"When you have your vision of your idea, visualize how you will contact your first customers/clients. It's never too early to start a conversation."
Allan Lalic is the co-founder of Kebloom. He is unwavering in his belief and support of young people dreaming big. He co-founded Kebloom as a gateway to catalyze opportunities for young people to become successful entrepreneurs and build a stronger future. He has facilitated numerous Kebloom workshops resulting in boosted confidence, business launches and multiple entrepreneurial success stories.
Prior to starting Kebloom, Allan spent 20+ years in the finance and software industry across a range of diverse organizations. His experience spans small businesses and startups as well as large corporations and private sector banking organizations. Allan, an entrepreneur himself, has also launched and managed his own financial planning business as a qualified financial planner.
Drawing on many years of experience in software and in the finance industry, together with his passion for progressing possibilities for young people, Allan’s background and skill set provides an ideal foundation for Kebloom’s vision, launch and success.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Allan Lalic: Kebloom was created by a team of dreamers and entrepreneurs, so we get the process it takes to launch an idea. Kebloom is guiding and preparing young people for tomorrow. Kebloom exists to empower young people to see themselves as change-makers. We believe that young people have dreams to make a better world, and Kebloom invites them to dream boldly.
The core of Kebloom is creativity, and we believe all young people are brimming with it. Kebloom seeks to inspire young people to engage their imaginations as they look into their futures with confidence, skill, and optimism.
Young people are wired to make ideas real, and Kebloom supports the risk it takes to do so. Kebloom guides young people in the process of making an idea into reality and launching it into the world with confidence. We created Kebloom to help young people create their own future.
Kebloom is a step-by-step process, and we are there every step of the way. We believe that it shouldn’t be impossible to start a business, so we made Kebloom to clearly guide young people all the way.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffet, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Allan Lalic: The global pandemic has illuminated a widening gap between the life skills needed to succeed in the workplace and the academic skills being taught in schools. The education system does a poor job of teaching leadership skills, financial literacy, and entrepreneurial expertise. Consequences are significant, 46% of high school students think their education is relevant as it lacks financial literacy, creative thinking, and entrepreneurship.
So, imagine a place where you can discover who you are and what makes you you! Imagine belonging to a global community of like-minded young people that support and encourage you to be your best self. Imagine a place where you can think like an entrepreneur, Create and realize ideas.
This is what we are solving, it’s called Kebloom! Kebloom is a platform that guides young people through the step by step process of having an idea, making it the best it can be, and launching it into the world as a business, non-profit, service opportunity, or anything you can dream up.
What advice do you wish you received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Allan Lalic: When you have your vision of your idea, visualize how you will contact your first customers/clients. It’s never too early to start a conversation. Have a great team around you that have extensive connections in the space that you believe that you are tackling, invest your time in meeting influencers, influential people, don’t shy away from having a conversation with them, start those relationships with them and find out how doors can be opened to get meetings and meet those people that are decision makers. Ask for support, ask for customers, ask how you can be part of their echo system as much as possible. There are great people out there, it’s all about sharing what you do seeking help to get the solution you are building out there as soon as possible with the right people helping.
We intend to improve our growth by bringing on more people to build out and expand Kebloom. We are across 26 countries, however, a focus in 2023 is Kazakhstan and Nigerian schools. We are looking for talent in these two countries which will help scale Kebloom. We have direct support in these 2 countries, however, always looking for help to bring forward our platform to schools in a much more scalable way.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Allan Lalic: Kebloom was always built for the digital world, so it is capable of both B2B and B2C conducting workshops via remote work conditions, global learning via remote workshops, or even face to face. What we are seeing is that people are wanting it all i.e what suits them best. We are set up for this, so if you want to do self-paced learning, classroom learning, or facilitated learning, we see that all these options are available, and more importantly, we can deliver this in a part of the world.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Allan Lalic: The journey of business is just that a journey. What I have learnt from my years as a founder, it’s not a hurdle, but a pathway, a pathway that you created, and when you get to the fort of the road, which way do you go? The answer comes from your pain points and the good points that got you there.
Opportunities come from what you are doing to create growth, ie just going out there and meeting people, talking to people, doing presentations, and getting invited to do articles like this. The challenge I see is that the team is not big enough to scale Kebloom fast enough to the masses of people globally. We see this as the biggest real challenge right now, however, we are working towards changing this in early 2023.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Allan Lalic: One of the most underestimated parts of running a company is surrounding yourselves with the right people, when you are growing out your team, there really is a big difference between those that do what they say and say what they do versus toxicity. When you are running your company, you just want to get on with it.
So, when you are recruiting, decisions are made very quickly, it’s just the environment you create. Any day missed feels like a month of lost opportunity. We tried bringing on a third co-founder, but this was a complete waste of time and a distraction to the company, it created an environment of slowness on the growth side and just a bunch of crap that the founders had to deal with.
The exit is never pleasant, not that it was nasty, but it was an exit that was really regretful and damaging. Also, we tried bringing on a CEO, externally. it didn’t go according to plan. When a company works together, it grows together, when a CEO doesn’t do this, it really stands out and over time, the damage created takes a long time to repair and rebuild. Toxicity is damaging. I do my best now to avoid people like this entering my world.
What does “success” in the year to come mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Allan Lalic: Success on the business level, is that we have strongly scaled in our focus markets via a top down (government) and bottom up (customers) month on month in the 2023 calendar year. We have also created strong partnerships together with building relationships with Global organizations with influence and also strengthen our relationships with global donors.
We still want success in the other markets that we currently have. We are looking to complete our raise round in 2023 with funding going towards developing the Kebloom app, employing more people globally, and iterating our current platform.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Allan Lalic for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Allan Lalic or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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