Hi friends,
Laura Earnshaw is one of the most impressive people I’ve met.
By the time you’ve finished reading this article, you’ll probably agree with me.
Until 2016, Laura was working in HR for some of the world’s biggest companies.
But, like many of us who end up working in mental health, it was a personal story that led her to start her business, myHappymind.
Years later, that business is providing mental health support to over 2,000 primary schools (10% of the entire UK market), is funded by the NHS, is profitably making millions of dollars a year, and most importantly, is improving the mental health of children around the UK.
And she did all this without raising money.
See, I told you she was impressive!
I recently sat down with Laura to chat about her story, and in today’s edition of The Hemingway Report, I share what we talked about. We cover;
How she started and grew myHappymind
Why she chose to bootstrap the business and how she’s made that work
How she got funded by the NHS
Laura’s thoughts on sustainably running an organisation focused on prevention in mental health
Laura’s five pieces of advice for mental health businesses
Whether you’re trying to run a bootstrapped business or growing a venture-backed organisation, there are a lot of lessons from Laura’s journey.
Let’s get into it.
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The Founding Story: Building for Her Child
The year was 2016, and Laura was working as the Global Head of Talent and Development for AstraZeneca. At the time, her four-year-old child had just started school. But they were really struggling.
Laura went to the school to try and see how they could solve the problem. But she didn’t get many answers.
So Laura decided to take matters into her own hands. She built her own program, one that focused on helping her child develop skills like resilience, confidence, self-reflection and relationship building. Funnily enough, these were the same things she was teaching executives at AstraZeneca. She worked with her child on this plan for six months and saw an incredible change.
The improvement was so drastic that the school called her in to figure out what she had done.
She explained her process and in doing so, had a realisation. The teachers who didn’t help her child… that wasn’t because they didn’t care, it was because they actually had no idea what to do. They didn’t have the time, knowledge or resources to focus on building the kind of emotional and mental skills that a child needs. This was lightbulb moment number one for Laura.
Lightbulb moment number two came in the middle of another personal story.
A few months later, Laura got a call to tell her that a close friend had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and had been sectioned. She immediately went to see them in the hospital. Driving home hours later, somewhere on the M25, she had another realisation;
She arrived home, walked in the front door and told her husband she was quitting her job.
Can I just say how much I love that energy!
Laura had decided to build a program for primary schools that would teach preventative habits for good mental health. And so, myHappymind was born.
The First Steps
I’m always interested to know the tangible first steps founders take in their journey. For Laura, it was about formalising the plan she had built for her child into a program that could be delivered in primary schools. Then, she focused on getting that into one school.
When people talk about building a company, they often talk about the work ethic required. Sure, a lot of work is needed, but I think we tend to underestimate how much being smart can make a difference to your outcomes.
Laura was smart. She made three important decisions early in myHappymind’s life that helped the business grow and be successful.
Make a lightweight program that could be easily adopted. Laura realised that if she couldn’t get myHappymind adopted, it would never have any impact. So she designed the first version of her program with this in mind. She didn’t have a fancy app or an intensive training program; it was just a set of digital lessons, a printed journal for students and clear instructions for teachers. The program was delivered in one 20-30 minute session per week, fitting into the rhythm of the school week in a way that was easy for teachers to deliver. Having the program delivered by teachers was a clever move. It made it easy to slot into regular class life, benefited from how well teachers know their own kids, and it obviously helped keep delivery costs down for Laura.
Charge from day one. Laura thought it was important to quickly test the commercial viability of her business. From her very first school, she made sure she got paid for the service, charging on a per-pupil, per-year basis. Yes, that gave her cash flow, but it also gave her confidence that she had a commercial model that could scale sustainably. Too many people put this off for too long. I think largely because they’re afraid that no one will pay, and their idea will come crashing down. But that’s exactly why you should charge from day one. Laura believed strongly that schools should pay for mental health education “Schools already pay for maths and literacy curricula. Why wouldn’t they pay for mental health? The obvious thing to me was that schools would buy it out of their own budgets. And that's how we built the business for the first few years.”
Collect evidence. Laura had a third important insight; in order to scale past the first few schools, she would need evidence, but she couldn’t wait to start collecting it. Her advice on this front is to get scrappy with the evidence you collect and to do what you can with what you’ve got. At the start, that just meant getting a testimonial from a Head Teacher. But that was often enough. Over time, Laura continuously got more sophisticated, collecting student-level data, then school-level metrics and eventually working with a health economist to model ROI. "We can now show a 38x return to the system. Fewer exclusions. Fewer CAMHS referrals. More kids in school, learning.”
With these decisions, Laura had a program that schools would pay for and could easily adopt. Teachers could easily deliver it as part of their regular week of teaching, and kids got the skills they needed to improve their emotional and mental health.
These decisions also meant that she didn’t have to rely on external capital to fund her business.
Why Laura Chose to Bootstrap
Most of the businesses I write about are backed by Venture Capital. I’m a big supporter of many of these businesses and think they have the potential to make a massive impact in mental health. But I also believe we need other models of success. Laura’s decision to bootstrap myHappymind offers a great success story for those who don’t want to go down the VC route.
When I asked her why she decided to bootstrap, she said;
Her early decisions certainly supported this bootstraped strategy. But it wasn’t until she landed a larger funding source for her program that she really accelerated myHappymind’s growth.
Finding a Sustainable Funding Source
Working with the NHS wasn’t part of Laura’s original plan.
But one day, a headteacher from a school that was using myHappymind was speaking to their local NHS commissioner. At the time, the NHS were overrun with referrals from schools to CAMHS (unfortunately, they still are by the way). They were saying to schools that many of the kids being referred didn’t meet the clinical threshold to be in CAMHS, and that even if they did, they just couldn’t handle the volume of referrals.
So the headteacher asked a simple question to the NHS commissioner: ‘Why don’t you just pay for myHappymind?’. From their perspective, this would be a way to actually reduce the volume of referrals being sent to CAMHS and to solve some of those mild to moderate problems for kids at their root, in the school.
Laura was shopping for school shoes with her daughter when she got a call from this NHS commissioner.
Since then, these NHS deals have become a major revenue stream for myHappymind.
Yes, yes, I can hear you already; “Steve, I wish I had an NHS commissioner call me and just offer me a contract”. Sure, there’s an element of good fortune here, but outside of the good fortune, we should understand what else contributed to this happening.
It happened because Laura was ruthlessly focused on delivering an incredible product to schools. It’s easy to forget the impact that focus can have.
The evolution of myHappyMind
Laura has evolved myHappyMind since those early days.
From a business perspective, they’re now making millions in revenue, with over 50% EBITDA Margins. They’re in 2,000 primary schools in the UK, with the majority of those funded by the NHS.
They’ve won multiple awards. Laura recently got to meet King Charles in Windsor Castle to mark their winning of The King's Awards for Enterprise.
On the product side, they now have an app for parents to allow them to learn alongside their kids and to reinforce what the kids are learning in the classroom. They offer wellbeing support for teachers and support for more specific challenges, for example, around neurodivergence in children.
In terms of how they organise themselves to drive growth. Laura continues to lead sales to the NHS and has a small team of salespeople who run sales directly to schools. Customer Support is the biggest function in the thirty-person organisation, looking after all of their schools through a remote-based service. A lot of their marketing still happens through word of mouth, but Laura’s just brought on a team to help spread the word. Part of this will be to support their international growth plans, which is getting a lot of Laura’s attention.
Above all, Laura is ruthlessly focused on shifting the culture in the classroom. I resonate with her vision.
When I was in primary school, I lived with a mental disorder. My hope, is that kids and teachers can be taught skills that would make life for a kid like me just that little bit easier.
Laura’s Advice
There aren’t too many success stories like Laura’s. I really wanted to hear what advice she had for other people building businesses in this space. Here are her five tips.
Use your existing customers to unlock new markets. Get your customers to advocate for additional funding pots rather than you going and pitching for them yourself.
Start charging early, even if your product’s not perfect. It’s the only way to know if your business model is sustainable.
Build an evidence base from day one. A lot of people think they don't have evidence when actually they do. It's just not as robust as it might be down the line.
Design your delivery model around existing workforce capacity. Services are already stretched past their capacity. If you’re asking them to take on more work, or for organisations to hire additional staff to deliver your intervention, it’s going to be much harder.
And last but not least, ALWAYS keep purpose at the heart of the decisions you take. With that as your North Star, you’ll maintain the energy to keep going in the tough times and the integrity to do what is right.
I’m really excited to follow Laura and myHappymind’s story over the coming years, and I’m so glad we have them as an archetype for success. They are a reminder that we can do this. We can build impactful mental health businesses that make a difference for the millions of people we want to help. And those businesses can achieve commercial success along the way, too.
If you enjoyed this story, feel free to learn more about myHappymind and Laura’s journey.
That’s all for this week. As always, I hope you found it insightful. Reply to this email and let me know what you thought.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Steve
Founder of The Hemingway Group
P.S. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn
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