From Compliance Officer to Online Startup

Zoe Hine, founder of SwapMyCityPad.com talks to Escape The City about how she started up her online business. Read the full article here.

1) What are you currently doing with your life?
I am the founder of the recently launched SwapMyCityPad.com which is an online home exchange website that offers members the chance to exchange their homes with other members for city breaks abroad.

Each day is never the same which means I skip out of bed every morning! My days can be made up of radio interviews, writing articles promoting SwapMyCityPad.com and home exchange, working on the design and content for partnership pages such as the one found on the Evening Standard travel section and on other days I will be relentlessly chasing press and media.

The main thing that excites me about my business is how creative you can get. You need to be resourceful and imaginative to get your business out there and heard about. The only limitation is your imagination, plus an infectiously positive attitude always helps!

2) What did you do before this?

I had been working in the City as a compliance officer since March 2000 working for blue chip firms such as Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. My final post was with a boutique investment group called Evolution, where I was the compliance officer responsible for their China securities business, based in London, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
3) What was your moment of truth?

For the past few years I had dreamed of, and researched to death, the idea of starting up my own business. On business trips I would use the lonely evenings to read up about business, building up my little black book of ideas. I didn't know what I wanted to do but I knew that when the time came I would count how much money I had and look at different types of businesses to start. I had been squirreling money away for many years: saving every month, taking very few holidays and I had been extremely fortunate enough to have sold my flat at the beginning of 2008.

Later in 2008 the markets were in turmoil and in December, the office where I was working was shut down and all of us were made redundant. The news didn't come as too much of a surprise for most of us, however the timing couldn't have been worse since Christmas day was only 2 weeks away. I felt that the time had come to put those wheels into motion. I had nothing to hold me back; I was a London girl, no dependents and enough money saved to start my own business. It was time to take that leap, and the news that I had been made redundant had certainly made me leap for joy!

4) How did you plan for it?

I spent the first couple of months researching the market, understanding my competitors and putting together my business plan and a rather lengthy document on exactly how I wanted my website to look and function. I financed my living costs and business using my own savings.

5) What have been the best and worst things about making this happen?

The best thing about starting up SwapMyCityPad.com is being in a job that requires a great deal of creativity. Being creative isn’t always in the artistic sense; it can be applied to the way you make your marketing work for you on an extremely limited budget!

The only negative is lack of money to spend on yourself. Say goodbye to holidays and nights out, all the pennies you have will be invested back into the business. However the joy I get from SwapMyCityPad.com certainly outweighs the negatives!

6) What is the best advice you have received?

Be enthusiastic and focussed, have a business plan before you start out however be willing to change your plans if your business takes on a different shape. SwapMyCityPad.com provides a service to its members and therefore if people tell me that they don’t like something/want a different service then I need to assess and address this need.

In the early days, I wish I had taken heed from friends and family that setting up a business on your own can be very isolating at times. I later decided to get a little dog from Battersea dogs home to keep me company during the day and to give me an excuse to get out of the house every day to clear my head. I also recently started attending networking events at Ecademy and The Athena Network which have proven to be invaluable; not only for my sanity but in relation to the wonderful support and contacts I have built.

Interview continued here.