Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however music has been cut or shortened due to rights issues.
Good morning, this is Jazz Shapers, I am Elliot Moss. It is where the Shapers of Business join the Shapers of Jazz, Soul and Blues. I am really pleased to say that my guest today is Dr Nick Taylor; we have a doctor in the house, Co-Founder and CEO of Unmind, a workplace mental health platform providing organisations with clinically-backed tools and training to create a healthier, happier workforce. Nick’s always been very interested in how people feel in the world and the things that impact on their wellbeing. Jessica, one of his three sisters, has Downs Syndrome and, as he says, “I grew up with someone in my family who saw the world differently.” After gaining a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and having worked in a leadership role for the NHS, Nick became interested in corporate wellness and how organisations can benefit by looking after their employees. He Co-founded Unmind in 2016 to create a proactive solution to support all organisations to do just this. “Mental health”, Nick says, “is the number one best thing about being a human being. So, it’s frustrating that we always see it in a negative light. We need the right care at the right time and we shouldn’t be ashamed of it.” We will be talking to Nick in a few minutes and find out just how Unmind works and how it’s being received. We’ve also got fantastic music from amongst others, Quincy Jones, Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder. That is today’s Jazz Shapers. Here’s Mose Allison with Swingin’ Machine.
That was Mose Allison and jaunty it was too, with Swingin’ Machine. My Business Shaper today is a doctor, his name is Nick and he is the Co-Founder of Unmind and it’s a real pleasure to you have you. Hello.
Dr Nick Taylor
Hello. Great to be here.
Elliot Moss
Lovely to see you. As I was introducing you, the thought that hit me immediately was this point about wellness and health and mental health being so kind of critical to the happiness of a human being. An obvious point but people don’t often posit it like that. At what point did you realise this was going to be for you, what you were going to focus your life on?
Dr Nick Taylor
I think there has been probably a couple of points for me, you know, I often talk about growing up with three sisters, my middle sister Jessica has Down Syndrome and I have a couple of very early memories of, you know, saying “Oh I think she said a word” and picking up an atmosphere from those people around like my mum that clearly she wouldn’t have done because she was too early and developmentally that wasn’t going to be possible and just being aware that there was a strange atmosphere and that kind of very, very, very young, like three/four years old, noticing that there’s a difference between people and that we are not all the same and so that had quite a profound impact and then always stayed interested in what made human beings what they are and I was always more into arts than science and was really into music and actually music’s a lot about emotion, I think the reason we like music is it makes us feel certain ways and transports us to different places in our head. My first Degree is in Music and I did my dissertation on the use of Gyorgy Ligeti’s music in Stanley Kubrick’s films which is super interesting because you’ve got kind of a post-modernist composer used in like a highly popular medium and it’s kind of a juxtaposition really, and actually when you dig into film music, it’s psychology because you are often using it to help make the point of the film or to contrast the point of the film or whatever it might be, so I started reading a lot of psychology and then that kind of came about the same time I was volunteering as a Samaritan and then I left University, I had a great three years and wasn’t particularly financially responsible and wanted to go travelling and I couldn’t work out how to afford to pay off my debts and raise enough money and go and see some countries around the world, until I realised that I could do a day job, living with my parents I could do a day job in a theatre and then at night-time I could be a sleep-in support worker for Mind and I thought at the time, well this is a great wheeze, what’s happened here, I’ve worked out a way of doing it but actually I just fell totally madly in love with the work for Mind and found it so fascinating, supporting people with enduring mental ill health and that was the moment really when I was like I want to retrain and focus my attention on psychology.
Elliot Moss
And just going back to the point you made about the atmosphere, the tension. People I meet that go into the medical profession are often trying to fix something. It sounds to me like there was a tension that you wanted to address that you were aware of and then you address it. Do you think of it like that? Do you want to ameliorate what you see in front of you?
Dr Nick Taylor
I don’t think of it as ‘fixing’ actually so much because I think there is a danger with mental health that we think about it sometimes as something that only occurs when we have problems but the reality is, we have mental health all of the time, all of our life, and it’s sometimes less to do with fixing problems and sometimes more to do with exploring what’s going on for an individual and thinking that less is a binary thing and more something that we have all of the time and sometimes it’s our interpretation and understanding of what’s going on in our mental health that’s important as opposed to fixing something that’s broken.
Elliot Moss
I actually meant, and I agree with that, I actually meant the fixing of the atmosphere, the fact that you sense that tension. Was that in the back of your mind as well as you’ve gone forward, because you are right, of course it isn’t, the whole point is that you present it in a different way, which is right, but that point around the tension that people feel and the uncomfort they have felt historically about talking about mental health, let alone dealing with it, is that part of the mission as well?
Dr Nick Taylor
Yeah, I mean that, I think is deeply frustrating because we’ve ended up in this place where, and it’s changing, but we’ve more or less ended up in a place where mental health has become really stigmatised, I mean people find it hard to talk about, and it’s being associated with the kind of images of black and white images of people holding their head in their hands. I picked up a magazine recently, there were three articles about mental health and all three articles had a picture of someone holding their head in their hands and I was like “For goodness sake, like, why do we always position the subject in this way?” when it is such an incredible part of being a human being. You know, if you really think about what our mental health is, it’s our ability to think, to be creative, to problem solve, to build relationships, to dream, to like feel all the emotions that we feel. Our emotions are really amazing. It’s like that’s the best thing about being a human being and yet we’ve ended up with black and white image of people holding their head in their hands, it doesn’t work in my head. My personal dream is that one day one of my three really titchy little kids one day will come home from school and say “Daddy, today I learned the most incredible thing, I have got mental health and it’s amazing.” That’s where the subject belongs.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much from my brilliant Business Shaper, it’s Dr Nick Taylor, he is the Co-Founder of Unmind and we’ve been talking about mental health and the fact that it’s a good thing rather than necessarily a problem or bad thing. Time for some more music and I hope it changes your mood appropriately, it’s Quincy Jones with Summer in the City.
That was Quincy Jones with Summer in the City. I am talking to Dr Nick Taylor, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Unmind and we are talking about a re-positioning of mental health. So, we’ve established why you got to this place where you said “You know what, this is a thing that needs to be addressed in a positive way, in a different way.” Converting that moment of you falling in love with the notion of being involved in mental health to your own business, to setting up something, to delivering a product. That’s quite a journey. 2016, I believe you set the business up. Just give me a little bit of a sense of how you got to the point where you are able to convert passion into product.
Dr Nick Taylor
So, I think if you had met me probably as like a ten year old boy and you’d said “What do I want to do?”, I would have told you I wanted to run a business. So, like as a kid that was all I ever wanted to do.
Elliot Moss
Why? I mean, that’s quite a thing.
Dr Nick Taylor
I don’t know, it just always fascinated me. It always really interested me, how you build something, how you create a new, how you create something new, right? And then really psychology became just a passion and then it started becoming a bigger and bigger, and bigger passion over the years to the point where I’m going to go and do that. So, I always felt that it was a little kind of ironic that I ended up working in the NHS, like one of the biggest employers in the world, and this is some way away from my kind of entrepreneurial aspirations as a kid so it doesn’t surprise me to kind of then go and start a business. However, that said, I didn’t do any preparation in terms of I wasn’t secretly kind of reading Harvard Business Review or anything like that. What really happened was that I found myself in a senior leadership role in the NHS and there was so much incredible stuff going on in the NHS and so many brilliant people but it’s also really under a lot of pressure in a lot of teams and we had high levels of absenteeism, presenteeism, turnover of staff and I found myself just kind of thinking “How do we address this?” and I’d go home at night and read kind of Gallup reports and Deloitte reports about how organisations better support their people and the more I was doing this research, the more I felt actually there just isn’t a solution that’s really adequately meeting the mental health needs of people in organisations. So, the kind of seed was sown at that point. I then took a family holiday to South Africa and through total chance saw an old friend of mine who was working with a guy in Johannesburg running corporate mindfulness sessions and as soon as I heard about what he was doing, I just thought that I think there was something about switching tack and I got in touch with the guy he was working for who was an old oil trader who had burnt out in London and he and I started talking and after a little while he said “Look, what would it take for you to leave the NHS and start the business that you are dreaming about?” and it was just as my second kid was about to be born and somehow my wife Mary and I thought it was a good idea to leave like the secure job with the NHS and start a tech startup just as our second…
Elliot Moss
You were drunk were you?
Dr Nick Taylor
Maybe it was that. Maybe it was that.
Elliot Moss
Had a really good dinner.
Dr Nick Taylor
I can’t remember the conversation but I don’t know how we…
Elliot Moss
Nor can she, actually. I spoke to her and she said “I deny any knowledge of this conversation”.
Dr Nick Taylor
But I am so glad we did it, you know. It was a cool decision and it’s been an amazing journey since that point.
Elliot Moss
And those first few months you set it up, it’s just you or you quickly hired people? The funding? I know you are funded to a significant level. Was that at the beginning to then hire the people or which order did it go in?
Dr Nick Taylor
It was a little bit of chicken and egg kind of stuff actually in terms of the early fundraising journey. I left in September and there was a period then of building the core founding team of whom there are four of us now; that’s Nick Tong, our CTO, lifelong engineer, Steve Peralta, he ran wellness sessions in corporates…
Elliot Moss
Sounds like you are introducing members of the band. On drums…
Dr Nick Taylor
On drums, Steve’s a great musician actually so there we go.
Elliot Moss
And you are a musician too.
Dr Nick Taylor
And me on sax.
Elliot Moss
Is there any? Joking aside about the band thing, is there is a sense that all of you have to work, I mean is the chemistry good? Is the alchemy good?
Dr Nick Taylor
Yeah, it has to be, right? The guy I didn’t bring on, I’ll put him on bass, is Ryan Morgan and I guess that to your earlier question, Ryan had experience of previously building businesses so he brought a wealth of understanding about HR tech and that helped us be really selective about the investors we approached because we wanted people that brought huge value, they understood either the mental health aspect of what we were trying to achieve or the business aspect of what we were trying to achieve so we were very careful early on in that and we’ve always been very careful about the investors we’ve brought in since.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from Nick Taylor, he’s my doctor in the house today. He’ll be back in a couple of minutes. But first though, we are going to hear from one of our partners at Mishcon de Reya with some advice for your business.
There are many ways for you to enjoy all our former Jazz Shapers and indeed to hear this very programme again. You can ask Alexa to play Jazz Shapers and there you can hear many of the recent programmes, or if you pop Jazz Shapers into iTunes you can enjoy the full archive there as well. But back to today, it’s Dr Nick Taylor, he is Co-Founder and CEO of Unmind, a workplace mental health platform. And we’ve been talking about the band members, the team, and that fusion, the meeting of business and of mental health expertise. Was it all plain sailing that first year? Was it a genuine, ‘We’re on a mission, we know what we’re going to do and everything’s happy, everyone’s happy’ or not? It’s the honesty moment.
Dr Nick Taylor
Yeah, the honesty moment.
Elliot Moss
His eyes are now going ‘How honest to do I be at this moment?’.
Dr Nick Taylor
Do you know what, I think for people who have run multiple businesses before and they hear our story, they say “Wow, it’s been an incredible journey, you guys have grown very fast and, you know, you’ve come to the market at just the right time and you’ve got the right team” and that’s wonderful to hear but of course, like, when you actually doing it, you are the person in the pot as part of that journey, of course there are times when it’s really stressful and scary and worrying but the vast majority of it is being incredibly exciting and fast paced and right and good.
Elliot Moss
In that adrenalin ride, and it is I imagine a bit of a rollercoaster, obviously you are making multiple decisions at speed. Did you all give yourselves the space to stop and just move away and think and be clear again? Did you have those opportunities because is strikes me often in the beginning of the lifetime of a business, it is just crazy but the people that really succeed and able to stop and go ‘Are we pointing in the right direction here?’. Have you had those moments yet or are you still on that first trajectory?
Dr Nick Taylor
Well, now because you’ve said the people that succeed stop and pause, I’ve got to answer that we stop and pause. We pause a lot. A lot of pauses. No, do you know what, there’s a lot of funny kind of decisions that you make, and we still make today where you’re trying to predict the right decision to make in that moment for something that will happen in six months’ time that you’ve never done before. So, inevitably you have to pause to think about those decisions quite a lot because you don’t know, there’s so many things you don’t know, that you don’t know, in building a business and no matter how many other people you speak to who have built businesses, no one has built your business in the way you are building it at that exact time so you are kind of writing the rule book a little bit, I think, every time so you have to pause, you have to think about it, and then it comes down to making sure you’ve got the right team to reflect and as careful as we are about the investors, we are careful about everyone in the team and Unmind is everyone’s story in the team, we are 41 people now and, you know, each and every person brings their unique lens to what we are doing and wouldn’t be possible without them so it’s such a team effort and hopefully amongst all those people you’ve got someone that will spot problems when they occur, someone that will see opportunities and…
Elliot Moss
And the clients of yours, or the enterprises you partner with, include Farfetch, John Lewis, Just Eat, Made.com, William Hill – these are big companies.
Dr Nick Taylor
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
And, how have you managed to a) land those contracts which are very big? And b) then sustain them in different ways because different organisations require different things or have you managed to say, no, no, no, there are three themes, you will need to do the following?
Dr Nick Taylor
I think every business is a little bit different in how they approach the subject and how their culture impacts on how they think about the subject. You know, it’s really important to point out that whilst we have this kind of aspirational point and we are saying “Let’s reimagine how we are talking about mental health”, the point of doing that is not to say “Oh, it’s all fine”; the point of doing that is to say “We’ve got a subject which people are not talking about, that people are scared by, that is causing an awful lot of pain”, you know the Stevenson-Farmer review in 2017 showed a £37 billion cost to employers every year in the UK due to mental ill health, you know, Vince Cable put that in perspective by saying “It’s the equivalent cost to going through Brexit every single year.” You know, the…
Elliot Moss
Something I am looking forward to, firstly.
Dr Nick Taylor
As we all are, of course.
Elliot Moss
Every year, for the next however many years. We’ve just got to keep going. Consistency is very important.
Dr Nick Taylor
Well, it is, yes.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of, give me one example of the sort of thing that you do for a business with over a thousand people. What is a thing as a person that I will experience if I have access to the Unmind platform?
Dr Nick Taylor
Well, I’ll definitely come to that but let me also just quickly finish because, you know, the point is that businesses are investing in mental health for their people because they recognise that mental ill health is causing them a huge problem. There is very much a need for a solution to a big problem here, but we believe the answer to that is to be much more aspirational and much broader in our approach, because by doing that you get an early intervention to people rather than a late intervention which we can certainly chat about more but in terms of how we support companies, let’s say you are a hundred thousand people, a hundred thousand people in your organisation, when we go live get access to our digital platform which they can use 24/7 on any device – their phone, their tablet, their laptop – and that gives them the tools to look after their mental health, empowers them to look after their mental health on a daily basis. You know, if you think about how great we are at brushing our teeth, I bet, you know, everyone here in the studio will say they brushed their teeth this morning and even if we didn’t, we wouldn’t say so because it’s embarrassing now to say we don’t engage in preventative dental healthcare.
Elliot Moss
I wish all my children did brush their teeth every morning. Just FYI on that point.
Dr Nick Taylor
But you know, like, it’s an amazing point, right? We are really good at it and that’s great, I am really thrilled everyone brushes their teeth but if you compare your teeth to your brain, your brain is a bit more complicated so it’s a bit funny that we are so good at looking after our teeth but not our brains, right? So, we give, we empower employees in organisations to look after their mental health on an ongoing basis.
Elliot Moss
I sort of asked a question around ‘So what is it that the platform could do?’. One of the things, and I had a guest in here many years ago, Andy Puddicombe who is the Founder of Headspace and he was talking about mindfulness. That was six years ago, probably. In that period of time, mindfulness has become a bit of a global phenomenon, there’s the Muse app and there’s a few others I can’t remember the name of, that’s one thing that one can do. What does, in practical terms, Unmind offer another person, what would they do beyond that? Because, for me, I find mindfulness quite difficult to do, even though it is only ten minutes of my time.
Dr Nick Taylor
Yeah, I think, kudos to the mindfulness community and the guys behind the companies that built the consumer apps that have been widely adopted because it’s helped normalise the conversation around how we can actually do things every day to look after our mental health. Our approach is more holistic and we believe that actually whilst mindfulness is a really great thing, just doing mindfulness or offering that is a little bit like just offering a gym with a treadmill, you know, it would be a bit of a rubbish gym with a lot of treadmills and, you know, you need to offer quite a broad array of things for people to do. For us, with the platform, it’s about also giving people the tools to measure their mental health. Generally speaking, people don’t know that much about what’s going on with their mental health so you need to give people a way of tracking and monitoring what’s going and based on their unique profile of how they are with their mental health, they’re signposted to content on our platform that draws on cognitive behavioural therapy in it’s various kind of iterations, neuroscience, positive psychology, mindfulness, all the content is developed in collaboration with top experts around the world. So, their scores then directly impact on what they do but we also integrate all the other services available within that organisation onto the platform because it’s hard for people to get to the right care at the right time and because 9 out of 10 employees in the UK won’t tell their employer about their mental health so, it’s often hard for people to navigate the often brilliant services that are available internally so we think that that should be made much simpler and lift the metaphorical fog around them and just like link to them on a platform. Health systems should talk to themselves, you know, and what I mean by that is, if you went to see your GP or your doctor and you said ‘I’ve got a terrible back’ and your doctor said ‘I can’t help you, I’m a medic’, you’d go ‘That’s outrageous’, you rely on your doctor to say ‘Let me refer you to a physiotherapist’. Digital health should signpost to traditional health and vice versa. There has to be that level of integration.
Elliot Moss
In terms of the products that you are developing, you’ve talked then about obviously experts, medical experts, a variety of experts contributing. What’s the process for you going “I think there’s something in there?” Okay, that’s the issue because obviously good business comes out of solving a problem. That’s the issue which we are trying to fix. Then what happens? Is there and NPD process that you follow?
Dr Nick Taylor
I guess a couple of things around that so, because obviously we get all of the individual data, someone uses the platform then we see how their scores are, we see what they are doing, we empower the individual in that respect be we also enable to the organisation to become data driven in their mental health strategy so we can aggregate and anonymise, the anonymous aspect is very important obviously, we aggregate and anonymise the data so the business can then truly understand what’s going on for their people and based on that they can start forming a strategy to support their people in the future based on how their people actually are which is really important; if you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it. That’s true for an individual but it’s also true for an organisation when they are building strategies around supporting their people. So how that informs our content road map because we are a workplace mental health platform, we are working, our road map is our clients’ road map to some extent, so if we see that there’s a particular subject that’s challenging for a group of people within a company, we will then develop content around that, and what we do, we have our own internal science team and data team and researchers, we will first and foremost, look at the subject so, let’s say menopause as a subject that’s being spoken about in a lot of workplaces at the moment, we will then do a review of the literature, what’s been shown to be effective in helping people understand the subject, how can we build programmes to support people around that subject and then we reach out to leading experts in the subject, people that have written books or the leading academic papers, or people who have been open and shared their own personal journey and we collaborate with them to create the content which makes it incredibly engaging and reassuring for the users to know what they are experiencing is designed by the best people in the world.
Elliot Moss
And a quick question on collaboration. In your own universe, in your own business, it feels like you are not going to be the bossy kind of boss, without being simplistic about it. Are you naturally a collaborative guy? I mean, is that intentionally your style or have you developed that over the years because sometimes I imagine someone like you sees the way through it as a very strong feeling about what is right, wants to inculcate the room with optimism because that’s where we’re going, right? And yet, other people may not quite be there. How do you navigate that, personally?
Dr Nick Taylor
Yeah, I think, do you mean as in for us and our team internally?
Elliot Moss
For you, yeah.
Dr Nick Taylor
I think if you see any of the kind of job specs that we put out when we are hiring people, it always talks about being a super flat organisation and that’s really important to us and my point earlier about, you know, everyone in the team has a different lens they see the world by and we believe to truly see the world in colour, we need to get all of those different lenses on each problem, so we are very transparent about staff, I think collaboration is incredibly important and letting people thrive and be autonomous and drive to find solutions rather than it be like a top down approach.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with Dr Nick Taylor, plus we’ll be playing a track from the wonderful Stevie Wonder. That’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
That was Stevie Wonder with Golden Lady and I am with the doctor just for a little bit longer, it’s Nick Taylor, he’s the Co-Founder of Unmind. We’ve been talking about all sorts of things. How young should we be starting to educate people about mental health because I imagine schools, it’s not really happening yet, would you go younger, is that the next frontier for you to lobby the Government and say bring it into the curriculum at age eleven or even younger?
Dr Nick Taylor
Ah, definitely younger than eleven. I mean, I think you know, you pick babies up and they cry and say ‘Oh you are feeling sad’, you know, it’s so important to name the emotion to help people build a vocabulary around how to talk about their mental health, that’s so important and also it’s important to help break the stigma, if we talk about mental health when people are very young, you know, four, five, whatever it might be, that means that when they are ten this is not a new conversation, it means when they are fifteen it’s not a new conversation, you know, that’s the time, you should be very, very young, I think it should be part of our, one of the first things we talk to children about.
Elliot Moss
I think it should be Unmind’s next public advocacy strategy piece. But, genuinely, I mean it’s a really important point. What about your mental health? Because you’ve got this big job, you’ve got three young kids, there’s a lot of pressure, you’re a funded business, you’ve got 41 people, I mean everyone gets stressed, how do you cope with that and are you very conscious of making sure you manage your own well…?
Dr Nick Taylor
I try and be very conscious, I actually find the measurement aspect of our platform super helpful because it highlights to me when problems are occurring. We have a really great culture at work so we do a lot of exercise, I spend at least 45 minutes a day running or in the gym which I find really important for me, I try and sleep but that’s a bit of a joke with three young children so that I know would help. We talk a lot about how we are doing at work which is really important and at home for me also Mary my wife is super supportive. You know, I’m lucky in that most of the time my mental health is in generally quite a good place but I definitely try and keep track of what’s going on and use the platform as and when I need to relax or whatever it might be.
Elliot Moss
And obviously, I don’t know whether the business is making money yet but it needs to going forward. How important is the money to you in this equation, personally?
Dr Nick Taylor
I think it’s one of the really exciting things about what we’re doing is that fundamentally if we do our job right, we are going to help people to look after their mental health in ways that were never possible before. That’s really incredibly exciting because we can do good. But also we are doing a venture backed tech startup which is a lot of fun, you know, it’s a great adventure as well. I am incredibly ambitious generally as a person and always want to push myself to the absolute max and that’s definitely true with Unmind so, how important is money to me, personally? It’s a, I guess a result of us achieving, if we are incredibly successful, the money will inevitably be part of that.
Elliot Moss
It’s been really good talking to you, thank you for your time. Just before I let you go, and I know neither of us are good with names and so on but we should have this under control now. What’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Dr Nick Taylor
So, it’s John Coltrane, Slow Train. I used to play the sax and loved the saxophone generally, the tenor sax, such a beautiful sound and I loved the story behind the people playing the instruments and I think John Coltrane is a fascinating man, totally smashed boundaries, just an inspiration really and the legacy that he’s left and I love this track because it starts out in such a relaxed way, it’s so chilled and then he just builds up his solo into such a way that it just totally takes over. So, I love it.
Elliot Moss
That was Slow Train from John Coltrane, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Nick Taylor. He talked about repositioning mental health and it being much more positive. He talked about measuring things; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. A data driven approach to mental health and what I really loved about him was the synthesis of a business mind with someone who really cares about the clinical need. Fantastic stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a great weekend.
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