ST22 | Empowering Women Professionals With Flexible Work Solutions

In this episode we explore the story of FlexiBees, a platform that is revolutionizing the way businesses hire qualified professionals and helping women professionals return to work on their own terms. We’ll discuss the challenges and opportunities Shreya and co-foudners faced, the importance of communication and filtering for flexible work, and their vision for the future. Whether you’re a business owner, a professional seeking flexible work solutions, or just interested in the future of work, this video is for you. Don’t miss out on the insights and advice from the founders on how to a successful startup.

Discussion Topics: Empowering Women Professionals with Flexible Work Solutions

• Introduction
• What is Flexibees?
• Why Flexibees?
• Flexibees gives flexibility to women
• How to convert customers
• Hurdles in the path of Flexibees
• What did Flexibees do differently?
• How to set up clients and customers?
• What differentiated them from competitors?
• How does vetting help?
• Difficult decisions on way
• How the journey aligned to the vision
• How to scale up hindrances
• Advice for entrepreneurs

Transcript: Empowering Women Professionals with Flexible Work Solutions

Amit: Are your small business owners struggling to keep up with everything yet kind of uncertain about hiring a full-timer? Well, today we are talking to someone who in addition to being a successful bootstrapped entrepreneur might also be your ideal solution. So welcome to another episode of ShopTok. This show is about and for bootstrap entrepreneurs. And we discuss people’s stories, their challenges, their wins, and most importantly, the lessons that they’ve learned along the way. So today we are talking with Shreya Prakash, who’s the co-founder and CEO at FlexiBees, which is a talent matching platform that helps experienced women professionals find flexible work, something that I think is quite required in the world today. But first, may I please request you to follow the show, so you don’t miss any of the great episodes that we have coming up? And if you like this episode, and I’m sure that you will, please rate it five stars. Thank you very much. So shear over to you. Before we start, would you like to maybe introduce yourself and also a little bit about FlexiBees.

What made you leave Unilever to set up FlexiBees?

Shreya Prakash: So thanks. Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here on ShopTok. So yeah, like you introduce me Currently, I am the co-founder and CEO of FlexiBees. That’s my full-time job and my passion. But from that, I’m also a parent to a four-and-a-half-year-old kid. And just to give a little bit of, you know, a human perspective. And before this, I was with Unilever, where I worked in sales and marketing for eight years.

Amit: I would be curious as to what made you leave Unilever to set up FlexiBees.

Shreya Prakash: Yeah, I will say the trigger really was the fact that the PA who is a batchmate, was going through an experience that we were aware of post-MBA, she’s worked as a management consultant. And she’s been very kickass very ambitious or her life. And then she had to take a career break for a couple of years. So I and my other co-founder Rashmi were working at that time I was in Unilever Rashmi was a PNG. And we knew her story, we knew that she found it difficult to return after those two years, especially because she wanted a little bit of flexibility. And that really kind of opened, you know, our eyes, even for qualified women, even for ambitious women. It’s hard. And especially if they’ve taken a break, which many of them do. It’s difficult to return and something needed to be done about it in India today. As we all know, today, you know, women’s workforce participation in spite of all the best intentions is declining, is it isn’t the 20s figure versus say 80% For Men just to give a little bit of a contrast over there? So it felt like a problem, you know, that needed an urgent solution. And that’s why we decided to get together and start Flexi vs.

Amit: Okay. And so, since we are on the topic, so what exactly is FlexiBees? How does it work?

Shreya Prakash: Right? So we started with the intent to help qualified women return to work. And we thought that flexibility was the answer to that. So while the reasons why women drop out are multi-fold, one way, we thought that we could address it quickly. And in a way that was also shaping up to be a trend of the future. FlexiBees today is not just for women professionals, it’s for everyone who wants, you know, a little bit of diversity in their lives. Definitely. Yeah, so we decided that flexibility, or rather, we saw that flexibility was the answer the ability to work, say for fewer hours, the ability to work remotely from wherever, wherever that you want to the ability to work in a way that could be on for some months, and then you know, couldn’t be off for the next few months. So project-based kind of work. So we started talking to businesses, small businesses, and we were very pleasantly surprised to know that there was a lot of receptivity, businesses wanted a way in which they could hire experienced professionals for a little little bit more affordably, which was possible due to the flexible models in a way that was far more on-demand than say the more traditional form of hiring offered in a way that enabled them to be more dynamic, more fragile to the external demands. We are especially talking about small businesses in an era that was pre-pandemic. Of course, post-pandemic, all businesses have kind of you know, however big however vintage, they’ve kind of woken up to the idea of the Magi being more lean, but at that time it was smaller businesses. Startups the, you know, the especially bootstrap startups or startups, which don’t have huge amounts of funding, or, you know, which seemed like the best kind of fit. And that’s when we jumped in, we thought that it was, you know, demand was there. And of course, supply was there. So flexibility came into being, which is basically a platform that helps businesses hire qualified professionals in a flexible manner, which is part-time project-based and remote working. And on the other hand, it helps qualified women professionals return to work via flexible opportunities and on their own terms.

The concept of a portfolio career

Amit: Yeah, I mean, this all sounds extremely good. Because there’s also this concept now of a portfolio career, right? Yeah, one thing, you know, 12 hours a day, or eight hours a day or whatever, you want to do two or three different things, because you want to explore different facets of your personality interests, and so on. So this gives a really good way to kind of do that. And interesting story. So about 12 years back, I had launched a startup, you know, which was a travel tech sort of a thing. And at the time, it was bootstrapped. And, you know, I couldn’t get funding, etc. So at that time, I’d actually hit upon the thought process that maybe there are women who’ve taken a career break, and perhaps I could work with them. So the fact that you’ve built a solution, which is a more structured way for both to interact, is fantastic. So that’s pretty cool. So there’s clearly a need, and you’re saying that there’s a fair amount of validation now. But when you first got started, how did that work? I mean, I’m sure this was novel because obviously no pandemic, and people were really working from the office full time. Yeah. How did you get your first few customers? Or what? What were the conversations like back then?

How to match women to the right opportunity?

Shreya Prakash: Yeah, so I think it was very easy for us, relatively speaking, to get customers, you know, because like you said, I mean, you 12 years ago, you had the idea to employ women professionals and you know, flexible manner, right. So it was an idea that had, you know, its own receptive as I said, people were wanting to, and everybody intuitively got it, you know, businesses that we spoke to the cortex, so it wasn’t difficult for us to find customers at all. I first 50 customers came from our networks, so people that we knew, and people who connected us to others. And we reached out to them also, I mean, we put out the word we actively went and spoke to, you know, folks who are working in the startup ecosystem. And that’s how our customers came. So, it wasn’t difficult to get the demand, what was a journey for us was to be able to find the right offering for them to find the right model. You know, how to do the matching. So basically, that’s been the end never reflexively, is over the last few years is to become better and better at the matching that we do between these two, there’s a demand and a supply, but how do we make sure that the interaction works? And, you know, we arrived at what we think is the optimal mix.

Amit: So this is quite interesting because unlike, you know, many other businesses I’ve spoken with where there was either market education to be done, or it was, you know, there’s a lot of competition in this space. But you actually somehow found a space that was ready for such a product. So it was relatively easy to get started, which is extremely good to hear. But now, okay, now that we get started, and people are receptive to the idea, the fact is nobody, as far as I understand people wouldn’t have been used to working with this kind of flower arrangement and maybe even remote. I don’t know. So how did you? What were some of the concerns that these businesses might have had, or some of the challenges that you had actually delivering the service?

The difference between gig work and flexible work

Shreya Prakash: So the challenge basically for us was to make sure that the person that we are connecting to the business has the right skills to do that job, and has the right light stage fitment. Because we are talking about women professionals, women who are returning to work become very important to understand if they are ready for the job that they are being offered. But the trick is to really match them to the right, the right opportunity, which, of course, is you know, self-sustaining. It not only works for the business, but it also works for the woman because it’s easy to also, you know, come back to work thinking you’re going to give it your best, and then you face a few hurdles in the first few weeks and then you drop out, you know, and that’s it. It’s fatal because if you’ve tried to come back and then drop down because you think it’s not working, then it will take a lot more to come back and try a second time. So we wanted to make sure that the very first time itself we did you know, a good job of finding them the right fit for where their lives were at that point in time. And that’s been the biggest sort of, you know, a breakthrough for us to be able to deliver what it is that businesses need, and the women need. I think where we push the envelope was a while before us, there was this idea of the gig economy, which is short projects, gigs that you do, right, we try to push it into a flexible space flexible economy. And the difference is immense. While it may not seem that way, because you know, only a few particular jobs can be done in a gig range. But almost any job can be done flexibly, you can be doing a very core job, you can be doing sales, you know, bookkeeping, finance, accounting, HR, which is, you know, a day-to-day operational kind of work, you could be doing it flexibly, you could be doing it for fewer hours, you could be doing it remotely. And it would be an ongoing role. And that is really what we intended to do. Because, you know, the idea is to make flexibility the norm, we had to coach our clients a little bit. So for example, we, you know, we have the best practices that we developed at that time for our clients, which are currently also being used. So we have a proposal, in which we put down things like and how should you treat your, you know, flexible team member, treat them like an employee’s, you know, they are, they are just working, you know, for fewer hours, maybe in from another location, but there is no difference. The other thing that we do is, even to our consultants, the people that we place, we do an induction before they start working because it’s equally important for the women professionals to also understand some of the new ways of working around, you know, remote, for example, if around part-time, so for example, communication becomes so much more important when you are in a remote setting than what it is in a brick and mortar one. So they have to understand that it’s easy for a person to think that they are doing the work and it doesn’t require them to be constantly in touch. But in a remote setting, it’s important to be in touch, be proactive about those things. So we do that kind of induction. The other thing that we do is we have an operations process where we have a channel of communication open, we have a time-shooting process in place. So that again, you know, it’s a simple thing, but it goes a long way because, you know, sometimes clients, you know, businesses might just feel that I have no idea I’m going in blind, I don’t know if this person is working effectively or not. But a simple thing like a timesheet gives them some assurance that you know, there is something that has been captured, there is even though it is self-declared, so some of those things we facilitate.

Amit: Right. Okay, so this is fantastic. I mean, that’s a lot of insight that you shared. So thanks a lot for that. So we’ve talked about the client site and there you’re proactively outreaching your team training them etc all that is clear, how did you get the actual professionals to sign up as well because this is effectively you’re running a marketplace and if you do have enough breadth of skills, then people won’t really have anything to give you

Shreya Prakash: I think you know a few 1000s We got very easily then worked on building the client pipeline because like you said both aspects have to work it’s a chicken and egg like a marketplace then we start once we had a bit of business that good you know when the case does apply could cater to that and we reached a saturation point we then again have to focus on building the supply side of it a little bit more than again the business side so it goes in phases.

Amit: Okay, got it. But I can see the attraction here I mean, in any case, your own networks would have people that you know, people who know people so that would have been a good start. And it’s obvious I mean it’s a service that helps people make money which is a naturally attractive thing to sign up for. So so do Flexi V’s use Flexi workers as well? Like you are you consumers of your one service?

Shreya Prakash: Oh my god, yes, and how so we are a fully remote company from day one we hire from our own pool. So we have at this point in time around 5050 of us working all of us, apart from the three co-founders have been hired from our pool, our own database so they are all women. A majority of them are returning professionals, mothers who are coming back to work after a career break. Many of them work part-time, some of them work full-time, and all of us work remotely from day one. So yes, very much. You know, we are a very Flexi oriented company, and it gives us a lot, it gives us the same benefits that we promised to our clients. And additionally, it gives us a highly committed team. So we have very low attrition, actually, because of this fact that we are giving them, what they most need, they need the flexibility at this point in their lives, and we are able to give them in mindset in actual hours in location, all that.

How do you differentiate from the competition?

Amit: Yeah, actually, it’s, it’s an amazing thing, right, that everybody in your company is somebody who’s experienced the same problem. I mean, that never happens to companies where that could possibly happen. So I think that’s great. And the fact that you have lower attrition, etc, shows that you have, I mean, it’s about purpose, ultimately, I think people are working on things that are meaningful to absolutely anybody’s experienced that problem, then well, in full. So that’s cool. So tell me something. So it sounds like when you got started, there wasn’t I mean, it, it felt relatively easy, like you were walking into a vacuum almost, and you were going to fill that. But were there other options for companies? Are you really competing with anyone at all? And if so, how do you differentiate from them?

Shreya Prakash: Yeah, you know, there are big global players who are in the competitive space, like and up work. There is competition, I would say, I mean, these are all positive signs, why do we call them competition, we can figure out when the time has come for a certain industry and a certain way of working because it means that the space is heating up a bit. Yes, of course, we have to differentiate. And I think, we actually followed, you know, that process or other that way of thinking that Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator speaks about which is in the initial days build for success, don’t build for scale. And that’s what we did. It’s not just about connecting to people, which is what say a simple marketplace would do. It’s about making sure that the people that we are connecting with are the right fits well, this engagement sustains. And that’s really how we differentiate ourselves, which today is a technology lead process is how we differentiate. And that is how we want to scale it. So along the way, we figure out how to scale it, it was a process. First, we standardize that process to a large extent, then we made it into a technology solution. So yeah, we got the right mix, and then we focused on the scale. And that’s our differentiation.

Amit: Right? Okay, that makes sense. I’m actually a power user of Africa using it for 10 or 11 years now, since my first startup, and I can see how this is different because I would go to Upwork for task-based work, something that is very well-defined, like audio editing, for example, right, so we go, I mean, I found my editor through Upwork. But if I wanted, like you said, you know, strategy, or somebody to do budgeting, let’s assume, in a way, maybe I could go to Apple, but I’d have to frame the work in a very well-defined manner with some of this work isn’t, then there’s also the question of trust and all of that.

Hiring a sales professional on Upwork

Shreya Prakash: It enables different kinds of rules, like you said, from us, because verticals are sales, marketing, and digital, some of these which are unheard of in the geek space. And you would be really hard-pressed to find a sales professional b2b Sales Professional on Upwork, it is difficult to do that. And of course, the other thing that we are able to do is we are able to really cut down the hiring time because you want that quickness if you had the time to actually invest in, three months of screening, and all of the hiring process, and then six months of training and including the time, to kind of do it all over again, if you ended up hiring the wrong person, a flexible opportunity, a flexible roll doesn’t have that luxury, you need to get that fitment, right. And you need to have the person come in who’s the right fit, who can start being productive from day one. So those are some of the things that we are trying to get right for our clients.

Amit: I think filtering is a huge benefit. It’s like a blend of LinkedIn almost, but with the vetting as well. Like there’s a person with actual experience doing what you’re looking for who has also been vetted for a real desire to do this work experience. So that’s fantastic. So up till now, the story is great, you found a fit, people are coming to you on both sides, and everybody’s happy you’re solving something real problem in the world. But what were some of the challenges that you faced, or maybe some difficult decisions that you might have had to make along the way?

Shreya Prakash: So first of all, we are also asked this question of now flexibility is for everyone, why not men, right? So that’s something is asked and to be honest, it does open up our supply. So business-wise, it might seem like a good sort of decision, but that’s something we are, we don’t want to do at least For the foreseeable future, and the reason is that we are starting from a place where we feel there is an underserved who we want to serve. And the day we see that there are, more men who are taking breaks, because they have caregiving responsibilities, or they have some constraints on their time, and not simply because they want to, sort of moonlight and do multiple jobs, which is the one about choice, but you know, we are talking to a pool that has constraints, the way that the world is constructed, the way that roles are gendered today, there are women across the world, not just in India, who are having to take, steps back in their careers, because they are not able to participate in the workforce in the same manner. And we want to serve those, you know, to begin with, so, that’s a vision, you know, lead decision.

Punching above your weight

Amit: Okay. I think that’s interesting insight as well, which is actually more than insight. I think these kinds of examples are what help other people understand what it means when a business says we have a vision because vision can’t be okay, I actually want to do something. But if you come to me with money, I’ll do everything else. It’s about what you don’t do. Right, what you don’t do. Exactly. So I think that’s very well articulated, and quite an important point to make. So, you know, so let’s talk a little bit about growth because you’ve been around now for a few years. And it’s obviously doing well, to the extent where you’re having to actually cut off things that don’t align with what you stand for. So what are some of the tactics may be that you’ve used to grow through the years beyond the, you know, initially, of course, you went with networks?

Shreya Prakash: Yeah, so we’ve had a very interesting journey. So our business model is client-led, we charge clients. So, that was a very important part to grow and to keep growing. So we, of course, the first 50, as I said, came from our networks, which had a lot of outreach to it. So alumni, who is an alumni, even if I don’t know them, write to them saying, I’m an alumni, we are starting this business, would you want to come and hire from us? And then we started doing, more content at that time, because we wanted incoming, so we, we started building, sort of a content strategy. And in time, a content calendar came into place. And we were at a point, where we were getting around 50-60 leads per month. And then we got a small round of funding, which was more friends and family and a little bit of angels. So we started doing paid advertising on some b2b channels. And today, we were able to scale from 50 to 60 leads a month to 500 leads per month. So that is the kind of scale that is the kind of jump that we took there. And, yeah, it’s been going very well, we have very optimized CPL, because we are able to actually go out and be very industry agnostic. So we today cater to around 50 Plus industries, which includes, two-thirds of them being new age industries, more tech, aligned. 1/3 of them are in all industries, packaging, logistics, and manufacturing, we have a detective service, and a rice mill, so the pandemic really has opened that up for us also. So that was the external sort of tailwind, which was happening simultaneously, where not just the more tech-savvy startups in the startup hubs of the country, were coming to us, but also really, you know, traditional companies, SMEs, bigger companies who were wanting to now hired in a new way. So we tied up with, you know, ecosystem players like accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces, startup communities, basically to get that, amplification, so that it is one partner, but through that, we are able to get access to a whole number of startups. So we have partnerships today across the board with Indian and International players, quasi-government players, and also government players like the Tamil Nadu government, which is looking at really, which is very business focused.

Amit: Okay, so within all the organic channels that you have, which one do you think is like punching above its weight?

Shreya Prakash: The thing with marketing is that thing that punches above its weight is, the sum of all of it. It’s like a thing where, no, the sum of its parts is always bigger than each individual element. So I think the fact that we do all of it, we are keeping ourselves abreast, with what the latest formats are. So we it’s a very concerted effort, a very organized, systematized effort to put ourselves out there. And I think all of it together works.

Worried about scaling the business

Amit: Yeah, I think you’re probably right, especially when it comes to content. It’s unlikely somebody’s going to see one social post or one blog and say, Okay, fine. Now I’m just going to Go to this business. But, you see people repeatedly and especially on multiple channels like you said, then you suddenly realize, Oh, these people are everywhere. Maybe I shouldn’t go and talk to them, then you start looking bigger than you are also. And then that thing helps significantly. So what are some of the things you know, now that you’re growing? And presumably, trying to expand? Just, beyond perhaps what was your sweet spot earlier? So what are some of the things that you worry about? Or which, classically keeps you awake at night?

Shreya Prakash: I think scaling because we have figured out what the solution is, we figured out the model, now we have to scale it. And we’ve already taken the first few steps towards it. So with that longer funding that we got, we also were able to build technology. So we were able to automate a large part of our processes, we were able to build a candidate self-serve in the form of an app, etc. But that journey has to continue, there is more on the technology roadmap that we have to do. Equally, I think even on business, you know, what got us here, to an extent will also get us there, because it’s like an engine as I said, but there will be other thrusts, we have to kind of incorporate so internationalization, for example. So we want to be president, we want to be a multi-country play. And at some point for supply to, right now, we are focusing on Indian talent, but definitely, for demand, we already have that. So we’ve given talent to now 500, plus companies, of which around 20% of our business comes from international markets, but we want to grow that because again, that is a very good space for a company like us to grow, because that there is demand. And there is a lot of say, acceptance, and respect that international markets have for Indian talent. So it’s a great place to be, and we want to really push on that. And those are things that, you know, we want to do, it’s not keeping us up at night, because we know that there is a time and a place that will happen. But yeah, these are the next, you know, few peeks to scale.

Managing technology development and hiring engineers

Amit: That’s a lot of things, actually, which is it’s quite cool. So tell me something that none of the three founders is tech, I mean, not traditionally, tech people. So how do you actually, manage technology development? Because I know I struggle. I mean, I have some tech background, but not enough and I couldn’t manage engineers. Well. So how do you actually handle that?

Shreya Prakash: So of the three of us Rashmi is, I would say the most tech and quite legitimately tech also because she’s been a developer, actually, before MBA, so she worked with AI technologies. And she was a product developer at that time. So when we did the tech development actually got a window, and we vetted the vendor really well. So that’s how we’ve built. Now in the second phase, we will start hiring so we will hire a CTO, we have a few people in mind, too, and we will hire you to start building our in-house team as well. But at least a big part of what we wanted to do in terms of the technology and the automation is out of the way and that we’ve done in an outsourced way.

Amit: Okay, so before we close, what might be some of the things that you would have done differently in hindsight, or what is some advice that you’d like to give to either aspiring entrepreneurs or maybe others who are earlier in the journey?

Shreya Prakash: Um, so on the second aspect, which is what advice I would give, I think one thing that we did well was that we read the book, The Lean Startup Approach, by Eric Ries, and we really liked it and it actually worked very well for us, because all three of us are from corporate background, we are not freshers have just jumped out of engineering, and we are now building we have had training of a few years in corporates and it might be then. So while it gives us a lot, it might also have been an impediment had we used tried to use the same ways of working because in a corporate environment, you have to put the process first you have to build a case and then when it gets all the necessary approvals, and it needs, then only you proceed whereas, you already read the book, it completely disrupted our thinking at that point in time when we decided to just plunge. So, we got our first client when I had put in my notice at Unilever but had not fully quit. But we started working and we learned on the job we built with real-time market feedback. And I think that’s very important because, in a startup scenario because you’re creating something new you know, there aren’t too many precedents you by design in a startup you’re trying to change something that exists. So it’s important to get real-time feedback late on pricing, be it on the model, be it on whatever the delivery, it’s important to actually go there and do it and learn from it and then change. And that’s something that we’ve been very good at. We’ve followed that through. So I think that would be some advice that I would give to entrepreneurs, new ones. And the other one is, of course, to get your co-founders, right, because you’re going to spend a lot of time in the next few years with them. So that’s the other one.

Amit: Yeah, I think the Lean Startup approach is a really good one. Okay, so thank you so much. This was a really interesting conversation. And I’m happy to hear about so much success so far. And your growth plans sound really cool as well. So I really had a great time chatting with you today. And I’m sure our listeners benefited a lot as well. So thanks a lot for being on our show. And yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, and for those listening to us today. Thank you for joining us, and please remember to follow ShopTok if you liked this episode, please do rate us five stars. We will Shreya and omit the chapter See you next time.

Our Guests: Shreya Prakash

Our Guest, Shrey Prakash, is a cofounder and CEO of Flexibees. FlexiBees is an organisation with a vision to normalise flexibility in work, via options such as flexi-time, part-time, remote-working, that brings new hiring models to businesses and a new way of living to people.