I launched a company in the midst of the UK lockdown, here’s what I learned
Recap
On June 8th 2020, after 11 months of arduous planning and various tests putting our current service together, Love Circular launched. We’re a mission-led online learning academy aiming to level the playing field for the underrepresented.
A month after launching, I wrote a blog: “Everybody has a dream; mine is seeing more people like me win” explaining who we are, our mission and why we’re here. After receiving positive feedback from our community, I made a promise to myself to keep our community in the loop — here goes!
What’s changed?
Our first offering of a three month part-time UX/UI Design course has made it to the sixth cohort. On this journey, we’ve extended our instructor network to include four UX/UI designers and two recruitment advisors who’ve successfully helped 40 students graduate. 11 of these 40 students are currently in paid roles as UX/UI or Product designers, with the average graduate in a full-time job earning £32,000 p/a. Not bad considering a year ago Love Circular was just an idea that hadn’t made it past the minds of myself, Izaac (who has now left Love Circular, on good terms of course) and my mentor Chris.
Along this journey, I faced two key challenges that I wanna write about that helped improve my personal life and my professional life.
1. Learn to accept being a leader
In learning to manage a team I’ve managed to push myself out of my comfort zone and to accept people will look to me for answers. At first, this confused me as imposter syndrome was prevalent in my daily life. I found comfort in attempting to fool myself, believing I wasn’t the one in charge. Before launching, I never had formal experience in people management; I imagine this blind spot in my arsenal was my Achilles heel that made me question my abilities. Now 6 months in, things have improved significantly, my approach to getting over this was: if I persevere long enough, I’ll find my feet and eventually figure out if I enjoy what I’m doing. If I hate it, stop — if I enjoy the process, I’ll continue. When I feel comfortable, push further to feel inadequate again, this will inevitably make me learn very fast.
2. Everybody has an opinion, choose what works for you
Running a revenue-generating operation for a day job is an entirely new reality for me. I’m fortunate to know and be surrounded by a number of people that are involved in business, in a variety of capacities — with this came a pitfall, too much advice. Whilst I’ve been grateful of the feedback given, the ability to sift out the information and guidance most applicable for my approach has been imperative. At first, there was a stronger inclination to trying to hash out ideas around the advice given. After you’ve heard a few different opinions, especially strongly contrasting ones, it’s not very hard to feel stuck and perplexed. While this might seem glaringly-obvious while reading this blog via your smartphone perched up against your bed’s headrest, picture yourself here:
You’re new to being in a position of power, and you have six team members waiting on you to schedule 1-to-1s with them, whilst also concerning ones self with strategising a more reliable sales pipeline than the uncertainty of organic social media posts. Concurrently you step in at the last minute to instruct a new cohort assigned to another instructor after three months away teaching due to a communication error.
This instance was just last Monday at 5:55 pm, a casual day. When faced with this sort of pressure, it’s easy to want to seek help from everyone one knows, I decided the best course of action was to seek wisdom of three people, two of which I believe had been in a similar predicament and another to give unbiased counsel. I discerned what I believed is practical, and discarded what was not. I leaned into my intuition. I believe it’s ok to not get everything right the first time; identify mistakes as they arise and learn fast.
What’s next for Love Circular?
A lot of change is happening within the company as we solidify our operation and processes to prepare for scaling. To keep things short and sweet, here are the main things we’re focusing on over the next few months to close 2020.
- New shorter online courses for UX and UI related modules to expand Love Circular’s educational offering.
- Sponsorships! We’re working to partner with more organisations to provide sponsorships aimed at people from underrepresented communities to improve diversity in design careers.
- New Love Circular Website on the way, this one will be our first post MVP site.
- In-house recruitment – Kieran has now come aboard full-time as Head of Recruitment and Sales, which has given us more capacity to build our internal recruitment pipeline.
Love,
Z
Special thanks to:
https://twitter.com/DeeTweets00 + https://twitter.com/oliviajai_ for proof-reading and giving feedback ❤️
