The brands we feature (which we call vendors) gain access to a marketplace that reflects them, stands for what they stand for, and helps them grow their businesses. Our members can discover new brands, come back to old favourites, and shop consciously. Yes, they save money doing so (10-50% is the discount range usually), but for most of them it’s about values and principles – buying from brands that make a difference.
Our clients are the companies that buy membership and give it to their employees or customers. This creates a loyalty mechanic that stands out from the crowd and offers a unique way to attract, retain, and reward people – again, based on the importance of shared values.
How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?
Everyone says it’s important. We’d candidly say that most aren’t doing much about it though.
Culture for us is more than free food, ping pong tables, and saccharin mantras posted on the office walls. Our culture – since day one – has been about trusting our people, giving them the tools, they need, fostering collaboration, and pursuing work life balance. We do this in a number of ways, but two things stand out when people say why they enjoy working at Loytech…
1. Everyone works a four-day week. We compressed five days in to four and shaved off a few hours. Everyone in the business works 0800-1800 Monday to Thursday – with a three-day weekend every single week. It provides balance, helps with focus, and has meant we don’t see exhaustion in our business. From a cold hard number perspective, it does also work – we assess performance as being around 115% of what we’d expect on a conventional five-day week.
2. We’ve fully adopted remote working. One of the silver linings of the pandemic (amongst many clouds, admittedly), we set up the company with remote working being a feature from the very start. Everyone is given the tools and equipment to work successfully from home and we’re scattered all over the country doing so. Face time is important, and we manage this by running a series of events through the month that bring people together – lunches, co-working sessions, all-team away days, etc. It might not be for everyone, but it works well for us and is a huge part of our culture.
How much time do you spend on things that don’t add customer value?
Less than 1%.
Almost every single thing we do adds customer value. We don’t believe in ‘dead time’ here. So many of the tasks that some leaders write off as not adding value are important.
Hiring the best talent, developing that talent, and spending time delivering tools for that talent… It all feeds into customer value because the people we hire end up building the products customers buy, providing the customer service, or crafting the customer experience.
What impact would you like to have on women around the world through your business?
All-female founder teams receive less than 1% of investment funds. Mixed-gender founder teams get around 10p in the pound. Which means around 89% of all investment funding goes to all-male teams. That is absolutely abominable. And that’s before you add in sexuality, race, neurodiversity, disability, geography, or any of the huge number of discrimination points in this world. We want to show that founding teams made up of people other than straight white middle-aged neurotypical men can build great things. That’s as much a part of our mission than anything else.
Why do you think your business has had such a positive impact across your industry?
We’re doing something different, building something that matters, and have created something that works.
What are your thoughts on ‘no sleep’ culture as an entrepreneur?
The glamorisation of “work hard, play hard”, the eternal “hustle”, and glib comments about surviving on no-or-little sleep is all nonsense. Dangerous nonsense at that. Life has to be about balance, in every aspect. Yes, there will (and probably should be) some late nights, stressful moments, and prioritisation pinch-points when you’re running a business. But it can’t be routine, constant, or even the goal. If it is, you’re not doing it right – and, crucially, you’ll make yourself ill.
What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
Who will be my Co-Founder and why do we make a solid team?
