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123: Hnry – James Fuller.

August 25, 2022 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In episode 123 of the Fintech Chatter Podcast, Dexter Cousins welcomes James Fuller, Co-Founder and CEO of Hnry. Hnry simply pays your taxes as you earn, so you never have to think about tax and compliance ever again!

As winners of this year’s Fintech Australia, People’s Choice Award, Hnry is capping off an incredible 5 years since they launched in 2017.

It’s a unique story where James shares how he and his wife Clare have built Hnry into a successful Fintech from New Zealand and the humble beginnings of an excel spreadsheet.

About Hnry

Founded in 2017, Hnry is one of New Zealand’s largest accountancies that provides a pay-as-you-go all-in-one digital accounting service handling invoicing, expenses, payments, taxes, and filings as well as providing expert on-demand support.

It takes care of all the financial admin for contractors, freelancers, sole traders and the self-employed – allowing them to focus on getting the job done, rather than worrying about tax and compliance.

In 2020 Hnry launched in Australia and quickly became Australasia’s fastest growing specialist accountancy. The Hnry Australia team are based in Sydney and are led by Karan Anand, Hnry’s Managing Director of Australia.

Make sure to give us a subscribe and like and if you are listening to the podcast hit follow and leave a review in the Spotify or Apple podcasts app. Every like, share, review and follow really helps us promote and support the Aussie Fintech ecosystem.

Links from this episode.

Hnry on Fintech Chatter.

More from the Finnies.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter, brought to you by Tier One People, leaders in fintech executive search.

This week’s guest is James Fuller, co-founder and CEO of Hnry. Hnry brings self-employment into the 21st century, making it as simple and risk-free as having a permanent job. Hnry pays your taxes as you earn, so you never have to think about tax and compliance ever again. Hnry were winners of this year’s Finnies People’s Choice Award, capping off an incredible 5 years since they launched in 2017. It’s a unique story, and James shares how he and his wife Clare have built a successful fintech in New Zealand from the humble beginnings of an Excel spreadsheet.

Make sure to give us a subscribe and like, and if you’re listening to the podcast, hit follow and leave a review in the Spotify or Apple Podcasts app. Every like, share, review and follow really helps us promote great businesses like Hnry and support the Aussie fintech ecosystem. James, welcome to the show.

James Fuller
Thanks so…

Dexter Cousins
Hnry, you were recently recognised as the People’s Choice Award winners at this year’s Finnies, so a huge accomplishment. We had a chat earlier this year, I think in May, as part of that competition, and it was such a great chat that, regardless of whether you’d won or not, we committed to doing a longer discussion.

James Fuller
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
And first of all, thank you, because this is something like a 6,000 kilometre round trip to make this happen in person. But before we get into things, do you want to tell the listeners and subscribers a bit about Hnry and what you do?

James Fuller
Sure. So Hnry is Australasia’s fastest-growing accountancy. We are a digital accounting service that specialises in sole traders. We take care of sole traders’ tax payments and their lodgements, we give them tailored software and expert support, all on a pay-as-you-go basis. That means that sole traders can focus on working on their business rather than in their business. So we’re saving them time, money and hassle, and revolutionising the way that sole traders go about managing their financial admin.

Dexter Cousins
Cool. So when you say sole traders, are you talking about tradies? Are you talking about gig workers? Where’s your focus?

James Fuller
The full spectrum. So gig workers, people who run e-commerce stores, real estate agents, tradies, graphic designers. Literally, you name it, we’ve got those people using our service. I don’t think a week goes by when a new industry pops up that we’ve not really come across. Dog walkers, for instance, are pretty big right now.

Dexter Cousins
Wow. Dog walkers.

James Fuller
All sole traders. They’ve got to pay the tax somehow.

Dexter Cousins
Gone are the days when you can get away with doing cashies.

James Fuller
No.

Dexter Cousins
I try not to have favourites, but I was really pleased when you did win. And I said this at the time, when we recorded the podcast: one, I love a great bootstrap story, but two is the origins of the business from an Excel spreadsheet.

James Fuller
See, remind me. I’ve still got the PTS land.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And I just found it was such an awesome story of how, from humble beginnings, you can then grow on and get that recognition. If you look at the previous two winners, Up and Airwallex, right, you’re in amongst that company. It’s such an awesome accolade, but also a great honour for the legacy of the business. I’d love to talk a bit more about those early days, how you got the idea for it, and how you got Hnry off the ground.

James Fuller
Yeah, sure. So this dates back to probably about 2015. My co-founder and I had just come out of salaried work and had both taken on contracts. I was doing some work in user experience with a bank, and Clare was working in government. We’d never been self-employed before, but it’s that feeling when you suddenly realise all these things you don’t know. You’re burdened by all of this hassle. You’ve got tax payments, you’ve got an old-school accountant that signs you up for some enterprise accounting software, and they’re like, okay, come to my training course, I’ll teach you how to use this. And you’re like, I’m a user experience designer. I don’t want to have to run the business. I’m doing one invoice a month.

And we were just like, it was classic: there’s got to be a better way, right? There’s got to be a better way of doing this. We couldn’t find anything out there, so we did what a lot of people do. We just put together a couple of spreadsheets. We said, okay, we’ll put a spreadsheet together that’s going to work out how much tax we’re going to need to set aside. And we existed like that for a good couple of years, with no intention of starting a business.

And it was only when some friends of ours came out of salaried work and said, what do you guys do? This is painful. And we said, we’ve got these couple of spreadsheets, do you want to use them? So they started using them, and then they told some friends, who told some friends. By this time I’d started to do some work in the startup community, and we sat down and said, hang on a minute, maybe we’re not the dumb ones here. Maybe we’ve got an idea. So we spun up a one-page website and put $100 behind a Twitter ad campaign, and it was probably the most clickbaity ad you’ve ever seen in your life.

And to our surprise, people signed up, and they went through a whole lot of friction to sign up. I think they had to print off, sign, scan and return two different government documents just to get access to the service. But they did, and they paid three times as much as they do today. For these people, the pain of having to deal with tax payments and filings was so great that they would have walked over hot coals to get it. So we really knew that we had something, and we didn’t really know quite how big it was until probably early 2018, when we formally launched. And things have just grown extremely, extremely quickly since then.

Dexter Cousins
It’s such an amazing story. And I think the lesson in it is that when you find a need, rather than a want, or what you hope people might need, as you pointed out, they’re prepared to go through the pain of the bad user experience and the friction and all that stuff.

James Fuller
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Right. But they’re prepared to do it when you’re solving a real pain point, and you’re helping someone. What did you take from that lesson that then helped you get to the next stage? Because I would assume that when you started to get responses to the Twitter ad, it was, oh, how do we do this?

James Fuller
Oh my God, I remember. And I can’t remember whether we talked about this in the last podcast, but it’s one of my favourite stories. So Clare and I are married, by the way. I don’t know whether I went through that in the previous story. My co-founder and I are married.

Dexter Cousins
How do you get away with calling your wife your co-founder?

James Fuller
I think she prefers co-founder to wife at this stage. So we were on holiday with our… well, it was just our one daughter at the time. And shortly before we went on holiday, and this is back in the real bootstrapping days, where everything was done manually, I had that classic startup idea around our pricing. I said, what we need is three different pricing models. You’ve got the entry level, and the medium, and then the extremely expensive, but the middle one’s the most popular. I was like, this is great, price anchoring, this is what all the big boys do: you have three packages, and this one’s the most popular.

We didn’t have a whole lot of functionality to put into an expensive price model, so I just made stuff up. I thought, no one’s going to take it. We were going to charge people something like 6% of their income. The usual plan cost was 3%; we now charge 1%. So that’s how much people were paying, but I put together this 6% plan thinking this is going to be so expensive that no one’s ever going to touch it. I think it included things like invoice factoring and, I don’t know, coming round your house and delivering your money personally. I don’t know what it was.

But we were away on holiday, and someone signed up for the 6% plan. And I turned around to Clare and said, oh crap, what are we going to do now? We don’t have any of this functionality. The Twitter ad has responded in someone saying, yes, I want all of those things. And she said, well, you’re going to have to tell them that we don’t have that plan. I thought, this is awkward. They’d obviously signed up with their phone number, so I gave the guy a call, while we were away somewhere, and I basically down-sold him onto the 3% plan. I said, no, you don’t want the 6% plan, that’s not for you. So I basically talked myself out of a sale.

But it was one of those classic moments. It was then that we realised that nobody needs three pricing plans. What our customers want is actually just simplicity.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Take it away, do it for me.

James Fuller
And so at the time we decided on a 3% pricing model. We’ve now gone down to 1%. We literally slashed our prices back in 2018, much to the surprise of our customers, who said, I’ve never been with a service that has just dropped their price by so much. But I think the thing that we learned, back to your question, is: number one, listen to the customers, but also you’ve got to have that integrity. You’ve got to actually be honest with the customers. When we dropped our prices from 3% to 1%, we contacted our customers and said it didn’t feel right: we weren’t providing enough of a service to justify 3%. So we said, okay, it’s 1%, and we’re going to cap it every year. Now our cap is $1,500 a year. So that’s all your accounting, all of your payments, all of your software, unlimited support, all rolled in. And it felt so much nicer to be able to offer something at a price point that felt fair.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

James Fuller
And we didn’t want to be one of those businesses that’s seeing how much it can get away with. So you learn by basically down-selling your customers when you’ve overextended.

Dexter Cousins
Kudos as well to the strength of the product and the problem that you’re solving. In this game that I’m in, recruitment, I’ve often had so many debates around, hey, why doesn’t the industry shift to more of a sports or talent management model, where the talent pays part of their salary, right? And the reality is nobody’s giving away any of their salary, right? Even if you find them a job, the expectation is that the employer will bear that cost. So the fact that you were able, with an unproven product, to charge 3% of somebody’s income…

James Fuller
Oh, it just shows how bad the problem was, right? This is years of systematic difficulty that sole traders have had. Sole traders were just like Clare and I when we started. They were expected to basically do their own books. I remember we used to have our old-school accountant, who’s a good friend of mine. But you know that thing where you become self-employed, and you wonder which one of your friends is an accountant, and then you ask around and you go, yeah, I thought so. So we registered with him, lovely guy, but there was that moment at the end of the financial year where he would literally print off the reporting software that we were using, the accounting software, he would print it off and hand it to me and go, does this look right to you? Can you initial each page and give it back? And I would say, hang on a minute, isn’t that your job? And he said, well, no. All year you’ve been reconciling your transactions, you’ve loaded in your expenses. I just need you to confirm that this is all correct.

And I sat there, literally staring at a wad of 25, 30 pages, going, I’m about to outlay, I think it was probably about $1,500, that I was going to pay the guy for the year. I’ve done all the work. I’ve reconciled all the transactions. He’s come to me asking for my signature and whether I think it’s correct. And I just thought, what am I paying for? And that was the genesis for Hnry: how do we change the nature of the accounting service that sole traders get, so that it actually benefits them? It’s not about how much can we gouge this sole trader because we can get away with it. It’s actually: how do we put in place fair pricing that gives an opportunity for anyone to earn independently?

It’s always an interesting thing when you come at an industry from the outside, like Clare and I did. We’re not trained accountants, but we just saw people being ripped off. And that’s where we’re at today: lots of people are being ripped off. I talked to a hairdresser the other day who was being charged $5,000 for their annual income tax return.

Dexter Cousins
Wow.

James Fuller
It’s the wild west. And what we bring is a bunch of standardisation, and huge value add on top of what you’re getting elsewhere. So actually we really stand by the pricing model and the service model, because it’s genuinely helping people.

Dexter Cousins
Now, I guess the launch of the business has coincided with this huge shift that we’ve seen in work practices and working life, particularly over the last two years. I would argue that the change was already happening well before COVID anyway. What impact has that had on the Hnry business? Have you seen a significant increase in business, and people moving to this sole trader model and becoming self-employed? We hear a lot about the great resignation, for example, and I do question whether it’s actually a thing or not.

James Fuller
Well, I think you’re quite right. We’ve always seen that this has been happening for a number of years: more digital economies, people taking a bit more control over how and from where they’re earning. But COVID certainly accelerated things. And what we saw was actually some traditional industries really had to pivot quite quickly. You don’t usually associate pivoting with more traditional sole trader industries, but I’ll use my mum, back in the UK, as an example. She does a Zumba class once a week in person. She goes down with all of her friends and they do a Zumba class. But obviously COVID hit, lockdowns, and that class can’t be in person.

But the instructor, as with a lot of people in that industry, had to very quickly pivot and said, actually, I’m going to move my classes online. And by doing so they actually increased their earning potential, because suddenly, rather than having to rent the church hall, where you can only put 10 people in it, you can do a Zoom class to 20 people concurrently, and everyone stays in their homes. So for the personal trainer, for the instructor, the overheads are significantly reduced, and everyone still gets that sense of community and they’re all there together. So quite a few industries really pivoted very quickly to embrace the impact that COVID had on their businesses and their ability to earn.

And so we saw a lot of that throughout 2020: people diversifying their income streams in a way that we hadn’t seen before. People who’d been let go from what used to be called permanent employment… we prefer the term salaried, because there’s no such thing as a permanent job, as COVID showed us. These people basically got turfed out of jobs they’d been in for a number of years, and a lot of them sat there and said, well, perhaps I’ve had all my eggs in one basket. I’ve had one employer. I’ve basically hitched myself to one horse, and maybe that’s not the right way to go about things. So these were people who took control of how they earned, and they said, I’m going to have multiple income streams. As a sole trader, I’m going to try and earn in a few different ways.

We talk about that portfolio careers idea. It’s a way of people really indulging portfolio careers and saying, I’m a real estate agent that’s also going to drive Uber. It’s about de-risking the way that you earn. And having Hnry at that point was a way of people further de-risking it, saying, actually, I can have a drop shipping business, I can do graphic design, I can do web work, and I don’t have to worry about the compliance mess that I would have had to previously, because Hnry takes care of all of that. So what we saw was the acceleration of portfolio careers, of digital working, in a way that encouraged people to look at other avenues. And we very much benefited from people going down this road, because they needed a way of sorting all of that income, all of that client management. Right place, right time.

But we’ve actually seen a continued growth of that well after COVID restrictions eased. So we’re not one of these businesses that saw a spike during COVID and then it all went away. Looking at Zoom’s share price, it’s back where it was two-odd years ago. For us, revenue growth and customer growth has been consistent since all the way back in 2018. What we saw in COVID was just that things got faster, and since COVID they’ve just got faster still.

Dexter Cousins
Now, you alluded to this earlier, around your round trip. This is another really cool thing about Hnry: your HQ is in Wellington, New Zealand.

James Fuller
It is. Yeah, it is sunny Wellington, as you call it.

Dexter Cousins
You don’t sound like a Kiwi. How did Wellington become home?

James Fuller
So I’m originally from London, from South East London, and Clare and I met over there. We were both working… I’m just actually reflecting on it now: we’ve had a pretty glamorous career. Now we run a tax business, but back then we met working at a company that makes address software. So we’ve hit all the high notes of glamour jobs. But yeah, we met working at an address software company in London 10, 15 years ago. And when we had our first child… London’s not a great place to raise kids, and Clare’s from here originally, so she said, look, why don’t we try the other side of the world? And me, as a not very intrepid Brit, said, okay, I’ll give it a go for a little while. But we settled in Clare’s hometown of Wellington. It’s just a really lovely place to be and a great place to raise children. We’ve got two daughters. And then obviously, since launching in Australia with Hnry a couple of years ago, Clare and I are over here incredibly frequently. Now the borders are open, we can come over every couple of weeks and spend some time with our team over here, which is growing quite significantly. It’s been one of the best moves we’ve ever made, relocating from the UK.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Now, it’s not renowned as being a fintech hub, Wellington.

James Fuller
Maybe, maybe not.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, well, I guess…

James Fuller
Xero did.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, yeah. Apologies, Kiwi listeners. But I guess the point being, as a hub for talent, and just access to capital and people, and being around there… We’re in Sydney at the minute, and you can go around the corner to the startup hub and chat to anyone, really. It’s just having that proximity to it, whereas in Wellington you haven’t got that proximity. What were some of the things you found you had to really go overextending on to make the business a success, because you just didn’t have access to it?

James Fuller
I don’t know. I think the access is actually phenomenal in New Zealand. I would imagine in London the access is probably a bit harder, but in Wellington it is phenomenal. I actually used to work at one of the startup hubs there, so I’m well aware of the community that exists. We were based out of one of the startup hubs and went through the fintech accelerator there. It’s very well renowned that Kiwis all know each other, so you’re literally a couple of degrees of separation from pretty much anyone. As a place to be and a place to do business, you can get a meeting with pretty much anyone at any time. Everyone’s very open and welcoming.

So what we found was, actually, we could go and pitch up at one of the co-working spaces and just run seminars during the afternoon on contractor tax, and then we could go to one of the bigger recruitment agencies and get in the door to sit with the MD, just because either it’s a warm intro or they’re just excited about the business. I don’t have an experience of starting a business in Sydney, but in New Zealand there is that plucky nature of supporting each other, and we found we had a lot of doors open for us, even to where we are today. I had the pleasure of sitting down a couple of times in the last few weeks with the Minister for Small Business, just talking about what we do at Hnry and what we’re seeing in the sole trader space. And the minister is incredibly excited to support businesses like Hnry that are effectively benefiting government and benefiting the wider New Zealand economy.

So I would say, if you look at a lot of businesses, New Zealand is actually a proving ground for businesses to refine their model and their go-to-market before they…

Dexter Cousins
Exactly what we say about Australia.

James Fuller
It’s just smaller. It’s just a smaller proving ground. But the lessons that we learned in business in New Zealand… when we launched in Australia, the growth that we’ve seen over here has been phenomenal in the last 18 months, and really only due to the lessons that we learned in the years we spent crafting a business in New Zealand, so that we could hit the ground running here and really tailor it for the Australian market. And the response from the customers and from the clients has just been amazing.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, fantastic. Now, the other thing that I wanted to chat with you about was the recognition that you got this year, winning the People’s Choice Award at the Finnies. How was that received in New Zealand? Because I can imagine you must have been like heroes.

James Fuller
The New Zealand team wanted to take the trophy back. Clare and I were at the awards, and I went down with Karan, who’s our managing director for Australia. We went and collected the award, and it’s a good old weighty award. It’s a real privilege. And there was a point at the end of the night where I think Clare and I were just about to walk off with it, and Karan said, no, no, that lives in the Sydney office. So yeah, it was a huge honour, and we’re so thankful to all of our customers in Australia for getting us there, as you know, with all the podcast listens and votes from customers. I think we were quite well celebrated when we went back to New Zealand, because it’s a big deal for us. As a Kiwi company that’s reasonably new to the Australian market, to get that kind of backing from the Aussies was just fantastic.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Now, I want to talk a little bit more about the fintech scene in general. You’ve touched a little on New Zealand. What’s your sense, when you come to visit Sydney, of the Australian scene, and how do you think New Zealand and Australia can collaborate a bit more?

James Fuller
It’s an interesting one. I think the scene here in Australia is mature. It’s busy. It’s another level over here. I was saying to some of our local investors here in Sydney: I think one of the first times I came over, you’re in a cab from the airport into the CBD, and the amount of fintech apps on the backs of buses, and the amount of ads… I remember at the time, a good few years ago, there were entire train station takeovers by the likes of Spaceship. I think they might have just raised a round, and I remember going through St James and it was just completely purple with Spaceship. And then I got upstairs to the hotel room, put on YouTube, and the first ad that comes up is a Spaceship ad. It was that first experience of just the sheer scale over here, and that was probably 2017, 2018.

And one of the things that’s really interesting is that since probably 2017 on, we’ve seen some huge businesses coming out of New Zealand, some massive raises, some big fintech businesses, whether it’s the likes of Sharesies or First AML and others, where actually I think they’re looking to the Australian market for investment. We were lucky enough to bring on funding from EVP, as I was saying, a local VC here, and getting that Australian flavour of the scale that you can achieve and the sort of things that you can do. I think there’s a certain amount that we’ve seen in the New Zealand market that actually emulates some of the size that you see here. But certainly four or five years ago I’d never seen anything like it: such a busy market, with such a variety of different verticals in the fintech space.

Dexter Cousins
On the VC bit: we talked earlier about you getting product-market fit really quickly. What were the discussions like with VCs, going to them with something that was already proven, where you had customers and they were actually paying a fair amount of money to use the service? How did that change the conversation with VCs?

James Fuller
Well, I think there were different stages, right? When we first raised money back in 2018, all the conversations were with angel investors, and it was very much, hey, we’ve got some initial revenue coming in, we’ve got good recurring monthly revenue coming in. But as we started to grow and you start to have conversations with VCs over in Australia, it all became about the metrics. How predictable is your customer acquisition? And what’s really interesting, as you look at it now, is the kind of metrics we were measured against in the early stages were things like: what’s your CAC, what’s your LTV, what’s your MRR growth over time?

And then suddenly you find yourself… we raised a round in December last year, about 15 mil Australian, from a US-based venture fund called Left Lane, and the sorts of things you’re judged on there are, again, next level. It’s fully grossed-up customer acquisition cost, when you take into account all costs to get there, your gross margin, your CAC payback period on a fully grossed-up basis, your burn multiple. All of these new metrics come in. As a business, we’ve always been hyper-efficient. We’ve always been focused on efficiency. We run lean deliberately, because we want to be able to have sustainable growth. We don’t just go and hire an army of people; we actually want to make sure we’ve got a good long-term road map. But at every turn you go and speak to a different VC and they’ve got a different set of metrics that they want you to look at. So now I look at the metrics that we have as a business, that we consider our vitals, and compare them to where we were in 2018, and it’s just leagues in between.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Now, you talk about scaling the business there. How many people are employed at Hnry?

James Fuller
We are… where are we now? 67, I think. So back in 2018 it was Clare and I, unpaid. We’re now 67 staff. I think it’s 48 in Wellington and the remainder here, but we’re recruiting for another 15 to 20 roles at the moment. We’re just about to open a new office in Tech Central here in Sydney, and that has capacity for 80, I think. So things are filling up pretty quickly.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What’s that journey been like, of scaling the business? And I’m going to ask for some tips here, because me and my wife work together.

James Fuller
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
I think it’s probably the reason why we’ve not scaled the business, because we couldn’t subject other people to that.

James Fuller
You’re in Sydney and she’s in Newcastle.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, that’s right. She sent me here. But it is something that I could imagine would be a real challenge, right? The stresses of a startup, growing a business, hiring people, trying to get funding, and then having the person that’s in your life, where there’s no filter between the two of you. Whereas at least with a co-founder that you’re not married to, there’s not that relationship there, although you’re pretty much married to a co-founder anyway.

James Fuller
No, I mean, often this gets asked, and I think genuinely this business wouldn’t be a success if we weren’t married. I think we would have probably thrown in the towel back in 2017. We had the benefit of having worked in close proximity before, here and there, but we had to adjust. The first time you disagree at work is an interesting experience, but you grow and you adjust very quickly to that. But actually, for me, it’s about this: when you’re not working together, and you work in different places, and you come home after a day at work and try and describe something that’s happened in your day, the other person has literally no context. They don’t know who Jan is or who Fred is. They maybe met them at a Christmas party once, but they don’t really know how the business works, and they can’t do anything to help you. All they can do is just nod along and be a sounding board. Whereas when you have that person, and you get home and talk about a challenge in the business, that person can directly fix that problem, or find a solution, or give some advice that’s directly relevant and comes with context. It’s actually so much more beneficial.

And genuinely, and I don’t say this because my wife’s probably going to watch this… she probably won’t, actually, she’s sick of the sound of my voice. But I couldn’t imagine running a business with even just a friend. If I think of any of my friends, and think about going into business with one of them, how difficult that would be, what a strain that would put on the friendship. Certainly we’ve found that the success has come from the fact that we have that strong bond as a relationship, and it means that we can be better as founders, because you don’t have a filter. You’re going to give it to somebody straight, and if they’re not doing what they should be doing, you’re going to call them out on it. In private, of course.

I think it’s actually been a great success story. And when you look at the number of businesses out there that are husband and wife, whether they put themselves out there as a husband and wife team or whether they’ve used different names to try and keep things separate, there’s a lot of very successful businesses that are couples who started the business themselves. For Clare and I, for a while we didn’t put it out there. We still don’t trade on it. We don’t want it to feel like there’s some stigma attached to it, right? There was a bit at the start, when you’re raising, and people say, is that your wife? And you go, no, that’s my co-founder. Each of us is there on merit, because we have different skills. But I think it’s actually really made the business so much stronger as a whole. And like I say, if I’d had a friend of mine and we’d put this business together, it would probably be long done by now. We’d have just had a big argument and that would have been the end of it. But when Clare and I put our minds to something, it’s actually a very, very powerful team. And you’re probably in the same situation: if you were trying to do this with someone else, it would be very difficult not to have that person at home actually on the journey with you, and the distance you’d find between the two of you, because you’d have no context of what each other was actually getting up to.

Dexter Cousins
Well, you talked earlier about the pricing model, right, and the integrity that you felt. We’ve got a really similar ethos in our business as well. We ain’t got a mission statement, other than that we just want to see Australia and New Zealand punching well above their weight on the global scene. But if you talk about values, I think our value is that we’re a family business, and we want to extend the values of our family to our clients, our community and our network: things around trust and respect and relationships, fairness, transparency, right? And I find it quite comical that we’ve got these crying CEOs on LinkedIn the whole time, with these announcements of redundancies: oh, it’s really hard, because we’re like a family. And that’s like a family, right? There’s a very different… I think there is a break-off between a business and a family, because you’ve got to make decisions in a business that are just cold, hard, calculated decisions, right?

James Fuller
It’s interesting, because actually we’ve got a number of people who work in our business who are related. We’ve got a couple of pairs of siblings who work in our business, and it’s funny for people to find out, a few weeks after they’ve joined, that these people are siblings, because the two of them will be bitching at each other across the office. And when somebody finally reveals that they’re sisters, someone goes, oh, that’s what that is. I thought they were just highly unprofessional.

But the great thing about a business is it does have that closeness, and actually, particularly in the early stages of a business, you need to feel like there’s that sense of family. And even now we’re 60-odd people, you really get the sense of it. Being in the Sydney office for the first time in a little while, the sense of fun that is in that office… I can genuinely sympathise with anyone that has to make hard decisions in their business, because sometimes you do have to make some very difficult decisions, and you try and separate yourself from it. But the one thing I do love about all of our staff is that they love working for the company and they love working with each other, because it’s genuinely just a fun place to work. And the amount of laughter… we had a guy manage to fall through a chair today. It was in a shared co-working space, and the first thing one of our team did was go straight to the building manager. And I was thinking, this is great, they’re going to lay a complaint. No, they got the CCTV footage, put it up on the big TV, and everyone had a good laugh. So you genuinely feel like there’s affection between people, and it’s a great place to work.

Dexter Cousins
What a great atmosphere. Yeah. And I’ve had this discussion with quite a number of people… well, lots of people. It seems to be the only discussion that people want to talk about now: the whole debate about working from home, working remote or being in the office. And for me, it’s clear. I don’t think I could be a good dad, or have a healthy family, if I was Zooming in to check in on the kids and seeing them one or two days a week, right? It’s pretty difficult to do, and I’m sure people would agree with that. Particularly if you want to have the vibe that you’ve got. Not every business wants to have that, but if that’s what you’re trying to achieve, it’s really difficult to do that without having a group of people together, and those moments that you talked about, right? That’s something that creates bonds between people.

I caught up with an old workmate, actually. We stayed in this very room three weeks ago, believe it or not, and we hadn’t seen each other in 12 years. He came from New Zealand as well, and we were just talking about stuff that had happened at work in the office, right? That bond and that friendship that had been created, and 12 years later we were still laughing about it, tears rolling down our eyes, laughing about something that had happened 15, 16 years ago. And I think those bonds are really difficult to replicate remotely.

James Fuller
And I genuinely don’t think that the technology has nailed it. There have been various attempts to use technology to recreate the virtual office, but for us, we love having people in the office. We love our staff having the opportunity to see each other in a different light, so not just at the other end of a Zoom call, but actually to see how people interact with each other, to have fun outside your own department, to go and enjoy something that’s going on physically in an environment, to stand around a whiteboard. We know some people would prefer not to be in an office, and certainly, if I think about people in the UK who sometimes have two-and-a-half-hour or three-hour commutes, there’s some productivity things there. But I think the benefit of being around other people and actually enjoying other people’s company is really good for mental health generally.

I was saying this to you earlier: we have a new starter coming into our engineering team, and for the last three or four years he’s been working primarily remotely, just by virtue of the people he was working for, and then a little bit of COVID in between. When we interviewed him, he just said, look, I’ve been doing this for years now. I just want to be around people. He said, the feeling I had of my own self-esteem, where I wake up in the morning, walk over to a desk, sit down, not really move for a period of time, and then just close up the laptop and walk across to the other side of the room… I want to be around people. I want the vibe. I want to be in the CBD, where I can actually go and do stuff and not be confined to my house. Some people don’t like that, but what we’re finding is a lot of people who’ve done long-term remote working are now going, yeah, that was fun for a while, but actually I really want to be able to work around other people.

Dexter Cousins
Now, we’re going to wrap up soon, James. You talked briefly about your growth plans. What do the next 12 months hold in store for Hnry?

James Fuller
So I think the Australian market is the big focus for us at the moment. New Zealand is just absolutely flying for us, but we’re still relatively new to Australia, and we’ve got some huge amounts of growth. I think the last 18 months has been 20, 25% revenue growth month on month, which has just been amazing. But it’s a massive market, and there’s a huge number of sole traders out there that we can help. We have plans for further afield, and going to other countries as well, but the Australian market is our focus. As we were saying, we’ve got a new office opening here, and we’ve got a significant amount of hiring across product, marketing, engineering and operations. So it’s really about making sure that we can serve the Australian market really well.

I don’t think we’ve really even scratched the surface of industries, and whilst we’re growing a lot, I think there’s so much more there. It’s such a Poe part of the Australian working economy, the Aussie battler, the sole trader. And there are so many out there that are still in that wild west, being charged three or four thousand dollars for a tax return, where actually there are alternatives in the likes of Hnry that can just do all that stuff for you, and you can get your life back. So I’d love to say that world domination is the next 12 months for us, but realistically it’s about serving this market, listening to Aussie customers, really getting it right and nailing that sustainable growth.

Dexter Cousins
Now, we get some seriously talented people watching and listening to this show. Some of them could be potential customers of Hnry, some of them might be interested in working with you. What’s the best way for people to reach out if they’re interested in joining Hnry?

James Fuller
So if you’re interested in joining Hnry, just jump on hnry.com.au, that’s H-N-R-Y dot com dot au, and come and talk to one of our team. When you jump on the live chat, that’s not bots, it’s not AI. Answer a couple of questions and come and talk to a human, and you can find out whether Hnry is right for you.

Dexter Cousins
Cool. And careers at Hnry?

James Fuller
jobs@hnry.com.au. Flick us a CV. Whilst we’ve got some pretty defined roles out there, we’re always of the opinion that we will hire good people if they make themselves available. So if you look at our careers page and there isn’t a role that’s immediately jumping out at you, just drop us an email at that address, and all comers are considered.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Well, James, it’s been fantastic to have you on. Thanks so much for the marriage counselling.

James Fuller
Anytime. That’s why I’m here.

Dexter Cousins
Business marriage consultant, the slashes. It’s been great to have you on, and fantastic to hear about the continued success of Hnry. Mate, can’t wait to speak again in another 12 months and see how things have gone for you all.

James Fuller
Yeah, we’d love to.

Dexter Cousins
And you can connect with me, Dexter Cousins, on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, remember to press follow on your favourite podcast player, and please consider leaving us a review. It really does help me in bringing in great guests, and helps fintech fans like you discover the show. Fintech Chatter is presented by Tier One People, leaders in fintech executive search. We’ll help you launch, scale and innovate by delivering world-class talent, and you can find out more at tieronepeople.com. Until the next episode, stay safe.

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