the times | Monday July 27 2020 1GM 45Working LifeBusiness
children while building work was
being finished on their home. “I
became a stay-at-home dad and went
to every baby-related class I could to
get out to.” He became so enthusiastic
that he qualified as a swimming
instructor and decided to launch a
rival business with his wife. The
couple invested their savings into
coming up with Waterbabies’ eye-
catching branding and used leaflets to
reach young parents and prospective
clients in their local supermarket’s car
park. Within a year Mr Thompson
was convinced into launching a
franchisee scheme by his sister-in-law,
who also wanted a career change.
Mr Thompson is evangelical about
Waterbabies’ franchises, proudly
stating that the business has not had
a single franchisee fold, a rarity in anP
aul Thompson hasn’t had to
deal only with steering a
business through the
pandemic — he has suffered
the human cost of Covid-19,
too, losing his long-serving chief
executive and close friend to the
virus.
The last time that the founder of
Waterbabies saw Steve Franks was
when they met for a coffee in mid-
March to discuss how their swimming
school business would deal with the
crisis. “By the end of our
conversation, we were determined we
were not only going to survive it but
we were going to come out of it even
stronger,” Mr Thompson, 54, said.
Instead, Mr Franks went into hospital
on April 1 and died 30 days later
owing to complications associated
with the coronavirus.
“Steve and I were very close, we
were like brothers. It’s been very
difficult emotionally and, from a
business point of view, really very
hard. He was bullet-proof, only 58, no
underlying conditions, very fit. He
was the last person you could expect
this to happen to, so it was a very big
shock all round.”
Nevertheless, Mr Thompson and
the Waterbabies team have rallied,
sharing memories of the boss’s
tendencies to mix his metaphors on
the company’s website and focusing
on the “battle plan” that Mr Franks
and Mr Thompson devised in their
last meeting. “It sounds callous, but
while we have lost Steve, we’re not
going to lose our focus. We know
exactly what we’re doing and where
we want to be. It’s harder to get there
from an emotional point of view, but
from a strategic point of view we’re
still powering through. Steve would
be looking down and saying ‘get on
with it’, so that’s what we’re doing.”
Since Mr Thompson set up the
business in 2002, Waterbabies has
become the biggest swimming school
in the world, teaching 53,000 babies
and children a week in 560 pools
around the globe. It has 80 franchise
partners, 56 of which are in the UK,
with the rest spread across Ireland,
Canada, Germany and China.
While the school focuses on
teaching children to be confident in
water, the classes are enthusiastically
taken up by new parents who often
want to use underwater photography
to recreate something resembling
Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover,
which features a newborn swimming
towards a dollar note. The company’s
youngest ever pupil was one day old.
The entrepreneur, born in
southeast London, started his career
working for a housing association in
Brighton. Then a meeting with a
“load of old duffers” made him realise
it wasn’t the path he wanted. “I was in
a committee meeting and one of
them pointed out I’d used a split
infinitive in my report. Half an hour
later this bunch of people were still
talking about grammar and I thought
there were better things to be doing.”
Mr Thompson handed in his noticethe next day and convinced his wife,
Jess, to follow his maverick tendencies
to the Caribbean, where he briefly
became a scuba dive instructor in
Dominica. It was a shortlived
adventure after his wife insisted that
they return home after he almost
drowned — twice. “She was already
going a bit stir crazy on this remote
island, saying, ‘If I see another
coconut.’ ”
The final decision to leave came
after he had a near-death experience
being swept out to sea during a storm
when a road gave way. “I was quite
calm about it. I thought, ‘This is it, I
am going to die.’ But I managed to
find the current and make it back.”
When the couple returned to
Britain, they ended up moving back in
with his parents and with two youngWhen Covid-19 hits so close to home,
you decide whether to sink or swim
The founder of the
swimming class firm
Waterbabies was
thrown in the deep end,
says Ashley Armstrong
Paul Thompson has turned Waterbabies into a growing global business. Classes
are taken up by new parents who often want to use underwater photography
to recreate something resembling Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover, rightindustry which often attracts business
novices. “We have a real support
system around them and we know
about their lives.”
Waterbabies is also lucrative. It
costs £30,000 a year to become a
Waterbabies franchisee, but most of
the businesses are now sold for
between £100,000 to £300,000 when
people retire. Many of the franchise
owners make £1 million turnover a
year, according to Mr Thompson.
However, mormally reliable sales
were blown apart by the pandemic,
which
prompted the
shutdown of
swimming
pools. Mr
Thompson
does not hide
his frustration
that pubs
were allowed
their doors to
open before
pools, despite
the
government’s
enthusiasm
around
fitness and
despite
chlorinated
water being
effective at
killing viruses. Waterbabies has been
heavily involved in lobbying the
government for improving the role of
fitness in childrens’ education in
Britain.
Despite initial worries about what
Covid-19 would do to customer
demand, 80 per cent of clients have
already rebooked classes. Indeed,
that was perhaps inevitable, giventhat “a lot of families have been
going stir crazy at home and want to
get out”.
The Waterbabies founder also has
found his phone has been ringing
with requests for advice about
bringing more black directors on to
company boards and to give a talk at
his children’s school as the Black Lives
Matter movement has gathered
momentum.
Mr Thompson calls it “positive that
there is more awareness, it’s part of
the conversation more than it ever
has been, that can only be a good
thing”.
However, he
emphasises
that he
doesn’t “want
to be classed
as a black
business
owner... I’ve
never lived
my life
thinking I
need to be
treated
differently
because of the
colour of my
skin. I should
be treated
equally,
nothing extra
but nothing
worse, either.” The Waterbabies
founder says that the movement is
helping to increase visibility. “People
can do all sorts of things. I want
people to take it for granted and see
this business story with a picture of
this person on the page without
having to blow the trumpet. That’s all
people need to see and know.”WATERBABIES; ALAMY
It’s game on as Playfinder emerges from lockdownOne of the few things
that people were
allowed to leave their
house for during
lockdown was exercise
(Ashley Armstrong
writes). However, most
team sports remained
strictly prohibited, until
the government’s
recent relaxation of
restrictions that allowed
facilities to reopen from
Saturday.
Whether as a result of
Oliver Dowden, the
culture secretary, urging
people to “work out to
help out”, or simply
because of pent-up
demand, bookings for
tennis courts and
football pitches have
soared. Jamie Foale, co-
founder of Playfinder,
said last week that the
company experienced a
158 per cent surge in
users booking football
pitches compared with
last year.
After struggling to
find venues for
recreational sport after
graduating, Mr Foale set
up Playfinder in 2014 as
an app that promised to
be the “Airbnb of
sports”, allowing peopleto book grassroots
sports facilities
including lidos, football
pitches and tennis
courts. It acts as an
intermediary between
sports enthusiasts and
the owners of sports
venues, including
schools and local
councils, that are
seeking a new income
stream.
The service is
available in London,
Manchester, Brighton,
Liverpool, Newcastle,
Glasgow and Dublin.
The business, which
employs about 30 staff
and counts Graeme Le
Saux, the former
Chelsea and England
footballer, as a board
member, raised
£735,000 at the start of
the year to fund its
expansion.
However, its growth
plans were interrupted
by the pandemic. In
February the company
was enjoying a “record
level of bookings, and
then in March the whole
thing shutdown. There
was no sport at all.”
Boris Johnson’s
recent war on obesity,after his own brush with
coronavirus earlier in
the year, is expected to
lead to greater
awareness of sport,
which Mr Foale, 34, a
fellow Old Etonian,
hopes that Playfinder
will benefit from.
He admits to being
surprised by the level of
interest in football
pitches, despite
lingering concerns
about social distancing
and the virus. “I think
the demand we have
had for tennis shows
that there is an interest
in playing sport in a
secure environment. It’s
easy to maintain social
distancing.
“Football I would
expect to be a bit more
tentative, because it is a
contact sport and that
will put some people
off.”
However, he says that
most users have missed
the camaraderie that
comes with playing
sport. He says that the
majority of Playfinder’s
users are men who, like
him, “really missed
having a kickabout with
friends”.Wt bbieshasbeene
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