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Jo-Jo Hubbard: From Literature to Leading Clean Energy

on • 27 min. read

Overview

#Cleantechers - 

On the show, we've had leaders with a variety of backgrounds. Some, like my guest in this episode, have come from investment and finance. But few have achieved so much so quickly in their careers as Jo-Jo Hubbard. This McKinsey veteran got her start in a fintech startup, then moved into renewable energy finance. From there, she helped found the UK-based Electron, a SaaS company, out to transform energy trading to make the grid cleaner. 

Jo-Jo now runs Electron as CEO. Her company helps grid operators and municipal suppliers with what it calls “local flexibility markets” to help them adapt to our renewables-heavy grid. 

Here are Jo-Jo’s B3P’s:

16:05 - When you manage other people, you make them more productive by creating space for them to grow. And the more you create space for yourself, the better you become at doing that for others. It’s important to prioritize the time to exercise, meditate, or take a walk without a cell phone.

20:28 - The difference between running a cleantech company and a more mature company is the pace of growth. Cleantech is still evolving alongside the energy transition, creating a collaborative spirit. Companies with overlapping skills often work together. It’s a dynamic, problem-solving mindset of “let’s figure this out together.” More mature industries have well-defined market parameters and sizes, which makes collaboration less about exploration and more about execution.

27:41 - Hire people who are passionate about your company’s mission and inspire excitement among the entire team. Startups demand hard work, and having colleagues who energize others and share your commitment to a meaningful cause can make all the difference. 

Thanks for coming on the show, Jo-Jo.

 

You can also listen on Apple, Spotify, Radio Public, Amazon Music, iHeart, and Google Podcasts.

Introduction

Mike Casey:
Hey, cleantechers, welcome back to another edition of Scaling Clean. This is the podcast for clean economy CEOs, investors, and the people who advise them. On the show, we've had leaders with a variety of backgrounds. Some, like my guest today, have come from investment and finance, but few have achieved so much so quickly in their careers as Jo-jo Hubbard. This McKinsey veteran got her start in a fintech startup, then moved into renewable energy finance. From there, she helped found the UK-based Electron, which is a SaaS company that's out to transform the way energy is traded to make the grid cleaner. 

She now runs Electron as CEO and especially helps grid operators and municipal suppliers with what it calls local flexibility markets to help them adapt to the renewables-heavy grid. Jo-jo, we want to have you on the show for a while. Thanks for coming on.

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Brilliant Mike, thanks so much for having me.

Early Life and the Accidental Startup Path

Mike Casey:
If you were going to describe your background in just a few paragraphs, looking back, what did you do or what did you experience in your life that set you up for your current role as Electron CEO?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Right, well I guess I'm from a family of entrepreneurs so I didn't think twice when I accidentally found myself leading a startup. But I didn't intend to lead a startup. It wasn't a stepped plan.

I am a polymath so I've always been drawn to fascinating interesting problems with lots of different roots in. The kind of thicker the onion the more excited I am to start peeling it. I have a degree in English literature which isn't what most people who working on some of these grid challenges that I'm working on, aren't exactly the same background they come from.

But I think that the story of the renewable transition itself and what had to change and why, how many different actors had to do how many things differently was really what pulled me into this space. And I love that it's finance and economics meets tech, meets politics and regulation and everything else. It's this kind of melting pot.

Key Mentorships and Lessons Learned

Mike Casey:
That's really a cool way to describe it. All right. Who were your three most important mentors and what did you learn from each one of them?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
I was thinking about this when we first spoke and I'm quite an irreverent person. Like I don't like when people are on podiums because they have to deserve it and I want to kind of rip them off. So I don't really think of people like that. But when I actually had to sit down and think, it's all people who I've had the opportunity to work with really closely as part of my team. 

So my original Co-founder had a market and electronic trading background and taught me so much about how markets work to concentrate liquidity in fintech that kind of builds across into energy. It was fascinating and really honed my view of what Electron’s purpose was in this transition and it was basically to help scale the use of DERs instead of other non-net zero compliant flexible sources. So I think he was the first one. My second one is my current Co-founder who is just the most incredible operational machine. She cuts through all complexity and if someone's like had a bad day instead of letting them say something that they didn't want to say and you didn't want to hear, she'll sit down and play a card game of cards with them and the other side of that everything's fine. I learned so much from her. I also learned so much about what I shouldn't be doing. When you see someone do something really well that you think you do okay and suddenly you realize you should never do that thing again. She taught me that.

And then my third one's actually our current Chair. He's got that more PE background again, which I guess is where it started from. He's thinking about building a business programmatically in terms of the multiples, in terms of like what are the data points that we need to get to in order to kind of prove points we can build up together and sort of taking you out of that startup scale up mentality into how someone grown-up going to look at this business on the other side of it. So, yeah, I think, it's those three, but none of them have been pontificating on stages, they've just been amazing teachers.

Inspiration Behind Clean Energy

Mike Casey:
So you touched on this in the first thing you said actually, but I want to hear a more detailed answer. And you started off in finance. What drew you to clean energy and what keeps you here?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Yeah, I guess I’ve said I was in non-clean energy finance very briefly and then it was clean energy finance. So I was originally going to go and leave university and be a novelist. I had a novel in me. I still have a novel in me because I never wrote it, I went to, very unpopular, I went to live in Russia for a year after university because I'd read this Russian novel that was in exactly the same structure I wanted to write mine and I thought my 21-year-old romantic ideals, I had to go and learn Russian to understand this novel properly. I learned Russian. 

Mike Casey:
I gotta say, what was that like? What was the experience? 

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
It was amazing. It was 2009. The ruble was so valuable and the country was opening and globalization was winning. Didn't we love those days? And it's such an interesting place, Russia, Because everyone looks like you, but thinks so differently. Someone put it really nicely when I was there. It's like looking at the world through this cracked glass. And you're like, look, there's a crack there. And they're like, no, it's meant to be like that. That's beautiful. And you're like, you're right. It's beautiful. But to me, it looks like a crack. And you're holding these two different kinds of realities in mind.

I realized there that I wanted to go and do something instead of writing about something. And a lot of what I was doing in learning Russian was getting free Russian lessons by hanging out in coffee shops and bars. And at the time, foreigners who spoke Russian were so excited enough to divert your afternoon plans to go and talk to you. And I was just talking to people about whatever they wanted to talk to me about to try and practice my Russian.

We spent quite a lot of time talking about the energy transition because it was a topic that particularly interested me and it was a topic that the glass really felt cracked in those conversations there were really different ideas and I started a conversation with a very nice man whose father ran a very large furniture workshop and they were paying a lot to get rid of their wood chips and we worked out they could import them to the UK and be paid to burn them and actually make a net profit. So it was a deal, an exciting deal. And it made me think, actually, this is the thing I'd like to do because even the people who don't really believe, let's be honest, we didn't do great for the planet on that one deal. That was probably energy arbitrage. We probably used quite a lot of power to get it to the UK. But I think just understanding what the difference in financial incentives would actually do to mindset shift and what you could do incrementally. And so I came back to the UK wanting to work in energy. I had no idea how to work in energy because who would take an English literature graduate to do any of these?

From Writing Novels to Driving Energy Transformation 

Mike Casey:
That was gonna be my next question. From Chaucer to climate finance. How did that work? Obviously, it did, so I got to hear that.

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
I was a math gold Olympiad so I went and competed for all these math medals and there weren't a lot of people who looked like me in those rooms. But I was like maybe I can use my maths so I was looking for a job on the kind of financial side of energy. I started working in the meantime in this start-up firm that was doing debt restructuring and they were getting debt restructured themselves and the person who was doing the debt restructuring was doing a lot of restructuring of offshore wind farm build-outs that were going bankrupt. It turns out it's quite hard to put pylons in the sea and there were an awful lot of German solar companies that were going bankrupt at the time because you couldn't make the panels cheaper in China. It was very early days when cleantech was a slightly dirty word. And so I got involved in the financial restructuring side, which is very much like financial skills plus soft skills, really trying to understand a company and one side of motivations.

And if something could kind of live and try to understand what kind of story they could or couldn't tell. And it's an amazing way to understand a company. It's a super depressing lens to live in life, particularly if you're an empath. So I quickly moved out of the kind of restructuring side, having learned enough about how companies worked and three-sheet modeling and all those sorts of things to the investment side, again investing in large portfolios of wind and solar - really interesting to learn how they work. 

It's fundamentally boring, Mike. You build one of these models and you don’t know how to do it by the time you've got three you could literally build them all and I think I said that to someone. They were like ‘Why don't you just build this universal model?’ So I was like, fine. So I was like, I never want to do another one. I'm going to build this one model that you can just plug in the tariff and the location and the size of the wind farm and plug in the output forecasts. And here you go, you've got this universal model. I never want to build a model again. What should I do now? And they're like, what should I do now for the kind of precocious emerging VP of finance in those days? 

There's this weird stuff at the edge of the grid called batteries that no one really wants to do because if you did a debt financing thing for an offshore wind farm, you were getting paid a couple of percent on a couple of billion dollars. Whereas these battery companies at the time were struggling to raise hundreds of thousands or low millions. It wasn't exactly like, I wasn't going to fight everyone out the way to go and do this cool stuff. But the problem I'd seen in a lot of these companies I was doing debt restructuring in and the assets we were trying to invest in was the grid.

And we were investing in huge portfolios that were getting curtailed a lot of the time. So curtailed is when there's not enough space in the grid to take all the energy they want to export. The assets are just getting turned off and wasted. And I was like, that's someone's money. Why is no one using that money? That's money on the table. And everyone was like, no, that's not our money. I can't believe it. There was a sense, why is that no one's money? And I then saw on the flip side, there were huge portfolios of developing solar, developing wind. They were going bankrupt instead of having two-year grid connection offers, they were getting six-year grid connection offers. They're getting 16 years of grid connection obviously. People would bite your hand off for that but at that time I was like, that's a grid optimization issue and I thought the answer was batteries.

So I tried to invest in batteries and six months later I had to sort of hand some of that fund back and that idea back and say the batteries aren't making money yet until there are marketplaces paying them or signaling them to use power at the right time and location and paying them to do it. And that was really the start of Electron via McKinsey. I was like, who gets to tell the industry and industry how they can structure itself? And again, like naively, maybe consultants get to tell people, but consultants don't get to set their own homework questions, which I learned, probably someone should have told me. I learned that a year in and I was lucky. 

McKinsey works like every other company. If you work with people who you really like, they support you. I got sort of up to the point, I could say, this thing I really want to go and sort out is this question around how distributed energy resources get time and location-based market signals. And I started looking at writing a report and ended up speaking to a bunch of companies working in that space. And that's how I met my Electron co-founder, my initial Electron co-founder, Paul, who was coming across from FinTech, also trying to work this out. And he was like, well, instead of writing about it, why don't you come and do it? And that just sounded so like my transition from trying to write a novel to trying to get into renewables. And that was almost 10 years ago.

Mike Casey: 
So McKinsey effectively talked you out of being a novelist.

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
McKinsey taught me many things but never how to make beautiful slides much to their chagrin. McKinsey got me to understand that you could speak to a whole bunch of interesting people about interesting problems and get a lot of support and I think understanding that made the idea of being a startup really fun and not really terrifying.

Learning from a Growing Team

Mike Casey:
Got you. If you and I split screened footage of you managing another human being the first time your job entailed that, that was on one side of the screen. On the other side of the screen, we were looking at the footage of you managing and leading now, what is the difference we would see?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Gosh, I hope you were immediately drawn to just how different the people I'm trying to manage are and how much more effective they are now at managing me. I think the things I love about the kind of start-up role is all of the problem-solving that you get to do on a daily basis. And I think there are times in the company where, especially around scaling, we doubled in size between the beginning of this year and now again, where you get drawn out of that.

Mike Casey:
Wow, congratulations!

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Thank you. But what I'm saying is, there are times when you get really drawn out of that fun phase and there's a lot of operational things to do. I think I'm much, much better now at not trying to do everything myself. I'm lucky three of my top team have done that 30 to 300-person start-up scale-up journey before so I can do a lot of learning from people around me. 

We talk about it all the time, you do such a different job every two years, depending on where the company is. I think that the zero to twenty phase, I mean love it, but this phase is much more fun and it's essentially much easier for someone who's not an amazing people manager to go and be on the front lines with customers and doing maybe more commercial or product-oriented role.

Being a Female Leader in Clean Energy

Mike Casey:
Is there something right now when it comes to managing other people that you're working on right now? Like at this part in your career, you're working on this skill or micro skill.

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Yeah, absolutely. This is something I've been working on as a mom as well, it's like creating the space for other people to solve themselves. You can see every spike is a negative in another world. I think one of the corollaries of loving problem-solving is crowding people out from solving their own things and just creating that space for other people. I need to create a bit more space for myself and do things like go for walks without a phone or like exercise and meditate after exercising because I'm not capable of being one of these people who wakes up in the morning and has this amazing meditation regime. And I find if I can do that for myself, then I can be the person on the other side who helps someone else think in a straight line or go to where they're trying to go in a straight line instead of joining in with them and appreciating and kind of ooh-ing and ah-ing over all of the complexity of the tangle they've seen.

Mike Casey:
That's nice, thank you. Have you found being a young female leader an advantage? And if so, how?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Yeah, I struggle with this one. As I just said, I think any kind of advantage has its kind of mirror disadvantage and vice versa. There are things that you get as a female founder or any kind of minority founder that I think are less available to people who look like all the other founders and then I think the question there is asking do those outweigh? In most cases, I could think of probably not. I mean, a really great example that I think founders should be aware of is that, as a female founder you're much more likely to get a meeting with a fund that almost definitely can't invest in a company of your type and of your stage. And that is not an advantage because you waste so much more time telling people about your company who are kind of never going to be involved in it.
But it might look like an advantage when you first start. I think some advantages I have been able to draw out of it, I found an amazing group of women along the way in this industry and actually, I think there are some really incredible women in energy who I've come across. 

I was thinking about this the other day actually, the UK Chancellor made a big statement about being the first female chancellor. I remember thinking that's not really a thing because we've already had female prime ministers or presidents to do the translation. So I was like is this not really a thing anymore? Like actually how cool that that's not a thing. But I think something I've observed is the women who tend to rise to the top of industries are exceptional. They are exceptional humans, not that they're exceptional because there aren't a lot of women.

Maybe some of that too. So I think finding commonality with some exceptional people faster would be an advantage if I were to do it. Then they've had some exceptional male mentors as well along the way. But yeah, I have an exceptional group of people who support me, and many of them are women.

Mike Casey:
Did you actively seek that support out?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
I'm getting better at it. So I was really lucky in a way when we started, they actively saw me. I didn't really know that was something that I could do or ask for. And I'm trying to pay it forward by spotting people coming up through the ranks who I can kind of actively seek out and let them know they can come forward. It's really hard. It's also the feeling of like, every time you're doing something that's not attached to your job, which would happily take 16 hours or 20 hours of your day every day, that's also time now I'm not spending with my young kids.

Mike Casey:
Amen.

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Often now it's more like commiserations. It's more like I saw that thing that happened, so I think they didn't get it right. I guess it's more like I noticed that too and I think that's probably more how I'll actively see it out it's more like just show solidarity.

Cleantech Versus Mature Sectors

Mike Casey:
From what you've seen in your career, are there differences between running a clean tech company versus running a company in a different, perhaps more mature sector? And if so, what are those differences?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Yeah, that's such a great question. Finance is my only great comparison. There's a much more competitive edge on the sense of the zero-sum game. My husband still works in finance, so I got like a lot of exposure to it. But it's like, if I make money, someone else loses money. Whereas there's this real sense if I get this customer, someone else doesn't get this customer. There's a real sense in this kind of energy transition of there just being this huge volume of distributed energy resources that aren't being bought into markets yet and what are all of our roles in doing this and there's this real collaboration between companies who have some skill overlaps but aren't doing exactly the same thing. 

Even customers who are using different platforms different technologies still want to come and understand our learnings and build some of our learnings in and we want to kind of share up and down because there's a real sense, and I don't know if it's because a lot of engineers' energy or because a lot of people are coming here with the purpose of making the world better, but there is a real sense of let's work this out together. And that is an incredible way, it's an incredibly fun way to work. It's like a huge part of my motivation for getting up every day. Let's also be clear, this is also hard. It's really hard. And more mature industries also have clearer market parameters and clearer market size and things like that. So you need that kind of community to get you through all those extra rubs.

Lessons in Resilience and Momentum as a CEO

Mike Casey:
One of the big parts of being a CEO at a company is leading with confidence. So my question is, was there a moment running Electron that stands out to you as the equivalent of what John of the Cross described as ‘Dark night of the soul’? You hit bottom in terms of your confidence that this or you or both would actually work out. You don't need to give me a detailed version but can you describe it a little bit and what did you do in the face of those doubts?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
There are moments where you think everything's over and there are loads of those moments and I think one of the things you learn and it's been a nine-year journey for me so far is actually that nothing's ever as bad as you think it is, nothing's ever as good as you think it is. So I think I had a lot of those moments where I'm like, we're gonna win and I'm gonna be okay and I can do this and I can't do this but I don't really have those like high or low moments in the same way. I've kind of learned to act like a bigger ship even if I'm a small ship in big waves and just kind of bounce around a bit less and start taking six-month rolling averages. I think it took us a really long time to commercialize our product. We started out with this vision of what distributed energy markets would look like in ten years and started building backwards for it.

I think it happened slower than we expected to, the kind of uptake of not only DERs but also this idea of marketplaces and orchestrating them and calling many of other people's devices instead of a couple of large utility-scale assets.

Along those waves, we've lost contracts that I thought would sink the company and then we've won contracts and this is going to be the make or break and it's not. I think it's a cake-eating contest and the prize is more cake. Like you pass one level and you just go up again and you just keep going. And I think actually that stoic mentality or something is actually helpful. What we have learned is to celebrate the small wins and be together and acknowledge the losses, but also help everyone who's maybe come into the journey later understand it amongst this general wavy sea that just generally will be on for quite a while longer.

Lessons for Aspiring CEOs

Mike Casey:
Tomorrow Oxford's Saïd Business School calls you. They say, Jo-Jo, we need you to come in and give a guest lecture on the role of the effective CEO. You're gonna walk in, what are the big points you're gonna make to the students?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
This is something, by the way, that I would never say yes to. There's actually someone else, this would never happen to me. I would never say yes to you, because I'm still learning this every day. There is one thing I've been working on recently, is building that space to condense all the things you've heard in the day, space mentally, but also space in notebook formats in which you can return to the things that are interesting. I think I started this answer on the wrong level though actually. It's that I keep thinking of that diagram of the zone of genius and the zone of competence and the zone of incompetence and things like that.

And being a CEO, the same as being like a mom, for being like anyone in any kind of part of life. It's like understanding the things that you can do that no one else can do that can make things successful and then understanding who else can do those things and being able to structure your company around it. And one of the huge advantages of getting a little later stage is, that you can start affording to employ some people who, you know, whose zone of genius doesn't overlap yours and vice versa, who are much more confident at many of the things that need to happen.

Success at Electron: Choosing What Not to Do

Mike Casey:
That's a good segue into a question. I'm gonna go a little bit out of order here. Okay. Have you found that success at Electron relies more on what the company chooses not to do or what it chooses to do?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
I mean for us it's more about what you don't do because start-ups are resource-constrained, it's time and money. I think part of the reason it took us such a long time to commercialize is we had this view of what the whole market would need in the future and we didn't simplify it down enough to look like something someone was buying today and that's when started winning our commercial contracts and this was really neat 18 months, two years ago. So I think that's a huge piece of it. Then for a while, you think that you understand what makes you successful and it's not doing all the other things and then you can turn around and be bitten on the other side first.

What makes you successful is constantly changing and that's the hardest thing for people because they see the thing that made them successful and think that's why they're successful. But yes, there are periods in which absolutely doing less and concentrating is right.

Hiring and Finding the Right Fit

Mike Casey:
Okay. Talk to me about hiring. What have you learned about hiring?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
God, I have such strong instincts about people very quickly that whenever I haven't listened to them, I've regretted it and I still just try and keep really open-minded in every conversation. I've learned that we have a fantastic kind of team which I use in leadership team. I think bringing other people in early and finding people who everyone is interested in and excited to work with is really important. You have to be excited to work at startups because you have to work really hard at startups and I think the people you work with are a huge motivator in that.

I've learned to do it from first principles. So what are things I'm trying to achieve with this high? Because there are things you hear along the way that just were not what you were expecting for that role, that actually might work much better. We're incredibly flexible, for example, in how people get things done as long as they get things done. It brings us fantastic talent who might not work in another structure.

I've learned that things don't get done unless people care about them and are excited about startups. So to hire someone with that kind of fire who's really aligned to what they want from their life or the next step in their career is important. And they've also learned to hire diversity of thought. 
There's one point where my team had too many optimists and I was like, I need to hire like a really anxious, a doer. I was asking people like, do you have anxiety? Do you wake up in the night worrying about things? You don't have to ask that in an interview. It's just really looking for a really specific profile here. Let's not talk about that. That's too complex. Let's focus on this. Like if we were wrong there, like I want someone who's going to wake up every night for the next three nights and know something's wrong. I think the personality piece is huge.

Mike Casey:
Do you have a go-to interview question that helps you ferret out the personality you're looking for?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
No, I usually just start with what someone wants and just try and dig in and understand why they want that and if they really want it and just try to get to the bottom of what's motivating them right now.

Mike Casey:
Do you have any guidance you'd pass along about firing people?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
I've never done it too early.


Mike Casey:
I've heard that a lot. 

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
We build really beautiful exit routes for people and I think that's important too. I think just to do it with like deep integrity and build someone, build everyone a story they can kind of hold their heads high on and help them find the next great role with a great fit. I think how you fire someone has probably as much to do with hiring great people as how you hire someone after you've been around for a while.

Balancing Leadership and Self-Care

Mike Casey:
Okay, you touched on this earlier, but I want to hear a more explicit version. What habits, hobbies, practices has Jo-Jo Hubbard learned to keep her performance as a CEO consistently high? Could be things at work, things on the home front, self-care, things at work. This question endlessly fascinates me, and we get some of the best answers.

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Yeah. I should, firstly, my performance is not consistent and that is why I have a great team. I sometimes can be brilliant, sometimes I can completely miss the mark and that's okay if you understand it's like a team game. I am at my best when I have had time to digest the things that are happening and there's someone who loves problem-solving, I like to jump on fires. So I have built that kind of reflection and integration, like this reflection integration through to my week.

And I used to have a get-out-of-jail-free club. I used to be able to do that after work in the evenings and now I've got two kids. It's almost even more important now to find a way to really intentionally structure time for that kind of creative thinking and reintegration in the day. 

Mike Casey:
All right, Jo-Jo, I gotta ask this question because I know you're a mother of a young family and you've got this high-demand job and I was there 15, 20 years ago. I know I didn't feel like I was doing it well. How do you navigate those two worlds? Because I think there's a lot of people out there who are always quietly feeling like they're either screwing up at work or screwing up at home because the sheet's never big enough to cover the bed. Any thoughts you have just to pay for it? Because I think there's a lot of people who want to hear how you're doing it.

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Yeah, I think having young kids and having a big job takes the proverbial village. We have support and a lot of people feel nervous or ashamed about that. We have a nanny from seven to seven and we can hop in, hop out. So the first thing to say, the first piece of that answer I have to call is we have the immense privilege of having support. But within that, I try and spend at least an hour in the morning and, an hour in the evening with my kids every day during the week, which is a huge call, right? Because that's a big chunk of useful work time you're taking out of not only your time but like your availability for all your clients and all your team who maybe have kids with different bedtimes or in different profiles who then want to have other other hours by themselves. I think we are really lucky that my CEO, my Co-founder, and my Co-operator had kids before me and just was kind of clear to me about really upfront about here are my values, here's the thing that's most important to me - at end of the day I am working for my family. I want to make well better and I want to hopefully earn some money to support my family. And there's a sense of what you're working for.

I think that helps you marry some of these two different worlds that feel and look very different together. I try and talk to my kids about what I'm doing, and what I'm working on to the extent that they're all quite excited about it and they want to come along with me and do it. I'm always trying to talk them down for coming to my office. 

But I'm trying to integrate these two parts of my life. And then I'm trying to make less bad decisions every time. I'm trying to be transparent and clear with them and with everyone at my work and everyone in the decision frameworks and the trade-offs and I understand them. I'm just trying to do them a bit better every time. I sort of invite people to comment on it and invite people to call it and hopefully then can eventually build up time with my team to do it back. 

And a lot of the time we're saying you don't have to do this. Go and do it this time. If it means that you're coming back online at 9 to 11 PM because you got to spend the previous two hours with your kids, that's your trade-off to make. I think we just come down to flexibility. These things have to get done. And if we have to step out of that, then we just communicate it really clearly on both sides and everyone understands, that's the fail-better approach we call it. 

Just try and sound better a bit every time and I think it's that thing that everyone in teams wants to understand how the CEO thinks and makes decisions, I think the same is true for kids. If you're not there, they want to understand why you chose to go to that work drink, that work dinner and I think just trying to build that framework up for them and yourself on a continual basis is how I'm approaching it.

Mike Casey:
Jo-Jo, that's a great answer and I love the hour in the morning, an hour in the evening. A friend of mine once said, you never get 6.30 to 8.30 in the evening back. You never get it back. 

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
Yeah.

Believing in Better Solutions

Mike Casey:
I think I know the answer to this last question. Has your work left you a climate optimist or a climate pessimist and why?

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
I'm a pragmatic optimist. So, I totally believe that the world can be better and we should all be working towards it, but I'm not someone who thinks that everything will come out alright in the end. I'm definitely someone who's trying to create the right nudges or incentives for things to move in the right direction. Sometimes I feel very pessimistic about where we are now. It's just I fundamentally, profoundly believe we can do better and that's why we show up every day.

Mike Casey:
Jo-Jo Hubbard, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for making this time. I was once the owner of a small firm, this one when I had two young kids. And I know that it's not easy to carve out extra time to have these conversations. So we're grateful to you. And we wish you all the luck in the world. 

Jo-Jo Hubbard:
It's a huge pleasure and thank you for having me, Mike.