Editors Note: This is the first post of what will be a monthly Blog by our CEO Iain MacDonald, to be published on the first Monday of each month. Iain will be writing about anything from Entrepreneurship, Start-Ups, life as a CEO, fears, successes and anything in-between. We are sure this Blog will give a great insight into the day-to-day challenges that one may face when starting a business from the ground up. 

Starting a Venture | StartUp

The other day, a friend of mine was talking to me about his passion for marathon running. He talked about how he always aimed to finish the race within a particular time. He then described how he would pace himself during the first mile, the second and so on. All the time he was motivated by the ultimate destination, but during the race, he focused on the task immediately at hand, that being to complete the next mile in the best way he knew how.

Building a Company

I believe that building a company is in some ways similar to running a marathon. At the beginning of the journey it’s important to take time to set out clearly what your destination is. This means reflecting on what you would like to achieve for your company and imagining what it would be like to be there in three, five, ten or twenty years’ time. Then it’s about bringing it all back to today and setting out the sequence of steps that you believe you need to go through in order to reach your desired destination for your venture. This approach enables you to break down what might otherwise be an intimidating endeavour into short-term achievable objectives. It allows you to celebrate your progress as you complete each step in the sequence and it provides you with tangible evidence that you are nearing your ultimate goal.

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1(welcome)

We’re excited to share that we’ve launched a completely new version of SkillPages. With major overhauls to our design and underlying technology, the new SkillPages is intended to deliver a faster and easier way for millions of people to find skilled people and discover new work opportunities.  At the heart of SkillPages is our mission to improve the way in which people with skills connect to the people who need them.  Everything about our new version is focused on doing just this, so that our millions of members can unlock new opportunities and live more enjoyable lives.

With over 8 million people having joined the SkillPages community and added over 12 million skills, we felt it was time for ‘SkillPages 2′.  All members will now start to see their profiles in the new look and feel.  With this brand new experience, we’ve introduced the following feature improvements: Continue reading →

Today we’re excited to share that we’ve been working hard on a new look for SkillPages.  With major overhauls to our design and underlying technology, the new SkillPages will deliver a faster and easier way for you to find skilled people and discover new work opportunities.  For those of you who can see the new design we’d love to hear your feedback.  Any comments will help us shape the final product so you get the best experience possible with SkillPages.

What you will see with the new look:

1. Dashboard 

A home for all your activity on SkillPages.

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Today, we’re delighted to announce another major milestone for SkillPages.  We’ve just passed the 5,000,000 members mark and we’ve closed a $9.5 million Series B funding round. Importantly however, SkillPages as a platform is working better than ever at unlocking new opportunities for our 5 million members.  There are thousands of people getting contacted about new opportunities every day and we’ve started highlighting some of these stories on our blog.  Helping our members find skilled people and get their skill found is the focus of SkillPages and we’re committed to continuing to improve SkillPages in this area. Continue reading →

Iain Mc Donald

We’ve been busy listening to your feedback!  For the past few months, behind the scenes, the team here have been working on new designs for SkillPages.  With so many millions of people having joined the SkillPages community and added over 5.5 million skills (wow, we still can’t believe it!), we feel it’s time for an upgrade.  With this new design, we’re going to “open up” SkillPages, making it faster and easier to search for skilled people, find the perfect skilled person for your need and to see your real life trusted connections to them.

For those of you who are looking to get found by people who need your skills, the new design will make it super easy to add your skills, create beautiful SkillPages and most importantly; make it easier for you to get presented with more opportunities that are relevant to your skills.

There are two major steps to the project.

  • Step one is intended to simplify SkillPages for everyone, making it easier to use, navigate and understand.  There will be a change in design in this step also, but mainly, we’re focused on making everything simpler.  This will start happening this weekend and continue with incremental changes until the end of April.
  • Step two is to add a new “presentation layer” to SkillPages.  This will make the usability of SkillPages much easier and enjoyable.  We’ve been prototyping some cool ideas and now we’re moving them into development.  Expect to see them on the site from early May.

We’re excited and impatient to get the new design and structure out to you.  We hope you like them and as ever, we love feedback and commentary so please, keep it coming.

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