Meet Natasha Syed, founder and CEO of SkilledIn Green and a key figure in the Professional Sustainability Hub, specializing in jobs and skills within the industry.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your family?
I was born in Ukraine, but until I turned 30, I spent my time equally between Ukraine and Poland.
At that time, Ukrainians were not always looked at positively and I found myself often in a defending position, where my intellect and ethics were questioned just because of the passport I hold.
I guess this had a profound influence on me, as it shaped my empathy and deeply rooted need to prove that people's capabilities are largely independent from where they are from, or even what is their previous experience.
It also taught me cultural curiosity and the importance of broadening one's worldview as we do not live anymore in cultural isolation and cross-border migration requires "host" countries to develop a sense of respect for cultures different than theirs.
Have you had any formal training or family business?
Since I was very little, I have always found creative ways to earn money - such as selling roses from my grandmother's garden or importing and selling clothes on e-commerce sites during my early studies.
My belief, however, was that you can study anything and yet do something totally different.
I got my bachelor’s in International Economics and master’s in International Business, which, I must say, gave me some broader business preparation, but I wouldn't call it the targeted training.
Most of the things I know about running a startup I either learned from books or my own practice. Sadly, sometimes we have to make our own mistakes to fully internalize the learnings.
How did you come up with the idea for your business, and what was the process of turning that idea into a reality?
What we currently have is significantly different from the original idea. We pivoted at least twice since the company's conception.
It all started with the research on the skill gaps in young graduates as compared to the expectations from the job market.
This area became of interest to me seeing my younger sister paralyzed by fear while choosing what to study, as she was afraid it wouldn’t be relevant by the time she graduated.
The beginning of the first product was very challenging, since as a solo female non-technical founder, I was not particularly in a privileged position.
I worked for almost a year with an outsourcing company, the resulting product of which we fully scrapped after finalizing our collaboration.
That's also when we started working on the current product - a brainchild of brainstorming with me at that time Product Team Lead.
We decided to keep our focus on skill gaps, but specialize in a specific niche, which was the green economy.
How have you grown as a leader since starting your company, and what have been some of the key lessons you've learned along the way?
The hardest thing was letting go of my controlling nature. This is especially difficult in fully remote settings, where our team is scattered across the world.
What I did eventually is fully opposite of what my nature would dictate - we have no set work hours, no hours clocking, and a lot of other flexibilities.
Of course, not everyone would find themselves fully productive in these settings. I was fortunate to build a team with an extremely strong sense of ethics and we also created our own trust-based culture.
If there's a single most important learning from this - it's that focusing on culture from the outset and having an open dialog with your team on why we do what we do and how each of them is the owner of a piece of the solution, but accountable for its totality - can be the backbone of success in early-stage startups.
Can you tell us about a time when you faced a major setback or failure in your business, and how you overcame it?
Failure is not often found in my vocabulary, and because of this, it's difficult to recall any specific situation that could be labeled this way.
Of course, we have a lot of challenges, but we've learned to view them as temporary conditions, and an unescapable reality of startups.
My approach is always to seek a lesson from what happens and to extrapolate it into the future.
One thing that I find helpful to keep in the right mindset is thinking that we grow forward, and when a similar situation happens in the future - we'll be equipped to manage it much better because we learned a lesson when we were smaller when the situation didn't impact us.
How do you stay motivated and focused on your goals, especially during challenging times?
I am tempted to say that at an early stage, every time is a challenging time.
The dynamic and unpredictable nature of startups puts you on a never-ending rollercoaster, and you just need to strap yourself in, but can't step down.
However, being in the front row of this ride, it's important to remember about all the people behind you.
For me, my team is the biggest motivator - I feel personally responsible for ensuring they have a stable and thriving career, which helps me to keep on doing my job in the face of challenges and setbacks.
How do you balance your personal life with the demands of running a business?
Unfortunately, this is one area where I am the least proud of myself.
While I have pretty good time-management and prioritization skills, which allow me to achieve a lot, I am still doing the job of a few people, which comes at the cost of my personal life.
One thing though that I do my best to ensure is getting quality sleep and mindfulness practice as often as possible and having some "emergency" breaks, when for example I am sick and understand that pushing myself more would only deepen my burnout.
So now, I have more of a work-burnout balance, but not yet much "life" in it. Having said that, I plan to work on this as soon as we hire people to take over my non-core work.
What are your plans for the future of your business, and how do you see yourself evolving as a founder and leader?
Of course, I want to achieve great success for us, which I define by the number of people we help and the geographies we are present in.
I do assign some monetary/revenue values to the success as well, but perhaps it's not that important to discuss as long as we can sustain and grow our operations.
We have a multi-generation vision for how our company and products could evolve, but we also do not want to be too rigid about it, as we pride ourselves on reacting quickly to changing external conditions as well as user feedback.
Too strict plans are a thing of the past - now we need open mindsets and sharp observation skills.
Currently, our team is very small and I do envision significant growth for it.
However, we do not aspire to become a company with thousands of employees - but to have a smaller team with a strong culture and leverage technology to scale our operations.
Staying small is also important for us to maintain our global culture.
As a leader, I still have a lot of things to learn. But one thing that I keep in mind is how I nurture more leaders from within the company, one of which will eventually take on my role.
My passion is product and I believe that's where my time results in the most outcomes.
Being a CEO, CPO, CFO, and all other Cs now definitely takes a lot of time and focus.
If I had to choose one of those, it would either be Product or Cybersecurity as my leadership progression.
If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
Build your support network.
I am still not good at this, but taking a much more proactive approach to reaching out and connecting. It's hard to do this when you have a list of pressing priorities, but it should be looked at as building your long-term social capital.
Especially when you are running your business alone, there are times you feel no one understands your struggles and even friends and family may not be the right audience to reach out to and discuss some of your obstacles.
Having people on the same wavelength and keeping in touch with them regularly may often be that missing piece of motivation to keep on going.
What's the most unconventional thing you've done to grow your business, and what was the result?
I don't think I've done anything unconventional yet in growing the business, but I do see an urgency and need for this approach.
We are saturated with messages on digital media and reaching people who may benefit from the solutions we offer is becoming progressively more difficult.
This is one of the times when our marketing needs a big-bang transformation rather than incremental change in approach.
And this transformation perhaps will start with some less conventional approaches, which I am eagerly awaiting for.
What's the most important lesson you've learned from a failure, and how have you applied it to your business?
From my personal life, once again, I wouldn't call it a failure, but definitely a lesson.
I was once a victim of a scam where I paid a downpayment for an apartment, before seeing it, driven by fear of losing a great opportunity, which was skillfully engineered by the scammers.
What I learned is limited trust which helped me years later in a business situation.
Even though everything seemed to be in order and the government organized the program, our potential business partner did not seem right.
There were multiple signs that I was trying to ignore, but the final drop was the request for my signature that could be pasted in the documents, as opposed to having an e-sign.
I decided not to pursue the collaboration, which should have resulted in a government grant.
I later learned that the said person was actually gaming the system and she needed signatures from multiple parties without their knowledge of what would be the final document.
Because in that document I was listed as the project lead, we would face significant financial losses and be burdened with reporting not only on our progress but other parties as well.
I believe intuition is our tacit knowledge and we do need to rely on it when something doesn't feel right.
What's the most meaningful compliment or feedback you've ever received from a customer, and why did it resonate with you?
It always fuels me to hear that what we do makes a difference.
We've received many compliments and positive feedback about our platform, some of which were sent in a private message or shared with me verbally.
Some of these messages I screenshot and share with the team, which is also very motivated by the positive feedback.
For us, every feedback matters - good or bad.
We are building Skilledin Green for our users, not for ourselves, so when somebody takes the time to share their thoughts about our product - it means the world to us.
If you had to choose one thing that makes your company truly unique and sets it apart from the competition, what would it be, and why?
I think what differentiates us the most is our future-focused orientation and quick adaptability to changing conditions.
We envision a very specific future of work - inclusive, technology-driven, and sustainable.
There's no single answer to how we get there, but what is for sure, is that Skilledin Green wants to play a big part in making it happen.
In terms of why it's important to have this orientation, I believe it's self-explanatory.
We can see many changes happening around us and as a society we are not fully equipped to respond to them in time - be it environmental factors or technological advancement driving job transformation.
When we prepare for what's to come, our society becomes much more efficient, let alone feeling safer.
Find Natasha Syed on Social Media:
1. Personal LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/natasha-syed/
2. Company LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/53239243/
3. Websites: https://green.skilledin.io / https://recruiter.skilledin.io
4. Email address: [email protected]
Hope you enjoyed reading Natasha Syed’s story!
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