Skilio — Our 5-year venture that has seen my transition from graduation, marriage and motherhood to be!
Exactly half a decade ago, I remember catching up with Felix over a cup of coffee (yes, Google photos and social media have their ways of reminding us of significant milestones at the right time!) We met each other during our university’s orientation camp and he was looking for Psychology students to develop Skilio further.
Back then, there wasn’t even an MVP built yet, and neither did we have the clearest picture of how the product would look like or eventually develop into. However, the vision was crystal clear — to help young people in their school-to-work transition and redefine success to be multidimensional beyond their grades. Most would know I was a mediocre student leading up to university, and hearing the vision of Skilio struck a chord in me. Despite having many commitments as a first-year undergraduate in university, I decided to give this a shot regardless. Never thought this would continue on for the next 5 years — but here we are today!
Thought of penning down some of my learnings over the past 5 years considering how I have been pretty quiet on LinkedIn and having to go on a maternity break soon (plus we had a public holiday this week too!). It’s been pretty tough fighting the pregnancy symptoms while trying to remain productive at work — but better now than when after the baby’s out right? 🤣
On Choosing & Forming the Right Team
Building a startup from the ground up requires more than just a great idea, product or service. It requires a great team. A few things we learnt along the way managing our team, and helping our start-ups and SMEs do the same:
- Identifying Talent: We focused on individuals who not only demonstrated the skills but also shared our vision and passion for helping young people transition from school to work. We value the diverse composition of our team because it helps us serve our clients and students from different countries better!
- Remote Management: I’m proud to say we practice what we preach! Our team members are spread across countries, so naturally, we had to develop strategies to manage our team effectively in a remote setting. We implemented regular cadence for check-ins, leveraged collaboration tools (Lark and Coda.io are our best friends), and made sure everyone stayed aligned with our goals beyond the vanity metrics, by adhering to our execution discipline.
On Humanising our Business
We have remained committed to humanising our business too. While engaging the help of technology/software are essential to help us automate processes, we’ve come to realise that technology can’t solve every problem.
- High Touchpoints: We choose to maintain frequent and meaningful interactions with both our fellows and employers. Some examples include our monthly masterminds with our fellows to catch up on how their month went, physical meetups with both our fellows and employers within and outside of Singapore, and 1–1 consultations for fellows who wish to spend more time with us crafting good application materials for their international careers. We’ve learnt that many pain points and challenges faced by both parties are so nuanced and complex — and that calls for us to be consistent with seeking feedback loops that help us do what we do better.
- Team Management: Likewise when managing our remote team, we want to ensure that the people behind the impact we make constantly feel valued and motivated. Apart from giving our team the tools and systems to succeed, the day-to-day communication with our team has to be even more intentional in building rapport and understanding their needs.
On being Open-Minded to Experiment with Different Pathways to Success
The journey was (and still is) rarely a straight path. Experimentation is still the constant, while we choose to be in constant discovery mode to “kill” our previous solutions. When our team was about to graduate from university, the climate then was challenging for us to raise money. Coupled with long sales cycles and security concerns when trying to pitch our soft skill analytics platforms to schools, it was a choice between giving up or finding alternative ways to sustain and grow our business.
- Helping ASEAN students kickstart an international career: We stumbled upon the idea of conducting skills webinars for ASEAN undergraduates seeking internships. The reception was decent for our first few runs of it and got feedback from our participants that they wanted to see more of this to help them secure international internship placements to level up their careers. From then on, we decided to take it from there by engaging more partners and schools from the various ASEAN countries.
- Resourcefulness: Along the way, we realised it was so important to be resourceful too in finding complementary avenues to build our business. For example, we ran immersion trips to Vietnam, which at the same time opened doors to career offices in Vietnamese universities that are looking for partners to help kickstart their students’ and international careers. Given a couple of years of experience we’ve had with employers and young people in ASEAN, this gave us the expertise to conduct workshops for young people given our understanding of their concerns and challenges.
On Balancing Personal & Professional Priorities
Last but not least, balancing personal and professional priorities has been one of the biggest challenges, especially with the major life transitions that Skilio has seen me experience over the past five years.
- Marriage and Parenthood: Personally, navigating the journey of marriage and as a parent-to-be has added layers of complexity to my role at Skilio. Being involved in multiple women in entrepreneurship communities has shown me that many mummy entrepreneurs have done it too. This gave me the confidence to take everything in my stride, be always ready to learn new things as they come along the way and prioritise my different aspects of life across the seasons. After all, that’s what my time in Skilio has taught me to do — it’s like running another start-up from scratch again. (And yes, I bring many of our workplace tools to manage my personal life too!)
- Support System: I am also very thankful for a supportive spouse (and family members!) who has been extremely invested in building this partnership with me, and is super excited to go through all the diaper changing, feeding, tummy times and the nurturing of a new addition to our family with me. Very thankful to the Skilio team too for being with me throughout my growing up and maturing years! It’s rare to have a venture accompany you through so many life stages, but I’m thankful we stumbled across this early in our university years :)
After 5 years, we are just getting started on the impact we hoped to make when we started Skilio back then. Whether you are a student based in Southeast Asia wanting to kickstart and international career, an employer who wants to build an intern army and support more young people in ASEAN in their school-to-work transition, or anyone else who wants to be part of this with us, do have a chat with us!! Happy to hear from mummy entrepreneurs too who have navigated the various transitions in life too — would love to learn from you!
