A couple of months ago we ran a special youth cohort of our after-hours business course, the 5-9 Club. This was in partnership with the Youth Engagement and Participation Service (YEPS).
We recently caught up with 5-9 attendee Zoë Gable, one of the founders of Cyhoeddiadau Lemonêd, to talk about her business, her 5-9 experience and what’s next.
Hey Zoë! Tell us about your business!
I’m Zoë and I’m one of the founding members of Cyhoeddiadau Lemonêd, a collective of young people from South Wales who are writing and illustrating bilingual children’s books, addressing issues not often covered in children’s literature, such as mental health, youth loneliness, and identity struggles.
What made you join the 5-9 Club?
I’ve always known I didn’t want a traditional job, I wanted to work for myself, and be able to do what I want when I want. With this said I had no idea how this could be done. Growing up, my local area wasn’t renowned for being a hub of business activity, so I felt trying to start something a little different in my area off the back of a pandemic would prove to be a barrier too big. However, the 5 – 9 Club helped me understand how I can actually do this, without any working experience and not having a lot of money. While personally, I am studying business A level, this hasn’t taught me how to launch a whole business.
Can you tell us about your 5-9 Club experience?
Over the 8 weeks we learnt about so many different aspects of business, from branding, how it can be used to communicate your business and your values to your customers, to financial strategies and legal know-hows. It covered putting your business online and getting organised so both our business and us as founders, can grow and prosper at a sustainable pace. Each part is just as important as the other, it taught me that you could have plenty of funding, but if your marketing strategy isn’t reaching the right audience and generating the required interest then the business won’t make any sales resulting in a struggle for profit. If you have a great website but have overlooked a lot of the legal stuff then your business could be liable for copywrite.
There was a lot of information to take in during the 8 sessions we had, but what the 5 – 9 Club did a great job at was helping us to understand all this information. They dissected the technical terms and broke everything down so that we could fully understand what it was we were learning. There was also always plenty of time and opportunity for questions. Guest speakers and mentors would also ask members of the group about their businesses to tailor the advice they gave each person.
One thing I particularly found useful was that there was a variety of speakers each week with varying levels of experience and knowledge. Some were business experts who had run multiple businesses over several years, and others had only just finished the 5 – 9 Club themselves. I found the varied perspectives and learnings they shared with us inspiring and extremely useful.
It was always great to hear backstories from the speakers. They would discuss how they found the business world and what hacks and tricks they’d learned during their own journeys to becoming successful entrepreneurs. It was also great fun and really interesting to learn about the business ideas that other members of the group had. It certainly added to the experience, from us all sitting apart during the first session, feeling rather nervous to share our ideas, to each week all working together, slowly progressing with our ideas with one another’s support. It was exciting to be in a room filled with people like me, all of us with a passion to be entrepreneurs and a desire to help each other and the world. I hope I can look back in a few years and come across some of these businesses that I was there to witness at the very beginning.
What’s next for you and your business?
Though I’m sad that the 5 – 9 Club is over, there are many exciting things ahead. The next steps for us are to register as a limited company and establish a business bank account. With these two steps in place, we can then officially launch our next book ‘Sanau’r Wrach’ (The Witches Socks), hopefully in time for Halloween! We’re also exploring starting up a small kid’s club where we can build a following for our stories and provide other young people with the teachings and tools required to be creative in literature themselves
Thanks, Zoë! You can give Cyhoeddiadau Lemonêd a follow on their socials below:
The 5-9 Club is a fully-funded after-hours business course designed to help you through the early stages of enterprise. Check out our upcoming cohorts here.