How SMEs and entrepreneurs are using online courses to level up their skills
It’s been well-documented that online learning has gone through a pandemic boom - but it’s not all bored home-workers learning to code/speak Japanese/do Macramé in their spare time. Small business owners too have been turning to online courses to upskill, save cash and make themselves more self-sufficient.
Along with my co-founder Lucy Cleveley, I’ve recently launched Discoco, a new platform curating the best independent online courses and injecting some much-needed fun into the often dry and worthy world of self-development. When we set out to find our “founding 50” courses to feature on the site, we weren’t sure what we’d end up with: as it stands, we have courses on everything from sex to hula-hooping to decluttering to playing the ukulele - but we’ve also been struck by the brilliant array of courses, often with a tech slant, aimed at small business owners and freelancers looking to level up their skills.
When you’re self-employed, with no boss to send you on corporate training courses, it can be hard to find the time or money to invest in your own professional development. You might have been running your business to a consistently high standard for a decade, but when did you last learn something new to enhance your offering? It’s also always a balancing act figuring out which parts of your business are worth outsourcing, and which are best done in-house, and it means that stuff like “work on social media strategy” and “relaunch website” can linger at the bottom of the to-do list eternally.
Investing in online learning can solve this problem. While paying a web design agency, social media manager or PR consultant to do the work for you can easily run into thousands, learning to do it yourself can bring much better value - many of the courses on Discoco are under £100 - as well as the chance to develop skills that could bring new satisfaction to the role you’ve been doing for ages.
One of Discoco’s founding course creators is Louise Maidment, a tech angel who runs a great Website in a Week course, helping entrepreneurs and freelancers to build their own Squarespace sites. “The people who take my courses are either fairly new in their business and need a website for the first time or they have decided it’s time for an upgrade,” says Louise. “Outsourcing web design is a significant expense which many business owners simply can’t justify at the beginning or even later on. Plus they really want to get to grips with it themselves and to have the satisfaction of having built their own site on Squarespace. It’s one thing having a website designed for you but if you haven’t got a clue how to actually use the platform, you’ll feel stuck, frustrated and scared you’re going to break it any time you want to make a change!”
Louise’s course guides her clients through the process in a clear and overwhelm-free way - which is what appealed toHelen Baimbridge of TinCup Social. “I actually built my site in three days,” says Helen. “I expected to be overwhelmed with it all but I really wasn't, and it did my confidence no end of good. I really wasn't tech savvy at the time so it felt like a massive achievement.”
Claire Brown also turned to Louise’s course when she needed a site for her coaching business and the skills she learned have boosted her own professional repertoire too. “As part of my work involves supporting small charities, I could also see how my newly developed skills in this could be of real benefit to others and enable them to manage their own website themselves without the need to source additional costly support,” she explains. “It’s enabled me to further develop my online presence, reach my clients in a really cost effective way whilst also equipping me with valuable new skills.”
Another huge area for online learning is around social media skills, with so many business owners feeling intimidated by everything they feel they should be doing - something Triinu Holman, aka Creative Puddles, has been making the most of with her Instagram Growth & Engagement course.
“There are time consuming things that people are doing on Instagram which aren’t actually getting them any results,” says Triinu. “My training teaches businesses exactly what they should focus on and how to proactively find their ideal customers and clients, without sending cold salesy DMs! I encourage them to use their own voice, their own words and to tell their own stories. This really sets them apart from their competitors and is not something that can be achieved through outsourcing.”
One of Triinu’s stand-out success stories is Wendy White of My Mood Stars, who went from 700 to 3500 followers after taking her course, and now cites Insta as her most lucrative platform. “In Wendy’s case, she has a fun, bubbly character and uses this, along with her own unique style, to showcase her business on Instagram,” says Triinu. “This is why I teach businesses how to attract their ideal customers and clients to their feed rather than actually manage their accounts for them. I fully understand what it’s like to be a solopreneur, juggling it all, so my training is practical and to the point. It can be really frustrating spending hours on Instagram with little return but armed with the right knowledge and training, it’s incredible how you can get Instagram to work for you.”
But is there a worry that, with so many people taking it upon themselves to learn these previously sought-after skills, these course creators are doing themselves out of future business? Louise says no. “I wanted to be able to help more people make the website they pictured in their mind a reality,” she explains. “The ideal client for the course would be quite a different person from a potential 1:1 client so I view it as fulfilling two different needs rather than competing.”
One of my favourite things about this explosion in brilliant, practical courses is that it has created an ecosystem of small businesses all helping each other out and learning from each other. All of the course creators on Discoco are self-employed, and many have made the pivot into online learning either out of pandemic necessity or to create an extra, passive - or at the very least low-maintenance - income stream which tops up their bank account during quiet times.
As founders, we’re building Discoco by taking some of these courses ourselves to improve our skills and knowledge of things like PR, making videos and managing our finances (with the odd sex workshop thrown in for fun, of course). Online learning isn’t just a lockdown fad - after all, just because the cinema’s open again doesn’t mean you’re about to cancel your Netflix subscription - but is rapidly becoming a secret weapon for the small business owner looking to level up.
@discoco_hq