She Used Her Life Savings to Go to San Francisco and Figure It Out — Now She Runs Accelerator Programs for Founders Across Scotland: Alison Gray of Skillfluence

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Alison Gray — founder of Skillfluence, a company that helps entrepreneurs, business leaders, and academic researchers get their ideas out into the world and make a difference with them.

Alison started Skillfluence after a project she led at work was so successful it got absorbed into a large organisation. She found herself getting worse at her job, not better. She took a sabbatical to San Francisco with her partner — six months, life savings, studied at Berkeley and Stanford, went to Toastmasters — and came back knowing she had to build something.

She left her job on a Friday and started at Entrepreneurial Spark on the Monday.

Skillfluence now has 12 core team members, 30-plus associates, a portfolio of mentors and speakers, and programmes running across the UK and further afield. Right now, there's a cohort of 30 female business leaders in the Highlands and Islands with a WhatsApp group that's, as Alison puts it, absolutely buzzing.

We cover:

• What Skillfluence does — for founders, entrepreneurs, and researchers trying to commercialise cutting-edge work
• The sabbatical that changed everything: six months in San Francisco, Berkeley, Stanford, and Toastmasters
• Building a team: why she started with associates, and what the first real hire taught her about what a business needs
• Recruitment: a process Alison has designed specifically to reveal who someone actually is before offering them the job (the surprise training delivery task at in-person interviews is particularly good)
• AI: where it helps, where it takes away, and why some things genuinely need to be your own words
• COVID: all the programmes fell off a cliff, and how being one month ahead of their clients felt like flying by the seat of their pants — but made all the difference
• The challenge of productizing something that's deeply tailored
• "It's not the knowledge that's the challenge. It's actually doing something."
• Why continuous improvement is more useful than regret

Quote of the episode: "It's not actually the knowledge and knowing how to do something that's the challenge for people. It's actually doing something." — Alison Gray

Playlist song: Titanium — David Guetta ft. Sia