In this episode of Never Mind the Pain Points, Robbie Motamed is joined by Jason Sharpe, Advisor, Culture coach and Non-Executive Director at Rebel Energy.
Jason brings over 35 years of experience in various industries, including food retail, financial services, and energy. He shares his journey from traditional to transformational work environments and discusses the innovative and progressive approaches adopted by Rebel Energy.
Tune in to explore the concept of progressive organizations and how they differ from traditional models. Hear more about Rebel Energy’s journey and the importance of autonomy, agility, and purpose in creating a thriving work culture, and take away practical steps and challenges in transitioning to a progressive organization.
Listen here or read on for an edited transcript.
Robbie Motamed: Welcome, Jason. Thank you very much for giving us this time and joining this podcast. So just to give a bit of context about why we wanted to speak to you and why we wanted to do this, this podcast.
We at Clarasys are deeply passionate about organizations that adopt progressive ways of working. We've done it ourselves. We support clients to do it too. And we've been lucky enough close to a year now to be helping run the Corporate Rebels, UK rebel cell community that brings together amazing companies that either have adopted or are trying to adopt progressive ways of working. And, you know, it would be really great just to speak to you, to understand your experience, rebel energy, and learn about the amazing stuff that you're doing there. So thank you for joining. Maybe we do some quick intros first. So just very quickly, myself, Robbie Motamed, I head up our organization design capability here at Clarasys. I've been here since sort of growing from 20 people to 200. And I've been helping lead the UK Rebel cell. It'd be great, Jason, just get a bit of background about yourself.
Jason Sharpe: My name is Jason Sharpe. I am 35, 36 years into a very long career. I work for myself as along with Rebel Energy now. I've worked in many industries, food retail for, you know, 15, 16 years
Moved on to financial services. And then I ended up going to work for First Direct Bank, which most of you will have heard of, suddenly at the time, I went there as one of the best customer services organizations, UK, worldwide and beating, you know, the Apples and the Amazons of this world and very much a challenging innovator brand.
And I think back actually, you know, talk about progressive organizations, I don't think you ever sort of thought of itself that way, but it definitely was both in terms of innovation and how it was kind of set up organizationally.
I then left and went to work for Vodafone for a couple of years, heading up their UK custom services function.
And then finally ended up finding myself in energy. So I worked for OVO Energy who were a very young, very small organization when I joined and went through tumultuous growth where the challenger brands were fighting the big six, as they would like to be called.
So Rebel Energy is interesting because when I left OVO, I had an idea where wouldn't we go set up an energy company and also a shoe company and a recruitment company and loads of other things. So loads of amazing ideas and the energy company that I almost didn't set up, Dan Bates, who founded Rebel Energy, he and I kind of met each other and we clicked because his vision of what Rebel is, and today has become, is definitely how I envisaged what my energy company would have been from a cultural point of view, from a customer point of view, from a business philosophy point of view. So I started working with him free of charge, helping him, he had no money, it was an entrepreneurial business, get it off the ground and, um, ended up sticking around. So I've done many different things within the organization, but. Predominantly beyond helping set up the operation initially has been focused on the culture, becoming a progressive organization, which we did from the beginning.
So we've not gone, we've been an organization to be traditional and then become aggressive. We always had that vision to do that.
Robbie Motamed: Amazing. Thank you. And you kind of touched on it there. I think before we maybe get into Rebel Energy and what you do, we're probably going to talk about the word progressive organizations a lot. I think it would be good upfront to give people a bit of understanding about what we really mean by that, because I know when I speak to people it can be quite a confusing term or there's lots out there. I think from my perspective, A, I always point to the eight trends of progressive organizations that Corporate Rebels talk about is on their website, because I think that's a really good grounding for what's important about being a progressive organization. Versus perhaps a more traditional one.
But for me, it's where you're looking to move away from traditional organizational structures of command and control hierarchy to more autonomous teams that distribute decision making throughout the organization. And in particular, it's around you building the company as ways of workings and principles to treat employees like adults and not create the parent child policies and dynamics that you might see in a lot of companies.
That's how I always try and describe it.
Jason Sharpe: I'd kind of add to some of what you said and use command and control. I'd say the difference, if I had to really simplify it between traditional and non traditional or a different way of organizing your company, is a traditional company has, I guess, predominantly been about predict and control. I'm going to predict what's going to happen. I'm going to control it. And that structures enable you to do that.
Whereas a kind of non traditional or progressive organization, as we both use as a term, it's about sense and evolve. So sensing what's going on and evolving. I talk about it, it's like this murmuration of birds, you all see the starlings in the sky and you know, how they just stay apart from each other and they break up into smaller clusters and then join up together and you know, it's that kind of sense and evolve. And we may come on to it later on, you know, that can feel quite chaotic. You know,
Robbie Motamed: Chaos is a word that comes up a lot.
Jason Sharpe: But you look at that in that chaos, they stay apart, you know, no, one's really in control, but they, they sense and evolve where they need to be. And that's the truism of, of progressive organizations. If you can get that humming, that's what really, really makes the difference because it frees people up, frees people to innovate, frees people to, you know, be fully in power, emancipate, you know, kind of get on and do their thing. And that creates speed and agility. And, you know, decision making's quicker and, satisfaction. People that come into an organization, with their own view of what they would love to do in life and they're able to realize that and they're not constrained by a title or a badge or a, or a structure. You know, if there's something over there they want to get after, they can do that. They have permission, you know, they don't need permission. They could just get on and do it.
Robbie Motamed: Yeah. Amazing. It'll be good to talk a bit more about how practically Rebel Energy have done that. I know that when we speak to a lot of people making those initial first steps and in particular, transforming a organization that's already set up to be not progressive into one that's more progressive can be really challenging.
It'd be great just to get, you know, a quick 30 seconds on actually what Rebel Energy do, what's kind of the purpose before we go into a bit more about the culture and how you're set up.
Jason Sharpe: Yeah. So Rebel Energy is an energy company. I think the name kind of gives it away. We are, we set up to provide energy to domestic customers.
So, you'll have heard of the bigger names like the Ovo's and the, you know, British gas and all those kinds of guys. And, uh, so we are a smaller version of that. But I suppose the principle that was set up when Dan envisaged Rebel Energy was we were really focused on fuel poverty. That was before fuel poverty became a very, very common currency word in the UK. This is before the energy crisis. So we really wanted to make sure that everyone had access to energy. No one got switched off. No one got the meters ripped off a wall. Everyone, no matter who you were in the world could get access to energy at a fair and attributable price at equal. And, you know, obviously the fuel crisis sort of exacerbated that, you know, it went from four or 5 million people, which is still a lot of people who have fuel poverty to 10, 12, 15, probably more than that now. So, you know, we were in the right place at the right time. Interestingly enough, you know, during that process though, the business, we almost went bust. You know, we went, you know, we had Rebel 1. and we're now Rebel 2. 0. We were not alone. You know, it went from 75 energy supplies in the market down to less than 20. I'll say overnight, but certainly within six months. And, you know, we had to sort of not close the doors. We had to just batton down hatches and we only had 200 customers at the time. And interestingly enough, our website had been switched on a bit earlier and that didn't work for certain reasons, you know, it's fortuitous. We may well have not got through that, but we did. And our investors felt that they would continue to support us. And that was really, really amazing. So we got through the other side and, you know, with the government interventions and all the stuff that would kind of be written in the press, we were able to come out of the side and, you know, we're now a business that's got a hundred thousand customers.
So in less than 18 months, you know, we've gone from 200 to a 100,000 customers. We've gone from, four employees to 150 employees, and that's a really tumultuous growth. And we've never set out to be a business that, you know, we want to be a million customers by this time, or we want to be, you know, have an EBITDA of that or a profitability of that. We've never really put numbers against that. We don't really believe that's the way we should manage our business, but organically that's happened. And then maybe that's part of being a progressive organization. You know, we've had the freedom. It's not about putting pressure on people to achieve a certain number. And we are a profitable business. So that's energy, you know, we are focused on fuel poverty. We have sort of some emissional commentary, which is, you know, Dan's view was like, we want to help rebuild society. And I suppose that's really thinking about fuel poverty. You know, society's got to be better. We've got to be better and kinder to each other, you know, restore the planet. You know, we are a green energy company. Don't get me on that soapbox. Regos stuff, you know, smoke and mirrors. There's an interesting story behind that. We are a company that really believes in green. Actually, we focus on UK based companies that are carbon focused in terms of taking carbon out of the atmosphere. And so seagrass and peat bogs and stuff that you probably never heard of. It's not just that. Always about planting trees and then renew the way business is done. You know, this comes to the cultural piece, actually business, the way it's done right now, there's nothing wrong with that, but there could be a better way to run a business and renew that. And that was the real focus for us.
Robbie Motamed: And you talked there about, you know, there was a period you almost went bust, you went through some very challenging circumstances, I suppose hearing the story, there's real importance placed on being a progressive organization from the very beginning. I suppose we can understand why was that the case? What was behind that, that importance that you placed on it?
Jason Sharpe: Yeah, I think we talk about this rebel spirit, this kind of thing, the DNA, and we wanted people to arrive at rebel, believing in our missional purpose. And I was saying to you earlier on, before we started this podcast, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, he talks about you can have different people come arrive at an organization, have mercenaries and missionaries and the mercenaries turn up and get the paycheck and, go home and, it's benefits focused. What's in it for me. Whereas missionary is about, yeah, still, of course I'm interested in that. I've got to get paid and I've got to pay my mortgage and there's nothing wrong with that. But actually I turn up with a further purpose. I believe in what my company is trying to do. I believe in, you know, the person that's leading this organization. I really buy into that and it aligns to my personal purpose. And I think if you can get those two things, that sweet spot, you get a real synergy.
I'll be very clear with people that arrive at the organization, if you're here for 12 months and that's all you're here for, but you believe in what we're doing. I'm here to support you. If you've got a dream to go and do something else, we'll help you get there. And if we can help you get there in six months rather than 12, fantastic. But you know, you've got to be in it here to be committed. Dan and I and Mark and various of the people of the team that kind of the people have been here since the beginning, talked a lot about our values when we were setting them up and commitments, you know, really important to us. Be committed to what you're interested in. Be committed to what the company is interested in and those two things should meet. We do expect a return here, you know, we are paying you a salary and we are paying you, giving you some amazing benefits, but actually we've got to go to take this business somewhere.
Robbie Motamed: Yeah. Well, I think being purpose led, but with a profit is becoming a really important thing for businesses. And we were speaking before this around both our experiences of being involved in various startups, you know, I've been involved in multiple and we're talking about the different stages, perhaps up to 50, then 50 to 150. And then beyond when you scale. For me in that first phase, you know, you probably don't really think about some of these things and you're not intentional about putting in place structures or trying to get people to behave in certain ways. Taking you back a bit, can you remember when you did start thinking about those things and when you were a bit more intentional, what was some of the first things that you did?
Jason Sharpe: The first thing we did was Dan and I sat down and tried to write out the journey we've been on. And so we created, The Rebel Way. And I'm really proud of this. And we're all pretty proud of it. This was trying to get out of our heads, what it is we've set out to do. So the first page here is talking about companies a bit different, why that is, you know, A big business, it can be good business. So it's sort of facing into, and we're not trying to say every other business out there is wrong, but just saying it can be different and better. You know, it's about the humans and employees.
It's about the customers. This is a new species of business. We're trying to be different. It's murmuration of birds, trying to tell people what kind of lies ahead. Customers being our North star in terms of we're just here to make sure the customers get their energy, they get billed on time, it's a, the bill's right. You know, if they've got any issues, they can access us quickly and easily. So that was kind of the setup. And then it's like, okay, well, if that's what we're trying to do, what are the behaviors, what are the type of people that we'd expect and want to join us in that organization? And we came up with this quirky, '29 and a half easy steps to being a rebel'. And I won't read them all out, but you know, in here, we've got some that maybe make people smile, you know, don't go with the flow, be the flow. Swim upstream, it's okay. Wear the right shoes and things like that.
Environment, set things on fire, innovate, fail harder. You know, some of the, maybe you could say, maybe cliches, adjust the sails, but what we've written then is, kind of narrative, the behaviors we'd expect around that. And understood that actually, and there's one in here, which really does lean, lean into progressive organizations. So number 24, let's agree to occasionally disagree. When you work in progress, forks in the road will always lead to disagreements and debates. After all, diverse minds will bring diverse opinions. But we believe that's a good thing because from healthy conflict comes healthy dialogue, which in turn strengthens relationships. That's what's brilliant about Rebel is we strive to always working against the same problem, not each other . And I think that's really, really key. And we might get into that later on. The organizations are traditional organizations often we end up getting conflict and it is very much person led. And sometimes that's because that person you think wants your job or, you know, that you're in it for promotion, or there's only a certain amount of spaces up at the next tier, or, you know, there's lots of dynamics that go on in an organization where, you know, people are quite selfish or protective of their own kind of being, whereas I think at a self managing progressive organization, it's focusing less on each other, but on the problem. So we may have different opinions and maybe absolutely loggerheads, but let's not point at each other. Let's point at, okay, but do we agree this is a thing we're trying to solve, you know, or create or grow or build or generate? Yes. Okay, so there's a way then, there's got to be a way. And it may be not necessarily be your way or my way, there'll be a different way, but sometimes you may have to disagree and commit. So as long as we got that as a principle, we'll hash it out. But at some point we may have to make a decision. You said your bit, but the one thing you're not going to do is throw stones at it. You're not going to take it down. And in a traditional organization, sometimes it's what happens as well, because people will be from the side, like, oh, well, that's never going to work. You know, and creating that narrative, that false narrative. So I kind of got off a bit of a tangent there, but I think that the kind of book really was just setting out, look, this is how we want you to turn up to work. This is how we'd expect you to behave. This is how we want you to behave.
We have a scaraway letter, which we created, I created out of the blue. Like, you know, this is, I want to put this thing in front of someone and go, look, this is how it feels to work at Rebel. It can feel chaotic and you can feel this. And you know, there's not necessarily someone over there to tell you what to do and you know, you're in charge and the buck stops with you and there's loads of kind of stuff in there.
Robbie Motamed: Has it actually scared away some of your employees?
Jason Sharpe: It definitely has. And we've had some people. Just in an email saying it's not for me, you know, and that's good. It creates a filter, but you know, when people turn up to work, we've got to make sure that they understand that it is going to feel different. And again, that's what this is trying to do is saying, look, when you arrive here, it's not going to feel how it would normally feel in a normal organization. So you've got toput your big boy, boy, girl pants on and just get on with it sometimes.
Robbie Motamed: And we'll talk in a minute about some of the challenges in scaling an organization who wants to adopt those sort of progressive ways of working. It would be good just to explore a little bit about how you support people when they join the organization. You've got a clear set of behaviors and values. It's important to you. Internally at Clarasys, we talk about what do we do to support people who have not come from that environment, because actually, it's not a case you can just necessarily switch. So it's how do you get people to understand, well, what does that mean on a day to day basis for me doing my job or interacting where there may be less structure or hierarchy.
Jason Sharpe: I think that's an area where we could do better, if I'm honest. I think when you talked about kind of different stages, when we got up to 50, it was a lot easier because you could put your arms around everybody. You interacted with most people every day. So if they were struggling or they weren't exactly the right behaviors, you could kind of say, look, Hey, look, you know, saying X, Y, Z, maybe not the right way to approach this here. This is how we do things around here. You know, you could have that honest conversation. As we got to beyond 50 to kind of a hundred odd, it's been harder and we're now beyond the hundred, as I said earlier on, and onboarding brilliantly is, I think is key to this. And so we are working on this right now. It's kind of work in progress where, people coming in, get a real level of induction.
Casey, who works for us and Anna, they kind of are working really hard on sort of taking the what into and creating the how to do stuff. So they've created stuff around rhythms and how we meet around here, how we get decisions made around here. Peerdom, how we structure ourselves, which we may get into later on, you know, the circles. And so they've created a lot more, I wouldn't say methodologies, but things you can point to and go, look, read this, or have a look at this.
We've had to kind of have a go at that because there's nothing available. And even if there was a book that was written by someone else, even like yourself or another business, it wouldn't be right. Doesn't apply. You can take bits of it and, you know, say, well, I like that bit and that bit. And, you know, but we have created our own stuff. And I think that's important. Got to have your own stamp of approval and badge on it. So I think from an onboarding perspective, that is one area where I think we could be better in terms of the how. In terms of the why and the kind of behavioral stuff we created a book very early on, and the other thing we did was we created the rebel way of working, which is a two day event, training, development, whatever you want to call it, where people are away from work and they can come and understand. A little bit more about progressive organizations. So we don't talk about the colors and the, you know, the teal and the, you know, the stuff that we could, and we did start that when we first set up about Rebel, we started going down that, reinventing organizations kind of methodology and, holacracy has never really been the big thing for us. We've used elements about particularly our structures and the kind of circles idea, but we set up the Rebel way to allow people the space to understand how to have really good conversations and how to have really good dialogue and how to build relationships. If you've got a great idea, how do you get people on the pitch and enroll people in an idea? And that's some things that people will have never been exposed to. The interesting was because we're so small and because we were taking people on in sporadic ways you get, people have been there like day one and then somebody has been there like three months. I mean, three months is still not a long time. Our initial one was kind of like, you know, we can envision about what Rebel could be and I've always been in the room on the training, so I'd be grabbing these people going, Hey, look, don't worry about that. Let's go and have a conversation over here.
So we recognize that our intent was great, but probably what we created was fine when we weren't growing hard and we didn't have lots of new people joining because everyone was in the same space, but now we've got people at different levels of progress or experience.
So we are right now, off the press, creating a new rebel way of working, which will kick off in January. And we're looking to be a little bit more, structured around our onboarding. So rather than hiring everyone, every day, let's hire people every two weeks. Let's create a cohort. Let's create people to join together, has value. And then when they go through the training, those people go through the training in month three altogether, and you might get month four, month five, but nothing less than month three. So it, you know, people have understood what the organization is about. They've all been able to challenge, experience it and go, I don't get that. I don't understand that. I don't like that. That doesn't make sense. So they got that space. So it's a really good question. And it's an area that we've kind of worked with, we've evolved, I suppose.
Robbie Motamed: Yeah. And I know something from, well, so it's our experience, but also when we speak to a lot of clients about how you make some of these first steps, for me, there's got to be an element of emotional intelligence around, trying to understand how you tailor those ways of working and even just adopting more of a coaching rather than mentoring or command and control mindset is not something that instinctively you're taught how to do. It's something that you've got to kind of have that support and training around how to flex your style.
Jason Sharpe: I agree. I'm glad you touched on coaching because that's the big part of what I do now at Rebel and it's a big part of what we definitely believe is needed and required for an organization that's becoming progressive to have as part of their armory, you know, allowing people the opportunity to explore what their challenges are, what the opportunities are with, the way the organization is set up, if that's part of it or their skills or their development, you know, in the absence of a traditional hierarchy, you don't have your team leaders and your managers.
Cause we don't have those for people to go, look, you know, I'm struggling with this or, you know, I want to get progress in my career to here.
Jason Sharpe: So we have got coaches in place, both internal coaches and some external coaches. We've done that purposefully. The external coaches are all sort of being part of corporate rebels, as you mentioned earlier on, so they understand what a self managing, self learning organization is, and that's important. But people have an access to that's really key.
The one thing that we're also now growing up on and, and just touching the point you made there is, is those individuals that sit within their own circles now, which I guess you'd call it as a team in a traditional organization, they need to have the key skills to be able to coach and develop themselves as individuals. They don't have to come to a coach because they need something. Yeah. They could be the coach, but you know, that's a learning thing as well. So we're again, working on how do we create that and give people the skill.
So we use this program called Peerdom, which creates circles in the organization. And these circles are mini circles. They could be like a really small team of like one or two, three people, or it could be a big part of Rebel Energy supply, and it might have 40, 50 people in it, and then mini circles, but we kind of created this. Structure, I suppose, to a point in there and saying, look, you know, we've got a circle. There's different types of roles that are needed in there. One's around development, one's about coordination, one's about job working, work out, connecting the other circles where there's overlap. And part of that is helping people develop. But, yeah, we kind of set that up. And I was saying to you earlier on we went down the road of allocating different types of roles and people could choose to do that role and choose to do it for a week, a month. It's very flexible. It's not about badges and hierarchy and titles, but one of them was about development, one was about coordination, one was about representing the circles and one was about leading the circle on terms of whatever they're working on right now. And I think, you know, we went a little bit too far too quickly because we found that some of the circles, only had one or two people in them and it's like they were doing all those roles. So, define them. I think we felt by defining would help people understand and maybe choose. Oh, I quite fancy doing that. And you know, I'd love to have a go at that.
So we've kind of retracted that a little bit and that's probably, as we got to the size we're at, we're probably just not big enough for that, but we also said, if there's a circle that has got 10, 15 people in it, and you want to have those functions, those roles, then fill your boots, you know, use them.
Or if you think there's something missing, then, then create it. You know, it's, it's not a defined, you must have, or you mustn't have. So we felt this just help those circles develop as individuals and find their rhythm.
Robbie Motamed: Yeah. And you, I suppose, talking about organizational structures. You mentioned a couple of names of some of the models or theories out there. I think when we speak to organizations today, it can be a bit overwhelming because there's now a lot of different theories and models out there. How did you find kind of what worked best for you and what were some of the things you learned about trying to adopt what another company was doing, for example.
Jason Sharpe: Well, I think the first I talked about the Rebel Way book and I think the one thing we identified is the ones that are successful, had got that, you know, playbook as it was kind of referred to, that define the behaviors and what you expect, any values. I don't think we ever, I mean, we looked at Holacracy and we looked at reinventing organizations and probably reinventing organizations. Frederick Leroux, his name, that was probably our starter for 10. You know, we use that internally to make sure everyone understood where we were trying to get to. And, and so for those that don't know about it, he talks about the colors of organizations. Organizations are red and I can't remember the chronological order now, but they kind of go to maybe the blue and then green and yellow, and then it's into teal, which is second tier thinking which is sometimes referred to. And it's a methodology. It can feel a bit just too pure maybe. And it's interesting because only recently, we talked about getting to teal and we stopped using that language quite quickly because people just go, what the hell is teal? You know progressive organization. What does that mean? You talk about that in a little bit more context. But that was probably the colors was probably the foundation of us saying, well, look, this is what it looks and feels like.
And we even kind of scored ourselves against that at the beginning. So where do we think we are on that? About meetings and conflict and decision making and financial acumen. And, you know, there's lots and lots of elements to it. And I only got that out the other week and said, well, you know, interesting if you did it again, I don't want to do that again. Against that measure. In fact, I think we should use our behaviors to do that because that's our version, you know, that's us, that's our truism. But yeah, kind of Frederick Leroux was probably the starting point. And just the last bit to say on that, we said, look, teal is, you're trying to get to second tier thinking and actually what's happened is an unintended consequence of saying that and we've never said this is that, well teal's the only color that matters. It's the arrival point, it's the destination. And, we've all got to get there and none of the other colors matter. We've never actually said that.
And it's only probably in the last three months, four months that some of the people have said, Well, we need a bit more blue. We need a bit more process. We need a bit more of this, a bit more of that because we're getting bigger. It's not about putting in hierarchy, but maybe we do need to be a little bit more considering in terms of what structures or processes we need and both from an outward facing kind of supplier interface, partner interface, even regulator interface, but also internally. So budgeting is a good one came up. You want to spend the money, spend the money, you know, and it has been as nice, brilliant. But, you know, you come into one of those areas, 150 people and go, well, what can I spend a million quid then? Well, why do you want, yeah, you got to have some justification here. Well, why do you want to spend? If you're unsure, then maybe you shouldn't be spending it. If you're really sure, you should. And it's a bit ambiguous, isn't it? And so maybe there's a need of help. And so actually having a bit of blue, a bit of process, a little bit of like, oh, we're not having a committee for this and a committee for that. And we've all been in organizations where, uh, I'll tell a story about, things not progressing. When I worked at First Direct, it was part of HSBC and HSBC were just the red literally a red company, to a first direct black, we were black brand, but we were a green or a teal colored organization. We were very flexible, innovative, and we were owned by this big Goliath. And, HSBC decided we're going to put in this new piece of technology called a Project Dragon. Project Dragon was around for two years and it effectively became known as Project Drag On. And I just love that. And it was, and you smile when I'm, you're smiling when I say that. That's something, we feel that in organizations and we cannot become that If I said, why have we set out to do what we do, we cannot become that. And if we start becoming that or sensing that, then we've got to really stop what we're doing and consider and maybe evolve or turn the ship around. And there's a great book about that, which Dan, our founder's reading at the moment. And, you know, we've got to be cognizant of that.
Robbie Motamed: Yeah. And you talked about, you started with this very clear idea. You've got the values and the principles. Scaling is always difficult and you've touched on some of the challenges you've had most recently with scaling, but it would be good, I suppose. Is there anything else you can share in terms of what's been the biggest challenges when you get in close to that 150 mark or even thinking about what might be next?
Jason Sharpe: Yeah, I think I've kind of touched on quite a few of the ones that are sort of really top of mind at the moment. I think it is probably for me, it's people now really just getting what we're doing.
And it's those new people into the organization. I think that's the bit, if I was being really self critical of myself now, we just run too fast. We've kind of got ahead of ourselves. We probably have been really good at sensing what's needed, but maybe we've just not done that as well this time. We've had our head down, you know. Focus on some big projects in the summer. And maybe we just hide all these people because of that. And we maybe didn't give that as much consideration about what that might do, how that might kind of stabilize or destabilize the business. And, you know, it's not consequential. We can, we can sort it out , we can affect it, but it feels painful sometimes.
I read this paragraph. It's from a book called Made Without Managers by Chris May and various other people, but it's made in the organization and he, and page 40 into the book of, 200, 300 per pages. And he says, you know, to, to say, and this is an organization that went from being traditional to non tramditional, to say it hasn't been easy would be an understatement. The pain we experienced when we left everyone to just get it, was a place many times with the struggles to figure out a workable alternative to hierarchy. Sometimes it was hard to convince everyone, including ourselves occasionally, that we hadn't lost the management plot. There were days when I was done and I thought it was simpler to bring managers back.
And that just get it bit was the bit that got it for me, because probably not everyone gets it as well as they did when we had 50 or less than 50. And, and that's the bit that I failed on it, but I think we need to do better.
Robbie Motamed: You touched on some of the challenges and in your previous experience, you've been at some very large companies, you know, obviously now at a startup.
It'd be good to understand if you are a traditional company and you are set up in some of the traditional structures, my view is it's harder than when you're building a company from scratch for sure. And. Yes, you're seeing some examples like, you know, buyer out there where there's a big top down push to radically change overnight. I think that's quite rare. And I think that's quite unusual for big companies to have that mandate. So what would your advice be to people who are within some of those 5000, 10,000 plus organizations, and they've got the desire, they like the theory, they want to make that change, but they're not quite sure how to start or where to start, what advice would you give them?
Jason Sharpe: I think the first thing I say is be clear on the why. Why do you want to do it? Why do you think it matters? What difference is it going to make? Or what do you think it's going to make? You know, obviously you won't absolutely know. I definitely talk to organizations that are doing it because it's good learning points. We had a chat earlier on and probably we should chat more often because we're feeling some of the same pains and, and you know, it's good, you know, it doesn't make it right, doesn't make it better, but actually maybe there is a cyclical, um, kind of process here, so it's okay to feel this way. It's okay to, maybe question it sometimes and that's okay. I'd say so first thing,
I think that if you've got an organization find a department, function, part of the business that is up for it and do it there. Beta test it, a lot of people read around agile management and kind of Six Sigma and, you know, that was a big thing. And when that was coming out, a lot of organizations were like, well, I'm not quite sure about this. And it's made big differences in lots of organizations, but they probably did that the same way, took an area, function, department, and had a go. And then you can demonstrate the impact and effect. I think one of our guys in UK cells is doing that, isn't he? And I would say you've got to start somewhere and, you've got to own it. I suppose, seeking permission is probably what you'd need to do because, I guess in the tutorial, it says that what you need to do, but I think it is understanding the why, what's the benefit.
A book I read years and years and years ago, 30 years ago, The Maverick by a chap called Ricardo Semler. It's a brilliant book. I read it, he probably doesn't realize about self managing organizations, but it definitely was the start of that kind of thinking. And he gave these chaps, these gold stars and said, right, go off and make me a million dollars or save me a million dollars and just go anywhere, do anything, and maybe it's seeking empowerment and permission to kind of just go anywhere, do anything, just try and proliferate it and find the value so you can then say, look, it's saved us money, it's made us money. It's created a better customer satisfaction, better employee engagement, you know, whatever your yardstick is. And it's probably all of those, but that's what you should do or could do. But it isn't easy. It isn't easy when you do it from scratch. So when you're doing it, we're trying to run an organization at the same time that is operating a very different way. And you'll get skeptics in the room. You'll get people that are very willing to be on the pitch and throw stones at you at the same time. So there is no easy answer. There's no simple answer, but definitely understand the why. Be clear on that, have your clear story, be absolute about that kind of missionary position, you know, what are you trying to achieve here? There'll be people that really want to get it and be part of it and embrace it and, you know, you can kind of grab those people and hold onto them and then get on with the sense and evolve, and just evolve it.
Robbie Motamed: And you mentioned there about benefits and that again, when we speak to in particular, larger organizations where perhaps there's greater budgetary controls, that was one of the challenges of, well, there's more data coming out there and there's more case studies and examples of companies. For a lot of companies, it's still quite hard for them to point at a company in their industry that has made this transition and has the, you know, the strong financial results, or you said customer experience or employee experience results to go, well, here's an example that we know it works, so that gives us confidence it can work here. It would be good to understand what do you think some of the benefits are that you've seen, whether at Rebel Energy or in some of the previous work that you've done?
Jason Sharpe: Well, you know, I'd sit here and say, you know, right at the beginning, we didn't set out to be a business that's focused on numbers. So we didn't set out to be a business that gets to a hundred thousand customers by X. And we didn't set out to be a business that is fully profitable from year one. We did set out to be a business that delivers the best customer service, but you know, in any organization when you're setting out sometimes your aspiration and vision doesn't actually match your aspiration of reality because, you know, we were learning as we went through an energy crisis, but we have got the customer leading satisfaction or answering our calls within less than a minute and a half, most days, less than a minute. Emails are returned in 24 hours.
It wasn't always like that. We've had some hard yards, some pinch points, particularly around the energy crisis. But, you know, that was our aspiration. It's relentless. The Northstar is our customer. Everything leads to that. You know, if you're here to do a job, how does that benefit and make it better for the customer?
Employee colleague experience. We did enter the best companies this year and we were in the top 100 for small businesses, new growth businesses. It was interesting because their methodologies didn't necessarily fit self managed organizations. So I never expected us to be number one, but for us to kind of punch out in organizations. Well, against organizations that are set up traditionally, I thought was good. And it was just a yardstick really. So a lot of cues that we just ended up, all of those things have come together. Is that because what we're doing? Probably, possibly, I can't say absolutely, but interesting.
Robbie Motamed: Yeah. And you mentioned, I don't want to say it follows you around, but you said a couple of industries you've been in, there've been, you know, big crisises when you've been in there. I'm a big believer that when you do look at the longterm, some of these companies, you've had these ways of working. They've been able to weather some of the market trends a lot better than others. And for me, that comes around the ability to innovate and adapt quickly.
Jason Sharpe: Absolutely.
Robbie Motamed: It would be good to understand, what are some of the things that's going on at Rebel Energy in terms of the more innovative things you're looking at? Am I right in thinking you set out like a different part of the business that purely is focused on that?
Jason Sharpe: Yeah, so we got a part of the business called Rebel Labs. I mean, that was set up as part of Rebel Energy and then we spun it off into a separate business now. Rebel Labs is there to do a couple of things. One is to innovate and create around our data. So how do we use that better? Our technology, how do we kind of be smarter, quicker, faster, better, in terms of working with customer data again, but then also creating things like billing systems and the industry in it, there's lots of industries, what's out there in the marketplace is generally, here's one I made earlier, you get to use it and it doesn't really fit what we're trying to do as an organization, completely. And some of that we have to use cause it's industry standards and we just have to adopt that because it's where data flows come from, but we're creating stuff at the back end that doesn't really matter how it comes in. We'll just make it right for ourselves.
So, yeah, we're kind of really investing in some really interesting areas.
Robbie Motamed: I think it's something that when people talk about progressive organizations, maybe they don't highlight enough is customer centricity. And I know if you look at how higher a structure is, that's really central to their structures, just giving autonomous teams the ability to be the ones who are listening to customers and they're making a decision about what's best for them.
For me, whenever I speak to people around maybe the hard benefits of why you might move to being progressive, it's that ability to respond to customer needs quicker is always, always the things that grabs.
Jason Sharpe: For sure. We're really proud of our customer stats and we talk about the complaints every business has complaints, even we do, and you know, our complaint ratio, which you get measured, managed through the regulator, is at the the lowest possible denominator and we're proud of that and it's about then how you react to what you do. Obviously when you get a complaint.
Our contact centers are managed in the UK. We have some in South Africa as well. So we've got some resilience and that's working really well. We'd love to bring a contact center in house and have ownership of that in totality for ourselves at some point in the future. But at the time when we set up, we weren't experts in running contact centers and it was a thing we didn't need to have to do. So we'd let someone else manage the pain of that, but as we grow, I guess we'll probably face into that and I'd hope what we've kind of created here just ends up enveloping and becoming part of that as well.
Robbie Motamed: Awesome. And final question from me. I know that chaos is a word that's used a lot when people who perhaps aren't familiar with how progressive organizations are structured or what it feels like to be part of them, to describe what it looks like from the outsides. So this is kind of some parting words. What advice would you give to someone who's either joining a company or there's talk within their own company of moving from maybe more traditional to more progressive ways of working about how to make that change or about, you know, from a more human center point of view, how it feels to go from that transition. What advice would you give them?
Jason Sharpe: The word that came to my mind is something we talk about in Rebel, which is this kind of freedom in a framework. And it's something I brought with me from First Direct actually. First Direct were really brilliant at just solving customers problems. Generally you'd speak to one person and you wouldn't need to speak to anyone else. And it's just amazing the kind of appetite that those agents had to kind of solve that problem. And the reason for that is that whilst you have the complexity of regulation and risk and compliance and all the things that you need to do to protect the customer, the business, the shareholders, all that stuff you hear most businesses trying to think about protecting and rightly so, you need to give people a sense of freedom to be able to get on and do the job. And I'm not really asking a question directly, but I'd say if you come into an organization, just think about it as that, you coming in, you have freedom. And with that the Spider Man, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
Robbie Motamed: Freedom to make mistakes.
Jason Sharpe: Yeah. So you have that but, don't expect to come in and someone to hold your hand and lead you through it. So it takes a certain type of resilience to come into this organization or even set one up because you are going to expect people to operate and be different and that's needed. You need people who are self starters. People are going to challenge, make it feel uncomfortable at times, question why we're doing it this way, they're not worried about authority because there isn't any.
So as a owner founder. Someone who's been here for quite a long time and someone comes along and challenges why we're doing it this way, you got to kind of, you go, well, yeah, great. Fantastic. Let's, let's, let's explore that and not just say, well, that's the way it's been done always. And, and, and people can't just say, well, I'm going to do it that way because it's the way it's been done. If I can see a better way, or it's the wrong way, or, or put my hand up and say this is wrong over here.
We are a business that has grown and we set out to have our compliance and risk, all of our function in the right place. But as we kind of start peeling back the layers, actually, we've been doing some things, Oh, I didn't know we were doing it that way. Should probably have done that, actually we can change that now, but you know, we didn't know what we didn't know. So as you grow as a business, you've got to kind of adapt and evolve as well. And that's, that's really important.
Robbie Motamed: Well, firstly, thank very much for your time to kind of share your journey and, and Rebel Energy's journey. And I think for me, the final message should be around, how much I think we can learn from each other around our respective companies.
And for me, that stresses the importance of being part of community or just having access to talk to other people around what's working well, what's not working well, or getting some other inspiration to making that transition to more progressive ways of working.
Jason Sharpe: Obviously we don't know who's going to listen to this, but if people out there are wanting to talk or get a bit of feedback, come and have a chat, come and see what we do, then, then, you know, I'd be very happy to, to open up rebel's doors to them.
I'm not sitting here saying it's perfect. We are all learning and there's not an end point here because as you grow, it changes, it has to adapt and evolve. Business is not static. So it's inevitable that what works today may not work tomorrow.
Robbie Motamed: Perfect. Wow. And great quote to end on.
Jason Sharpe: Brilliant.
Robbie Motamed: Thanks very much.
Jason Sharpe: My pleasure.
Clarasys: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Nevermind the Pain Points. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcasting app or site. We would love your feedback, so please leave a review or drop us an email at podcast@clarasys.com.
Guest bio:
Find Jason on LinkedIn here.
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