In today’s article, we have Laura Landmark sharing with us her journey from England to Norway to start a fintech company.
Originally from England, Laura moved to Norway over 10 years ago.
She is a qualified Accountant from CIMA.
After working as an accountant for almost 20 years, Laura decided to quit her job and co-found Mantle Analytics with the goal of helping companies use technology to grow their businesses.
They do this by helping them move from predominantly reactive, historical reporting to putting the emphasis on proactive, forward-looking reporting and forecasting.
Becoming an Accountant
In school, I was a very average student, certainly not brilliant, and definitely not an A-grade student.
When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I started working in a clothes shop.
Being on the shop floor folding clothes and greeting customers didn’t seem to be my strong point, so they stuck me in the back with the money! There I discovered that I loved finance and administration, and I became the back-office girl.
Along the way, I figured out that taking some exams in this area would help my career, so I started studying at night school with the AAT (Association of Accounting Technicians).
So, I actually never decided to become an accountant. I became one by accident.
After passing those exams, I decided to carry on to study CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants).
By the end, I had been studying in night school for over 5 years and had two jobs for a great deal of that time as well.
To put it mildly, after five years, I reached a point where I had quite enough of studying!
I would get up at 4:30 every day to study, then study during lunch breaks, every evening after work, and at weekends.
Consistently, relentlessly.
Eventually, all the efforts paid off, and I was a fully qualified CIMA when I was about 28.
Moving to Norway from England
I have worked a long career in lots of different accounting roles in England, from Electronic Arts to a South African wine company (Distell) to Royalton, a luxury house builder, before moving to Norway.
I met my Norwegian husband to be in 2002, and we married in 2004. We didn’t move to Norway until 2008, when we felt ready to start a new chapter in our lives.
Luckily, being married to a Norwegian and already having a network of friends made the transition easier.
However, there was a massive language barrier at first. I couldn’t understand or speak any Norwegian.
Norwegians are generally really great at speaking English, but in my opinion, if you want to fit into the culture, you need to speak their language.
So my primary goal was to first understand the language and later speak confidently. This process took approximately 2 years, and there was a steep learning curve.
In Norway, I was working at a company implementing accounting systems for about 10 years. This gave me a “behind-the-scenes” view of databases (at that time, cloud systems were not the norm).
I was then able to understand how accounting systems are structured, meaning it was easier to conceptualize how to harness and use data and dig out insightful and valuable information in the form of reports, KPIs (key performance indicators), and analytics to help businesses succeed.
Quitting my job to start a Fintech company
After almost 10 years of working in Norway, I finally decided to quit my job in 2017 and start a fintech company.
And that’s how I co-founded Mantle Analytics in October 2017 with my business partner.
The main reason for starting our company was realizing there was a big gap in the market for bringing finance and technology to SME’s (small and medium-sized businesses).
These are companies that want digital efficiencies but don’t have their own in-house IT departments.
Today, many business leaders recognize the value of data but don’t necessarily have the in-house resource to “find, prepare, and analyze” it.
Imagine what it would be like if you could harness all your relevant data, no matter whether it was in your accounting system, project management system, Excel, a.csv flat file, or the cloud.
Working with data is not easy, and that is why we set up Mantle: to bring data science and analytics to SMEs that don’t have their own in-house function.
We have been well received in the market, and the business is growing.
We work often with accountants as well, as for them particularly, technology has changed the way they perform their jobs.
We are helping accountants get future-focused and future-ready by implementing cutting-edge business intelligence and performance management software, etc.
It’s hard work and nothing comes for free, but it has been an exciting roller coaster-type journey.
Funding Our Business Concept
We both left well-paying jobs to set up Mantle Analytics, so it was a bit scary but mostly exciting.
After making the decision to start for ourselves, there were a few issues to overcome. But suddenly a lot of things started falling perfectly into place, which meant the idea of starting the business became more and more compelling.
Luckily, ours is not a capital-intensive start-up; we are bootstrapping. This means we are funding the company ourselves without any outside investment or loans.
When we started, we only needed a few thousand dollars to buy some laptops.
We both had some savings from before, which we set aside and dedicated to the business should we need it.
We both injected the same amount of capital into the business, and that is now repaid, and we still have the rest of our savings on standby! I am not suggesting this is the right way to start a business, but it was right for us.
We sit in a co-working space, which gives us instant access to a whole community of “colleagues.” This energetic environment (Innovation Dock, Stavanger) has been a lifeline for us; we would not have thrived stuck away in a home office environment.
Having said that, it has already been necessary for us to open a second office in Oslo, the capital of Norway, since we have so many customers there. So we travel very often back and forth between these two cities, where the biggest concentration of our customers is.
The team at Mantle Analytics
My business partner and I were the only two of us when we started in October 2017.Today, we are a team of five (almost).
My co-founder and I both come from accounting backgrounds, but he is also a developer, which is an added advantage.
Not everyone on the team is a qualified accountant, but all have business backgrounds.
It is essential, certainly in our fintech company, to have the accounting knowledge in-house, as a lot of what we do depends on understanding fundamental accounting concepts, statements, elements, and equations.
Without my background, I guess I probably wouldn’t be starting a fintech company.
I am a big believer in playing to strengths, however, so if finance and accounting, marketing, or IT are not your strengths, for example, they can be outsourced.
Sacrifices Made On the road
We managed to start our venture by making a conscious decision to go salary-free for a period of time. It was not easy, and we had to downgrade our lifestyles and expectations.
However, we had some savings put aside from before, which helped take a bit of stress out of the equation.
In these early years, our priority has been to put all the money we made back into the business.
After several months of going salary-free, we started paying ourselves a bit and slowly stepped it up over two years until these days we are earning more or less a “livable” salary.
Not too high, and not too low! perfectly in line with being a start-up entrepreneur!
My business partner also rented out his flat and moved into a 9-by-9-meter room in a shared house. It felt to him like going back to his student days.
Fast forward two years, and he is almost ready to put his key back in his own front door and reclaim his flat, so slowly, life is getting back on an even keel.
Today we have clients in the UK, Sweden, and Norway, and all the sacrifices made are worth it.
We are “growing up”! Hurrah!
Managing Our Business Effectively
Our daily struggles are to find the right balance of business development, sales, and execution.
We are small, so we need to do “everything,” and everything takes time.
We priorities revenue-generating tasks over internal ones, but we have implemented good systems for internal communication (Slack), internal project management (Smart Sheet), and document handling (G drive), so I feel we are pretty organized.
We haven’t started documenting our internal processes yet, but that is on the list for the next year or so.
The absolute best advice I can give to overcome struggles is communication.
We, as partners, are not always sitting in the same area of the country, as our customers are based all over Norway (and Sweden and the UK).
But we make it a point to speak on the phone or online at least once a day, often more, and keep each other informed via mail and Slack of all the relevant details, small or large.
My business partner says he would rather be told twice than have to fish for information, which wastes time and energy. Time and energy are two resources we need to preserve at all costs in a fast-growing start-up company.
Making business partnerships work
Me and my business partner have very open channels of communication, and we keep the conversations flowing.We have also made it “safe” for us to have hard conversations with each other. No matter what business-related issues are on our minds, we are able to share them.
We don’t always see eye to eye, and some of the conversations are tough and challenging, but our best ideas
are often generated from these types of interactions.
Being open and honest and sometimes agreeing to disagree has been absolutely critical in driving the business forward together.
Key Takeaways from My Journey
My advice to those wanting to start their own business would be to identify their purpose.
Why do you want to do this?, How will you change the world and make an impact with your product or service?
It is that “why,” that reason, purpose, or vision, that will keep you going when times are hard. And they will get hard!
My CIMA qualification has given me a huge advantage in starting a business, as in school we learned a lot of the fundamentals of business, or at least the theory of how they are screwed together.
I am very grateful to my 20-year-old self for deciding to push through the five-year slog!
In Conclusion….
I personally have created more time in my life by giving up TV (almost!). It is amazing how many hours the TV sucks away.
I quite honestly think, as entrepreneurs, we need to use our time (our most valuable asset) as wisely as we can to get the best chance of success.
I can only speak for myself, but having a leading role in this tech start-up of ours is allowing me to increase my business acumen. Having to work on my own business enables me to help others do the same with theirs.
I am able to put my formal education to good use, and together with my brilliant development team, we get the machines to do the grunt work, allowing us and our customers to focus our time and energy on growing our businesses.
