Official: We're An Inspirational Small Business

We're stoked to tell you we've been picked by PeoplePerHour, the UK's leading freelance marketplace, as one of its inspirational small businesses for the ninth annual Small Business Saturday on 4th December 2021!

As well as giving us credit to spend on freelancers, the guys at PeoplePerHour have written a great article about us. We've reproduced it below or you can check out the original here.

Huge thanks to PeoplePerHour for the support. We've worked with some great freelancers since we first started TEN OF CLUBS. PeoplePerHour has proved to be the most effective, secure and easy way to find them.

♣︎ ♣︎ ♣︎

Small Business Saturday: Meet TEN OF CLUBS

We recently caught up with George ‘Skev’ Skevington – Founder & Creative Director – to find out their story.

How did you start your business?

Having been friends for years, we’d regularly discussed ways to showcase and commercialise our skills. It’s hard for young artists and designers to establish themselves because industries tend to favour experience over potential. Our idea was to reverse that ethos. 

We set up TEN OF CLUBS to be a platform for young designers to showcase their work. We credit each designer for their work, whether it be an item of apparel or an art piece, with each designer getting a percentage of the profit from sales of items featuring their work.

Because we value potential more than experience, we trust luck to some extent. In a deck of cards, the TEN OF CLUBS denotes good fortune, so we adopted it as our name.

What pushed you to take the leap into business?

We’d had the idea for the business for a long time, but it was losing our jobs to Covid that gave us the push to actually make it real. Unemployment made us reflect on our talents and how best to use them. Now we use our design skills to make unique art and apparel, and we sell worldwide via our e-commerce site.

Our aim was, and remains, to take our negative experience of the pandemic and to remould it into something positive and empowering. Specifically, having learned that our everyday freedoms should not be taken for granted, we seek to promote an inclusive culture where everyone is able to exercise their freedom to be who they want to be.

Where is TEN OF CLUBS today?

Our website and shop – tenofclubs.co.uk – went live in February 2021. We’ve been learning the ropes of eCommerce ever since. Limited cash has meant we’ve always had to do the lion’s share of whatever work needs doing ourselves, learning and researching as we’ve gone along.

We have sometimes had to enlist the services of professionals, with PeoplePerHour having proved extremely useful as a quick and cost-effective way of plugging the gaps in our knowledge. We’ve worked with some great freelancers, not just in the UK, but also in South Africa and India.

What’s been your biggest challenge so far?

It’s hard to get noticed as a new business. Because we have finite resources, we have had to focus efforts on organic growth, word-of-mouth, referrals and grabbing whatever free publicity we can.

There’s never enough time, but time does have the advantage of being free. Investing time is the best way to grow any business and there are lots of free things you can do to help get your business noticed.

How have you grown the business?

We’ve grown our business by staying true to the vision we agreed on when we started. It’s very easy to be blown off course by events, and even more so by apparent opportunities.

Before making any strategic business decisions, we discuss and check they’re consistent with our core plan. Clarity of purpose is essential, as are patience and persistence.

How have freelancers helped grow your business?

PeoplePerHour has been our go-to place for freelancers, enabling us to access the skills we need as we grow our business. If there’s a job we can’t do – which in our case is typically coding or complex ‘under the hood’ IT tinkering – we know there’ll be someone on PeoplePerHour that can help.

We check reviews to get a better understanding of the freelancer’s skills and performance. Because payments are escrowed till the job is done, we know we won’t be paying for work not done.