Nick Fulton is the Co-Founder & CEO at trustshare, a complete fintech layer for marketplaces across payments, escrow, banking and credit in a single unified API.
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1) To kick things off, could you tell us a little about your career background and current role?
I’m the CEO and co-founder of trustshare – we’re a complete fintech layer for marketplaces across payments, escrow, banking and credit. I’ve been working with marketplaces since the beginning of my career. I started working at a company tracking communications and phone calls on these platforms to now make it easy for marketplaces to keep customers’ money safe.
2) What does a day in your life look like for you? Can you take us through a recent workday?
Everyday is very different, my role currently has a lot of breadth and many plates to juggle. I try to spend as much time in deep work because it’s easy to become distracted and lose focus.
We are quite successful at minimising meetings with lots of people in the room and instead try and distribute decision making within the company with regular asynchronous updates over slack combined with quick huddles on particular topics.
3) Does your current role allow for flexible or remote working? If so, how does that fit into your life and routine?
We’re a remote-first business founded during the first COVID lockdown in the UK. There are definitely pros and cons to remote working that are important for leaders to be aware of and understand that your choice of office, hybrid or remote is never going to please everyone and is definitely going to disappoint some people.
We subscribe to a co-working space marketplace and have a monthly full-team meet up and social to balance this but ultimately, the choice of set-up will attract different people.
4) What does work-life balance mean to you and how do you work to achieve that goal?
I aim to try and do stuff that I love but being careful not to make it so I don’t anymore. Work-life balance for me is about being happy and achieving your goals. It’s personal and specific to the individual and definitely changes over time so having flexibility is important.
Personally, my work is a big passion of mine so I’m keen to put the hours in to make an impact and achieve my goals. If I’m finding I’m working too hard and no longer loving the challenge of what I do, then it’s a sign that I need to step back, think and add a bit more balance.
5) In the past 12 months, have you started or stopped any routines or habits to change your life?
I find pomodoro timers really useful and I’ve used them a lot over the past few months to generate focus and increase the amount of deep work that I do each week.
How it works is that you focus for a 25-minute sprint and then take 5 minutes off away from the screen to stretch and chat and then repeat. I find it really helpful to start and make time for projects that I’ve had on my to-do list for a while.
The most influential thing that I’ve found is using habit trackers to build behaviours. I’ve used these for 5 years now and cycle through different things I want to focus on.
6) Do you have any favourite books, podcasts or newsletters that you’d like to recommend?
I try to always have a book that I’m reading and switch between fiction and non-fiction. No Rules, Rules by Erin Meyer and Reid Hastings is fantastic. I enjoy biographies of people in loads of different spheres.
7) Are there any products, gadgets or apps that you can’t live without?
I use a habit tracker (Habitbull), a to-do list app using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” method (Nirvana), and a simple youtube video for my Pomodoro timer.
8) Do you have any last thoughts on work, life or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?
Enjoying life is 100% the most important thing. If you’re in a role that you don’t love right now, it’s worth taking a risk, finding your passion and doing something that you do. Or be explicit, speak and make space in your current role. It’s so easy to become passive. Be conscious of what you’re doing to make work-life balance, which is very specific to the individual, work for you.
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