Coffee with Charlie Rosier

Eat Sleep Work Repeat with supermum entrepreneur Charlie Rosier!

What’s next in childcare for the working parent in London.

Property entrepreneur, mum-of-one and Director of Cuckooz; a design-led brand which creates beautiful apartments in London’s most exciting neighbourhoods, for the growing number of business travellers visiting the UK. In 2018, Charlie also set up Cuckooz Nest; London’s first co-working space with creche facilities for children under two with business partner Fabienne.

Charlie speaks to Ellis Seder of Santa Monica Talent about her businesses, childcare for working parents and the future for female founders.

Eat Sleep Work Repeat with supermum entrepreneur Charlie Rosier!

Drawing on her extensive experience working within the Property Development sector, as a startup founder and mum, Charlie discusses Cuckooz Nest; how it all started and how it came to be what is is today. “Cuckooz Nest was set up after I experienced, first hand, the struggle of returning to work after giving birth to my daughter. After learning about the cost of childcare in the UK, and with no intention of sacrificing the career I had worked tirelessly to progress, I reached out to other parents experiencing similar difficulties and decided that something had to be done. With a lot of hard work, ambition and one hell of a learning curve, Cuckooz Nest was born, and will celebrate it’s 1st birthday in April this year.”

But why introduce a creche into the mix?

“We just realised it’s so expensive in London”, Charlie continues, “Nannies or anything to do with children really. As you talk to people more and more, you realise this is actually a really big problem in Central London and also in all the big, major cities in the UK.

That problem is that there’s no flexibility in the childcare system as it currently stands, where you have to commit to a certain hours per week and you can’t really swap it round”.

So what is Cuckooz Nest?

“We offer a completely flexible, pay-as-you-go nursery which is fully Ofsted registered, with fantastic, trustworthy staff.”

Charlie goes on to tell me more about the services provided by Cuckooz Nest; “The youngest baby that’s ever joined was six weeks old. I returned to work after six weeks maternity, and found I only really needing a couple of hours a week. As the child gets older, the parents start to use the service more and more like a normal nursery, which is why our emphasis on flexibility is so important. Another example of the type of parent who regularly uses our service is the project-based freelancers. They might have a project for three months and require full time childcare for those three months”.

So why the push for childcare in the workplace? Why is this important?

“The churn rate in the UK for women within their first year of coming back from maternity or paternity leave is about 43%. So they’ll come back after their leave but within that first year they’ll end up leaving.

Sadly, a lot of the time, it can be that new mothers and those returning to work are not supported on their return to the workplace. A lot of women who return to work quickly realise that the cost of childcare in those first two years is so expensive, and ultimately end up spending what equates to their entire year’s salary on an alternate solution. It’s only at three years old that your government subsidies come in, so you can get publicly funded childcare for a minimum number of hours per week. But up until three years old, everything is private.

So as well as maybe feeling isolated and lonely upon returning to the workplace, a great deal of women are struggling to make ends meet”.

I absolutely see what Charlie means. Salaries in London over the last 20 years have become deflationary. If you look at London salaries compared to New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Sydney and Dubai, we’re at the bottom of the salary charts while everything else has gone up tenfold. The average house or apartment in London is thirteen times the average salary.

But for the future of Cuckooz Nest, what’s the ultimate plan for this innovative startup that keeps childcare in mind?

“We’re very much in dialogue with large companies in terms of supporting and building robust programs for female returners to the workplace.

One of the big topics surrounding new parenthood at the moment is the subject of loneliness, rejection and isolation, and what our space does is create a community of working parents, where people are able to work together, vocalise their frustrations and most importantly be understood - without judgment”.

What about the rate of employment for working mums in the UK?

“The number of mums in work in the UK is one of the lowest in the G8. There’s approximately one million mums who are highly skilled, educated people that aren’t working because it doesn’t make sense for them to do so because of the cost of childcare. If we’re going to lose a whole load of talent because of Brexit, let’s get these women back into work. But how do we do that? We have to support their childcare”.

But how does Charlie manage all of this? Two businesses, multiple co-working sites with childcare to look after as well as a two year old?

Charlie laughs, “Well, I’ve sacrificed any semblance of a social life, that’s for sure! In all seriousness, I’m privileged to be working alongside some incredible people, in two industries I feel wholeheartedly passionate about, so for me the positives vastly outweigh the sacrifices I’ve had to make in the short term. At the end of the day, though, like many working mothers, I’ve fought tirelessly with feelings of guilt.

I can take comfort in the fact that I do everything to provide a better future for my daughter and she will grow up feeling empowered to do anything she puts her mind to!”

What else do Charlie’s businesses have to offer? With Cuckooz, fully serviced, design-led apartments are available for those travelling for business who may be staying in central London for long periods of time.

“We’ve been in talks with Amazon and Facebook to provide apartments for their staff members when they travel. And we’re also in the process of developing a Cuckooz app for those new to a city who want to network, make friends and get to know their neighbourhood”.

It really is all about connecting people.

As a female founder of two businesses, Charlie knows what it’s like to be in the start-up world as a female founder.

“I think the issue is that funding is low. Equal amounts of men and women have good business ideas. Maybe there’s a little confidence thing about women not jumping in quite as quickly head first into a business idea. But the number of female freelancers and female self-employed is three times that of men”

There are now funds coming out that are purely supporting female founders. Albrights is an obvious one. They’ve launched a female founder fund. Progress is always slower than we’d like, but I think we will start to see women rule the world.

Charlie Rosier, a leading property entrepreneur and start-up founder clearly knows what it means to be ruling the industry and the workplace. Her career so far has been impressive and we can’t wait to see what happens next with Cuckooz, Cuckooz Nest and beyond!

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At Santa Monica Talent, not only is our own business diverse with exceptional talent. Last year, over half the candidates we hired for clients were female. This included a scale-up project with HealthUnlocked that included 14 female hires out of 20 when they went through Series A funding. Download the case study here.