How Georgina Fairhall became a champion for the UK’s low-paid workers

With years of experience working in hospitality, Ms Fairhall encountered the same problem in every job; she wasn’t getting paid correctly.

Hours would frequently be missed, breaks wouldn’t happen, and she was routinely expected to work beyond her finish time to support the team.

Ms Fairhall, whose experience in the sector began when she was hired to work part-time in a pub at the age of 13, decided to turn her frustrations into a concept for a new business.

She established Leeds-based WAC, which she describes as a forward-thinking worker-technology company. The WAC app enables workers from all sectors to track their hours, add their rotas and view live payslip estimates, including deductions such as tax.

Her bold move has undoubtedly paid off. She was recently named the top entrepreneur in the UK and Europe who founded a company under the age 29 in a competition organised by TechRound.

Since WAC’s launch, Ms Fairhall has raised close to £1m through angel investment. She has never lost sight of the fact that her business has a noble mission; to ensure workers are treated fairly. She has troubling memories of her years working in hospitality.

She recalled: "I believed I was being underpaid all the time; it's really hard to manage shift work and I would even see employers ‘round down’ employee hours if the outdated systems failed them.

"I really felt workers had no support and no way of feeling in control of hourly paid work. I wanted to do something about it.”

WAC is helping hourly paid workers keep track of their hours, rotas and earnings.

"We want to empower workers and become more than a tool to help track work and money,’’ she added.

“Our mission is to be the go to platform for hourly paid workers offering financial security and support all over the world.”

Four years ago, when the world was about to be plunged into the horrors of the pandemic, her working life had reached a crossroads.

"I knew I needed to make a decision about the direction I wanted my career to go in,’’ said.

"I was working full time in hospitality, studying for my LPC (Legal Practice Course) at the weekends and I had started the business in the evenings.

"I deferred my LPC, quit my job and I managed to raise enough investment to launch the app in March 2020, just before the pandemic,’’ Ms Fairhall, who is now aged 30, recalled.

“It was a scary time but we knew there were multiple industries which relied on shift work, so after a slight pivot in marketing, we started to get traction from many essential workers including NHS, supermarkets and takeaways.

"Shift work can be chaotic in the best of times; you live from pay check to pay check, different hours each week and often don't know what to expect on payday.

"Although the pandemic brought on extra challenges, we managed to raise small investments on a continuous basis, as a pre revenue, B2C (business to consumer) business and continued to gain great traction and prove a product market fit.

"If Covid hadn't had such an impact on funding we could have moved a bit faster.

"However it did give us time to test our marketing strategy and focus on further development by building a community of users who helped us improve the app, which also increased stickiness.

"We are currently raising our seed round of investment, and once this closes our focus is scaling the business.

"We will increase our marketing budgets to further reach the UK market and test global ads, in reaction to the organic global growth we are already seeing. We are also keen to build partnerships to further support workers.”

This expansion is set to lead to job creation as the company takes on a broader role. So far there have been just over 300,000 downloads.

"We have a small team of three people in Leeds and a full-time senior development team in India; we are looking to hire at least three employees by the end of the year,’’ she said.

"We hope to provide a global solution and have a social impact on hourly paid workers and indirectly employers.

She added: “We also recognise that the gig economy is growing and there are a lot more self-employed workers joining our app to keep track of work and generate invoices through a clever addition we made to the app in 2023."

She is proud to be part of a growing tech community in the North after launching WAC in Leeds, especially as she was encouraged to move to London in the company’s early days.

She added: "We are an all inclusive solution helping workers in more ways than one. We are due to launch our premium offering that will give access to a legal hub.

"This will provide a simple step by step guide when disputing pay and offer information on worker rights to support users of the app. It's all about empowering the worker, helping, educating and supporting them.”

The path to success hasn’t been smooth, but Ms Fairhall is made of stern stuff.

"It has been very challenging to get to this point. You need to have a passion for your business and be very resilient.

"It's been very hard to prove myself as a non technical, sole, female founder. But I’ve done it. We have finally proven how huge the problem is and why WAC is right to solve it. We now need to focus on. growth and revenue. For me, It's all about hard graft and building the right network."