Ben Thompson, CEO of Employment Hero, talks to us about Employment Hero, the company’s beginnings and how it has grown since.
Tell us a bit more about your business and how it started.
Employment Hero was co-founded by Ben Thompson, CEO, and Dave Tong, CTO, in 2014, and is one of the world’s leading HR, payroll and benefits platforms. The award-winning employment software helps launch businesses on the path to success by powering more productivity every day. Employment Hero services over 80,000 businesses, collectively managing over 750,000 employees. Its core platform reduces admin time by up to 80%
As an employment lawyer for 20 years, I witnessed the devastation of poorly managed employment. I wanted to make employment easier and more rewarding for everyone, so launched Employment Hero as a scalable cloud platform that could help millions of SMEs. We launched in the UK in 2020.
How has the business grown since it started and how did you ensure growth?
We recently announced the closure of a £96 million funding round led by return investor SEEK Investments with participation from OneVentures, AirTree Ventures and other shareholders, valuing the business at over US$1 billion and seeing us become a unicorn.
The support from investors at the ‘unicorn’ mark reflects our strong and sustained revenue growth and prospects. In 2022, we made our first acquisition in workforce management and payroll solution, KeyPay.
With the acquisition, we now have over 12,000 SMEs in the UK collectively managing over 120,000 employees on its platform. We now boast a team of over 500 FTEs globally, with more than 35 in the UK.
What’s the business’ approach to management?
Our management philosophy at Employment Hero is strongly grounded in trust. We also know that the executive team sets the tone top-down, so it’s important that as a leadership team we model the right behaviours.
There are a few ways we do this. The first is to be as open and transparent as possible with our team. The second is to solicit and action feedback and the third is to practice reward and recognition. All three of these activities are incorporated into our ‘All Hands’ – a weekly company-wide meeting in which the whole team gets together to go through important updates, celebrations and feedback.
We also refer to ‘psychological safety’ in our management practice – which can be described as the ability to feel confident having difficult conversations in the workplace, without tiptoeing around the truth. It’s also the concept that if an employee were to make a mistake, they would not feel judged or penalised. This is incredibly important for innovation – if an employee is scared of speaking up or challenging the status quo, this limits our ability to innovate at scale.
What is your company’s vision and goal?
We are an ambitious group of people on a mission to make employment easier and more rewarding for everyone. We believe that the future of employment is global, diverse and purpose-driven.
Our primary objective for 2022 is to bring our ground-breaking pillars, which covers talent solutions, core hr, payroll and e-Benefits. This suite of solutions will offer UK SMEs and their employees a seamless employment management experience and specifically help them to grow their engagement and work relationships with employees, together in ways that will completely transform what businesses and their employees can expect from employment. We have plans to grow exponentially in the UK over the next few years, introducing new service lines and increasing our market share, including the launch of our e-Rewards package.
As part of the e-Rewards package, soon to launch in the UK, Employment Hero leverages the incredible buying power of its platform (over £22 billion in wages paid annually) to help employees’ wages go further, with everyday cost savings across categories such as groceries, electronics, financial products, well-being and insurance. An individual employer could not provide these offers but Employment Hero benefits everyone by working together.
What kind of clients and markets do you serve?
We support over 80,000 SMEs globally across a wide range of industry sectors. Labour employment globally is a huge total addressable market and any SME in the world employing up to around 500 employees is our target customer.
What has your career looked like so far?
With a background in finance and employment law, and as a business owner myself, I have over 20 years’ experience in the Australian employment landscape. I have boundless curiosity, enthusiasm and ambition and thrive on creating innovative solutions and disruptive people management offerings that redefine markets. I have built a team of A-players and have communicated a clear vision – to make managing employment easier and more rewarding for everyone.
I manage a group of companies — Employment Innovations, KeyPay and Employment Hero, with Employment Hero seeing more than 100% year-on-year growth over the past seven years.
How do you equip your staff with skills and knowledge?
I inspire my team to continually learn. In one-to-one meetings, we ensure that we set strong goals and objectives for all our team members and help them to find the relevant routes to achieving them. It is important to get to know your team members individually as there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to help everyone attain the skills and knowledge they seek.
How do you work with other executives within the C-suite to make sure your voice is heard?
I encourage honest and open conversations within our senior leadership team to ensure everyone’s voice is heard, not just my own. As the CEO of Employment Hero, it is my job to make sure that we are delivering the strategy we have set for ourselves and are opening up new opportunities. I do this by making sure we have a collaborative environment, working together as a team towards one common goal. Having an open channel of communication, where ideas and information can be shared is very important.
How do you ensure different teams in your organisation work together?
The workplace is rapidly changing and with our approach of flexible working the most important foundation is communication and trust. We also ensure that we provide platforms to share, discuss and collaborate on ideas, making the management of global teams seamless.