So I think one of the keys to success or being able to understand that is, okay who are my clientele, how do I make, you're not going to make everybody happy but how do I make people and customers understand that I'm here to, you know, help them, right? And make it easier for them, like my product is to help them learn about technology.
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Do you consider yourself resilient? And what does that even mean to you? In this podcast Resilient Entrepreneurs with Two Four One, we chat with business owners about what resilience means to them, and we go deep.
What we've learned running our own business, is you're never alone, even when it feels like it. So tune in anytime to this podcast we're always here for you celebrating resilient entrepreneurs, just like you. We are Laura and Vicki from Two Four One, a marketing company for early stage business owners who want to launch, grow and be resilient.
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Coral Wells has been named The Woman of the Year and the most inspiring woman in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) by the Bermuda government. Coral is our resilient entrepreneur guest today. She's Bermuda's most recognised woman in technology education, and for good reason. She's humble, yet she's a powerhouse of knowledge, her years of experience and driven passion brings today's tip to young people in a way that creates opportunities for them. Coral’s charity, Connectech paves the way for young students to discover and fall in love with technology and continuous learning and her programs open doors to that cool side of tech, the coding, the programming, the robotics, the artificial intelligence, I admit, I'm super interested in all that myself, and also mobile app development, as well as the fundamental basics of office computing, spreadsheets, and all the things that you need just to survive in the business world. And Coral is on a mission, to inspire young people to follow their passion, and to follow the love of learning tech. So we're so excited to welcome you to Resilient Entrepreneurs Coral, you are a mover and a shaker, you're a mentor to many, you're a visionary, and we're just in awe of how you do it all. This podcast is all about developing resilience in business so we can thrive. So I must ask what is your secret to success?
So I guess everybody's secret to success is going to be different, right? And I don't know if there's one right answer to this, I would probably have to say, just doing what you love and being passionate about it. I feel that if, we spend so much time at work, compared to not at work or home or our other life that you have to love what you do. And if you don't love what you do, how do you expect to be successful? Because when you love what you do, you're going to put 150% into it or more, yeah, so I'm all about following your passion. You’ve got to do what you love.
Yeah, and it's clear you do because it comes through in everything that you share that you do with the kids, they love you and love your camps and your classes, and all the great things that they get to do, through you. So speaking of kids, what were you like, as a kid? What was your first job? Were you a bit of an entrepreneur or did that come later for you?
So I think my first job, or one of my first jobs, I think I get my entrepreneurial spirit from my mom. She was an entrepreneur, she owned Devil's Hole, the aquarium. And so my first job was cutting bait to feed the fish. Yeah. Right. You know, so I remember at 14-15 years old, I used to have to work in that gift shop, I used to have to feed the fish, clean up right alongside of my mom being the entrepreneur. So I feel that that's where I got the bug from and she had many different sorts of jobs and companies that she owned as well. So I think that's where I got it from.
Great to have a mentor like that in your own family. So what do you recall was your first more entrepreneurial gig? What did you create to make money?
Right out of college I started doing a little bit of freelancing and so I went to university or college for graphics, computer graphics. So I can actually speak to kids when they say, Oh, I'm going overseas to study graphics, and I turn around and say, Oh, you don't want to do that! You come back to Bermuda unfortunately there is no demand for graphics, there's no demand for Computer Graphics right now, there are very few, very few jobs in Bermuda, even I would even say worldwide, right? It's kind of a stepping stone into the tech arena and so that's what I did. I started doing some freelancing, I worked for Island Press, things like that. And I did some freelancing and it was tough, it was really tough, because I think freelancing in Bermuda isn't too bad but then I moved to America, after a little while I moved to America with my husband, and now you're competing against the rest of the world, as a freelancer it's a good lesson to learn. And I try to explain that to many of the university kids that I mentor now that we're just a little fish in a big pond when we go to the US. In Bermuda you might feel like you have a bit more of a chance. But you know, to get that true feeling of, I would say competition, right? That's where you need to, that's where you see if you're going to make it. So it was a struggle, it was a huge struggle in the US, but I loved it, I kept doing it. So I would have to say it would be, I did some freelancing, that will probably be my first gig and put myself on, it used to be called freelancer.com, I don't even know if they're still around and I put myself out there. And you know you bid on jobs and things like that. And I think my first one was a CD cover for a life coach. I was like, okay, she did records or music.
Yeah, I know very well the freelancer life, I've lived it for a long part of my entrepreneurship life too. So it is, I would say, much easier to be a freelancer in Bermuda, where you can build relationships and connections versus being in a really big pond with a whole lot of other fish in the outside world, outside of our little pond. Absolutely I feel you on that. So what led to Connectech, how did you bridge from that to where you are now?
So I came back to Bermuda in 2000-2001, or 02 something like that, to work for the government. I was working in their e-government, e-services and it was really early stages. We were building a portal for them, things like that so I started to get into the tech side of it. So after I graduated from college, I actually taught myself so I'm self taught in programming. I took a couple of certificate courses and things like that. One of the things that I've learned, a lesson learned, is that I wish I would have started Connectech earlier. I think that not just for me as an entrepreneur, it was more about providing the opportunities for our young kids. So if you can imagine I could have started Connectech, because Connectech was started because I saw a gap in the market, right? I saw a gap in, we have students that are going off to university and they want to be in tech, they might be doing the wrong thing in tech and they just need a little bit of a pivot but they weren't getting the proper advice and they weren't getting, at the very beginning when they needed to be introduced to tech and I would say Middle School, sometimes even Primary School to align with what the US and Europe and Asia are all doing. We needed to start our kids younger and so that's why I created Connectech, to offer that.
Yeah, I think this really speaks to how you have such a strong vision of where the gap was, you very clearly saw the gap in the market, a need and you became the problem solver to fill that gap. And then I think it also speaks to how it can take much longer than we expect to get a business off the ground to really be delivering the solution that we envision. We have this fantastic vision in our mind, we know exactly how to solve the problem and it just doesn't take, it's not an overnight thing it can be something that takes years to really get off the ground and the way that we envision.
Yeah, I have to say though I made the decision quite fast to start Connectech, it was quite scary. Once I decided to do it, it was like let's go find a place. And yeah, it was. I mean I did research you know I agree with you, you have to do the research, make sure well I would think for any business right? You need to do the research, look at the market, obviously do all your business planning your budget planning all of that for sure.
That’s the stuff that takes the time, isn't it? And we're brewing on the idea and we're thinking, and we're doing and we're talking and we're networking, and we're setting things out all under the surface, and then the decision is made and the baby is born! What do you think the most important, or what would you say is the greatest achievement that you've had in business to date?
Sure, so well if I look at it as a whole, I would say having Connectech as I feel that it's successful, I mean, when we started I never imagined for it to be as big as it is. We've probably had about 5000 to 6000 kids come through our doors and we've taught them, or we've taught them at the schools. We've made such an impact on so many kids. Just yesterday I have an intern from high school who's here and he's talking about, he said, he gave me a cute little quote that I am dying to use. He started with us when we opened in 2016 and we taught him Python and coding and that's when he got the bug and now next year, he'll be going off to university to be a software engineer and he owes all of that to us, he said. He would have never thought of doing anything like that if he hadn't had the experience at Connectech, so that in itself to me, that one person, that one young man that I was able to inspire, to follow something that he didn't realise he loved as much until he got exposed to it. And that's exactly what we're trying to do in all of the primary schools where we're in every primary school just trying to introduce this to the kids. So things like that is what I consider to be my best greatest achievement. I mean, I could go on. In 2019 I took five kids to Dubai to experience, from robotics, to experience Dubai and competing against the rest of the world. Next month I'm taking another group of six to Switzerland and these are all kids at the age of 14 to 17. It's an awesome experience for them.
We are just in awe of how much you do and it's always on a grand scale. And it always seems like you're juggling so many brilliant projects all at once. Was there ever a time when you just thought this isn't working, I'm not going to get this off the ground? Or have you just always been, touch it and it turns to gold?
Yeah, so right before I actually started Connectech, so before Connectech, I had and I still do, so like you said I juggle a couple of things, I probably have about three different companies that I run. I have a software development company, I have a cybersecurity company, I have connectech which is my main and then I also run the Technology Leadership Forum as their Executive Director as well, so I have a lot of balls in the air. But there came a time just before ConnecTech that I was doing my software development company, and I decided that it's really too hard to be an entrepreneur, I'm tired of living month to month or you know, not having the finances that I really want. A lot of people tend to think being an entrepreneur means that “Oh, you have so much free time and it's you know, so easy” and I'm like no it's not, I work 18 hours a day right, it's just crazy. Whether I was doing one company or eight companies, you still cannot turn off, you never turn off, you don't. If you're not working for another company where I can take two weeks vacation, I don't think I've ever taken two weeks vacation since 2000, since I stopped working for government, I don't think I ever can, so I want to say it was maybe 2009, I don't know my dates, I decided to stop being an entrepreneur, well I can't say stop, but just take a break. And I went and worked for Mount St Agnes school (MSA) for about nine months and did not like it.
You got pulled back into entrepreneurship?
Yeah, I was like oh this is not for me and it might sound terrible but I can't work for anybody else.
I get it.
Yeah, I am passionate about what I do and maybe being in a school environment helped to give me that kick of you know, you've been juggling and thinking Coral about this ConnecTech idea for a little while. Go do it. I think I got to see at MSA there are a bunch of kids here that love tech, but they're not being guided in the right way and how do we help that? So it might have been the catalyst. Yeah.
I'm really curious too about how Covid affected your business because a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs really struggled during Covid because they lacked technology, because they didn't have things in place to pivot. So many had to open a store or get on social media or have a website that can help sell anything. And people were scrambling to build and grow and pivot during that time. How about your businesses? How did it affect you? Was it in a totally different way?
It was, it was. We were busy as busy can be. So from a ConnecTech perspective, what was difficult for us was, we were teaching in all the schools, none of the kids had any computers for home. So we had to figure out a way for us to pivot from being in the schools to being online, and then teaching the kids how to get online, and then teaching them or providing them with computers. So you know, my poor staff were working, I feel like I had them working like me, 18 hours a day, right? I was like, OK we’ve got to build or refurbish all these computers, give out the computers, find out who needs them and then we went down the path of who didn't have internet, all of this so that we could still teach our kids. Because not only were we thinking about the kids during this time, but we're thinking about the parents because the parents still had to work. And can you imagine having three eight-year-olds running around in your house while you're trying to be on a zoom call? Right? It's crazy. I know. And so we kind of increased. In saying that we're a charity, so ConnecTech is a charity and we took a huge hit because many of the Foundations pivoted their funding to the health reasons for Covid and we got the shorter end of the stick, right? Where they said, Okay, well, we need to, and I get it, we need to give to Covid, we need to do that and we understood, but what we had to do then was we did everything for free. We even did coding camps during the breaks for free, which hit us hard from a financial perspective but we knew that the families and the community and the kids, they loved being here and so we needed to give them another avenue because they couldn't be here. We still wanted them to learn and we still wanted them to love what we're doing and love what they're doing. That's what we had to do. I mean, it was insane I have to say.
Yeah, it sounds, it sounds like you had a lot of resilience to fall back on there. You were able to pivot, you understood what was required, you were still very customer focused or client focused. And I think those, I understand to be ingredients to success and to resilience. Would you agree? What would you consider to be the most, one of the most important concepts?
Yeah, so I think that, you have to, you definitely have to understand who your clientele is. So I think every year I go through a planning stage of what we are going to provide each year for our clients, and our clients aren't just the kids, right? Our clients are the adults, they're also the parents, we get tons of requests for all different types of tech training. But how do you offer all of the different types of tech training? But you don't, there's not always a full class, right? So you have to think about that. So I think one of the keys to success or being able to understand that is okay, who are my clientele? How do I make, you're not going to make everybody happy but how do I make people and customers understand that I'm here to, you know, help them and make it easier for them, like my product is to help them learn about technology, and so there might be ways that I can't directly help them, but you know what, I'm going to point you in other directions of where you can get the information, maybe where you can get other training. Because I'm saying that you need to have, I need to have like five people in a class in order to make it feasible for me to be able to offer that class but at the same time, I don't want you as a customer to be upset because I'm not offering this class, so let me give you another avenue to still learn, right? Because I feel that if I do that, when I do offer another class that you can attend, you're going to come back to me. So I think it's really important that you have a relationship with your customers, with your clients, right? It's not just okay, you're my client now but once you use my product, sold my product, or bought my product, then you're no longer my client, I think it's important to continue with that connection.
I think that's an amazing piece of advice for anyone in any business, to focus on relationships and connections with clients and all the people that you deal with, I think it's really important. And so speaking on that you were talking about mentorship as well, being important to you. So if you could, we often ask the question if you could hop back in a time capsule, what advice would you give your younger self, but I'd like to know, what advice would you give someone who was say, just fresh out of college? They're either looking to build a business, maybe they want to go into entrepreneurship, but they're not quite sure about it? What words of advice would you give someone in that stage?
So I guess I would, the first thing I would probably say, is to do a bunch of research. I think it's really important to learn the market, figure out what market you're in, what your clientele wants, like surveys, right? And you don't have to do the surveys yourself, there's a few companies that do surveys, like, get a couple of questions out there to find out what the market’s about, find out what everybody is looking for. Make sure you're going down the right path before you commit. Because becoming an entrepreneur and making that commitment is huge. So I think with me starting ConnecTech, that was a big step because, bigger than I did my software development company, because my software development company was me and I had another gentleman maybe sometimes I had two people working for me, but ConnecTech, I have a building, I have parents that are relying on me every year to do stuff. I have a huge staff now. So that's a big step. So making that commitment is something that you want to make sure that you've done the research. And I know that the likes of BEDC (Economic Development Corporation), they say have a business plan, what's your business plan? And I used to be like, why do I need a business plan, I know what I want to do? No, no, you need to have a business plan. You need to, and that business plan, so some of the advice I'm giving is definitely research. So research your clientele, research what the market looks like, what does the market need? Where are the gaps? That's a huge one. And sorry if I'm gonna offend anybody, but a hair salon, where are you going to put a hair salon in Bermuda that there's not one that's right next door to you? Right? So what is your niche going to be? What are you going to do that's different from the hair salon next to you? I think about Starbucks. So when you think about Starbucks, when Starbucks opened up, they had a Starbucks on every corner. But Starbucks is a franchise, and if I open up this franchise on corner A and somebody opens it up on corner B, really what is going to make your Starbucks different from that Starbucks. So those are sort of the things I think that people need to have a look at. That business plan is important, that business plan is important because it helps you in the beginning but it also helps you every year after because now you have a basis to learn from or to help guide you and then next year you're gonna look at what you planned. And for that year, and you're gonna be, Okay, now my lessons learned, let me revise my business plan for the next year coming. Right? So you're not running around trying to say, Okay, well, how am I going to change this? And what am I going to do? Well, you already have this plan in place and that's your starting point.
Yeah, we call ours a Strategic Plan but it's the same thing and we review it really a couple of times a year, sometimes more. If we're looking to develop a new line or product, or we see that the market is shifting, you can go back and we can just have a little strategic session, pick up where we left off, tweak things where they need to be tweaked, enhance them and so forth. So 100% agree with that great advice and it all sounds a bit daunting when you're starting, oh, I need a business plan. But it can be something pretty simple. It can be a double-sided one-pager it doesn't have to be a 20-page document that nobody's going to read. Definitely agree the success is in the planning, right? So Coral, we do like to ask our guests, what does resilience mean to you?
So I would have to say it's being able to bounce back from those hard, I would say those hard decisions. So I'd like to say failure as well. But it's not always going to be failure. So you have to learn from, I'm really big on, it's okay to fail. In actual fact it's really good to have a failure experience, because you're gonna learn from that. And I think that's all part and parcel of becoming resilient. I'm gonna learn from companies telling me no, so when we go to ask for money from grantors and they say no and I have to understand why and then I have to figure that out. But being resilient to know that the product that I have, and the service that I'm offering, is actually very much worth it and being able to bounce back from, whether it be a failure, or whether it be a challenge that you might not have gotten to where you needed to get to, where you wanted to get to, that is all part and parcel of making you resilient. I want to say it is having the passion, having the drive and the confidence to say “I can do this,” I'm an entrepreneur and I know what I'm doing is going to not just benefit me, depending on what your service is, but for me, it's going to benefit, like these 5000 - 6000 kids that I've been teaching for the last seven years, and benefit Bermuda, because those kids are coming back to become the tech geniuses of Bermuda. I think that you can get a lot of negativity thrown at you, quite a bit and being an entrepreneur you have to have broad shoulders and be able to hold that and say it's okay, I'll take that on and I'll figure out a way to switch that around and make that a positive. And I think that's all part of how you build up your resilience, how you become a resilient entrepreneur is being able to transition from the negative to the positive, the failures and turning those failures into successes. We actually, we teach our kids quite a bit about failure. So I think, unfortunately, I think in today's world, not just Bermuda, in today's world, we don't teach our kids how to fail. Our kids are really struggling with that and so when they come to our class we trick them up. And we will give them some code that won't work. We do and because we need them to troubleshoot and figure it out. And if anybody's done any coding, and you have 5 million lines of coding, and you’ve got to figure out where are the errors, they get really frustrated. But guess what, and it won't run. So they’re like, why isn't this running? Why isn't it working? I don't understand, what's going on? Well, that's because there's an error or two in there and you’ve got to figure it out. Because not everything's gonna be all sunshine and roses for you, you’ve got to figure it out. And they get really frustrated. But unfortunately, we have not taught our kids how to fail and it's important because you're gonna learn so much from that failure.
It's so true, It's so true and I love that you're doing that. And I think more teachers could implement some of that into how they teach and those that we mentor, just help them to understand what failure is and how you turn it into a positive like you said, it's the learning, it's the growth, it's where we become resilient. And that's what we're all about here at the Resilient Entrepreneur podcast, about being resilient. Coral, thank you so much for joining us today. That was absolutely amazing, inspirational and of course, we'll be following you and your journey, in plenty of years to come and these amazing kids, their journeys are going to be pretty awesome too. And I'm sure a few of them will be on our podcast in the future, I hope so for sure because being an entrepreneur, it's not an easy road, but it's always worth it. So thanks Coral, and bye for now.
So thanks for joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs, were Laura and Vicki from Two Four One. We love supporting entrepreneurs, especially with mindset, marketing and motivation, which is why we've built an incredible community of business founders who meet weekly in the Level-Up League. If you'd like to know more about it look us up at www.twofouronebranding.com.
