Meet Jim Woods, Founder of BetterSpace

x+why member BetterSpace are a personalised employee wellbeing platform that outperform corporate mental health programmes by up to 90%. The first intelligent marketplace of its kind, BetterSpace work in a disruptive, holistic and expert-backed capacity. Forgoing the reactive approach that has contributed to the rising personal and financial cost of mental ill health, they focus on prevention and true cultural change. Jim Woods, co-founder and CEO of the platform, spoke with us about their ambitious plan to to act as a wellbeing concierge to over ten million people a year by 2026.

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What is the BetterSpace mission statement?

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We were setup to help tackle the mental health crisis. We recognise that no one company can do this on their own, but we hope to play a key part in that movement.

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Can you tell us a little more about your role within BetterSpace?

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I’m the co-founder and CEO and my job is to hire a brilliant team of people who are much smarter than I am, in each of their respective areas. Ultimately my job is to carry the torch and ensure that the mission is laid out in more practical terms. I spend a lot of my time fundraising, talking to investors and larger employers with longer lead times.

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What has been your journey towards co-founding the company?

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I was born into a family with strong values, which really shaped who I am as a person. I did 5 years in Investment Banking straight out of university, but I never found it very satisfying, and in 2000 I setup my first venture. It designed and delivered motorbikes, spanning many sectors including courier services and pizza delivery.

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This led to me meeting and working with brands such as Yo Sushi. Later Simon Woodroffe and I successfully collaborated on projects including Yotel – a cross between a first class airline seat and a hotel. We built the prototype, put a team together and raised £12 million in initial investment.

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An important turning point in my life was when I had my first child. This brought me back to the values I was brought up with. I wanted to do things that mattered, it shifted my perspective towards something that was far more long-term. I wanted to consider the kind of world I was leaving for my children to inherit, and became more interested in tackling big challenges such as climate change.

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My first role was to help a couple of people who were setting up sustainability recruitment firm Acre, first as an executive director and subsequently as a non-exec. Acre is now the leading firm for sustainability jobs in the UK, as well as being present in the US and Europe. I’m still a shareholder and am hugely proud of that journey; matching candidates to companies that can create change was extremely fulfilling and rewarding.

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Then 3 years ago I found myself outside of the psychiatric unit in Oxford, trying to see a good friend of mine. However she didn’t want to see my wife and I. Two months later, she would go on to take her own life. She was the 6th friend of mine to do so.

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What I noticed from this experience is that it’s hard to help someone when they’re on the floor. The point at which you can do something comes much earlier, when they have moderate mental health. This is when things like going for a run, walk, or talking to a friend are much more feasible. So I wanted to help people with moderate mental health build better behaviours.

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Luckily, this was around the same time that x+why member Zinc accelerator was setting up, so I joined their programme as an entrepreneur. Here I met a swarthy Sardinian called Alfredo, one of the best Tech guys in the group; We hit it off immediately and began to think about what the Tesla for mental health should look like.

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We knew we wanted to go into prevention, and that this was a product designed for over half the population. We identified two main barriers – the first was that people lack mental health literacy and have often never thought much about what they do to protect or prevent mental health issues worsening. The second thing we noticed is that they had nowhere to go to find things that are good for their mental health. Doctors don’t see you until you’re ill, and Google is very confusing and doesn’t offer a personalised algorithm.

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We wanted to know if we could build a wellbeing marketplace where everyone can come and find something that’s good for their mental health, and shortcut that discovery process for them. I was very interested in employers because they have a good business case to look after their employees’ mental wellbeing.

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We found some progressive employers to help us build our platform, particularly Linklaters, who have done a series of pilots with us. We’ve had off the charts results – a 94% engagement rate and 70% reported improvement in mental wellbeing on our last pilot.

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Then Accenture put out a Request for Proposal for a next generation wellbeing platform. Being one of the premium employers in the UK, it validated the need for what we had been building and testing for two years. We were very excited to win the RFP, and we launched with them in February and it’s been a great partnership. Smaller companies come and sign up very quickly, for larger companies the lead times can be a little longer.

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I hope that what we do is build an access point that works for millions of employees and helps them find what is best for them quickly and efficiently. In turn, this helps employers to maximise their ROI and minimise the admin burden. If we do these things well, we believe we can fulfil our mission to help tackle the mental health crisis.

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What are some of the main reasons behind the growing mental health epidemic in your opinion?

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I think it’s a very complex space and any one answer is at risk of over-simplifying the situation. I’ve read many reports and talked to many experts, and for me it boils down to us becoming increasingly isolated as a society.

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For the past few decades we’ve been very influenced by an economic model which celebrates the individual and says we are rational beings driven by self interest. That model has been so drummed into us as a society, but we know through our work that social connections are critical to mental health.

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The deterioration in our communities has created a deep need for belonging, which is manifesting in different ways – whether it be polarisation via Brexit, Trump or otherwise. Employers are increasingly offering Millennials and Gen Z in particular, a sense of belonging. It’s hard for boomers to truly understand that these generations are looking for more than money – belonging, psychological safety and so on. Employers who understand these things will win the war on talent.

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Our vision is that over the next decade employers will emerge as the primary custodians of wellbeing in society. What makes me optimistic as I see it in our own team. People feel they can be open about how they feel, what’s going on in their lives and how this impacts them and their work. Working hard to create this culture is a team effort, where leadership must lead by example and be ok with being vulnerable. When you achieve it, you attract and retain talent. We feel we are an example of what the future employer will look like – as a concierge or custodian of wellbeing.

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What makes BetterSpace an ‘intelligent’ market place and gives it a leading edge?

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Lots of things – in the medium to long term the main thing we are trying to crack is how you personalise to each individual. Wellbeing is intensely personal. For some it’s sleep, or exercise, for others it’s finances or social connections.

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We want to be amazing at personalising that process of improvement and discovery. The more data we have, the more we can understand what works, and for who. This ability to understand someone, often better than they even understand themselves, is what matters.

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The data is only really useful in context. When someone does something such as purchasing a book on a certain topic – it gives you a set of clues about them. Their feedback in terms of ratings tells you a little more information, then we look at similar individuals and are able to recommend things they might like through this cross-analysis of data. Connecting the dots is what helps make effective personalised recommendations.

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This can be a challenge on day 0, so we have a self-assessment at the start which focuses on The Six Pillars of Wellbeing, before drilling down into a few other areas. Thereafter,  each new data point contributes to the network effect which improves return on investment for everyone.

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How did you fundraise?

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To date we have focused on High Net Worths. We’ve gone to great lengths to find people who share our passion to tackle this growing epidemic, and have been lucky to find supportive investors in terms of financing, help, connections to clients and special areas of business. We are now embarking on our seed round where we will take our first VC investors.

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This is a really interesting moment for us. We’re finding a healthy amount of VC’s who back mission driven companies, and who share our desire to make profit from doing socially useful activities.

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How has the platform been impacted by COVID?

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The silver lining is that it has de-stigmatised mental health. 5-10 years ago it was awkward for employers to talk about it, people connected it with weakness. No one wants to be weak. But I think the pandemic triggered a huge conversation in society about mental health, normalising it and recognising that we all have it and it’s a spectrum. A recent survey by PWC suggested that 61% of CEOs see wellbeing as very important for the future of their business. 10 years ago this would have been 5 %, if they even measured it!

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How does BetterSpace adhere to the triple bottom line in its practices?

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I think it’s held through the individuals in our business – from the founders to the investors and management, everyone in the team is committed to our mission and vision. We haven’t considered the B corp certification just yet, as it’s so ingrained in our DNA. At the moment it’s an unwritten constitution but as we get bigger we will probably start to institutionalise it and formalise this process.

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When it comes to business, it’s common for people to feel the need to decide between higher education and learning on the job, what has been the value of each?

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I got a lot out of going to university. I studied economics and politics and within that, specialised in utopian socialism. I learned about people like Charles Fourier, who set-up ideal communities in the states in the 18th century, where he narrowed people down to 1600 passions and tried to build utopian societies, and in some way that’s what we’re trying to do. So I often think about what I learned there. It was super helpful in that sense but it’s not for everyone. Many people without degrees outperform those that hold them.

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I’ve been really taken in by Brené Browns’ podcast recently, there’s one episode where she speaks about advice that she gave her daughter, where if she knew what she wanted to do she should just get on with it and do it. However, if she wanted to remain curious and try lots of different things, then she would finance it.

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What is your favourite interview question when hiring?

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I like to ask people what they’ll be doing in 5-10 years. This tells you what’s important to them, it’s an indication of whether the job you’re offering could help them in that journey or not.

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The way I would answer it would be Simon Sinek style – understanding your “why”. Mine is to put together great teams of people, to tackle society’s big challenges. This is what I know I do well, and what I enjoy doing. My hope is that in 5-10 years I’ll still be doing that, whether it’s through BetterSpace, or a new venture.

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What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

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I think it comes back to losing 6 friends to suicide, you have to help people before they have a problem. I’m more alert to my friends. If I feel they aren’t in a good place, I try to keep tabs on them and ring them up to see how they are more frequently. This has been the hardest lesson I’ve learned.

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What’s the smallest change that’s given the biggest return?

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Having my first child. It was not a small change but it’s transformed my whole outlook on life. I have much further horizons and I take fewer risks. In business this has translated into things such as hiring the right chairman, which has helped shape the business and turn it into something from which so many good things have flowed much more easily.

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How do you balance your life while remaining disciplined, what percentage of your time do you keep unscheduled?

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I use the 6 Pillars of Wellbeing – most days, I ask myself the question, how am I doing on sleep, exercise, social connections, meaningful activities, helping others and stress management? I find that knowing these 6 pillars tells me what I should be doing with a lot of my life every morning.

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Earlier today I took a call from someone thinking about a job. I don’t know her and whereas in the past I may have felt like I didn’t have enough time, I know that helping others is also good for my mental health. I feel immensely lucky to have this framework and it’s the kind of thing that we were never taught in school, but which is increasingly featuring on the curriculum.

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What are your strengths and weaknesses?

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My strengths are also my weaknesses – I’m a perfectionist, which is good because building tech products requires grade A quality and attention to detail for it to work in the market. But it also comes with challenges around how fast you move, and to what degree you are happy to delegate to others. Over time I have learned to delegate better – the more good people you have around you, the less you need to be a perfectionist.

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Do you think that entrepreneurial attributes are personality traits, or skills that can be developed?

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In my opinion they are definitely skills that can be developed and it helps to be an optimist. I’ve been through so many challenging times, from trying to find product-market fit to raining money, and you have to be an optimist to believe you can do these things. Being an entrepreneur is learned through sheer experience, it’s people who take risks that succeed in becoming entrepreneurs.

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How has what you do changed you as a person?

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I’ve done this for 21 years now and it makes you feel very free. It’s also quite scary, you’re in charge of your own destiny to a large degree, there’s always stakeholders and shareholders to satisfy but it still gives you a sense of freedom to be who you are. Which I appreciate.

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Are there any books or blogs on your reading list?

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I’m currently reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. It’s a positive take on society which I love. I’m increasingly moving from books to podcasts though, especially Brené Brown’s Dare To Lead where she interviews many fascinating people. I love the play on the theme of vulnerability, which is the future of leadership. There are also some great podcasts on BBC Sounds, like 13 Minutes to the Moon and Sideways.

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What do you love most about x+why?

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I love that you put wellbeing right at the centre of what you do, and I think you will do really well because of it. The timing is perfect and when I met Rupert very early on, we were probably both still at the stage of having a business plan. It’s been great to see him turn his vision into a reality, it’s hard and he had to persuade a lot of investors to buy into it, but there’s no doubt that it’s the future.

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