Founder@ Interview
Interview with Christopher Golby
“Read the lean startup!.” – Christopher Golby
Today we feature Christopher Golby, the founder at Lumien. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
I’m Chris, a director, and co-founder at Lumien. Our mission is to make culture and wellbeing an actionable part of every board meeting. We have a scalable SaaS product that drives data insights behind a companies wellbeing strategy.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
I actually have a PhD in digital healthcare from the University of Warwick, where I performed research on emerging technologies for the NHS. I stayed as a research fellow for a while, working on innovative technologies, before branching off in to our original company – Evolyst Ltd.
We spent several years working with the NHS and leading universities – developing further innovative technolgies. Our flagship project being SlowMo (with Kings College London and the NHS) – http://slowmotherapy.co.uk/. During this time we worked on a multitude of mental health products, and made the decision to eventually branch out and develop our own tool – Lumien.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
We’re based in Birmingham UK, and we create high performing, happy teams through Data-Led wellbeing programmes.
We help organisations understand what drives their employees, making them feel well, supported and motivated. Lumien is a software platform which allows you to:
Measure your employee’s wellness & productivity –
Allow your whole team to understand their own wellbeing and productivity and see how they can improve it. Lumien provides individuals with their own anonymous wellbeing reports, and also provides the company with an aggregated data report.
Understand the impact wellbeing interventions are having –
Our reports & recommendations allow you to see changes in productivity across different teams and/or geographies. Whether you’re a small company, or large corporate, our reports adapt to suit you. View what is working, and what is not working, and see where in the organisation the most impact is being created.
Manage & monitor changes within your organisation –
Use our action planner to manage your wellness strategy internally, or let us link you with our trusted delivery partners to lower your workload. If you want to run everything yourself, or would like to outsource your wellbeing strategy, we have you covered.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
Really this comes off the back of the work we did with the NHS and different universities. We noticed the emerging issues at a national level in Mental Health, and that the workplace could be a place to tackle these issues.
We noticed that companies often try to tackle poor mental health and wellbeing to help support staff and boost productivity; however, most go about it without adequate data or a srategic approach, which is where Lumien steps in.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
Make sure you really understand your mission – and make sure it’s measurable, and can be broken down in to milestones, which are spoken about with the entire team.
Start small and incremental. Organic growth will follow.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
Stay small and lean to begin, get it absolutely right with small customers, then growth will come naturally.
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
We’re a SaaS platform, so everything’s cloud based! However, there’s everything that’s needed behind the scenes, which is handled by a small team, keeping everything going day to day, who I’m incredibly grateful for!
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
Start small and incremental. Organic growth will follow.
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
Receiving feedback as to how we’d helped someone on a weekly basis with their mental health – this makes it all worth it.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
We want to see 10,000 companies taking monthly actions from our culture health reports.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
Read the lean startup!
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Lumien”
To learn more about Lumien Visit www.lumien.io
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