October 14, 2020

Hayden Wood - Founder of Bulb, the renewable energy company

37 minutes

The two articles that I mentioned in the summary that Hayden sent across after the show:

https://cultureby.com/2019/01/someday-we-will-all-play-for-the-patriots.html

https://www.patspulpit.com/2017/5/18/15644770/bill-belichick-explains-why-the-patriots-always-have-one-of-the-smallest-coaching-staffs-in-the-nfl

Jimmy is joined by one of the UKs leading entrepreneurs, Hayden Wood founded Bulb alongside his co founder, Amit just five years ago in 2015.

For those of you that haven't heard of,Bulb, they provide 100% renewable electricity and 100% carbon neutral gas to a now staggering 1.7 million members across the UK.

That has led it to become the fastest growing private company in the UK, but its growth is not just limited to these shores, as it has recently just announced expansion into France, Spain and Texas.

They employ almost 900 people in a wide variety of different roles, and we'll ask Hayden where he sees green jobs of the future coming from, it is a phrase that is often trotted out, but we'll aim to get into more of the detail today.

Whilst it has been a great success story, not everything is or has been plain sailing and we will discuss some of the challenges the company has had along the way.

**Please leave us a rating if you enjoy the show or even tag us on social media in particularly on LinkedIn, we are at @JimmysJobs**

Prime Ministerial Summary

If I were summing that conversation up to the Prime Minister in a short briefing memo, the key things that I would include.

All employees have some form of data test now

The best ideas can come from surprising places for example their internal hack weeks, where they put lots of multi disciplinary people together to try and improve the business - this is where their single energy tariff idea came from.

Only 5% of their employees had a background in energy before joining the company.

At any given point, 5% of employees are in rotation within another part of the business, seeing how each other work and sharing ideas

Biggest challenge came when trying to recruit too many people too quickly - this is a challenge we see often for fast growing scale up companies

They are using the traditional in person interview less, because of biases that this can lead too.

Lastly, I was interested to hear how whilst the energy use has been smoothed throughout the pandemic, rather than the traditional 5-7pm dash, that has actually led to an increase in prices because it is therefore less predictable.

I would then cross check that with the energy adviser to see if they had any comment they wanted to add.

**Please leave us a rating if you enjoy the show or even tag us on social media in particularly on LinkedIn, we are at @JimmysJobs**

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