Sarah Dowzell remembers being eight months pregnant with her first child when one of the staff at her cleaning business called in sick.
“I just started running the vacuum cleaner around the office because it needed to be done,” she recalled. “It was a brilliant learning curve and that’s why I did it.”
Today Dowzell is in charge of Birmingham-based Natural HR but said it was her time running her cleaning business that shaped her.
“I was 21 when I started my cleaning business in 2009 and I would recommend people set up their business as soon as they can,” she said. “Everyone wants that ‘get rich quick’ idea but even if you fail, you’ll learn.
“I ran the cleaning business until 2011 and it was such a good grounding for me. It was a really small micro business. It was never a big business. I employed 12 people the entire time it was mine.
“One of the things I learnt from running the cleaning business was the need for accreditation and control systems and now we do that on a bigger scale.”
It was while running the cleaning company that she started to look for reliable, low-cost HR software to help her deal with her growing administration.
Unable to find what she wanted her husband Jason, a keen programmer, developed a custom application for her that would help me to do that. So Natural HR was born.
Dowzell sold the cleaning business when the couple moved house and threw their efforts into developing Natural HR.
“I liked the HR side of running a business, especially the people side, and went off and undertook some education around that,” she recalled. “Natural HR was kind of a hobby in the background.
‘If you don’t feel you’re growing fast enough, you’re not growing fast enough’
“Initially we put it online as a free tool. It meant that when I was at home, then with our first child, I was supporting these free users on the project.
“It got to a point in 2012, where we thought ‘actually there’s something in this’. Businesses started to use this tool and we registered as a limited company in 2012. It was quite a journey then and by 2015 we were raising £250,000 in investment.”
Natural HR provides all-in-one HR and payroll software for SMEs, making it easy to manage the HR department and enables professionals at the frontline to engage, manage and pay their people.
Dowzell, who holds a first-class honours degree in business studies, told TechBlast’s latest Going 4 Growth roundtable: “I’d describe Natural HR as being like my child. We’re a software vendor that covers your whole employee lifecycle around the things that you need to do to manage your people.
“There’s a lot of processes and paperwork so we automate those processes. We help automate and streamline that paperwork. It gives the HR professional one tool to use.
“Certainly, back in the early days, as companies were using various different tools, we found they’d use a tool for recruitment, a different tool to manage their absence and holiday tracking and then they might use something else to manage expenses and reimbursing people. So, for us, it was about becoming an all-in-one solution.”
Natural HR has now grown to 50+ employees, raised £1.6m in investment over a six-year period, and generates more than £3m a year.
Dowzell said: “We are really specific about the size of customer we target. We’ll respectfully decline business if it’s not right for us. it goes back to the honesty you know. If we can’t serve a customer from the outset knowing their requirements, we don’t want that business because the only way we’re going to achieve growth is if we retain customers.
“People are hugely important. I’m currently sitting in our newly kitted out office that we moved into a few weeks ago. Part of that move was because we’ve outgrown our old office and needed a new base to scale up and that is because – while we work from home on Mondays and Fridays – we genuinely believe that being in the office is what’s driving that innovation, growth, collaboration. It’s what we do differently in the market.
“There’s are a lot of faceless vendors in our market. They outsource their service delivery. People buy from people ultimately and offering a local service is what we want to do.”
Dowzell, who got a first class honours degree in business studies, said: “I’d describe Natural HR as being like my first child. We’re a software vendor that covers your whole employee lifecycle around the things that you need to do to manage your people.
“There’s a lot of processes and paperwork so we automate those processes. We help automate and streamline that paperwork. It gives the HR professional one tool to use.
“Certainly, back in the early days, as companies were using various different tools, we found they’d use a tool for recruitment, a different tool to manage their absence and holiday tracking and then they might use something else to manage expenses and reimbursing people. So, for us, it was about becoming an all-in-one solution.”