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🎓 Grad Blues
I graduated with a first class honours from my dream degree and had to move out of my favourite city where I lived with friends, back into my densely populated family home. Filled half and half with pride and melancholy, I began job-hunting in the hopes that opening an exciting career path may solve my conflict of post-graduate emotions. I quickly accepted a copywriting role for a local, well-established, family business within the luxury travel industry. As the months went on, I felt I had maximised the potential for growth within my role which regrettably exposed itself as being mainstream admin work. I was faced with a conundrum; I was very fond of the people I worked with but very un-fond of the work. What I began to realise, is that not even half a year after graduating, I was zooming down a one-way-street down the wrong career path, which is certainly a life I had never imagined for myself as a creative, progressive and hungry learner.
✅ Green Flags
Enter: Passionfruit. Unsurprisingly, I had been interested in the concept of Passionfruit from the start of my career journey and actually interviewed at the same time as I did for my previous job. The first green flag that pulled me back towards Passionfruit was that the founders had maintained their interests with me from my previous interview. Immediately, I knew that a company who can tell you why they want you to work for them four months later is a company who values its team for who they are as individuals, keen to pursue potential. Further than this, during our re-connection, I was being encouraged to think about how I wanted to transform the working world for freelancers and people like myself; how did I think my literary and research background could contribute to the innovation of managed marketplaces? This immersive, opportunity-focused habitat is what I consider to be the birthplace of a career.
🍎 ABC’s
Naturally, despite the dominant feeling of excitement for this new chapter, there is also the fact that I have barely worked a ‘proper job’ outside of retail and hospitality, let alone in Marketing, and even further away in a startup. Fortunately, learning has never scared me, in fact, it keeps me inspired more than anything. Even though I’m joining Passionfruit at its Pre-Seed level, everything here feels like it’s sprouting and blooming and everyone around me is rapidly moving upwards. I write this at the end of my first week, where I feel like I have accomplished so much, but all I can think about is what I have coming up and what I can do next. I am in awe of the handful of Specialists I have had the pleasure of meeting this week, and hearing their stories of the incredible work they have done makes me so grateful to be surrounded by such knowledgeable and independent people. On the other side of the spectrum, I am fascinated by the prospect of collaborating with various startups, with people who have had life-long passions for their business and have recently abandoned the outdated, current model of white-collar work. There is something to be learned from everyone involved in this business, from the team I work within, to the investors, to the Specialists and the Customers. Ultimately, I joined Passionfruit because I love to educate and I love the empowerment of education.
👉 We want YOU 👈
So, here I am now. Quite honestly, I didn’t fully understand the role I had signed up for until I was thrown right into it; how do you ensure success between young businesses and independent workers? The answer, I quickly understood, is quite simple. Enabling people to transform their professional lives in their own terms promotes highly productive, goal-driven output, that thrives in a creative industry like marketing. In a freelance satisfaction survey conducted by Forbes, 84% of freelance marketing specialists value the flexibility and independence that freelancing affords, while 70% enjoy the quality of life they hope for. The client satisfaction survey, however, reveals much lower stats, whereby under 50% of freelancers feel that their clients know how to work with freelancers, or even knows how to prepare them for a project. My goal here at Passionfruit is to make a substantial improvement on those stats, to prepare a contemporary generation of freelancers for new, impactful projects whilst working alongside our clients to help them maximise the high potential of their specialist. As we approach the rear-end of a global pandemic, the work available and ways of working have changed drastically; let’s use this opportunity to fix what is broken, not stay cemented in old ways.
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