“You look like you’re about to drop dead,” the deputy leader of Pendle Borough Council warned Paul White back in 2018, as the colour began to drain from his face during a late night council meeting.
After serving as councillor in Lancashire for eight years, White had just led the Conservative party in Pendle to its first majority in 10 years at the age of 32, bringing a number of young councillors into politics for the first time.
“During the campaign, I found out I had heart issues but I just ploughed on not really expecting to win. I thought I couldn’t tell anyone about it because it may have been seen as a weakness in the leader. I had quite a lot of pressure on me,” Paul White tells Prolific North.
He was in the early days of setting up online grocery service Modern Milkman, which has since become one of the UK’s ‘fastest-growing companies’ according to the FT1000, while running the now shuttered marketing agency, Wise Owl Creative.
Up at the crack of dawn to do a milk round for Modern Milkman, that same day he hopped on a train to Westminster to meet with the Northern Powerhouse minister before returning to Lancashire for a council meeting that evening. But it all became too much to juggle as those health issues surfaced at the meeting.
“I was around two weeks away from having a pacemaker fitted. I knew I couldn’t go on maintaining all of this.”
But he kept those health issues quiet over the next 12 months to avoid the breaks “coming off” and to see the party through to the next election.
“I was really relieved to be able to stand down, it was definitely the right time for me.
“I discovered the average life expectancy was 24 months. So I stood down but I was really proud of being able to make change.”
Modern Milkman – why he exited one of the UK’s ‘fastest-growing’ businesses
So how did the Modern Milkman story begin and why did he decide to step away? Hungover, led on the sofa watching David Attenborough’s Blue Planet, he watched on helplessly as a baby whale choked on plastic.
With a desire to reduce plastic waste, he hunted down the local milk round, borrowed money from mum and dad, and took over the business from the local roofer.
Starting off with a Facebook page to try and tap into a new audience, before long the company was “blown over by the sales” after he brought in Simon Mellin, the current CEO of Modern Milkman and his wife Becky Hilton, plus business partner Thomas Shaw.
“They took the Modern Milkman on to the next level where we went from a battered old truck and a book that just had some people’s names in, to digitising it and rolling out additional milk rounds.”
Remember former prime minister Boris Johnson’s escapades during 2019, when he was locked in a fridge on the evening of the election? That was at Modern Milkman’s headquarters, where Johnson sought out a brief period of sanctuary away from a news crew from Good Morning Britain.
“It gained quite a lot of publicity and quite a lot of customers very quickly!” he laughs.
But the issues with his heart remained. Although he was already in the process of standing down from his life in politics, he explains there was a “different vision” in how Modern Milkman should go forward.
“There was the opportunity for me to take an exit and I’ve learned an incredible amount from Simon as it was his second high-growth business, but it was my first and I’d learned enough.”
After a brief period away from the hustle and bustle of entrepreneur life and politics during the Covid lockdowns, he began offering business consultancy services before managing his own farm, this time inspired by another TV programme – Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm series.
With a rather frenetic energy, it doesn’t seem too bizarre that he swapped milk rounds for commercially farming turkeys at Christmas.
Whilst all that extra free time was “idyllic” and allowed him space to decompress after 10 years dabbling in politics, marketing and milk bottles, he soon realised he felt “unchallenged”.
“I just thought: ‘I’m not going to sit here and wait to die for the rest of my life’. There’s more excitement to life than this.”
And that’s where his next venture came to fruition.
“I didn’t know how my health would go but I wasn’t prepared to put my life on hold.”
Patch App: Why it’s the ‘Uber for home maintenance’
At Modern Milkman, the idea for digitising window cleaning and home maintenance services was bubbling away. But he needed the right co-founder.
After meeting Conor Walsh, a former electrician who had an idea to reduce the amount of plastic electricians use, he knew he found the right person to create Patch App with.
“When I talked him through this idea, within one meeting I very quickly knew that he was the guy to do Patch App with.”
The very next day Walsh handed in his notice and the duo moved into an office in Lancashire in 2022.
“With the Modern Milkman, we bought an existing service and started bolting on and building the tech around it. At Patch App, we built the tech first and then started to deliver the service so it gave us a bit of time to work out how things were going to work.”
In the early days, there was a “learning curve” when the duo realised Patch App couldn’t operate as a marketplace, where existing window cleaners signed up to offer services.
“To make this work, what was really important was us delivering a service but as a brand and we weren’t going to get that unless we delivered that service ourselves. We have to deliver an end-to-end service because we have to protect the brand and do what we say we’re going to do.
“This makes it a much bigger job because the headache is in delivering the service rather than the tech, because it involves many more people. But that was a decision we made early on. And we’re really happy that we did.”
Yet as a pre-seed business trying to raise investment in Lancashire, he admits he’s had to take “some pretty big risks”.
“We commissioned the tech and borrowed the money for a month. It was a private lender and we didn’t have a clue how we would pay them back. But they lent us £50,000 to commission the tech, I guaranteed against my house, and we said we’ll pay you back within 30 days.”
The duo were soon raising a toast after raising £200,000 of investment that same year from early-stage backers including the likes of Joycelyn Neve, the founder of Seafood Pub Company and Lee Duerden, CEO Of XLCR Vehicle Management.
“Once we completed that round, that was the first moment where we thought we were actually doing something here and the community was listening to us.”
“If you have a good idea, and are willing to die for it, you will be successful”
Although the Patch App product has only been on the market for around nine months, the online subscription outdoor home maintenance company launched a £250,000 Armed Forces Business Academy in partnership with Community & Business Partners CIC and Burnley Football Club in the Community last year, exclusively using veterans to carry out its services.
With Patch App named as one of Prolific North’s Tech Companies to Watch in 2023, the company also secured an additional £300,000 from a network of 42 individual investors to boost its operations across the North West with 12 staff, including six veterans.
Gearing up for a fresh investment raise at the end of the year, he went for a routine scan once again to check up on his health.
“They said I had a significant deterioration in my heart. They were always really clear that once there was a deterioration, it would deteriorate very rapidly.
“I didn’t feel any different but I probably was running on adrenaline for a very long period of time.”
With a 12 week recovery time, he says health professionals recommended he had open heart surgery. But with the investment raise dominating his thoughts, he postponed the operation for as long as he could until April of this year and went into the hospital on a Friday lunchtime, only closing his laptop before the operation. With Monday off, he was already back on his laptop by Tuesday.
It’s definitely not something he would recommend to others.
“I certainly wouldn’t recommend any staff to do it but being a business owner, you take on great responsibility. I owe it to everybody who has to pay a mortgage.
“My philosophy is if you have a good idea, and are willing to die for it, you will be successful. You can’t just have a good idea and not be willing to die, because you will give up when things are stressful. And you can’t be willing to die for a crap idea. I’m certain that’s what we have here.
“I had it done and feel great now. It will take about nine months for the heart to properly reconfigure.”
As a business based in Lancashire, he hopes there will be more “ambition” in the region but believes that is already changing.
With a different approach in raising the company’s next round of investment, he’s keen to continue building a network of individual angel investors rather than approaching venture capital firms or angel groups. He recognises that it’s “really hard work” to raise with individual angels, especially with financial planning, but argues pitching a vc firm or angel groups have only “wasted time” for Patch App.
“We’ve been blessed by telling the story, people liking it, and then them deciding to come along on the journey with us.”
“Our group of investors are called the Patch founders club. We’ve built this community out of people, where 50% of them have probably never invested before, and we get them all together twice a year with a garden party at my house.
“It’s now on us to formalise that as its own investment group with a specific out of city focus. We want naturally more money and talent coming into the areas we’re from.”
Aside from the new investment raise, where he hopes to continue building his angel network, the goal over the next five years is for Patch App to become the “Uber for home maintenance” with one million customers on the platform.
As part of this, he recently announced the platform has rolled out six additional services on a trial basis, including domestic cleaning and jet washing, but will only be available for existing Patch App customers.
“We are starting a program of acquiring other window cleaning businesses,” he says. “It’s only effectively the customers we’re acquiring, not any of the ops or staff of these businesses because ours is run quite differently and we have our own staff that we want to use. So there is an acquisition and profitability strategy.
“I love when we get a text or a message on LinkedIn when someone sees one of the Patch App vans because people are noticing it. For me, what’s exciting is we’re building out the brand and a presence people recognise.”
