Year 3: Building Resilience and Discovering New Opportunities | October 2019 — December 2020
This post is the last in my three-part series about Generation Entrepreneur. Check out how it all started in my first post here.
🌟 New year, new role (again)
A challenge with volunteer organisations like Generation Entrepreneur is talent retention. I’d argue that we rate highly on a typical employee satisfaction survey, but often, our top talent is ‘forced’ to leave for a full-time job or internship.
The end of 2019 was challenging because both project-leads for the Schools team left the organisation for full-time roles, leaving two large shoes to fill in the leadership team. At the time, the best decision was to promote our most senior team member, Blake, and for me to step down as COO and join him.
Blake is making waves outside of Generation Entrepreneur too — he has a newsletter side hustle about careers advice called ycompass.io — check it out!
Essentially I was demoted. It was a good test of humility and keeping my self-pride in check. However, the company needed me to be a project lead — someone who could get stuff done and lead a team.
☕️ Where can you make the most impact in whatever you’re doing? In my case, stepping up for Generation Entrepreneur meant stepping down from my flashy C-suite title.
⏰ Time is of the essence
At the start of 2020, I knew that my time at Generation Entrepreneur would end soon. I was finishing up my degree in May, meaning full-time work would start soon after.
An unspoken rule at Generation Entrepreneur: full-time jobs and leadership roles do not mix well. At least it’s not sustainable. As such, I knew that I only had six months, or 12 months at most left in the organisation.
Blake and I hit the ground running. We spent December and January strategising so we’d be ready to go once school started. Our two focuses for the year were:
- Scaling Startup 101 (our in-person program) across NSW
- Running our first inter-school entrepreneurship competition
We were running hot 🔥. By late February, we had booked in 10 schools to compete in the competition, secured venue space at the Sydney Startup Hub and a potential partnership with Finder. We had also booked in 10 in-school programs for the year, with more in the pipeline! Everything was tracking along well; actually, things were great! I was feeling unstoppable. I settled into the role, the team was working well together, and we were well ahead of our targets.
But of course, just as things were looking a bit too good to be true, COVID-19 came along. COVID-19 is probably the closest thing to a “Black Swan” event I’ve experienced so far in my career.
As hard as it was, we had to “indefinitely pause” all of our in-person events until it was safer to run in-person events. Everything came to a screeching halt. The organisation’s key revenue stream stopped, the team felt lost, and I felt heavy knowing that my final year was looking like a real disaster.
☕️ I believe it’s difficult to “prepare” for Black Swan events — they are the unknown unknowns for a reason. The best we can do is make sure we’re in a position to respond to whatever is thrown at us.
💡Pivoting into the digital world
The following period felt numb, but we refused to let COVID-19 define our year. Blake and I even put together a post-COVID-19 strategy presentation for the team. Our new priorities of the year were:
- Digital learning — develop an online program that could be run by teachers or students themselves
- Content strategy — create a new channel to keep in touch with our network of teachers
- Team development — ensure our current team members are engaged, hire two new members and develop future leaders.
☕️ Pivoting in motion is difficult, but having a firm conviction on the new direction is crucial to reorient the ship as fast as possible.
🔑 New normal, new opportunities
Shortly after Sydney went into lockdown, one of the careers advisors we had previously worked with reached out to us for a program. This was the spark we needed.
The requirement was to run a fully-remote, 6-week program for year 10 and 11 students while home-schooling. And the program should start in 6 weeks. While the lead-time was short, we knew we could not pass off this opportunity.
What happened after was quite impressive. As a team, we created an entire online schools program called Startup+. This business-building competition which included six content modules hosted on an online learning platform and a Microsoft Teams space for students to contact the GE team. All of this happened in a month!
It was a bit of a bumpy ride (as with most things) and our main challenges included:
- Timing of the program. We had to extend the program by two weeks to accommodate for exams. As a result, students started to lose engagement as their focus turned to study.
- Marking submissions every week. While this was beneficial for student outcomes, it is not a good idea for creating scalable programs.
Despite the challenges, I still firmly believe that the program was a success for many reasons.
- The 74 students who participated rated us 4.1/5 on average — not bad for a pilot program, if I don’t say so myself. One student had this to say about Startup+: “Generation Entrepreneur teaches concepts that schools don’t cover…business is a skill that should be taught, but it isn’t. This is why I appreciate Startup+…”
- The careers advisor was also happy with the program saying that the students have even started a new business club because of our programs!
- I’m most proud that this team created a successful pilot program under so many constraints.
While Startup+ was not the only program that Generation Entrepreneur ran during the year, it was one of my highlights. Check out our case study here.
☕️ Uncertain times are the best times to be running low-cost, low-risk experiments. Use this time to your advantage.
🌥️ The silver lining
In the second half of the year, COVID-19 restrictions started to lift, and students returned to school. We were able to begin rerunning some of our in-person programs. I can’t begin to describe how happy the team was to work with students again.
In the last blog post, I talked about how proud I was that we worked with over 1200 students over 2019. Well, in 2020 we didn’t come anywhere close to that number: 458 students over 30 schools.
In truth, I’m not disappointed at all that we didn’t ‘beat’ last year’s numbers. We didn’t achieve any of the original goals we set for the year! However, as I always say to Blake — it wasn’t the year we planned, but we still achieved a hell of a lot nonetheless:
- We ran a pilot program for online entrepreneurship learning — something we can take into 2021
- We started a Generation Entrepreneur newsletter!
- We hired new members and built up a fantastic team who are more than ready to smash it in 2021.
Yes, COVID-19 sucked and ruined my original plans for a triumphant end to my time at Generation Entrepreneur. Still, looking back at what we’ve done, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
☕️ This is a cheesy one: always look on the bright side of things. Anchoring old expectations to the past will likely lead to disappointment.
🤔 Year ??: What’s next?
I’m 22 and ‘retiring’ from my first job; I never thought I’d experience the feeling of retiring this early on. I’ve always said, “You know it’s a good time to leave if you know that you’ve done everything you want to do and learned everything you wanted to learn.”
After three years at Generation Entrepreneur, I’m more than satisfied.
