Hellen Bowey, CEO of Alcove, discusses her journey from Teesside to founding Alcove in 2014. Alcove uses smart sensors, AI, wearables, and video calling to support over 20,000 users, including older and disabled adults.
Hellen’s career has moved through high-impact, operationally complex sectors including parking, highways, and now social care tech. She values managing profit and losses and operations and building systems and processes from the ground up. She has considerable expertise in turning overlooked markets into sustainable, scalable businesses.
Hellen was born into a working class community in Billingham, Teesside. She was an ambitious, boisterous child, neither of which were valued by her peers or community. Therefore, she had a plan from an early age to escape her hometown, and the first step was to go to university where she studied at Newcastle Business School.
I had my exit strategy worked out about the age of 10 from Billingham, and I managed it when I went to uni in Newcastle. And so effectively technology didn’t exist at that point in Teesside, you either you became a carer, a hairdresser, or you worked in the crisp factory. If you’re a woman, that’s all the jobs that there were. And I remember I said I wanted to be a barrister to the careers advisor at school, and I don’t think she laughed at me, but I don’t think it was a particularly positive sentiment, put it that way!
She didn’t end up going into law, but was attracted by the world of business. She loved Business Studies A-Level and then at University her energy was focused into studying economics, finance and strategy.
After university, Hellen applied for University Graduate schemes and got on the scheme at Adidas in Manchester. She worked in merchandise planning, which included some chartered accountancy. Here she learned how big business worked. She loved the spreadsheet work but chafed against the corporate rules. One of her university friends had left to start a small business chipping Playstations (before Sony made it illegal). He was doing well in the dot com boom, so Hellen rang him up and offered to be his receptionist with the aim of helping him run his business. In the end, she took it over!
They’d fix someone’s Play Station and it would come back, and it wouldn’t be working. So I built this system that when something came in through the door, rather than a big box, a big mountain of boxes on the floor in the middle of the unit, it would be unpacked straight away, put on the shelf, assigned a code, put into the database. We’d then give the technicians their assigned workload, and they’d be docked on the basis of any errors and rework, which meant we didn’t have hundreds and hundreds of calls coming through on the phone, and just on a loop every day of people complaining. So, I fixed all those problems, and I loved it!
When the time came to move on, her next job was in car parking, working for an American company called Central Parking System. The UK subsidiary was acquired by a European parking business called APCOA.
My career has kind of traversed, mostly unsexy, dirty industries – one day I hope to work in something that’s quite glamorous! I worked in car parking at the time, where they didn’t even have indoor loos. You had to go to the pub next door in any of my car parking offices to go to the loo!
Hellen started off with one car park, and asked her boss how to acquire more. He showed her how to use Excel workbooks to do bidding. As it was an American company, staff were driven by their KPIs and depended on them maximising the commercial potential of their assets. Hellen used Excel to analyse and predict use of the car parks and did a deal with a local shopping centre to acquire two more. This led to a bonus and promotion to General Manager when she was in her 20s, unusual in her company as other General Managers were 50 year old men.
It was the best training programme ever, because they were brutal, and he didn’t give me any dispensation because I was a young woman in my early 20s. He just saw business people as business people. It was fascinating to do that, and I learnt then how important it is to be on your forecast. So always understand and predict what your revenue streams are going to look like, and your success is built upon how close you can get to your forecast. That was something, as a principle, that I still always drive through now.
Hellen’s next job was in Civil Highways Engineering, managing 150 engineers in Hertfordshire. She was brought in to renew a large contract with Hertfordshire County Council, Amey and LaFarge. Here she worked on client management, governance, and people management. She found she had a skill for weeding out low performers who were hindering a project. After she successfully re-won a major contract (around £15m per year for three years, c. £45m total) the engineering company wanted to move into car parks, so she ended up working back in car parking again!
Hellen started work for Capita, initially to build a parking business. Instead she identified social care as a more strategic space. She noted that existing telecare was essentially pull cords and re-purposed BT landlines. She saw an opportunity to build an Internet of Things (IoT) based platform to support older and disabled adults at home. She drafted a business plan for Capita, but they decided not to go ahead with it. This made Hellen decide to leave and pursue the idea herself.
I spotted that there was an opportunity to produce a technology platform to provide insights to keep people safe at home that mirrored the principles of the current status quo… [buyers] just wanted telecare boxes, they want an easy life, they don’t want all the friction that comes with a new system … So, you have to really keep things simple for them. So, keeping the spend low and effectively keeping the amount of features low in the early days was a part of the bedrock that has led to us being such a successful business now, and being the real pioneer in this space with the best traction and the best numbers.
Hellen co-founded Alcove in 2014, leaving a well paid, secure role at Capita. She took on personal financial risk and early cash flow stress. The strategy from the outset was to build only the minimum viable tech and avoid over-engineering and feature bloat. They wanted to grow slowly and resiliently in a conservative market and use client contracts and real-use cases to decide what to build next. Alcove focuses on sensors, wearables, and video calling to support independent living for older and disabled adults and works directly with local authorities and the NHS on social care technology.
COVID 19 was a major inflection point for the business. They rapidly delivered about 5,000 video care phones for multiple councils (Kent, Essex, Suffolk). This meant building end-to-end logistics, onboarding, and device management systems under extreme time pressure. This demonstrated large-scale impact on loneliness, communication and remote care, and led to the creation of a virtual care agency. Here, trained care workers deliver visits via secure video. Alcove have since won large managed service deals such as Suffolk County Council’s £15m contract.
Alcove’s technology has been used to detect cuckooing and exploitation in learning disability cases and reduce costs and risk in domestic violence and falls scenarios. They support dementia, wandering, UTIs, loneliness and other issues through data and AI. Recently Alcove has heavily invested in AI and automation and set a goal to triple business volume and value in 3–4 years by automating repetitive work and re-skilling staff to manage and oversee AI systems. Hellen envisions autonomous robots in social care within 5–10 years and wants Alcove to be among the first to deploy them.