How do you build a community from 0 – 45K members?
Why is building a personal brand and owning your story critical for success?
How can we value creativity in a challenging economic climate?
We first came across Isabel Sachs’s work and her brilliant membership platform I LIKE NETWORKING in 2020 during the global pandemic. In times of great change and economic turmoil, the creative industries get hit the hardest and we believe protecting the role of creativity in business is critical to driving forward innovation and progress. This is why Isabel and her team’s work is so important to highlight and learn from as we continue to move into uncharted waters.
In this issue of Future Moves we talked about the power of community, why networking can be so advantageous to get ahead in your career, the requirements for building a personal brand to stand out as well as how creatives are the business leaders we should be paying attention to and why they are best placed to solve the big problems of tomorrow.
Jess: Isabel, thank you so much for agreeing to this conversation. Let’s kick off by telling us who you are and what you do.
Isabel: I'm the founder of a platform called I LIKE NETWORKING. It's a social enterprise created to improve diversity in the Creative Industries with a focus on supporting women and non-binary individuals from 18+. We help in a variety of ways. We have a free mentoring scheme and we’ve mentored over 700 people since 2020. We also have an online platform with articles, podcasts, digital workshops and events and do IRL networking events and workshops to support our community. So far, we currently have over 45,000 people engaged in our network.
Jess: What’s your background? What led you to set up I LIKE NETWORKING?
Isabel: I have worked in their creative Industries for over 18 years, and I've worked in visual arts, music, theatre, dance, and film. I had my own company back in Brazil (where I'm from) and so when I moved to London in 2015, I had to start my career from scratch and then in 2020 I had to start all over again because of COVID. That's how I LIKE NETWORKING came to be. So, a kind of patchy career, some would say and very entrepreneurial but that's the reality of most creative careers these days.
Jess: When and where did you see the problems that I LIKE NETWORKING is looking to solve?
Isabel: I had never deeply researched the systemic problems in our industry until COVID came and a lot of people lost their jobs, and I had this hunch that this was going to affect women more than men. Women tend to be the ones taking care of kids, being carers, erc. People would say to me, don't have a baby now, if you have a baby you can't afford to go back to work because the cost of nurseries is so insane and the salaries in the Creative Industries are so low. So, I said let's put together this mentoring program for women and marginalised genders to help combat that issue.
Jess: Did your own personal journey shape your entrepreneurial journey as a founder?
Isabel: My family emigrated to Brazil and had to completely build a new life there. So, I learned early on that you need to be prepared and you need to work hard as nothing is given to you and the world is not necessarily fair. So, I think in a way that that's helpful because you’re not expecting things to be fair. You're expecting things to be hard, and you can make it way less hard when you have a good community around you, which is why I think networking is important.
Jess: What’s been one of the most important learnings since setting up?
Isabel: It’s important to know your limitations, which is why we have an Advisory Board with several different women who all have different experiences that identify in different ways, and they have overcome their own separate hurdles. I believe that it's the diversity of voices that makes I LIKE NETWORKING work. I only have one experience in this world. And of course, it informs a lot of what I do but if I only listen to myself, I'm not going to be able to support a lot of people and I do want this to be a platform for everybody.
Jess: As the founder of the business, how important has building a personal brand been?
Isabel: I realised that if I told my own story of why networking was important, it would be a lot more powerful for people to get behind. People identify with stories, they don't identify with concepts. That was a big change for me. Things really picked up after that and we were featured in an article in the New York Times about the economic downturn in Europe and the importance of entrepreneurial projects like I LIKE NETWORKING. And that's when I realised how important my own story and my own voice was. I don't want to claim that I learned all of that on my own. I owe a lot to a talk on personal branding by Sallee Poinsette-Nash, which was a term I had never heard before. That then led to me being introduced to Lucy Werner who promotes doing your own PR. I did a course with Lucy and that really helped me feel more comfortable as I knew how to do PR for others, but I felt uncomfortable doing it for myself and her course really helped me to get over that and be more comfortable.
Jess: What advice would you give to people who struggle with showing up online?
Isabel: In today’s world, and especially online, it can feel that we exist in a comparison culture. What’s powerful to remember is that we can take ownership of our actions and narrative, we can choose what we want to put out into the world and how we show up. I don't think you need to share everything about your life, but I think sharing a few things and how you got to where you are is so powerful because it helps demystify the journey.
Jess: What’s the value in being part of an industry community? Why do they matter?
Isabel: I think this is where having a community is so important because the power of having people to talk to, having your community supporting each other shouldn’t be underestimated. There are always going to be people who don't believe in connecting or community or collaboration. But it's a big world where you don't necessarily need to deal with them. You can choose your people and try to surround yourself as much as possible with that community which will make all the difference. I think about giving up a lot and that I should do something else and then something will happen and you're like, no, I can see the impact or I can see that this is happening, or someone will talk to you and get you excited again.
Jess: Throughout the past 18 years since you started your career, what’s changed in the industry?
Isabel: I would say that the biggest thing that changed our societies forever was the invention of the iPhone, and the iPhone would not have been possible without a designer. I think if Steve Jobs was considered a visionary by capitalists, then we’ve also seen the value of having creativity as his long-time collaborator in Sir Jony Ive. I believe everyone should see the value of creativity but it's not how it's currently functioning.
Jess: What does creativity mean to you? How can it show up in business?
Isabel: I think creativity is a practice. We are all born as creative beings. You only have to look at kids, they are creative and have an innate curiosity. I also think having a good visual diet is important, seeing different things, reading different things, and sometimes just doing things for the sake of doing. A lot of those big visionary businesses are creative. They were dreaming of doing things that maybe weren't done before. That's where the failure part comes into play. You need to accept some of that will fail and then you'll learn and pivot from it.