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Day: April 15, 2025

Sales Meeting

Just completed the weekly Sales Meeting at SkilledUp Life today. We discussed the positive story of one of our customers and how to amplify it. This is almost an ideal customer reference. Hope the team left motivated.

Rebuilding Deal Lite Team

I just completed my weekly meeting with the Deal Lite team. Our team has shrunk from about 20 to less than a handful. We need to re-energise, starting with building our HR team first. Francisca recently joined from Nigeria. I’m on the hunt for another HR Volunteer – ideally Chinese. Then we are going to rebuild the Cap Table team. We will be taking on a past Nigerian team member who moved to Canada recently and a youngster from India, both will volunteer for us in exchange for gaining experience and skills.

TCMCR60 is on 23rd April

The next Techcelerate Coffees Manchester 60 (TCMCR60) will be on 23rd April at Coffee Hive in Manchester Piccadilly. Grab a ticket – respect our rules TCMCR are pure networking events where tech founders and investors alike can mingle with Techcelerate members, partners and specialists. Guests can attend one event free per year. Regulars are asked to join Techcelerate, which is home to tech founders of the North. From 2006 to 2013, we built Manchester and North West’s tech startup ecosystem when tech startups were not very well known. Some of the superstars of Manchester today were very much part of…

China50k Plan

What is China50k or Chinese50k? It’s an audacious plan by me to acquire 50,000 of the 150,000 Chinese Students and Graduates in the UK and provide them with an option to acquire UK experience and skills through SkilledUp Life. Crazy, hah! Perhaps. To achieve this, we need to recruit 30 Chinese UK graduates into SkilledUp Life.

SkilledUp Life Signs MoU with Accelerate Me

I had the privilege to speak at an Accelerate Me session last Tuesday. Yesterday, I signed a Accelerator Partnership Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with their President, Jasper Lee. Under this Agreement, Accelerate Me cohort members can benefit from 20% discount on SkilledUp Life price plans.

Getting things wrong – two resigns

In my effort to be efficient (I’m still a slacker), I seem to have dropped all the niceties. My sentences are straight forward. I still use please but they are more to the point. I don’t write long essays when emailing. I try to keep things compact. I seem to have removed the filters, which means output can be quite row. Sadly, this drove two of my invaluable team members to resign over the weekend. “Yes, we decided to resign because we felt that the working environment at SkilledUp Life was not as supportive or friendly as we had hoped…

Evolving SkilledUp Life Product Team

Started with just me and my lead developer, we started to bring on SkilledUp Life volunteers at the end of December 2024. Now the team has expanded into: Head of Product – me Product Manager Lead Developer (only full timer) Back-end Developer Lead Designer UI/UX Designers Front-end Developers QA User Tester Next would be to add DevOps. Image credit: ChatGPT

Wisdom Bites #2 – Be Yourself

Perhaps a better phrase would be authentic. I think there are subtle differences between being yourself and being authentic. There’s also another term be genuine. We can pretend to be someone else in some cases, but in my opinion, this could lead to heaps of problems. No one is perfect. Painting a picture of perfection could lead to disasters, especially when you have to be right all times. It’s much easier to be you and yourself and access the roughness that comes with it. If you pretend and if you are not genuine, people will eventually find out. When they…