I have always been unsure about my career path. It was never something that I had planned for myself. My involvement in this field began when I was 17 years old and started helping my mum with her tutoring clients.

After completing a Foundation Diploma and then a degree in graphic design, at the age of 22, I took a year off and lived in Leeds. I fell in love with the city after a few trip there during my time at university to see different artists and DJs perform (none of whom ever came to play at my university!).

Being Employed

During this year I got my first job which was working on the shop floor in Marks and Spencer, just around the corner from the original market stall that started the company in 1884. I worked there for two months and didn’t enjoy it. The people were great, but I hated the monotonous tasks such as checking the dates on hundreds of loaves of bread stacked in layers along a row of shelves of which I could not see the end.

I had two breaks per shift. The first was a 10-15 minute break in the morning. The second was around half an hour for lunch. This wasn’t nearly enough as I had to make it up four floors of the superstore, go to my locker to get my phone and wallet and then to the canteen. 

By this time I had a few minutes to purchase and eat some food before heading back to my locker and back downstairs again. And this isn’t taking into consideration being stopped by customers on the journey.

The other seven people in my houseshare were planning to go home for the Christmas holidays and to be honest so was I. However M&S wouldn’t transfer me to a London store while I went back home so I had to leave. I don’t regret that decision at all. This was the only two months in which I have been employed by another company.

During the remainder of my time in Leeds, I did a few graphic design jobs on a freelance basis while continuing to look for a job in the city as well as doing a little tutoring and question design work.

Life After Leeds

After returning home, I continued to tutor and help the start-up while earning a little money doing so. I wanted to get a design job, but I never managed to get one straight out of university. That might have been down to my portfolio, timing, luck or maybe I just didn’t try hard enough.

I set up my own freelance design service and did a few jobs for friends and family, but again I probably didn’t market myself as well as I could have.

I also worked with a content agency start-up called ‘Cut to Content’. I met the founder through a friend’s recommendation.

We were a bunch of 20-somethings figuring out what we wanted to do in life. Some were designers, some were writers, some were photographers and videographers. I worked with them on a freelance basis on a few jobs such as designing a website for an up-and-coming musician, material for a healthy pre-work daytime rave event and designing the maps, signage, tickets and billboards for the Silicon Milk Roundabout job exhibition in London. 

I also got to work in a cool design studio in the heart of Shoreditch which I enjoyed a lot. I really liked working with them and meeting them each week but, in the end, the company didn’t take off and they stopped trading.

However, the fact remained that I was making more money from tutoring which meant that I didn’t try as hard to get another job.

After a year or two, Plan B slowly turned into Plan A and the old Plan A faded away. I was no longer looking for work elsewhere and was getting paid per hour for tutoring and using my graphic design knowledge to create non-verbal reasoning questions and designing and writing full books around the dining table (where pretty much every start-up starts!).

I was working with a team of around 10 to 12 other students and graduates, all of whom were friends, or friends of friends and family of either mine or my sisters. We taught at home after school, hired church halls and school classrooms on Saturdays and also sports halls to run hundreds of 11+ mock exams around the city which were all produced from a tiny little printer at home.

I ended up living the start-up life regardless, just not in the field I expected to. One of those friends who joined a little later stuck around and now just so happens to be my business partner.

What Did I Want to do?

As a child, I always loved the idea of being an inventor. Design technology was always my favourite subject (along with music). I loved, and still very much do love, the idea that this thing, whether an object, a piece of music or a design exists in the world due to a random idea followed by a  series of thoughts that started in my head.

I used to spend hours trying to figure out how things worked – radios, VCRs, toys, etc., and if I was lucky, there would be a piece of broken tech like an old radio that I could take apart. If not, I would be creating new inventions, buildings, or vehicles out of building blocks and whatever else I could get my hands on. I would include whatever I could find to make the invention work, not just the blocks that were in the box.

A messy sketch of my folding plug idea, designed around 3 years before Apple released theirs.

So Do I Like What I Do Now?

I do, but it wasn’t always the case. I like the entrepreneur life and I enjoy running a business more than I enjoy this particular industry of education and tutoring. The more time I spend in the business and the more I notice all the variables involved and the bottlenecks that arise when it comes to scaling, the more I question whether this will be the big thing I ultimately end up doing but equally it very well could be. 

Unlike many entrepreneurs, I haven’t failed enough. I know this sounds counterintuitive but most entrepreneurs try several different things until one of the ideas takes root and starts to grow. That has not been the case with my business.

I appreciate the fact that I don’t have to answer to anyone. I didn’t enjoy having to answer to someone else during the two months I worked at Marks and Spencer. Especially when being reprimanded for something so minor as being two minutes late to the food floor in the basement (after travelling down the four flights of stairs and dealing with customers again) or having to skip lunch to stay at the tills until 4 or 5 pm because nobody had come to take over for me.

Now, I have almost full flexibility with my work schedule due to the staff, systems and automation I have put in place over the past ten years, bit-by-bit. I could even earn the same amount of money while only working a few hours per week. I don’t personally know anyone else my age who can say the same. However, I chose to work a similar number of hours to help grow the brand and the businesses further.

I used to be envious of my friends working in the city during my twenties. They would meet new friends and potential partners through work connections and after-work drinks. Whereas the only people I met were parents and their children and this was during social hours (evenings and weekends). I would finish tutoring at 7 or 8, jump straight on the central line and join their work drinks as soon as I could.

Nowadays I appreciate not having to get on the tube during rush hour. I’m writing this in a coffee shop at 8 am while watching a load of commuters rush to the station. I may not make as much money as some of my city-working friends but I don’t think I would trade this life for a 9 to 5 and I know I don’t want to be looking at a spreadsheet for the next 30 years.

So in short, yes I do like what I am doing now and I’m enjoying the journey, which is the most important thing anyway!