Series 2 Episode 04: Mary McKenna
On this episode of Strategy Sheroes I’m joined by Mary McKenna.
Mary is a tech entrepreneur, angel investor and was co-founder of the hugely successful e-learning company Learning Pool, where she was also my boss. She is one of the entrepreneurs in residence at the University of Oxford and is currently kickstarting new female founder network AwakenHub. Mary was awarded an MBE in 2014 for her services to Digital Technology, Innovation and Learning.
Mary and I chat about:
Mary’s move from accountancy to becoming a tech entrepreneur and investor
Her investment criteria
The skills needed to be successful in business
Advice for female founders
Check out below some of my favourite quotes from our discussion and listen to our full conversation on apple podcasts or spotify.
On her passion for helping female founders
I think it’s harder for women, all the numbers and all the research will back that up. There’s a lot of variation in how this is presented, but you can look at the amount of VC funds that go to women or other minority groups and it’s a tiny, tiny percentage, an order of magnitude you wouldn’t believe at first. So there’s no doubt it’s more difficult for women, and anyone who says it isn’t is lying or badly informed.
I’ve always liked backing the underdog and making it easier, and I think it is easier for people if they have somebody experienced advising them, or backing them…A lot of people helped me and therefore you reach a point in your career where you realise you did a bit of paying it forward, and maybe it’s time to start paying it back.
Mary’s advice for female founders
The first piece of advice I would give is go find a mentor or sponsor, someone who has done what it is that you’re trying to do, and they’ve come out the other end... Invest the energy and time that it will take to go and build a relationship with someone you can then ask to be your mentor. There’s no point sending them a note on twitter or a note cold on LinkedIn, that’s not going to get you very far. The second is about building out your network, it’s necessary for so many things.
I would also say to work on your self-confidence. I had a co-founder who was extremely polished and good in the spotlight which meant when I was asked to speak I would pass it over to him, which meant I never developed that part of my skill-set, and it’s something I’ve had to work on since. So work on your self-confidence, accept those public speaking events, and work on yourself so you can become more polished.
The last thing I would say for female founders starting out is work on your personal brand, and devote time to your online persona and your online profile, it will drive customers to your business and it will put your business on the map. You can worry later about how to work out the succession planning and make it less about you. But at the beginning it is about you.
On the importance of cash flow forecasting to start-up success
The numbers get more difficult the further away they are. You’d hope they’d have accurate numbers for the next 3 months, you’d expect they’d have accurate numbers for the next 12 months, and after that things become more uncertain. You work through this by trying to take as much risk out of it as you can without killing it, you have to put in a few things that aren’t certain.
It’s a particularly good skill at the moment, one of the pieces of advice investors are giving to their portfolio companies is to look for ways to make their cash runway last for 24 months during COVID so they don’t have to go back out to the market to look for more money.
Cash flow forecasting out of everything a founder does is the key piece on the financial side, and if you’re not able to do it you need to bring in some expertise you help you do it.
Running out of cash will close your business down quicker than anything else.
The value of investing time in building customer relationships
On my first day spent as Learning Pool’s new owner, I sat and I wrote to the 80 customers who were existing users of the service and I asked each and every one of them if they would like to join a customer steering group that I would chair, as a way of being able to feed directly into the company what they want from a newly launched platform.
It was one of the most useful things I did in those early days. I think we got 16 replies from people saying they would be interested. This was incredibly useful to us in building that business and being able to then sell it on to other local authorities. So it was the existing customer base that attracted me, even though I was then disappointed to hear what poor service they had been receiving from the government. But there’s often an opportunity if you look hard enough.
What Mary looks for in a business when investing
It’s about the team. It’s less about the idea. All startups pivot, the idea that is presented to you is unlikely to be the idea that goes to market, and it’s unlikely to be the idea that scales because somewhere along the way it changes or something happens, for example a competitor comes along. I look for a founding team that is able to be flexible along with those changes in demands that I know will be in the future for them.
My specific investment criteria is that it has to be a female founding team, it has be a project that will make the world a better place, usually a tech for good project. And it has to be something I can add value to through my own network and experience. This sounds bizarre for an investor to say but I don’t invest to make money, that doesn’t interest me, I invest because I want to build the next generation of founders and I want it to be easier for them than it was for me…
Links to some of the stuff we chatted about
AwakenHub female founder network
Mary shares more business, and networking advice on her Kicking Assets blog
Follow Mary on Twitter @MMaryMcKenna