Validating Your Idea & Creating A Culture of Play with Ennie Lim
Also: a simple question to find out if your employees need financial support.
This blog post highlights the main takeaway from our Founder Spotlight episode featuring Ennie Lim, CEO and Founder of HoneyBee.
Ennie Lim is the CEO and Founder of HoneyBee, an employer-sponsored service that allows employees to access 0% emergency funds and talk to a bilingual financial counselor whenever they need to.
“Rainy day coverage for the workforce.” — Ennie Lim
Ennie created HoneyBee after experiencing a financial setback herself — after a divorce, her credit was negatively impacted and she wasn’t able to rent an apartment. She soon realized that many other Americans — especially employees in the healthcare, manufacturing, food production, and non-profit industries — were often living paycheck to paycheck and experiencing financial stress. The need for employers to offer a financial health benefit was there, and HoneyBee was born.
“67% of Americans are considered financially unhealthy.”
“It took a pandemic to realize that employees need access to financial health programs.” — Ennie Lim
During the pandemic, some of HoneyBee’s clients were cutting budgets and sent a survey to their employees to know what benefits they wanted to keep. Unsurprisingly, HoneyBee came up second, right after paid time off.
Due to the crisis, many employees needed emergency cash as they were dealing with mental health and health issues.
Financial health became a top priority for a lot of employers during the pandemic.
Validating your idea
To validate her idea, HoneyBee’s Founder put herself out there, talked to employers, and knocked on doors. This led her to get the information she needed to build her product and confirm that there was a need for a financial health service.
Ennie knew that the need was there, but she went through trial and error while building her product, which is part of the process.
Getting your first client
“Getting that first customer is extremely challenging.” — Ennie Lim
While hospitalized, Ennie Lim came to talk about HoneyBee to nurses and doctors. Many employees that she talked to admitted struggling with financial issues and living from paycheck to paycheck, lending money here and there.
That’s how HoneyBee got its first client.
The company keeps growing thanks to word-of-mouth and talking directly to employers.
Finding out if your employees need support
To find out if your employees need a service like HoneyBee, look at how many of them borrow against their retirement fund, or how many of them aren’t participating in the 401K.
Using authenticity to drive success
Authenticity is what led HoneyBee to success. As Ennie Lim explained, it’s the desire to share an authentic story that led her to meet her co-founders and customers. All of them identify with the company’s mission, which is to de-stigmatize financial stress in the workplace and provide a safety net for all working Americans.
Using authenticity to attract the right people
It can be challenging to hire people who identify with the culture you built within your company.
To determine if job applicants identify with HoneyBee’s culture and mission, Ennie Lim asks them the following questions:
- Can you share a financial setback that you have been through and how you overcome it?
- What are you hoping to get by working for a company like HoneyBee?
Creating a culture of play in the workplace
Ennie Lim and her co-workers started to virtually meet every Friday during the pandemic, as a way to keep in touch with each other and share their updates. Each week, one of them gets to talk about a topic that matters to them or start a game.
“This, says Ennie Lim, made us feel a lot closer, and the team members know that it’s safe to be more playful and not talk only about work.”
Click here to stream more Founder Spotlight videos on our YouTube channel.
