Whilst we have an amazing team at SkilledUp Life and I appreciate everything they do (except Mithun and me, all others are Volunteers), I am really annoyed at myself for the slow progress we have achieved.

If SkilledUp Life is a venture-backed tech startup, I would most likely be fired by now as the CEO, as I have not managed to get the best out of our team.

We seem to be a ship that is floating, but not a ship that creates waves. As one teammate mentioned a few weeks ago, perhaps we had fatigue from the marathon that turned into a sprint in the last week of July, when we attempted to hit our primary target of onboarding 10,000 Volunteers in our second year. We achieved the target but 9 days after.

Two months have passed since then and we can no longer use the same excuses. We had all the learnings we needed from 26 months of operating SkilledUp Life. Everything needs to improve. I know I remain a key bottleneck for many decisions taken but not implemented well. I certainly need to up my game.

In Oct, I want to achieve the followings:

Country Specific Teams

Build country-specific teams starting with #Philippines. I’m interviewing the third person (sales) on Monday and if that works out, then we will have

• Volunteer Acquirer – Maria is already delivering great results and is a pleasure to work with even though she reports to Mithun and not me.
• HR Recruiter – I recruited Mary in less than 12 hours but delegated onboarding which took weeks.
• Customer Acquirer – interview on Monday.
• Support Hero – not essential, but could be useful.

Then I want to get this sub-team to operate as an agile and dynamic unit (not something we have experimented with in the past). If we can achieve this, then we can launch this model in other countries.

Our tech startup customers can also benefit from our experience and attempt to replicate the same for their products and companies. Did you know that it only costs £30/month to start tapping into our nearly 14,000 free talent pool from 92 countries?

Rapid Recruitment

Our recruitment process has suffered significantly due to being headless since Feb. We need to find a strong HR leader (Volunteer). I simply do not have the time to work with the HR team. Secondly, I bring no value due to a lack of any HR education, training or experience to improve the experience we provide to our own HR team members. Remember, everyone is here to gain more Experience through real planning and execution to improve their career prospects.

The change I want to make is that every HR team member will now be responsible for:

• Volunteer sourcing.
• Interviewing.
• Preparation of Volunteer Agreement and obtaining signatures.
• Onboarding.
• Looking after those onboarded.

Currently, these tasks are split across the team, which has created its own bottlenecks.

If I interview an applicant, I will also execute all the above activities, instead of delegating. Perhaps this is not a great use of CEO time, but it’s actually not hard. Just a matter of doing.

Our Performance in September

We have not managed to improve customer acquisition. We suffer from churn due to many reasons. All we have achieved is replacing the churn and the total number of customers remains at 29. The key problem in our customer acquisition strategy is due to not having a sales team. I am the only person responsible for sales. This has to change. As an experiment, we are going to explore generating sales through country-specific teams. A lot more needs to be done in this area.

Our MRR target was to achieve £10,000 by end of October 2022. This looks like an impossible feat to achieve now based on past performance.

In our third year of Operation, we need to add 100,000 Volunteers. Our performance over the last two months has been terrible.

As you can see, we have significant targets to hit in October. Let’s go team!