Russell Teale will never forget the moment he thought he was having a heart attack.
He’s the founder of award-winning Vivify, which helps schools hire out facilities outside the normal teaching hours.
At the time he was working for his previous business FiTR, described as the Uber-style health and fitness app.
Teale co-founded the business after leaving Total Fitness in 2017 after nearly 10 years, where he’d risen up through the ranks to operations director.
He left FiTR in 2019 and his wife was pregnant with their second child when the stress of making ends meet suddenly hit him.
“It’s a bit like that weird psychology that you can see your money go down,” he told The Naked Founder podcast. “You’re not quite getting that traction. You’ve just had another investment meeting.
“I was just sitting in my living room at home and what sounded like a knock at the door was this big thud in my chest and I thought ‘oh my God’ and I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack.”
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After wearing a health monitor, it was diagnosed as a panic attack.
His sliding doors moment came when he landed a role as head of operations at School Letting Solutions.
Although he was one of nearly 1,000 staff to leave their jobs at the company, he set up Vivify in 2020 at the age of 37.
Today Vivify employs 500 people, is set to grow turnover from £8m to £12m this year. At the same time, the startup has given more than £10m back to schools and raised £2m in investment.
He bootstrapped the business until 2022, when he raised £1m from Arete, which included high profile investors Bill Currie and former Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy.
In 2021 Vivify was undergoing a lot of change when his mum Janice took ill.
Vivify founder Russell Teale with his mum Janice
She was a single mum who took three jobs when her son was young and couldn’t resist rehoming stray cats. She died of blood cancer on New Year’s Day 2022.
“We’d have £10 left and she’d speak to someone and lend them £10 and the electricity would go off,” he told The Naked Founder podcast.
“My mum instilled in me at a very young age what resilience was but I didn’t know it.”
Teale won the Judges’ Award at the 2025 Northern Leaders Awards and urged other founders to build up their own network.
“I left Total Fitness with no network,” he said. “I put all my life into Total Fitness.
“When I came out and I suddenly had to get a job and I didn’t have anything.
“Over the past 12-24 months I’ve built such a strong network. I didn’t know the real power of what that could be.”
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