"Approach every day like continuing education" with Bhavneet Chahal
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Bhavneet is co-founder and CEO of GoSkills.com. After completing degrees in Molecular Biotechnology and Entrepreneurship, Bhavneet founded several startups and worked at a range of companies, including the world’s fastest-growing e-commerce marketplace, Groupon. It was during her time at Groupon that Bhavneet saw the opportunity to create online courses for busy working professionals. Bhavneet enjoys hiking, reading, and traveling to exotic locations.
Can you tell our readers about your background?
I am passionate about providing accessible and affordable education for both unemployed adults as well as working professionals. I co-founded GoSkills in 2013, an online education company that provides courses to help people learn practical business skills to get a new job, upskill for their current jobs or to stay relevant in the workplace in the face of changing technologies.
What inspired you to start your business?
I want to see working professionals reskill and upskill more easily given the fact that the roles we take on after a formal education often allows for more flexibility. I also am very interested in alternative education and changes that broadband access is bringing across the globe.
Where is your business based?
The company is incorporated in New Zealand, but since our team is remote and distributed, we have team members all over the world, including North America, Hong Kong, Spain, South Africa, and New Zealand.
How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?
I saw a market opportunity while working at Groupon in Sydney, Australia. I noticed that online courses were selling like hotcakes on Groupon, and Excel courses were the top-selling products.
But I was appalled at the level of quality. When the opportunity presented itself to provide higher quality courses and to use Groupon as a distribution channel, I partnered with some former colleagues in New Zealand, who created the technology behind GoSkills, and together, we embarked on this business.
The money that it took to get GoSkills off the ground was self-funded by myself and my co-founders. We have since reinvested profits from the business to grow. So we are “bootstrapping” rather than taking venture capital.
What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?
When we first started out, we sold our courses on the Groupon platform. This provided great exposure for our business as our courses were advertised to millions of consumers worldwide.
Over time, as the daily deals industry slowed down, we focused more on gaining exposure through search engine rankings. So if you search for our courses on Google or Bing, we should appear at the top of the results page.
Today, we have a dedicated marketing team working on content marketing, search engine optimization and public relations to continually raise awareness of GoSkills.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
The biggest work challenge is simply ensuring our business pulls through the crisis and is not negatively impacted in the long run. We have also hired two new people during the pandemic, and it’s important to us that they feel secure with their new positions.
We have offered free months of learning for those who have canceled their subscriptions due to COVID-19, offered a discount on our yearly subscription, and created free COVID-19 and Work-From-Home courses for businesses to share with their teams. All in a short window of time.
I’m very proud of my team, and I believe that a continued need for our bite-sized business courses, even after some of us have returned to the office and roles have shifted, will continue to help us grow.
How do you stay focused?
I embrace online collaboration, project management, and communication tools. The GoSkills team relies on Slack, Trello, Google Drive, and Zoom to get things done.
I trust in my team, that the work is being done.
I over-communicate. It may seem silly while you’re doing it, but it reduces chances of miscommunication and has the added benefit of making remote work less isolating.
All of these things also maintain our work culture - we remember to have fun and connect with coworkers on a personal level.
How do you differentiate your business from the competition?
GoSkills focuses on providing practical business skills through a micro-learning format. All our courses are broken down into 3-5 minute video lessons, followed by a short quiz. This approach has been shown to increase retention by 20% and learning speeds by 28%.
What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Approach every day like continuing education. It’s important to learn from your past mistakes and failures, to help inform your future decisions.
Also, surround yourself with the smartest people you know and bring people along for the ride with you. You will need to motivate others around you, and by listening to their experience and factoring their approach, you will succeed faster. No one does it alone.
What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?
I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter as a young adult. It advocates the importance of financial literacy, financial independence, and building wealth, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to start a business.
What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why?
The most important and favorite tools are communication tools for us. Right now we are using a combination of Slack, Trello, Google Drive, and Zoom to get things done...but when Slack recently had an outage, we went nuts!
Who is your business role model? Why?
I respect Richard Branson tremendously. His early life story and what he went through to get where he is is inspiring and a great read as well!
How do you balance work and life?
This is really important if you want to succeed. Stick to a typical work day...whether 9-5 or not...just set your hours and get into a regular routine. Then once you are finished, you need to be diligent about switching off. I don’t like to take calls or reply to emails in the evenings -- although these days I need to more often than not!
What’s your favorite way to decompress?
I love to escape by watching movies or getting lost in a book.
What do you have planned for the next six months?
We have a number of product features we will be rolling out to make learning more fun. More games, challenges, and social learning. For our Enterprise and Business users - more features for remote training.
How can our readers connect with you?