Wow, and just like that we’re in 2020 – somehow it still doesn’t seem that long ago that it was the early 2000’s. Awfully cliche, but it must be said!
As I spoke about in my previous blog post, I recently decided to set up Seedling Consulting – an independent consultancy with the ultimate goal of growing NZ’s social enterprise sector. Part of my journey right now is identifying the skills I already have as well as focussing on learning and building out my own capabilities. I have to say, it can difficult to know where to start!
Fortunately, there’s no better time for reflection than the New Year and I’ve been able to do a lot of thinking as I’ve been doing my various jobs around the house. From painting fences to weeding to dog-proofing our house (photos of dog to follow later on!), it’s been a busy few weeks which has meant a lot of time for thinking!
So, as a result of all this thinking as well as fighting with my typically-kiwi, built-in ‘tall poppy’ syndrome, I have identified some key skills! The obvious opportunity for me to assist businesses is with their banking and finance – think tailored packages of spreadsheets & information that can be provided to your bank or maybe take it back a notch and just think, “what can my bank even do for me?” I also have a head for operations, administration, and research – I’m not trying to be a specialist in anything right now but a jack-of-all-trades who can ease a multitude of different stresses within any business.
In the name of being a generalist, I’m committing myself to learning a bunch of different cloud platforms that I may need to use such as Xero, Trello, and Shopify. In fact, mucking round on Shopify and working out how to code a website is one of more frequent past-times right now – I am loving the creative challenge overlaid with the technical nature of building a website. I’ve unexpectedly realised this is an area I’m really interested in helping small businesses with!
I’m also committed to learning about digital marketing and have been learning A LOT from the wonderful Google Digital Garage platform – check out the ‘Fundamentals of Digital Marketing’ course if you’re keen to know more.
And that’s not even talking about the soft skills that I have and that I know I will need during this journey. I expect I’m going to learn a lot about myself and how I can best work with others. More on this next week!
P.S. Really keen to hear recommendations from anyone on other cloud platforms I should be looking into!