Future² Innovation

Collective Campus in its third year now and in that time I’m proud to say that, unlike other consultancies and education providers that have come (and gone already in many cases), we didn’t start out with fundraising as a key priority. It still isn’t. We started by focusing on finding our value proposition and delivering on it in a cashflow positive way. Over the course of the first 18 months we built a seven figure business, then with what was just a team of four (soon to be a team of nine), but the purpose of this blog is not to chest-beat, it is to paint a picture and deliver some important lessons. By not tapping into funding early, we were operating under conditions of serious constraint. Both my co-founder Sean and I didn’t pay ourselves anything in the first 12 months of operating, opting instead for side gigs and part time shows to keep the lights on - literally - and we had to be creative with hiring, incentivisation and marketing - opting for free third party platforms and quid pro quo arrangements