About Jules Coleman

Jules Coleman concedes entrepreneurship and the world of start-ups is not for everyone, there can be a loss of security and financial wellbeing. But as the years have gone on, she has recognised it is definitely the world for her. After studying a BSc in Economics and Finance at UCD Quinn she followed a more tried and trusted route initially, but things would ultimately pleasantly change direction for her.

While she loved studying subjects like economics and finance at UCD, she wasn’t sure what career option would most suit. But a casual visit to UCD’s O’Reilly Hall one day put her on a firm path, at least for a time.

“I remember I went to O'Reilly Hall. They were doing a careers fair, and the very first stand inside the door was Accenture. I'd like to say my career had a slightly more thought out plan than that, but it was like they were the first stand I met, and then they said they'd take me to America to do training, and I was sold,” she recalls now.

She enjoyed her subsequent time with Accenture and got to work with some large global players, helping improve their internal processes and working capital practices. The consultant path was not finished with just Accenture though, in 2010 she went over to PWC where she was a senior manager working with a range of clients on restructuring programmes and financial models. Crucially she was working with PWC in London which would turn out to be an important part of the story. During her time in PWC the first signs of the entrepreneurial bug started to appear as she worked on a project in Calcutta. But something else was bugging her at the time, as she explains it, and it was all about pianos!

“I was over in Calcutta with a lot of time on my hands, and kind of thinking about things, and I'd been trying to take up learning the piano again. I'd played as a kid and teenager but stopped, and so I was in my mid-to-late twenties at that point, and I wanted to find a piano teacher. Most people did not have an iPhone in 2011, like it had only come out in like 2010, so to get a piano teacher at that point in time, it was still kind of like you'd look up the Golden Pages or whatever, and get some phone numbers and call people. It feels kind of archaic now.  So, I started thinking could I create a virtual school of music which I'm not even sure what that really meant? But I think I meant a website, basically where you could book piano teachers and I called one of my friends from Accenture and told her about it, and she's like, ‘no, I don't think that's worth leaving the day job for.’’

 She was not dissuaded however by this advise and she thought a little more about her father’s occupation at the time, of driving instructor and generally formed the view that there might be space for a website that put web surfers in touch with various local service providers.

“And so I rang Alex back, my friend from Accenture, and she's like, ‘oh, maybe there's something a bit more to this and that kind of started off this whole thing”. That ‘whole thing’ was to become website Hassle.com (which linked up consumers and services providers based in local communities), which represented her first tentative step into the start-up world, 13 years later she is still plying her trade in that area of the economy.

At the time it was not easy to leave the full time security of PWC, but she decided to take a leave of absence from PWC 2011 and work with two Accenture colleagues on the new project in London. Asked did her background prompt her to make such a move, she partially agrees.

“At a very small scale I guess yes, in that my parents ran a newsagents when I was a kid in Leixlip, and so they ran that until I was about 14 or 15, and then they sold that. So, you get to see the real kind of coalface, that sort of entrepreneurship. It was the newsagents a few 100 yards from where we lived. You know, my parents, they'd open it up at 7 in the morning, and they close it at 11 at night, and it was 7 days a week,” she recalls now. She laughs however, saying “I'm not like the daughter of Elon Musk’’, to indicate that nothing was easy during her journey.

She described Hassle as a local service marketplace. Initially the business had teething problems and eventually the team would tighten the offering down to just cleaning services and the traction was almost instantaneous, eventually the firm would employ 130 people and expand across many European countries, including Ireland. In the summer of 2015, out of left field, a German company came along and wanted to buy Hassle and with its venture capital backing, it was decided to do the transaction. Coleman describes the Hassle venture as a very happy time, although she did feel it went by in ‘warp speed’.

After Hassle, Coleman says came the ‘difficult second album’ period, trying to come up with something fresh that could form a new start-up venture.  This time it would be architecture, not pianos. Asked how the new business came about, she laughs at the simplicity of it now.

“It was pretty organic, myself and my husband Simon, were buying a house in Southeast London, looking for a project, like a kind of ‘doer- upper’ of some sort, and my friend Alex her husband was renovating their maisonette in South London. And in that process we kind of got into the world of residential architecture, and meeting with architects and stuff. And just both myself and Alex were incredibly underwhelmed with the customer experience of that process. From there the creative juices started going,” she explains.

From those reflections emerged her current business, RESI, which started life in November 2016. Today its website describes the company as the UK’s leading architectural service.

Coleman describes the business very well. “So we are the UK's largest residential architecture practice. You know, we employ architects as part of RESI, we employ technicians, designers, all of the people that you typically expect in a practice. But we then obviously use technology. So I'm the CTO. So that's kind of like myself. And we do that to make sure our designers are about 10 times more efficient than what you might expect from a more traditional architectural practice, and then we have a marketplace at the back end, so when people have all the plans, they have the permission to make the building, or like the change they want to their existing building. Then we have a marketplace to connect them to the builders, to the structural engineers etc. Everyone that you might need,” she explains. She says 99% of the firm’s customers are people living in their own home who want to make changes to it. For Coleman developing another business is very enjoyable but she admits she is most at home in the tech part of the operation.

“So I've always been on the tech side, and I think in Accenture and PwC, that's kind of where I gravitated towards. Even from my teenage years, I've always gravitated towards that, like software engineering, computer science etc.,” she explains. Whatever the reasons she seems to enjoy it and is very passionate about the work. But she doesn’t necessarily see a huge difference between tech and her original UCD courses on finance and economics.

“I think what I would say, the degree that I did at UCD kind of having that economics piece, game theory kind of statistics etc. It probably made me more fully rounded rather than just knowing and being good at how to write software,” she observes.

She believes RESI is bringing something to the construction industry, an industry which often doesn’t see a lot of innovation or R&D spend. She cites 3D modelling for example. “It didn't really make sense for small residential practices to do it. But we've made that kind of leap and kind of gone across. We do laser scans of an existing property and create what's called a 3D digital twin. And now we're starting to do more 3D modelling. We're starting to bring in elements of AI and other pieces because we have an engineering team and so on, so we can actually make those investments,” she explains.

For now, she sees the business becoming a bona fide consumer brand and going public for the company is also a long term ambition. Much of the journey started, she laughs, all from a desire to find piano teacher all those years ago.

“I think it is officially the world's worst way of finding a piano teacher. It's like 14 years later, and I got sidetracked by 2 businesses,” she laughs.

Sidetracked maybe, but it sounds like it’s been a very interesting type of sidetracking.

Panel

Reflecting on your time at UCD, what experience stands out as particularly impactful or memorable?

In our 2nd year of Economics & Finance we did a fantasy stock trading game as part of one of our courses. I made the very brave (and totally foolish) decision to short-sell the recently IPO'd Google. I made 'unlimited' losses! The lesson has stuck with me for 20 years and I've never been tempted to dabble in stock-picking. I don't have the nose for it!

Is there a particular book or song you have carried with you for much of your life?

I've been a massive Jeff Buckley fan since my teenage years. I must have listened to the album Grace a thousand times at this point. Trying to pick just one track off it is almost impossible but perhaps `Lover, you should have come over` takes the top spot in my Desert Island Disc collection.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received, funny or serious?

A San Francisco based venture capital investor we met when running our first company gave us the advice "Things move fast, take pictures". He was totally spot on and myself and my business partner, Alex, still make a point of taking photos at moments big and small. It's amazing what you forget until you look back at photographic evidence.

What's a hobby or activity you've always wanted to try but haven't gotten around to yet?

I can attribute my entire startup career to the world's worst bout of procrastination in finding a piano teacher. That initial, incomplete and frustrating search led to me starting Hassle.com. That was about 13 years ago, I still don't have a piano teacher!

If you could have a conversation with any historical figure, who would it be and what would you ask that person?

As an economics graduate I think I would go for John Maynard Keynes. I would be fascinated to get his take on the current challenges we find ourselves in with a lack of growth and stagnant wages. Would he double down on Keynesian policies or would he have a new prescription for our modern ills?

November 2024