Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:00:15] Welcome to two-sided, the marketplace podcast brought to you by Sharetribe.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:00:23] Hi, I'm Sjoerd CMO with Sharetribe and I'm your host. I'm actually very excited today because this is the first time that I can say to at least some of you welcome back  because we dropped the first few episodes last week and the response has been absolutely amazing. And if you're one of the people who heard those and came back, thank you so much.And also thank you for the fantastic response we've gotten so far. Now let's dive into the episode. So in this episode, I'm talking to Charles Armatage. Charles was actually a doctor and training to go into emergency medicine, but then decided to radically change his career to start a marketplace for independent nurses and elderly care.

Well, Charles will tell us all about that. And it's a very interesting story, but he'll also show us the importance of talking to your customers before actually building your huge product. You know, spoiler alert, their first version failed hard and how to build relationship and have trust in such a delicate Margaret.

Again, I've only had fantastic episodes so far, and this one is no exception. So sit tight and listen to Charles story 

Charles Armitage: [00:01:27] about Florence.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:01:36] Hi Charles. Welcome to the show. 

Charles Armitage: [00:01:38] Thanks very much for having me. 

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:01:39] Hey, I checked out a little bit of your background. I saw that you're trained as a doctor and well, I think we'd like to know a little bit more about you. So can you tell us a little bit about what you did before you ended up at Florence?

Charles Armitage: [00:01:51] Sure. So, uh, absolutely. So it was a, a doctor in the UK and a number of different specialties, but it kind of was settling in on emergency medicine and then laterally surgery. So was pursuing a career in trauma surgery, but still relatively, kind of early on in that journey. It takes quite a long time to get to.

You know, the end of being a trauma surgeon, but yeah, so worked in a lot of places, worked in London a lot on the South coast and up in Scotland and then some other funny places around the world, like South America and Africa and places like that. 

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:02:21] That was too boring for you or what was the reason why were like, Hey, 

Charles Armitage: [00:02:25] sure.

I'm sorry. Is that something that was a bit boring actually. So I could talk about this forever, but the thing about medicine is that, um, you know, you get moments of absolute, huge adrenaline rushes and amazing thrills. Also punctuated by quite a lot of time, grinding your head against quite a challenging system.

And you can spend a lot of your time doing paperwork and filling out. You're not necessarily having a massive impact. And certainly that the impact you're having isn't exactly scalable. You were kind of an equals wide and there's only so much you can do really to make a change. And so 

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:02:54] were you always into tech that you're like, I'm going to start a startup for like, maybe you can tell us a little bit into the origin of Florence.

Charles Armitage: [00:03:02] Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've always been kind of interested in tech and I was like new shiny things, but essentially, you know, learn more and more about myself. And my drivers is kind of my goal and the journey, but essentially I just like new things and maybe I've got a slightly short attention span. So always kind of looking for something new on the horizon.

And I was working in. London at the time in emergency medicine and was really enjoying their job. But at the same time, it was kind of investigating things on the size. And one of the things I noticed and it's kind of a pervasive problem throughout healthcare in the UK and actually most of the world is, you know, the biggest challenge is staffing.

And how do you create a solution to some of the biggest challenges we face as a society, which is, you know, looking after an aging population and providing the staff to do that in like a safe and high quality way. So I was messing around with some ideas in this, any department, trying to kind of build an app for me and my colleagues to swap shifts and, you know, work more effectively between us.

And obviously like couldn't build it because I'm not technical. And it started kind of the idea going and didn't really come to much. And then I met my cofounder, Dan, who is from the military, but I guess comes from the other side of the fence as well. He manages a care home group. Well manage the cat and group in London.

So it was having challenges, finding staff to look after their residents. And we met, we were introduced by a mutual friend and kind of started bouncing some ideas around. We both had ideas in the kind of space of how can we use technology to bring together this supply and demand in a more intelligent way and, you know, high quality cost effective, all these kinds of great things.

And then we just started like, thinking about it and it's right. Single map. And you know, the rest is history. 

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:04:40] Yeah for the people at home. So could you tell us a little bit about what is Florence exactly. 

Charles Armitage: [00:04:45] Sure. So Florence is the online marketplace for flexible staffing on demand staffing in the cat section UK.

So what we do is we have a platform that connects care homes to nurses and carers looking for extra shifts. And I guess, traditionally the problem in the UK cast actor is a massively understaffed industry. So. It was around about 120,000 vacancies in UK care sector. So what ends up happening is a huge proportion of shifts.

About 10% of all shifts in calc care in the UK have felt both. Temporary workers, flexible workers. 

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:05:18] Is that elderly care only or health care. 

Charles Armitage: [00:05:21] Yeah. So when I talk about car I’m talking about elderly care in the community. So in town homes, nursing homes, not necessarily the health care sites, which is more the NHS, and there's a bit of a differentiation of the UK.

What ends up happening is about 10% of this workforce is temporary, is flexible and it's managed. Pre Florence was managed by traditional recruitment agencies who were really fragmented offline processes. You know, one man and his phone kind of with relationships with individual workers or homes and bring these two people together.

And, you know, whilst. That's a model as well. For very long time, it was hugely expensive for the care sector. So billion spent every year just on the kind of the agency models in the middle. And there's just so much that could be done with technology to improve those engagements. 

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:06:02] Yeah. And so Dan had experienced that problem himself.

Charles Armitage: [00:06:05] Yeah. So he was the chairman of this nursing home that couldn't find nurses. And on the other side was a doctor who would occasionally work these flexible shifts in the NHS and, you know, weekends or holidays. I, you know, want to get an extra share for a bit more pocket money. And whilst I knew there was a shift down the road, I'd have to call up my recruitment agency and get sent to Birmingham and, you know, turn up and get thrown the keys and told, you know, that they'd be back in 12 hours.

So it was January, a really poor experience and I needed a better way of doing it. Yeah. 

Sjoerd Handgraaf: [00:06:33] And so you said, Dan is your co founder, is he a more technical pers...