Ashley Tate, serial entrepreneur and founder of EV charging payment business Mina

Entrepreneur Ashley Tate All Star Charge Pass After the company acquired EV charging payment startup Mina,

Since the age of 15, Tate has started a number of companies, including Split the Bills, which helps people in shared housing with utilities such as water and electricity.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to work for myself. I remember what school was like and what careers were like, but I had no interest in it and left school after my GCSEs.

That summer, I founded a company that sells mini bikes. My father thought this was an interesting concept and helped me open a bank account. It was successful and popular before Christmas, but it was quickly game over.

read more: My first boss: Martin Metcalf, CEO of Basis Technologies

The fad passed and I was forced to work in a local pub, against everything I had set out to do.

My first boss taught me all the traits I never wanted. First, he had no respect for anyone on the team. I remember one meeting where he said he was the boss and needed to be respected. He was unkind and even made people cry. And the thought stuck with me about how his boss shouldn’t run his business.

I bounced around between bar and restaurant jobs until I ended up as a waiter at TGI Fridays. I learned so much. It’s how you train and incentivize managers to take care of your staff. It is the people on the front lines, not the managers, who decide the success or failure of a business.

Now, I’m open about what I’m bad at, and I’ve always hired people who can do a better job than me. The more you do that, the more people will trust and believe and want to work somewhere where their boss doesn’t think they know everything.

This isn’t the case anymore, but back then TGI managers had to work in the kitchen or the bar washing pots. It was a “do as we do, not as I say” mentality. Everyone is working together and that was a concept I got from his two years at TGI.

story continues

By the time I turned 19, I started an online marketplace to sell student housing and felt inspired again to try it out on my own. I had no income at all for two years before he shifted his focus to the real estate rental business. That was in 2009, and by 2011 it had evolved into another idea: a technology platform called Split the Bills that allows students and individual tenants to pay cheaper utility bills.

read more: My first boss: Jules Goldberg, CEO of SnoreLab and Sleepwave

The biggest lesson I learned was that while I made sure my staff were happy and motivated, I was missing the biggest business fundamentals of making a business work: cash flow forecasting and P&L. It was said that there was not enough.

We knew we had a good business model with a customer base. Six months later, we bought the domain back from the custodian and hired a great financial manager (who still works with All Star).

But I was getting tired of running a company in the student market. After launching Mina in 2019, I quickly sold these two businesses. I had the idea that there had to be an opportunity in the field of electric vehicle charging.

I knew about domestic billing through Split the Bills. I realized there was a hole in the fuel card market. A fuel card is a simple product that allows drivers to pay for fuel and have payments reflected directly into their business.

I knew I could fix the problem at home, but I also knew I couldn’t do it alone.

With three co-founders and the coronavirus, we were forced to run a business where everyone worked from home. By the end of COVID-19, trust in hybrid working stopped being a problem for us because it was our whole being.

We spoke to the all-stars who carved out a niche for themselves in 2020, covering the UK’s largest range of fuel vehicles. If we were to convert that amount to electricity, we needed to find a way to accelerate the transition of Britain’s fleet to EVs by making it easier to pay for EV charging at home or on the go.

read more: My first boss: Hovhannes Avoyan, Picsart Founder and CEO

All-Stars invested in us in 2021. The company gained momentum and was acquired by Fleetcore, All Star’s parent company, this year. So far, we’ve been looking at how to bring startups and large companies together.

Again, it’s important how you keep your staff happy, but at the same time, don’t retain them for the sake of it.

Also, this is the first time I’ve had a boss since I was 19 years old. I was surprised at how much I learned about building my business. What would have taken five years and many failures along the way, we were suddenly able to start. Accelerating in huge successful organizations. It’s like having a mentor appear again.

clock: ‘Almost half of all new passenger cars in the EU are electric.

Download the Yahoo Finance app. apple and android.