I’m Susanna Lawson and I’m the co-founder of Circle of Trust. I founded a Tech business and education technology business back in 2005 for my back bedroom in Manchester. It was called One File. We scaled it over the next 15 years when we sold the business to the second largest tech company in Canada. I said I was never going to start another business two years ago. I met TJ Tracy Johnson about a year ago and she told me about the Circle of Trust and I was absolutely bought in. I love the idea, love. The concept completely understood the problem and around March time we said let’s go and we founded the business.
My entrepreneur's Journey
My entrepreneurial journey. I’ve sort of identified that if you can see what the problem is that people are having and you can identify a solution to solve that problem, then you should. If enough people have that problem, there is a winning solution.
The Circle of Trust
The Circle of Trust will solve the problem of not being able to get trusted recommendations. But individuals such as myself and any others can connect on the platform with other individuals that they trust. It could be your neighbours, your family, your friends or your business network. And then everybody recommends small to medium businesses that they would trust to do business with their friends and their family so that could be a plumber, it could be an electrician, it could be a dog walker, it could be an accountant or a marketing agency. So it’s for your personal life and your professional life. And it’s there to help individuals make lives easier and to help businesses shine.
Meeting TJ
When I met TJ, it was a brilliant time. She’d already scooped out the idea with a tech company called Radical, so they’d sat down. They’d gone through what the features should be, what the pages should look like, so they had it scooped out. So what then needed to happen was the build needed to start to build the apps. So when I came along, that’s the point that TJ was at. I had experience founding and sort of building a tech company. So when I was introduced to TJ, it was like a match Madrid in heaven because she had the idea and I had the knowhow on how to do that.
My advice to StarUps
The advice that I would give to any budding entrepreneur is, if you’ve got a clear problem that people have and you’ve done some research to understand what the market share is, how many people have that problem and you believe you’ve got the solution and again go out and do your market research? Do people think that your solution will solve that problem? That’s got to be your first thing. Otherwise you might have two smaller market share or there might not be a problem that you think you have. But nobody else has. So you’ve got to do that.
Manchester 1st
The Circle of Trust as it’s launching is going to be available nationwide all over the UK which is really exciting. We’ve already had interest from people and individuals and businesses abroad which is very exciting so we could see this could be completely scalable globally. But the launches are in Manchester and our network from Greater Manchester because this is where we’re based and we love the region and we want to celebrate with everybody that we know here.
Download the App https://www.circleoftrust.co.uk/
