Francesca Brady is co-founder and CEO of indoor air quality certification business AirRated. She won the 2024 Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award.
After my Masters degree in environmental geosciences, I started a lifestyle business selling drawings and furniture at Spitalfields Market. It was a temporary stop gap; I wanted to get creative after a heavy academic university life.
My first proper job was at a property technology start-up company. I worked in admin initially as I was so niche in terms of what I studied. I wasn’t geared up to go into finance or marketing, and I didn’t know what I was good at.
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I was booking meeting rooms and making tea, but I started to naturally fall into a sales role. Perhaps it was the scientific communicator in me that knew how to understand this complex topic of property technology, all the variations of air quality sensors, and how they worked with smart building management systems.
Steve Smith was head of sales and in the beginning his force of nature personality took me by surprise. You have people who are clever and switched on in academia, and Steve was the same, but once I got to know him I could see how supportive he was of me trying to find my feet.
“As long as you are honest with me, I don’t mind what you do,” he told me. “If you are, we can sort it out together.”
There’s no doubt that he influenced my management style today.
The first client I secured was at the Met Office. I had worked hard to get a meeting and was overjoyed when Ralph James agreed to it. I took Steve with me on the train and sent an email to Ralph, who messaged me back saying he thought the meeting was tomorrow. I was horrified. I looked at Steve knowing his honesty mantra, but still I called Ralph immediately.
He said he couldn’t fit me in but I could blame the mix up on him. Steve found the humour and Ralph did find 10 minutes in the day. We have stayed close ever since and he continues to be supportive of young engineers.
I don’t normally mess up and I am my biggest critic. People can sense that, and they try to make me feel more confident in myself.
I thought if I was in Ralph’s team at the Met Office I would have the best boss. In fact, if you could combine both Steve and Ralph they would be the ideal ‘super boss’.
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Steve had such a calm nature in the direction of travel he wanted us to go in. To such a degree that even if it was the wrong direction he had so much conviction that I was fully invested in where he was going.
He would change his mind but not with a knee-jerk decision, he would justify and communicate why he was making the turnaround. These are all things I aspire to in my management.
We would work from home on Fridays, but Steve would never call to see what I was up to. It never felt like he was micromanaging and I felt like I had autonomy in my role.
I saw a gap in the market at the property technology company. They had lots of different sensors and tracking devices, and they were monitoring air quality performance in buildings.
I understood the business case for why people should invest in the tech, but I saw there was very little context on the smart buildings front to bring the data to life in a way that was valuable for people to use and understand.
People are buying monitors, but how do we capitalise on the data they are receiving? The tech exists and creating a ratings system was something that I could build.
It was a natural spin off. I had exposure to business, the academic understanding of how to take it further and I acted as the figurehead. I wouldn’t have described myself as a business CEO, more as an advocate, someone who was passionate about getting it off the ground. We did that in 2020 with my co-founders Olga Turner-Baker and Oliver Spriggs.
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It’s not mandatory to track and rate the performance of air quality in spaces, which I find incredible. And when COVID hit it was about a duty of care and peace of mind coming into spaces.
Our product was built for commercial spaces and we had to pivot into multiple other sectors in retail, residential and industrial settings.
Using the platform I had at the Veuve Clicquot Bold Awards, air quality is something that isn’t talked about a lot and if I could talk about it in a room full of influential people maybe we can get the message out there to demand results in term of both internal and external pollution.
Francesca Brady will join Veuve Clicquot’s newly launched Bold Open Database, the first global, open and innovative database, aimed to bring together female entrepreneurs worldwide
