Chris Williams, founder and Managing Director of Tiggo Care
Chris is the founder and Managing Director of Tiggo Care, an award-winning home care business in London that supports adults living in their own homes, and a Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund, one of the most active seed stage investors in the world.
Tiggo Care was born out of my own personal experiences, following my struggle to find suitable care for my parents, both of whom lived with rare diseases. It was this experience that prompted me to set up my own organisation – one that would not only support and care for people with mainstream diseases but also those with more unfamiliar conditions.
Tiggo Care is a bootstrapped business and we currently employ about 50 people.
My background outside of entrepreneurship is quite limited but I did work as a strategy consultant for around 6 months at Kearney and I worked at Oxford Sciences Innovation (now known as Oxford Sciences Enterprises) for about 1 year.
I started my first venture before university and ever since then I’ve enjoyed the thrill of creating something from scratch and trying to sell whatever it is I’ve created. I love the thrill so much that I can’t imagine myself doing anything.
I also enjoy being my own boss and having full equity ownership of the business. I can work entirely on my own terms rather than the terms of my employer or, as it can be for some founders, their investors.
The coming together of a group of people committed towards creating a product or service with the intention of selling that creation for money.
If I’m honest, I don’t think I truly knew if the idea of Tiggo Care was a good idea until I’d been running the business for 12 to 18 months. There is a lot of competition in the market, the sector is highly regulated, and many businesses in the sector failed / owners quit during the COVID-19 lockdowns. I knew I could lose a lot of money, especially as I wanted to bootstrap the business, but I believed the only way I could tell if the idea was good was to simply give it a go.
I acknowledge this advice isn’t very practical so if you’re looking for something more practical, I usually test all of my B2C ideas by creating a simple landing page with a simple CTA. I then allocate some money to Google Ads and see if people convert over the next 1 to 4 weeks. I did this test for Tiggo Care and the results gave me some confidence that I could at least get some paying customers.
1. Patience - Overnight success stories are rare despite them being the preferred story of all major media outlets.
2. Tenacity - Lots of things go wrong on an almost daily basis and you will constantly be reminded of your own limitations. You’ve got to find the strength to keep going despite the daily setbacks and reality checks.
3. Listening - I spend most of my day either listening to staff or to clients. If you don’t listen you’ll never know where you’re going wrong or if you can improve.
Having complete control over my time.
Luke Johnson - I’m immensely impressed with the diversity of businesses he has either started, bought or managed. Everything from retail and hospitality to dentistry and media.
I’d love to learn how Luke identifies opportunities and why he thinks he’s had so much success across so many different sectors. What’s the secret?
Either when we were admitted to Y-Combinator or when Tiggo Care became profitable.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes as an entrepreneur but those I regret the most are always to do with hiring and selecting co-founders. In my opinion, the people on your team are the most important factor when it comes to building a successful business so the mistakes I’ve made in this area are the ones that haunt me the most. However, the good news is I feel I’m getting better at this and make far fewer of these mistakes compared to 5 or 10 years ago.
This business has been entirely bootstrapped. My previous business DNC Tech Labs Inc. went down the venture capital route and we secured funding from Y-Combinator.
I’m currently looking at debt financing and revenue financing. I’d recommend first-time entrepreneurs explore as many options as they can when it comes to financing. VC / Angel equity financing is not the only option or necessarily the best option when it comes to financing your business but they do have the best PR and I think that’s why first-time entrepreneurs immediately look for equity financing from Angels and VCs.
I think the homecare.co.uk award that we won in 2023 and reaching the finals of the Caring UK Awards in 2022 really helped provide some social proof to prospective clients and staff.
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Enspire Oxford, Oxford Entrepreneurs, Startup School, Y-Combinator
I meet a lot of people who ask me for their opinion about a side hustle they’re working on, hoping to one day work on it full time. They want to know if it is a good idea before quitting their day job.
The problem I see is that the side project is usually suffocated by the limited time they have available to work on it so the founder never receives the positive signals they require to give them the confidence to quit their job and work on it full time. This always makes me sad and I advise that although it can be scary, the pressure of needing your full-time gig to succeed is usually enough to give you the clarity to know if you have a good idea or not. If it turns out to not be a great idea you can always try something else or find a new job.
