'Parents encourage their children to go into a safe job in banking, but entrepreneurship is an option'

After becoming disenfranchised with stockbroking, this entrepreneur turned his grinds lessons into a business.

By Sean Judge Co-founder, UniTuition

I SEE MYSELF as a bit of an accidental entrepreneur. Four years ago I was a stockbroker and now I have a tutoring company that I never thought would amount to an actual business.

Throughout my Leaving Cert and college, my goal was always to go into stockbroking and once I was in it, I hated it. I learned that even though you might have the best laid plans, those can change and that it’s okay for them to change.

My company UniTuition, which I co-founded with Orla McCallion, had a humble beginning. I was giving grinds during my time in college in Trinity and had lots of students coming to me for accounting, statistics and maths lessons.

It got to a point where I was getting so many random text messages and emails from people who had heard about me giving grinds that I set up a simple website with the help of a friend to keep track of it all. At first it was only me giving the lessons, but once the website was built it got so busy that I had to get four other tutors involved.

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Source: UniTuition

Becoming a company

Around this time I ended up leaving my job in stockbroking to join Accenture. At the same time, Orla, who was a close friend of mine, questioned that if the grinds service was working in Trinity College why wouldn’t it work in other colleges in Ireland, and even further afield in the likes of Cambridge or Oxford.

At the time, Orla was completing a part-time master’s degree, so we decided to establish the service as a company and she came on-board as co-founder in order to help expand it into other colleges. She really started to convince me it was more of a business than a side project that I was happy to run in the background.

I think finding the right co-founder is one of the hardest things to do when setting up a business. I don’t think there’s an exact science to finding the perfect person, I think you just need to find someone who compliments your skillset.

If you’re a big picture person you should probably look for someone more technical minded, and not necessarily someone exactly the same as you.

Leaving the day job

We properly launched UniTuition over the summer of 2014 and started to really push it when the college year began. By December of that year, we had 150 tutors on the service compared to four when we started. It was at that point that we started to look at this as something that could be our full-time job.

We decided to exhibit at the startup event, Dublin Beta, and came second in the pitching competition. It was here that David Bowles from the venture capital firm Delta Partners and Gary Leyden from the NDRC came across us and encouraged us to apply to the NDRC’s Launchpad programme.

When we secured a spot on the programme, that was the additional boost myself and Orla needed to actually leave our roles in Accenture to focus full-time on UniTuition.

I didn’t know how well the company would take off, so the move was a bit daunting to say the least.

I was in Accenture three years and leaving a job I loved was one of the biggest decisions I’ve had to make. I was fortunate with how encouraging Accenture were when I left and I still act as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the company.

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Source: UniTuition

Ups and downs

Things started falling into place when we got funding from Enterprise Ireland as part of their high potential startup programme and received financial backing from the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme to give the business an early boost and get us off the ground. We now have over 1,500 tutors in Ireland and the UK with hundreds of lessons booked every month.

So, we’ve been at this for two years now and there have been a few highs and lows along the way. We also know we still have a huge way to go.

I’ll never forget that feeling of getting our first customers, especially in the UK. Launching our second site, TutorHQ for Leaving and Junior Certificate students was also a great milestone. Since it was launched in September 2016, it has grown even quicker than UniTuition and we already have over 800 tutors signed up and giving lessons.

But it hasn’t been all highs. Launching into the UK has been a really slow burner because we’ve learned the market over there is so different to Ireland. We grew UniTuition quite fast here by partnering with students’ unions and we didn’t get any solid partnerships in the UK compared to Ireland.

That was a bit of a low-point for the company and has led us to try and consolidate the Irish market a bit more through some new marketing channels, before properly taking TutorHQ to the UK.

Lessons learned

If there was one message I had to get across to new founders, it would be the importance of looking at metrics from day one.

You need to understand how much it will cost to acquire a customer because knowing that from early on will give you a great sense of what kind of business you have, how much funding you need and how scalable it is.

I’d also like to get across that there is no set format to becoming an entrepreneur, but it’s worth letting younger generations know that it can be a career choice because I think generally, parents will encourage their children to go into a safe job.

Nowadays there are a lot of programmes in schools like the Young Scientist competition and incubators in colleges that will help engage students and show them there is an alternative rather than becoming an accountant or working in a bank.

That said, I think the experience you gain while studying or working for a company can be invaluable in its own right. I don’t think I would be where I am today if I didn’t go through the steps that I went through, realising what I was good at and what I enjoyed working on.

Sean Judge is the ‎co-founder of UniTuition and the tech jobs fair UpStarter. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.

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