Advisable connects companies to the world’s best marketing specialists on-demand. The company was founded by Peter O’Malley and Galen Lowney in 2017 and secured a €1M seed round from top European VC and angel investors. Lowney took a moment to update the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center on the company’s journey and his own experience as a founder so far.
So what does “entrepreneurship” mean to you?
GL: For me entrepreneurship is identifying and taking advantage of opportunities to build a profitable business, cleverly navigating risks and uncertainty with limited resources.
What’s the biggest experience or lesson gained on your journey so far?
GL: My initial goal was to be an independent entrepreneur with a profitable business. The lesson I learned as I worked toward that goal was that it simply wasn’t enough. If you’re going to invest all your time and energy in something then it’s not enough to strive to build a profitable business: it’s got to be a big enough opportunity to worthy of your commitment, it’s got to be work you enjoy that demands the best of you, it’s got to be building towards a mission you believe in and a better world.
How did your company come to be?
GL: Advisable was a slow-burning idea of my co-founder, Peter O’Malley, a former marketing freelancer. The company in its current form came to be as he and I were testing multiple business opportunities live in the market – the “aha” moment was when we realized that we could fulfill the obvious demand for marketing freelancers in an automatable, scalable way, as witnessed by some of our earliest sales.
How is your company changing the landscape?
GL: The landscape is already changing: the amount spent on highly skilled freelancers in the US quadrupled to $500B between 2013 – 2017. Yet only 15% of freelancers have used a digital platform to find a project – that’s the massive opportunity we’re working to capture. The shift toward a remote workforce and distributed teams is underway and we’re working hard to further enable and accelerate that shift.
What do you wish you knew when you started? Is there anything you would do
Differently?
GL: We are still starting! Despite having worked with some major companies and gaining the validation to secure top investors, Advisable is still under a year old. I feel like we’ve been quite efficient in our learning to date, but from the perspective of one year’s time looking back I guess the biggest room for mistake right now is in the people we hire – hiring decisions are the most difficult ones we have to make. So I wish I could know exactly who the right hires are, but I’ll settle for being able to look back in a year’s time and not want to have done anything!
What advice/credo do you live by as you grow the business / what is your professional and personal mission statement?
GL: When it comes to work, less is definitely more. Professionally this means focusing on only doing the activities most important to growing the business. Peter and I have unlimited ideas for how we could improve the business, but ruthlessly prioritizing and culling these ideas to only work on the most important few is a key credo. Personally, I operate the same way: I have a limited amount of time and energy so prioritizing the key things to focus on and doing them very well is far more important to me than spending all my time trying to do a million and one things and inevitably doing them badly and burning out along the way.
What’s it like to work alone or with your partners? What advice do you have for fellow entrepreneurs about building and leading teams?
GL: Not a day goes by that I don’t feel lucky to be working with such a great co-founder in Peter – which is saying a lot from someone with sometimes unrealistically high standards for other people. The benefits of working with high caliber people who you respect and learn from can hardly be overstated. As for building our team, we’re still drinking our own Kool-Aid with a distributed team comprised entirely of Advisable freelancers.
Where do you find inspiration when faced with challenges?
GL: Having a support network in place – my co-founder, other entrepreneurs, friends, family – always helps put things in perspective and it’s useful for reminding me of previous challenges that I’ve overcome.
What does “success” look like for you? What do you think will help you achieve it?
GL: Success for me is having the independence to do my best work on my own terms.
I’ve always had the drive to do the best work that I am capable of and this is backed by a belief both in my own abilities and that I know how to get the best from myself. It’s totally fitting that the fate of this success is now tied into that of Advisable’s wider mission to enable others’ to produce their best work by working on their own terms as freelancers.
I think this is important: many people are driven to work hard for unhealthy reasons and as a result get caught working in unhealthy ways rather than optimising for their lasting professional and personal development.
What is your proudest and darkest moment so far? Share a key high and a key low from your journey if you can.
GL: My biggest achievement as an entrepreneur has been to persevere to find an opportunity worth entirely committing to: one I believe in both on a business level, as a potential billion dollar opportunity, and also on a personal level, as Advisable strives to enable the best marketing talent to work on their own terms as freelancers.
The low points were the many moments of doubt along that journey – scraping by as an affiliate marketer, turning down the security of job offers, business opportunities not working out, the conflict between giving up too easily or chasing an impossible dream. Each low taught me valuable perspectives that can only be learned the hard way.
What lesson did 2018 have for you? What do you look forward to in 2019?
GL: 2018 I transitioned from exploring multiple business opportunities in parallel to committing to and focusing on only one. I guess in 2018 and the years before I’ve learned how difficult it can be to find that one opportunity you believe in and is worth pursuing at the expense of all others, so I appreciate how lucky I am to have found that in Advisable. In 2019 I look forward to making the most of being in this position to single-mindedly focus on growing Advisable.
Many entrepreneurs continue to perfect their daily routines to support their work and greater vision; would you mind sharing your morning routine or a regular ritual that grounds your work each day?
GL: I don’t try to be too perfect here and have one 80/20 “rule” each day simply to be out of bed at 6AM and to get 2-4 hours uninterrupted work done before interacting with the outside world. 4 hours in this hyperproductive zone is as good as a full day’s work – the rest of the day is generally filled with team and customer calls and admin.
What kind of an entrepreneur do you want to be known as, as in, what do you want your legacy to be?
GL: I’m an entrepreneur in order to have the independence to do my best work on my own terms. We’re building Advisable to enable others to have this same opportunity as freelancers – achieving that goal would be a legacy I’d be proud of.
