Three-time founder Jennie Johnson has experienced the highs and lows of life as an entrepreneur.
She sold her first business – Kids Allowed – after growing it to eight sites and 500 colleagues.
However, she closed her second business – parenting app My First Five Years – after realising she couldn’t make it sustainable.
Now she’s back with her third business – Vets At Home – which allows people to give their pets a peaceful goodbye at home.
In this episode of The Naked Founder podcast, Johnson also talks about:
• The mistake of sacrificing your health for business success;
• Why business success is a ‘wiggly path’ rather than a straight line;
• The juggling challenge facing female founders;
• Why each bruise in business is also a learning; and
• The importance of founders owning failure.
She told The Naked Founder podcast: “I guess no one tells you how hard it’s going to be and how personal it’s going to be to you.
“I think you get some incredible highs when you’re running your own business, but you get lots and lots of lows as well, where you have to get right in the trenches and sort problems out.”
“People say having a business is like having another baby.
“You feel so passionate about what you’re doing you believe success should follow if there’s any justice in the world.
“But it doesn’t always work that way. Be prepared to be incredibly resilient because it’s not for the faint-hearted.”
Johnson is a mother of three and launched Kids Allowed in 2003.
She recalled: “Kids Allowed solved a problem that nearly all parents have, which is that they’re looking for high-quality childcare, that they can feel happy that they’ve chosen and that they can feel that their child is getting a really good experience.
“For me it was grounded in a very personal need. I needed that for my own child. And I created an environment that was just a step change for the sector. Everything that we did, we did to be the best.
“As long as we delivered an exceptional service and looked after our colleagues and looked after our customers, it kind of just worked.
“We got to eight sites, we looked after 2,000 children a week, we had 500 colleagues, so it ended up being a fairly large company and something that I’m incredibly proud of as well.”
Kids Allowed was built on the two big Cs – culture and colleagues – followed by purpose.
“We all juggle too many balls,” Johnson told The Naked Founder podcast. “As a female founder you’ve got your CEO hat on. If you’re a family person as well, you’ve got your mum hat on, which probably means you’ve got a partner. We spread ourselves too thinly. And this myth that we can have it all.”
The timing of Kids Allowed’s acquisition by Kids Planet seemed perfect, as it came just at the start of the Covid lockdown in 2020.
Johnson bought a dog and a camper van and resolved to get healthy after sacrificing her health while building Kids Allowed.
“I just did everything for everybody else but me,” she said. “There was no wonder by the end of that journey that I was overweight. Sometimes the answer seemed to be that glass of Chardonnay or whatever it maybe was.
“Going to the gym just seemed like a crazy idea. Where were the minutes in the day? Never mind the hours in the day that I’d need to do that.
‘I forgot my own health’
“My biggest regret as a founder was not thinking about my health all the way through that journey. I ran that business for 17 years and in that time I never prioritised myself.
“That’s a long time to neglect yourself and there’s going to be major consequences to your body, to your fitness, to your mental health, to your robustness.”
However, she cut short her retirement to launch parenting app My First Five Years in 2021 with Alistair Bryce-Clegg. The app supported a child’s unique development.
Johnson told the podcast: “I really felt we had something, but I think what we were trying to do with that was change behaviour. And actually changing behaviour is really, really difficult.
“You need an awful lot of money to launch a direct-to-consumer brand that’s going to change behaviour.
“Kids Allowed was providing a service people needed. What we were trying to do with the app was help parents elevate their experience as a parent and elevate outcomes for the children. We just couldn’t get the traction.
“We were successful on so many metrics, but the one thing we couldn’t do was get our traction to a sustainable level that would pay the bills.
“People need to come find you. They need to be aware of you. And to create that awareness at scale is just incredibly expensive. Some people get a bit of luck along the way. I’ve always said the harder you work, the luckier you get.
“I’m not trying to say for one minute that people that are successful have just been lucky. They will have worked incredibly hard as well.
“But sometimes with apps, you just have that viral moment or the right person download it and rave about it that can just give it that new trajectory. We just didn’t have them lucky breaks.
“We couldn’t have been raising money at a worse time but it is what it is.
“The other thing that I’m kind of proud of with My First Five Years is that I didn’t bury my head in the sand.
“I could see we were going to have a problem and I treated every colleague with respect and fairness.”
She said success in business is rarely a straight line.
“I think a lot of people talk about career paths being a wiggly path and I think owning a business is a wiggly path as well,” she told The Naked Founder podcast.
“You’ve got to be ready to roll with the punches, try your best to learn from the mistakes you make so that there’s value in everything.
“And try not to make a bottle of wine the answer every night, as so many founders do.”
In 2025, she launched her third business, Vets At Home.
She said: “It is exciting in a funny way to get a third opportunity to learn the things that went well from the first one and bring that forward. The things that didn’t go so well from the second one and bring that forward.
“I do think I have a broader experience now as a founder than I could have possibly done if I hadn’t done that second business and learned the things that I learned. There was definitely a pressure then for the third one to be successful.”
She launched the business with her partner, Mike Crawford, who is also the chief product officer.
Her cousin, Dr Sinead Bennett, is the veterinary director and clinical lead.
Vets At Home’s mission is to make the process of losing a beloved pet a little easier to bear.
Asked whether it feels different third time round, she said: “I feel wiser. I’ve come into it more bruised, but each one of those bruises is like a learning.
“The one thing that you’re always going to be frightened of as an entrepreneur, at least me anyway, is the F word.
“You can dress it up all you like, but the middle business (My First Five Years) although it had lots of successes depending on what metrics you used, ultimately it wasn’t a sustainable business. So the F-word (failure) might get associated with it and you have to own it.”
The Naked Founder is sponsored by Financielle and produced by Dan Brown of Renowned.
You can listen to it here.