Yahoo Finance My first boss: Ashley Tate, serial entrepreneur and founder of EV charging payments business Mina
The people who helped shape business leaders
Entrepreneur Ashley Tate is managing director of Allstar Chargepass after it acquired Mina, his electric vehicle (EV) charging payment startup.
From the age of 15, Tate has started a raft of companies including Split the Bills, which helps people in shared houses with their utilities like water and electricity.
For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to work for myself. I remember classes in school and what careers looked like, but I was never interested and left school after my GCSEs.
That summer, I set up a business selling mini motorbikes. Dad thought it was an interesting concept and helped me set up a bank account. It was a success and a craze before Christmas but it was game over soon after.
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The fad had died and, against everything I had set out to do, I was forced to get a job in my local pub.
My first boss taught me all the traits that I never wanted me to be. Firstly, he had no respect for anyone in the team. I remember a meeting where he said he was the boss and he had to be respected. He was unkind, he also made people cry and it stuck as to how a boss shouldn’t run a business.
I jumped around bars and restaurant work and landed upon being a waiter at TGI Fridays. I learnt a hell of a lot – how they trained their managers to look after their staff and how they put incentives in place. It isn’t the manager but the people on the front line who would make or break the business.
Today, I am open about what I’m not good at and have always hired people who can do things better than I can. The more you do that, the more people trust, believe and want to work somewhere where their boss isn't the one who thinks they know it all.
It’s not like this today, but at the time the TGI managers had to work on the pot wash, in the kitchen or the bar. It was a 'do as we do, not do as I say' mentality. Everyone was in it together and it was a concept I took from my two years at TGI.
By the time I was 19 I had started an online marketplace selling student housing and I was re-energised to go it alone. I made no money for two years until we pivoted into a property lettings business. This was 2009 and by 2011 it spun out into another idea, a tech platform called Split the Bills where students or individual tenants could better pay their utility bills.
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The biggest lesson I learned was that while I made sure my staff were happy and motivated, I was missing the main business fundamentals of what make a business work – cashflow forecasts, profit and losses – and we ran out of cash in 2016.
We knew we had a good business model with a customer base. We purchased the domain back from the administrator six months later, and hired a great financial controller (who is still part of the business at Allstar today).
However, I was getting bored running companies in the student market. I soon sold the two businesses while having started Mina in 2019. I had this idea that there had to be an opportunity in the space for charging EVs.
I knew about domestic charging through Split the Bills; I realised there was a hole in the fuel cards market, a simple product which allows drivers to pay for fuel and payments going straight into the business.
I knew we could solve the problem at home but I knew I couldn’t do this on my own.
With three co-founders and COVID hitting, it forced us to run a business where everybody was going to work from home. By the end of the pandemic, trust in hybrid working wasn’t an issue for us as it had been our entire existence.
We carved out a niche in 2020 and spoke to Allstar, who have the largest coverage of fuel cars in the UK. If that volume was going to turn to electric, they had to find a way to accelerate the UK’s fleet transition to EVs by making paying for EV charging simpler at home and on the road.
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Allstar invested in us in 2021. We gained momentum and this year were acquired by Fleetcor, the parent company of Allstar. To date, we have been working through how to mesh a start-up with a massive corporate.
Again, it’s been about how to keep staff happy but also not to retain people for the sake of it.
This is also the first time I’ve had a boss since I was 19. I’ve been amazed at how much you can learn about structuring a business, something that could have taken five years and lots of failures along the way, to suddenly accelerating in a huge, successful organisation. It’s almost like having a mentor again.
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