If you have to venture anything, dare to be strong and courageous. For a business leader he has to focus on compassionate and informed leadership. Additionally collaborate with experts, data-driven decision-making, and adaptability to impact the lives of those in recovery.
Today we uncover the story of one such leader, Daniel Fincham, with a remarkable journey from personal struggle to purpose-driven success. His career in the technology industry was driven by an early fascination with the transformative power of technology. As the CEO of Recoverlution, he has leveraged his unique blend of tech expertise and personal experience to pioneer a groundbreaking platform that offers hope, support, and digital innovation to individuals on the path to recovery.
Thus we at CIO Business Leaders interviewed to Daniel to know more about the impact he has to transform lives. Below are the highlights of the interview:
What inspired you to pursue a career in your industry, and how did you rise to your current position as CEO?
At a young age, I’d always marvelled at technology. Its seemingly never-ending ability to surprise people, to do things unthinkable just years before and its endless possibility to innovate. I soon realised that technology can do a lot of the hard work for you when used effectively. From simply improving a process to revolutionising or disrupting an industry, technology is power and can help and serve people at scale.
At 36 I was a VP at a software company that I’d grown up with. To most, I would have been viewed as successful. I excelled in education, sport, have great friends and come from a loving family. After travelling the world I landed in Copenhagen; found my career and a place to be at my happiest. In reflection, that this was a foreign residence seems more likely hiding than a happy place. Having met my wife on holiday, I moved back to the UK and in the following 10 years we married, had 3 wonderful children and built a dream house.
I’d never felt comfortable in my own skin and had been drinking to negate worry, anxiety or focus on where I was going or where I belong. I couldn’t connect with a purpose, or what life was about so I just let it take me where it would. When I reached the finished line there was no celebration. The goalposts just moved. I was exhausted and took off the mask. Before I had a chance to even breathe, I was hit by the tirade of bullets I’d missed from the comfort of my hiding place. But as I took cover, the airstrike would this time ensure I had no safety and I would be ripped apart to a point of submission. Almost.
Rehab, redundancy, divorce and multiple times of sanctuary in hospital and jail all haunted me for the next 9 months. In June 2020, At 37, I made it to recovery and 6 weeks later, I started Recoverlution.
I’d struggled to find a place to start, a place to understand why I was who I was. Whether that was sat at my desk and Googling for help, listening to others stigmatised opinions or talking to medical professionals – I couldn’t find a digital home to start getting well. So I researched everything – nutrition, exercise, meditation, sleep, spiritual principles, philosophy, music, you name it, I wanted to know about it. And the more I applied to my life, the better I felt. As I started to engage with the recovery community, I noticed it cobbled together with differing technologies. The first thing I was asked on an AA Zoom meeting was for my name and phone number so I could be added to a WhatsApp group and it just felt bonkers. But it was the people I feel in love with, you cannot define a person with addition, but what was synonymous was our drive to help the still suffering and grow together. Ironically, you’ll not find a more sober or spiritually well community anywhere in the world, and this community is 100M+ worldwide. So I used my background to start Recoverlution and bring together educational content, a community platform and a dedicated to addiction wellness hub – free to join anonymously and available anytime anywhere. You can find the information you need, you can connect or build your recovery tribe and continue to build your recovery capital all in one safe space.
Can you highlight a significant achievement or turning point that played a pivotal role in your career trajectory?
We launched Recoverlution in July 2022 and our community started to grow. But what we soon noticed, was that it wasn’t just the member we needed on the platform, it was the people who support people in recovery. The service providers, the charities, the rehabs, health services and peer support groups. The more we talked with these people, the more we understood their universal digital challenges. They cant use WhatsApp (as an example) for legal reasons, so they were immediately disconnected from their people who create groups regardless. I’ve been through rehabs, and had to tell them that people had died before they were aware, just from peer communication.
Soon after, I dropped off their mailing list so they don’t know how I’m doing, how their services perform or if im even alive. So this year we are launching Recoverlution Spaces to connect the eco-system with its community. An easy-to-use technology that enables any supporting organization to showcase their services and reach the right people. I only knew about 1% of the support available to me at any given time and yet there are so many ways to recovery out there. We then embower the organization to not only grow their support systems but to they onboard their people, to maintain lifelong and safe communication and to learn from their alumni’s, cohorts, and peer groups.
How do you foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement within your company?
As a platform built for people in recovery, by people in recovery. We very much live and breath what we stand for. Recoverlution isn’t just a technology but a philosophy that strives to shine a light on the transformational power that recovery has to change lives. As the sum of all our parts, we learn from our members, partners, medical professionals and organisations to understand what it is they do and how they long to deliver it online and then creatively bring that together in a way that is intuitive, universal and ready for anyone to use. The journey of people in recovery is very much unkown and by having all the people in one place, we can learn as to what actually works at every stage of the recovery cycle to enable the amazing supporting ecosystem to better their own offerings.
We know that there is no magic wand to recovery and that its very unique to the individual. Over time, Recoverlution proposes a pioneering approach to addiction recovery – an ‘AI Journey For Recovery’. This innovation seeks to revolutionise the path to recovery by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our existing platform to create personalised recovery routes. Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, this unique tool uses AI algorithms to map out individualised recovery plans grounded on each user’s unique persona and behavioural patterns derived from their interaction with the Recoverlution system. You don’t have to hit rock bottom or spend thousands on short term rehabilitation if you can bring people into lifelong recovery sooner.
Can you share an example of a difficult decision you had to make and the factors you considered before making it?
I was very early into my own recovery journey when I started Recoverlution and I was high on the pink fluffy cloud we elegantly talk about in recovery. And with that wave, I wanted to help people immediately. Whether that was employing everyone I could, or getting the technology to people as quickly as we could. As a result, we probably launched to soon, without a lot of the research and functionality I speak of here. So we had to slow up a bit, build relationships with the eco-system and hire more effectively. I soon learnt that start-ups are tough work, especially in this economic market. A huge challenge has therefore been cash flow. We are building a huge platform, and we want to lower as many barriers to entry as we can.
For that reason, unlike your marketing platforms like Facebook, we don’t productise our members and have a freemium model that enables anyone to get started and they can pay for things they would ordinarily pay for like Wellness Apps or Zoom licenses. This is a costly way to build software and so the challenge that we’ve now accepted is to focus on a B2B2C route, whereby we build the technology for the ecosystem, that there is inherent value to pay for, and then they bring the communities – it’s a self-sustaining ecosystem.
