Jack Tang is the CEO & Co-Founder of Urban, a mobile wellness service who want to empower people to live happier and healthier lives. Jack is determined to reshape the wellness industry into one that offers convenient high-quality home treatments whilst making sure independent therapists are paid fairly for their work.
1. Tell us a little bit about your business/organisation…
Urban is an app where you can discover and book self-employed wellness service providers in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Paris. You can choose from 50+ treatments across massage, beauty, fitness and more.
2. How did you get into the industry?
Urban was born out of mine and Giles (Co-Founder & CTO) frustration of not being able to discover and book wellness treatments easily and as convenient as ordering a takeaway. The wellness industry has traditionally lacked innovation, an industry that is highly fragmented and is branded as a “treat”.
We saw an opportunity to digitalise the industry and become the defacto platform for services. We started our journey at grassroots level speaking with talented professionals that power the wellness services economy and unraveled a world of potential for a digital revolution.
3. What are the biggest opportunities and challenges in your industry?
The industry has gone through a really turbulent period for the past 18 months, we’re just emerging out of it but demand has been growing at a strong rate.
We’ve noticed a few interesting trends:
- As people are used to staying at home more and are looking to book more to their homes. This leads to a growing demand for services delivered to the home.
- People have recognised the importance of preventative health, building new habits to stay well rather than reacting to problems as they arise.
- Prolonged working from home over the past year has fostered bad habits and poor work setups have triggered a wave of issues such as back and neck pain. Anxiety is another common problem we’re seeing and people are booking massage therapy to tackle these issues.
The not so bright side of the story is labour shortage. Since reopening in April 2021, 35% of our UK professionals have not returned having actively operated on our platform pre-COVID.
The perfect storm of COVID and Brexit colliding together meant that many professionals who lived in Europe returned home to see through the storm. Prolong periods where they couldn’t work and earn a living meant they were forced to leave the industry and retrain into other fields.
Fresh cohorts of graduates will diminish this year as classes were cancelled and capacity reduced by 50%. This means fewer newly qualified professionals will enter the industry unless the Government urgently intervenes to support upskilling new professionals entering the industry. Urban is currently campaigning to ask Minister Gillian Keegan MP to expand the list of complementary and holistic therapy qualifications eligible for the National Skills Fund to address the significant skills gap the industry is facing.
4. How would you describe your leadership style?
Leading by example. As an entrepreneur and business owner I believe my team will be more motivated by seeing me walk the talk rather than simply ordering them around. I try to stay humble and don’t hesitate to get my hands dirty when my team need me. As a consequence, I am also demanding with them and expect them to perform at the best of their abilities. We have a very organised targets and KPI setting process every half year to make sure everyone is clear on their objectives. This also allows us to continuously measure our success against these bi-annual targets.
5. How do you get the most out of the people who work for you?
The two key elements in my opinion are: identifying their strengths, what they do better than anyone else, and giving them clear ownership and accountability for the projects and targets that leverage those strengths. This creates a virtuous cycle of improvement both for people and for the business. My team are empowered to use their best skills, gain more confidence in doing so and become more performant as a result.
6. What are the most crucial elements to your business/organisation running smoothly and being successful?
Never settling for average. We’ve made it part of the Urban culture to always aim for stretch targets and push to the next boundary. One of our company values is actually “pushing boundaries”. It is essential for any fast growing business.
Recruiting passionate people who believe in the company’s mission and make it their own. I am so grateful to have such a strong team of passionate individuals in the company. They’re incredibly proactive and always come up with new and innovative ways to grow our business. Our Quality and Operations team transformed our therapist onboarding process from an in-person manual process to a completely remote digital process in a matter of weeks; our Marketing and Product teams very quickly adapted and developed our service offering to deliver essential services during the pandemic; that helped thousands of customers in need.
7. How has the past 12 months been for you?
Although the past 12 months have been challenging for Urban, our partner pros and of course our customers we were fortunate enough to be able to continue to serve those most in need with our Injury pain management treatment, Osteopathy and Physiotherapy.
8. Is there anything you’ve learnt during the pandemic that you’ll take forward in your business/organisation?
Covid has taught us so much, we’ve built a stronger and more resilient business as a result of it. We’re very happy we’ve reached all time highs and kept momentum. We’re not out of the woods yet, I don’t think. So we must stay focused.
9. What will the next 12 months look like for your business/organisation?
We’re focused on building more momentum and plan to double down on building a balanced ecosystem for self-employed people in our industry. We’d love to start thinking about expanding Urban into more cities.
10. What are the highlights of your career so far?
I feel extremely proud to have given self-employed individuals a platform where they can work for themselves, effectively running their own small business through the Urban platform. Over the years, we’ve worked closely with the partner pros to make sure that they feel 100% supported and empowered. Through our protection and rewards programme we enable our partner pros to access sick pay and healthcare and after our recent treatment pricing increase, we can now proudly say that the pros earn more through us than they would through one of our competitors (on average £52 per hour)
11. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt that you’d like to share with businesses just starting out?
One of the biggest lessons I learnt from The Student Job, my previous business, was the importance of not just building features for the sake of building them and really considering if they’re useful and add value for our customers. Because of this, building our Urban product has been very much hinged around customer research and validating the problem and the pain points that we’re trying to solve, before we start writing lines of code.
