“A great idea at the time…”
My short-lived experience of starting a business from the other side of the world.
Roy’s Peak - Wanaka
For those of you who are new to Sixes in the City or what I’m trying to do: for the last two years, I’ve run a charity social cricket tournament in London between our friends at various universities across the U.K, raising over £10,000 for the Ruth Strauss Foundation.
This year, Sixes will be taken forward as a business, with six university events arranged over the summer and a baseline target of 6,000 students in total. The annual fundraiser in London will continue, whilst it’s really important to me that each university event also has an element of charity.
The Idea in Question:
I spent the last few months having the time of my life travelling New Zealand and Australia whilst starting Sixes as a business – needless to say, these weren’t compatible.
My trip began with a month’s work in an English pub in Wanaka followed by a forty-day road-trip around New Zealand. We skydived, hiked, surfed, played golf and drank good wine, all while watching the entirety of the England vs. New Zealand cricket test series!
We left New Zealand content in knowing we had “done it properly”, and headed to Australia, where I proceeded to tick off the two most significant items on my life’s bucket list:
As is so often the case, New Year’s Day arrived with a dreaded reality-check. Hungover and deep in conversation with ChatGPT about how to best articulate my grand ambitions for 2025, I decided that my one main goal is to make sure Sixes is an ‘absolute success’.
Now, you’re probably thinking that ‘absolute success’ doesn’t exactly align with setting up a business from the other side of the world - and you’d be absolutely right! It somehow took another thirty minutes of writing down to-do-lists for the upcoming couple of months for the truth to then hit me like a slap to the face: ‘Why the f*ck am I on the other side of the world travelling’, I needed to go home.
For a bit of context, I’ve always been set on travelling Australia, with plans to do a cricket season after school before Covid-19 put a swift end to that idea. I had always considered visiting with the idea of moving there in the future, but as I’ve now learned, that’s just not feasible right now! This itch I needed to scratch, as well as the chance to travel with two of your best mates had completely clouded my judgement!
Within minutes, Skyscanner was fired up, a flight was booked, and – just like that – my eagerly anticipated, perhaps oxymoronic, ‘digital nomad entrepreneur’ era had come to an abrupt end.
Hindsight is a blessing
Our lovely campervan just outside of Queenstown
While I’d managed to do some of the necessary Sixes admin when working in the bar, my road-trip routine was, admittedly, lacklustre.
I would wake up; Whatsapp admin - checking in with the heads of the events for 30 minutes, jump on Canva and start a new graphic - then inevitably get bored of it (I hate being on Canva!), then go and explore New Zealand for the day!
As evening falls, dinner is followed by a spirited game of high-card to determine who gets the dreaded top bunk. Night-time brings business calls and more WhatsApp admin, with the UK waking up. These tasks are usually done in a campsite kitchen, where mosquitoes are the true adversaries. Finally, I would awkwardly clamber back into the campervan without stirring the others.
Not exactly the routine of a successful entrepenueur…!
I underestimated how much time and effort I would need to invest in my start-up. Knowing this will be shared on LinkedIn and seen by my peers is, in truth, embarrassing, but by going through this process, I’ve realised the hard way that you have to be all in.
View from the van
Being Seven months out from the first event, the reality that I was starting my own business just hadn’t sunk in yet. Due to the nature of being an events company, I didn’t think that much of the initial work on my list required me to actually be there; the first three months was just focused on getting as many team sign-ups as possible. In hindsight (a wonderful thing), many things – sponsorships, marketing, partnerships – would now be a lot easier to manage if I had been there, physically, in the first place. Meeting the heads of the events at each university before I left should have been a key priority, in order to really explain my vision and get them excited about the event.
The one other problem? I wasn’t even sure what that vision looked like myself. My own lack of clarity and direction about what I wanted Sixes to be was only exacerbated by the physical distance between me and my team; my communication with them was confused at best. Working out my vision has been single-handedly the most important thing since being back and will continue to be going forward as I now look to convey this vision to thousands of students!
Lessons learnt and an update
Back home – thirty degrees colder, a few grand poorer, and a valuable lesson learnt – it was time to dial in.
I’ve taken forward the idea of being ‘all-in’. It seems that “There’s not enough hours in the day,” which my self-employed dad usually mutters whilst making his tenth cup of tea in the morning. I’m beginning to see where he’s coming from. I've started getting bogged down in the partnerships and particularly the marketing side of the business - an area I’d overlooked, most likely due to my lack of skill and knowledge in the matter!
I’ve recently completed a long-overdue uni tour meeting the Heads of Events and connected with some exciting companies in London. In just a month of being back, Sixes has evolved massively which I’m looking forward to expanding on in due course, but in all honesty it’s pretty daunting. Like many other new entrepreneurs, I’m out of my depth, that’s for sure, but if I wasn’t then the idea wouldn’t be big enough!
To think – I genuinely believed I could travel the east coast with my best mates and organise such an ordeal! But I don’t regret my travels, not for a second – nor the lessons that came with them.
Thank you to Emma Large for helping edit this blog to make it somewhat legible!