In the midst of doing 40 to 50-hour work weeks at local bars just to make ends meet while attending university, George Fairhall soon discovered that she was being underpaid.
“My upbringing was tough. I learnt how to be a proper little grafter after watching how hard my parents worked,” George Fairhall tells Prolific North, who started her very first job at the age of just 13 at a hairdressers.
At university, especially as a law student, all those relentless hours meant the missing pay became even more noticeable.
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“I would struggle to keep track of my hours and would not know what to expect on payday,” she explains.“I just used to shrug my shoulders and think it doesn’t look right, and it was very normalised to not really have that control or be aware so you just continue on.”
It’s a story that’s all too familiar to shift workers across the hospitality industry, as nearly two thirds reported that they were not paid for overtime hours in 2024.
That’s according to a salary survey of 1,300 workers, created by KAM in partnership with Access Group, the BII, Hospitality Jobs UK, Montgomery Group and Otolo.
When the figures weren’t adding up, Fairhall began tracking her hours and pay and was shocked by what she found.
“When I would receive my pay slips, I knew it wasn’t right and that something was wrong. I would be underpaid by quite a lot because I was working irregular hours, and every payday wasn’t the same.
“It was quite hard, especially at university, as I couldn’t have afforded it without working.”
To figure out what was happening behind the scenes, she took on a sales job at the bar she was working in.
“I started seeing that things would be rounded down, things would be missed. A lot of it was unintentional, but some of it was taking advantage of a broken system where it ended up being that the workers were the ones that were getting impacted negatively. And I just didn’t like it.”
In 2019, she stepped away from a potential career in law and began working on fair pay platform WAC app in Leeds. Now, the app has already helped “thousands” of frustrated workers to track their hours and pay.
WAC was named as one of Prolific North’s Tech Companies to Watch back in 2023, and has already had an impressive journey as a start-up, with Fairhall raising over £1m in investment. The start-up was also one of seven that received £200k investment from start-up programme PraeSeed last year.
But with no initial connections into the tech world, Fairhall’s journey to success has been by no means easy.
“I always tried to look for an app but there wasn’t one. When I was trying to figure it out, I didn’t know anyone that had a business, I didn’t know how to get funded, my parents didn’t have money, I had no money, nothing.”
“I was told it’s impossible to do this”
But Fairhall is used to being a “little hustler. After briefly returning to university in Nottingham to do a postgraduate in law on the weekends, she discovered a way to get cheap Air Bnb’s just to be able to talk to staff at the university’s business hub about how to get her idea off the ground. It led to her pitching against Oxbridge students in a baggy suit from Primark at the Santander Entrepreneur Awards – yet she still landed in the finals.
But the “biggest challenge” early on was being told she needed a CTO or a technical co-founder to move the business forward.
“Again and again, I was told: ‘It’s impossible to do this. You need to find a co-founder’. I wasn’t against it, I just didn’t even know how to find a co-founder!”
Taking the advice on board, she started working with an outsourced development company, that WAC App still works with today, that almost acted as a CTO consultant. Gradually, she began “unlocking” parts of the tech ecosystem by expanding her network.
Armed with £5,000 her parents gifted to her, which had been saved away as a future wedding present, she lived off the funds for eight months to build the business in what was “probably the tightest” time of her life.
“It was all about survival, trying to get the product developed, raise the next amount of funding, and slowly unlocking everything.”
The app officially launched in March 2020, just a week before the nation went into lockdown for Covid. But she continued on, determined to help other underpaid workers.
“We continued working through Covid and I loved that it was a time where essential workers, those who were paid hourly, were actually valued more than ever.”
“Being a female founder hasn’t helped…”
Navigating a pandemic, lack of funds and no network, once she became more established she faced another challenge – being a young, female entrepreneur trying to raise funds.
“Funding was difficult because being a female founder hasn’t helped. I’m definitely not spoken to in the ways I hear other male founders spoken to.”
According to a survey by social enterprise Code First Girls, 40% of female entrepreneurs have faced gender-based discrimination in a leadership role.
Although she’s keen to stress it is rare – and has plenty of male allies across the tech ecosystem and in her team – she says she’s experienced “subtle” comments and behaviour from investors, making it more difficult to call out.
“The only way I’ve been able to learn is by having male allies in the room, who hear it and tell me they’ve never been spoken to like that.”
Some comments have “crossed a line”, from being called “fit” at the end of a meeting, her chairman being posed the exact same question, to being asked why she isn’t wearing any make-up.
“It can be patronising and you can feel like you’re being spoken down to, which in some cases male founders get as well, because it may be the type of investor or person you’re dealing with.
“I will end meetings if it’s that bad and explain my expectations or my boundaries. I’ve only done that maybe twice.”
And as a young founder, she said it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female as it can be “savage” in the early stages with the need to “constantly try and prove yourself”.
Now, her motto is to go into external meetings with confidence and “blow their mind” about her business. And she hopes to inspire other entrepreneurs with her story too – despite the difficulties they may face early on.
“I came from a place where I had no idea, I didn’t have a network, I didn’t have money, so I want to be proof that you can do it. It’s all about being a hustler.”
“You need to figure it out, be resilient in those earlier stages, but it does get easier. I’ve loved every second of it, despite when things have become hard.”
‘We want to grow and be the go-to solution for underpaid workers“
Now, Fairhall says WAC’s plan for 2025 is all about scaling.
The start-up is nearing the end of a £600,000 investment round and plans to relaunch its marketing and continue exploring a B2B offering, with the ambition to work with bigger companies to help improve their processes while ensuring workers receive fair pay.
And according to WAC’s own research via an in-app survey which had 21,130 respondents, 45% of hourly-paid workers have been underpaid by their employer. Even one is too many for Fairhall.
“Unfortunately, It’s a broken system. When there’s hundreds of people in the workplace with people swapping shifts, being sent home or missing breaks, hours are missed due to work processes and human error.
“We want to grow and be the go-to solution that is almost like a work passport, keeping everything from your hours, tax, holiday and sick pay all in one place – and there’s a space for it.”
Already claiming to have helped workers claim back “hundreds if not thousands” of pounds, she plans to expand the app to go beyond helping just hourly-paid workers to those with salary-paid jobs or “side hustles”, across the UK and beyond.
“We have paying users in 39 countries now, and organic downloads in 130, which is wild but the majority are still in the UK,” she explains, “We want to replicate it across the world in countries that have slightly different problems and laws.
“The US is where we are planning our next go-to market strategy because of the organic growth we’re seeing and the problems that they have. There are around 10 million hourly paid workers here, but 80 million in the US. So it’s definitely a place where we can solve a lot of problems.”
Thanks to funding, she said it’s a “really exciting time” over at WAC.
“Finally, I have an actual pot of money, rather than just constantly raising month to month to try and survive. But it took a lot to prove that, to get us to this point.
“I’m definitely a woman on a mission,” she laughs. “I didn’t even think I was going to get to university, let alone start a business and genuinely change people’s lives.”
