Twenty-three years ago, Peter Jenkinson pinned up a notice in the Aer Lingus crew room in Dublin Airport. As a pilot with the then state-owned airline, Jenkinson was frustrated at how hard he was finding it to get income protection insurance and he wanted to see if any of his colleagues would join him in seeking a better deal.

Pilots were seen by the insurance industry as a bad risk because they could lose their jobs if they ever failed a compulsory medical test. “I felt that we were being discriminated against on the basis of our occupation,” Jenkinson said.

“I felt that we were actually a good risk because we went for medicals every six months and we were really aware of the need to be healthy.”

Jenkinson gathered up his colleagues’ information and brought his dossier to Jardine Lloyd Thompson (today Marsh). The insurer agreed to do a deal with the pilots that gave them better insurance than they had before. The offer took off, and Jenkinson started getting more tailored insurance deals for pilots such as motor and home insurance. It was a hobby he did for free on the side in between flying.

“I didn’t have any ambition to start a business at the time,” Jenkinson said. “But that became our first product, although I didn’t realise it.”

After securing better deals for pilots, Jenkinson was asked to do the same for cabin crew and other workers at Dublin Airport. From there, it grew outside the airport to work with dozens of businesses under the brand Groupschemes.

Years before Eric Letkofsky had the billion-dollar idea to launch Groupon in Chicago, Jenkinson was running a version of that idea for thousands of employees in Ireland. But it remained a side project for Jenkinson and he continued his career as a pilot while running the business part-time along with his co-founders, Tom O’Driscoll and his brother Mark Jenkinson.

It would take more than a decade before he decided to go full time with it.

Rebuilding and reinventing

Peter Jenkinson is on a Zoom call in his home in Dalkey, recalling his early days in business. He has the lean physique of a keen cyclist and loves recounting the early days.

More than two decades have passed and Jenkinson is now working full time on that idea that began on a noticeboard. It has become a business with annual recurring revenue of €2 million and more than 400 customers. However, double-digit growth only really started in 2017 after a significant restructuring and repositioning of the company.

The company’s chairman Fergus Redahan, a neighbour of Jenkinson, had suggested we talk as he feels Jenkinson is on the cusp of something big after turning in two years of rapid growth. The company is pushing into Britain and expanding its product offering. Yet it has all happened under the radar. The business hasn’t needed to go out and raise funding in the market as it has been consistently profitable for all but one of its years in existence.

What began as Groupschemes is now called Wrkit. It is slickly branded with a well-thought-through user experience. This allows its B2B employee engagement business to comfortably handle its addressable audience of more than 500,000 people in its key markets of Ireland and Britain.

Wrkit has a sales team on the ground in Britain and it has a growing presence in Australia and New Zealand, two other markets which it sees as having big potential.

The Wrkit online portal has five modules. The key ones are lifestyle savings and Wrkit POWR (a wellness module competing with the likes of Headspace and Calm). Its services are used in places like FedEx, Apple, Fitbit, Bank of Ireland, AIB, IBM, Axa and Deliveroo.

The business grew by 25 per cent last year and it expects to take this over 30 per cent this year. This is rapid growth, which Jenkinson traces to a decision in 2017 to rebrand his old business as just one platform called Wrkit.

This still offers lifestyle savings to customers – the original idea for the business – but it has also added new streams of employee engagement in six more areas from wellness and fitness to digital recognition, learning, workshops and surveys.

“We decided in 2017 to differentiate ourselves by providing a broader range of services, all available on the one portal,” Jenkinson said. “That really accelerated growth.”

It was a period of intense strategising for the business as Jenkinson, along with his co-founders , started to think about every aspect of the business.

With Slawek Naczynski, their head of development, they rebuilt the technology behind their platform and its user experience. 

Jenkinson brought in Fergus Redahan, formerly with Goodbody, to help reposition the company, initially as managing director before he became chairman in January 2018.

In Ireland, Wrkit moved Brian Layden to the position of director of Irish sales as it pushed hard to win new customers and deepen its relationship with existing ones.

“People in investment talk about hockey-stick growth, but what we’re seeing is accelerated growth and now we intend to sustain that.”

How did you fund it? “One of my bugbears is the word bootstrap,” Jenkinson laughed. “It has this connotation of being borderline shady. We’ve always taken a professional and conservative view of our growth.”

Wrkit initially funded itself initially using money from its co-founders’ other jobs. In his own case, he only retired as a pilot in Aer Lingus in 2010, a decade into building the business.

“We’ve been profitable every year of our history,” Jenkinson said. “The exception was 2017 when we had to bring in a whole new variety of skills and rebuild the product.”

Wrkit had used its accumulated profits and some support from Enterprise Ireland to rebrand and regenerate itself.

Today, Wrkit is continually expanding each stream of its business as well as helping its customers respond to the pandemic. According to Jenkinson, the Covid-19 crisis has moved the Wrkit wellness proposition to centre stage. Led by Jason Brennan, a psychotherapist, Wrkit POWR has seen a huge increase in demand for its digital wellness modules and wellbeing webinars.

He said that these products are becoming essential tools for human resources departments in their efforts to support employees managing their mental health, particularly in a working-from-home environment.   

“We’ve thousands of people working from home,” he said. “So, we thought about what we can do to help them exercise when the gyms are closed.”

Wrkit hired videographers, yoga teachers and gym instructors to create online fitness classes and it helped human resource professionals stay in touch with their teams by providing things like mental healthcare services and surveys of staff morale.

The business had served clients for years in Britain, but about 18 months ago Jenkinson said it hired Megan Sowney as its UK managing director.

She leads a team of five people on the ground there. Jenkinson said Wrkit’s first customer in Britain was FedEx, which asked it to roll out its services for its staff there after it proved itself in Ireland. Its second customer was an NHS hospital and it has grown quickly there since, he added.

“By the end of this year, our run rate will be fifty-fifty between Ireland and the UK,” Jenkinson said. “That’s how quickly we are growing there. We’re already up 35 per cent on last year.”

Growth of 35 per cent in 2021

Most tech start-ups burn out quickly and fail while the few good ones take off quickly and succeed. In Wrkit’s case, it has been steady slow growth for most of the last 21 years before it began to take off in the last few years.

From being a side project, it is now its founders’ main focus and the business employs a team of 26 people.

Would Wrkit look at raising venture capital to accelerate its growth? “We’ve had those calls,” Jenkinson said. “But we haven’t gone to the market so to speak. We get lots of inbounds from the United States but when they see that we’re not turning over €20 million it tends to quell their enthusiasm.

“Will we get to €20 million? Yes, we have the vision to get there but we’re not there yet. We’re keeping VCs at arm’s length. We can continue to fund our development because we have the cash to do it. We grew by 25 per cent last year, and our forecast is to grow this year by 35 per cent.

“People in investment talk about hockey-stick growth, but what we’re seeing is accelerated growth and now we intend to sustain that.

“We are profitable and we think culturally it is a better fit right now to grow from our own resources.”