PocDoc CEO: Lend your expertise to other businesses

In this instalment of our weekly video series, My Business Leader Secret, we talk to Steve Roest, the co-founder and CEO of PocDoc.

Roest co-founded PocDoc with his wife in 2019. It makes at-home digital diagnostic kits, so people can do health tests for chronic conditions like heart disease. The company can make up to 200,000 tests per month. It has 40 employees and multi-million-pound revenues.

His personal business advice is that it is good to make time to lend your expertise to other businesses, so everyone can succeed together.

"The 'Last Friday' club involves me giving up my time on the last Friday of every month for free with no fees, no equity, nothing that you often find in and around the advisory space," he says.

He calls it a "safe space" where people can book a 30-minute slot to discuss their business challenges. He keeps his last Friday of the month free so he can do a day of sessions.

"I came across so many entrepreneurs, particularly of healthtech businesses, and they had so many similar problems, particularly around how to go from idea to a fully fledged business, which was mostly driven around commercial and operational issues, customer needs, unmet needs, how to scale or how to raise funding. All of these things I've experienced myself."

Roest has worked in the world of venture capital funding and also spent nearly a decade in a senior role at ticketing platform Viagogo as it scaled globally.

He says his motivation is that he wants to "help the ecosystem". He also appreciates that founders can lack people to speak to about pressing issues. It's hard to discuss pain points with investors or potential investors because you only want to paint a positive picture for them. Something similar holds true for your existing investors or even your board, he argues.

"You can't really go to a prospective investor and say, 'I'm really struggling on this point to scale my business' - that's going to be the worst investment meeting you've ever had."

That's why the best advice can sometimes come from your fellow entrepreneurs, whether they are in your sector or not.

"Giving up my time is a bit of a stretch when you have a growing business," says Roest, "but it's something I feel passionate about."

Watch the rest of the My Business Leader Secret series.