How to do the 365!
HEJ SBC Member,
Who are you Ulrika? Can you explain a little bit more about your background?
In short, I’m a Swedish Ed-tech entrepreneur and mother of three, who is passionate about technology and storytelling. I’ve always been intrigued with technology. My father, who was one of the pioneers in the computer industry, would bring home all sorts of fascinating devices when I was a little girl. Also, my love for storytelling was evident growing up. I was always the first one to volunteer for “the funny hour” (roliga timmen) or to write and direct school plays. Right after high-school I started working in a computer store (DGC), which later led me to get a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). In parallel, I started working at Microsoft, where I later ended up working full time after graduation. It was with Microsoft I later moved, together with my Swedish boyfriend (now husband) to Dubai in 2007.
What made you want to start your company?
I never fantasized about starting my own company. I was set on pursuing a long career within Microsoft. But after a couple of years working here in the region, I felt that my professional development stagnated. I have always been very driven, but I had reached a point where I felt I wasn’t learning as much anymore from the people around me. My mentor, the CFO of Microsoft Gulf at the time, recommended I do an Executive MBA at London Business School, which I did. It was a two-year program with courses taught in Dubai and London that I took alongside my full-time job. If I had asked for a bigger challenge, I got it! It was tough – especially since I fell pregnant and had our first son during the same time period. But in hindsight, I’m very happy how it all turned out. The program opened my eyes to a whole new world of opportunities and after graduating in 2011 I resigned from Microsoft and started my first business.
The company, Business Productivity, is a media and consultancy company focused on driving effective use of end user productivity software. From my many years working at Microsoft, I knew that a big majority of companies spend enormous amounts of money on software, but they don’t reap the benefits since their employees don’t know how to use the tools effectively. Through word of mouth, I signed with large customers in the UAE like GASCO and Mubadala – and also in Sweden with Vattenfall, SAS and NCC. As we were refining our solution offering, and moved to a cloud-based subscription model, we decided to re-think our business structure and make it more long-term. We founded Storyals in Sweden, together with another family business partner in 2018. Today we have our headquarters in Sweden, with sales entities in the USA, UAE and Sweden.
What were the main challenges in opening your business?
Opening a business in not challenging - it’s growing a business that is the challenge. Subscription-based business models are based on recurring revenues. This is great since you grow your customer base over time. The problem is that you incur the entire production and development costs up front, but only get a fraction of the revenues. So it’s a cash-flow intense business model. In this day of age, there are a lot of venture capitalists that are more than happy to invest money in female-led EdTech start-ups – for a stake in your company. But if you, like us, prefer to bootstrap your business, and decide to grow organically, it’s harder. For me, it’s not about a reluctance to give up ownership, it’s about keeping my independence. Today, my husband and I have three kids. It’s imperative for me to be able to decide myself where and how to run my business so that I can juggle my life puzzle.
Can you explain what you put a lot of focus on in your company to make it what it is today?
Today, the focus is on growth and customer retention. We recently entered into a global partnership with Microsoft where their sales force is incentivized to promote our solution. Even if we are a small player, we can deliver on a global scale thanks to our online service offering. With that said, it takes manpower to engage with partners and customers in different countries and in different time zones. In addition to growing sales and entering into new markets, a key focus is on delivering world-class content. We have an extremely talented media production and customer delivery team and we continuously strive to enhance the customer experience, but it’s a never-ending race since the pace of software development is so extremely fast. Witnessing that fast development and seeing the continuous change users are faced with and how organizations are struggling to keep their workforce motivated, I so strongly believe in the growing need for services such as ours.