From a Warrnambool caravan park to life as a London fintech millionaire
Meet Kane Harrison, the 39-year-old entrepreneur who slugged it out selling pancakes at markets before coming up with an investment app that he just sold for multimillions of pounds.
Kane Harrison is not afraid of taking a risk.
He’s converted VHS tapes to DVDs, put himself through university while living in a caravan by the beach, and sold Dutch pancakes at markets in London.
It was the profitability of the pancake venture that eventually left him with enough cash to take a break, capitalise on his commerce degree and create an investment app, NuWealth.
He went from driving around a Volkswagen Golf that leaked oil to a brand new Porsche 911. For the 39-year-old Victorian, who now lives in London, those business leaps paid off after he sold the fintech start-up last year to Quilter – a FTSE-250 wealth manager that oversees £116.2bn ($193bn) in customer investments.
Details about the deal are confidential, but it is understood to be worth millions of pounds.
“I think you don’t try and take life too seriously. If something is working you double down on it. If something’s not working, you just try something else,” Harrison says.
“I love to try different things. And, I definitely think I’m super lucky. To be able to set up (NuWealth) was like a dream.
“I think it comes down to persistence. Not necessarily listening to the naysayers and just believing in yourself. Having a bad memory helps, because … you get a lot of rejections, like when you’re trying to raise capital.
“Move straight on. Don’t focus on your problems.”
Life’s a beach
Harrison says he’s always been entrepreneurial.
“I set up my first business when I was 18. It was VHS tapes, at the time, to DVD,” he says.
“That paid my way through university. Yeah, so I was earning pretty good money at the time … it was about £15,000 a year. So I was earning about $30,000 about 20 years ago.”
He studied commerce and marketing at Deakin University’s Warrnambool Campus, located on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. But when he arrived, having moved from Mount Eliza on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria’s southeast, all the student accommodation was booked.
“I ended up borrowing my grandma’s caravan that was stored down in Sorrento,” he says.
“I was about 50m away from the water in this caravan park in Warrnambool, which was pretty cool.
“I would just go surfing and stuff before class.”
Looking for a job in finance
After graduating, Harrison secured a position at NAB in 2009.
“I went to work in their risk area. I did that for a couple of years and then I moved into capital markets. I was doing the London shift, so I’d work with traders and staff when they’re clearing and doing trades on the London market,” he says.
By 2011, Harrison, then aged 24, had saved about $80,000 and, on his Mum’s advice, decided to travel around the US, Canada and Europe.
After 18 months, and having spent most of his nest egg, he set about looking for a job in finance.
A visit to London’s historic Borough Market prompted a fresh business idea.
There were about 40 people lining to buy raclettes, a Swiss dish in which boiled potatoes are served with pickles and melted cheese that is scraped off a barrel and on to the plate.
“I was doing the maths – 40 times £8. I was like, this guy is raking it in,” he says.
“I said to my sister (Jess), we should set up a stall. There’s heaps of money to be made. There are tourists everywhere.
“We went to a couple more markets. I was trying to look for a unique product and what they didn’t have was Dutch pancakes.”
From finance to Dutch pancakes
Harrison says his parents lent him $20,000 and he set out to buy a little Volkswagen Golf that leaked oil, paid six months’ advance rent on a new flat and worked on the pancake stall. Their opening day in January 2013 at Camden market was “terrible” with only four portions sold because of snowy weather.
But they added strawberries and nutella, created their own “bespoke” pancake mix and updated their branding.
“Then we just took off that summer,” he says.
The siblings added a stall in Notting Hill. They started doing festivals too and late-night events at the London Zoo. Eventually, they got into the Southbank Christmas market where there are only 20 stalls.
“We went from zero to making about £6000 a week (in six months),” he says.
Eventually, Harrison says they opened a permanent kiosk in Bluewater Shopping centre on the fringe of London, to stabilise their income – which had been seasonal up to that point.
‘Not super passionate about pancakes, love investing’
But Harrison was thinking about his next venture.
“I like pancakes, but I don’t want it to be the last thing I do. I’m really into tech, and I’m really into investing,” he says.
“The reason why I really got into investing is I would see my Dad and Mum buying shares. They would hold them for five, seven years, sell them and that would pay for holidays, school fees, pay off the house.”
After some research, Harrison says he realised that fractional share trading, including on investment apps like Robin Hood and Acorns, was taking off in the US.
The platforms allow thematic investing in areas like technology or green energy as opposed to an individual stock.
He wanted in and, after deciding to create a stockbroking app, he raised £250,000 on crowd-funding platform Crowdcube in December 2017.
“The premise for this business was investing in brands that you love, (and) that you understand for the long term,” he says.
There was a minimum investment of £10.
The app was launched as Wombat in August 2019, and over the next six years it boomed – particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Harrison says the app raised £8m in total and had different acquisition offers as 300,000 users joined the platform.
It was rebranded to NuWealth, and in September last year Quilter announced it had acquired the business.
“We’re there to assist their financial advisers with younger customers,” Harrison says.
Harrison has since become a father to daughter Harper and lives in London with his partner Caroline. He hopes to one day retire in Australia.
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