Cash Confessional: SkillPop’s Haley Bohon shares tips on starting a business and adapting to a pandemic

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Haley Bohon is the founder of SkillPop, a popular Charlotte startup that has local artists and other experts teach classes in a variety of fields, such as photography, home decorating, and social media.

Since March 18, SkillPop has held classes completely online. When SkillPop can resume in-person classes will depend on guidance from health officials. Bohon, 30, spoke with the Agenda about her journey as an entrepreneur, her company’s pivot to online classes, and lessons learned from the pandemic.

(The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

What brought you to Charlotte?

After graduating from N.C. State in 2012 with a degree in mechanical engineering, I got a job as a test engineer at Newell Rubbermaid up in Huntersville in 2012. I was there until 2014, when I left and went to (Charlotte software startup) Passport.

Back then, Passport was a much smaller team than it is now. It was hugely formative as far as becoming an entrepreneur. When I think about my early career, I got to see a really big company and then a really high growth startup. In both of these, I got to see how culture is formed, what leadership looks like, and how decisions are made. When I went to Passport, I was sitting just a couple yards away from the CEO.

How did you come up with the idea for SkillPop?

I started thinking about the idea for SkillPop in June 2015, then launched that September. … I started the company because it was a need that I had. I moved here for a job. The only people I knew here were friends of my parents whose kids I’d grown up with (in Greensboro).

So just like the thousands of people who move here, I was figuring out adulthood. How do you build community and meet people and make friends? What do you do after work besides, you know, running errands, going to the gym, happy hour, and Netflix?

I also had a DSLR camera that was getting dusty. And I couldn’t find a place to use it that fit with my startup work schedule.

How much of your own money did it take to launch SkillPop?

It took an upfront investment of about $3,000 of personal money. That covered expenses like the domain, class materials, and web development.

Who were the first instructors for SkillPop?

Our very first teacher is a woman named Kaley Olson and she still teaches with us today. She is a local hand lettering artist I met through my realtor.

I met with every small business owner I knew. And as a recently married 20-something, those included people like my realtor, my wedding photographer, and my friend who is a DJ.

Corri Smith (of Black Wednesday) taught early classes on social media for businesses. Erick Hodge taught one of the very first photography classes.

We did the first four classes for free.

What was it like to leave a full-time job to start your own company?

(My husband and I) said, “What are the things that we need to hit in order for this to be a real thing and to make something worth leaving a great job for?” It was a mix of personal and business milestones. I still have in my house a scrap of paper that we made this list on and it was things like, registering as a business, getting a business bank account, just some of those logistical things.

Also, I worked part time for the first six months of SkillPop in a contract project management job for a local nonprofit. It was a little financial security. But also for me, it kept kind of a foot in the door of my old career path in case everything crashed and burned.

Over the years you’ve expanded into new cities. How many cities are you in now, and how has SkillPop been received outside Charlotte?

Five cities total now, including Charlotte.

There’s a true hometown advantage with any startup, not just us. It’s a hard thing to replicate. We’ve tried to go into communities with people who are already there. Every time we’ve opened in a new city, we’re still learning how to do it well.

Do you plan to expand beyond those five?

It’s a hard time to answer that one because so much is in flux right now. If you’d asked me that in February I’d say absolutely. Back then we were working on scaling up in Atlanta.

Have you taken on any outside investors?

We haven’t. A couple times we explored it and really considered that as an option, but every time I’ve just backed away. We did go through TechStars in Austin and 2018 with two other female founded companies here in town, Skipper and Nourisher. That program provided $20,000 in seed money.

It is not an easy thing to bootstrap a company. You have to be super scrappy, and that’s one of our core values. There are things that we do differently than a venture capital-backed company. We have a smaller team, we spend way less on marketing, we’ve worked in co-working spaces for years.

When the coronavirus happened, we just saw our revenue tank. But our expenses were not at the level they would be if we had raised a lot of money.

How many employees does SkillPop have?

Full-time, four, including myself. When we were doing in person classes, we had a big part-time staff of about 35.

How did Skillpop manage to pivot so quickly to virtual classes? How has that gone?

It’s gone incredibly well for the most part. I don’t think we could have asked for anything better.

Revenue from in-person classes was our entire business model. We pivoted quickly to virtual because if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had any way to generate revenue at all.

Which classes have been popular online?

A few include: Home decorating basics — everyone’s at home right now; mobile photography class — it’s a really accessible skill, and everyone’s taking pictures on their phone these days; a watercolor class — people do this as their date night, as do friends who live in different cities but want to do something together virtually.

Did you get a PPP loan?

Yes. We have kept everyone in the system and as we have added more classes to the schedule, we have added a new role of moderator. We’ve been transitioning people over to that role.

What lessons have you learned from the pandemic?

The value of asking for help. As an entrepreneur, you want to work independently, you want to be confident, especially being a bootstrapped company. Over the last couple of years, I’ve also been intentional about developing mentors.

I did a lot of soul searching as part of this pivot. Over the years, I have had so many people ask if we would ever do online classes, and for years, we’ve been just super passionate and super focused about in-person learning. I also thought the online education landscape was really crowded.

So we had to work through, how are we going to do something that we’ve always said we would never do and how to still feel authentic? It’s been delightful to see our community embrace these classes. Looking ahead, we’ll continue to grow SkillPop Anywhere.

If you could give one piece of advice to 22-year-old Haley what would it be?

I think it would be to get plugged into the community sooner.

What is your No. 1 piece of financial advice?

One thing my husband and I try to do is live below our means. We’re both 30, we’ve been married for almost six years. Being together for that amount of time, it’s afforded us a lot of flexibility. When I wanted to quit my job and start a company and reduce our income by half, our monthly expenses were at the level that we could afford to do that.

As soon as things started happening in early March, I stopped taking a paycheck and I didn’t take a paycheck again, until we received the PPP loan. We were able to do that because because of what our monthly expenses are.