I’m still figuring out what I do for a living

As of September 29th, 2023, I am no longer an employee of CYB and I am now working for Orva full time. But what does Orva do exactly? I’m still figuring that out.

There’s been a decent amount of interest from companies, local UK councils, and bootcamps in teaching people how to code. This includes people who want to change jobs or people who are struggling to find any job. Right now, this has been the main focus of Orva, and it’s going well. However, I’d like to incorporate my wife’s awesome design skills into the business, and we’ve been investigating different ways to do that.

The most obvious way to do that would be to form a creative agency, and I’ve written about doing that a few times. However, a tiny bit of research will show that there are loads of creative agencies, even just in Sheffield, all trying to win work. I know there is probably more than enough work for everyone, but I’m not the biggest fan of writing proposals, pitching, and counting hours. This is where the value-based pricing or productized service model speaks to me more, but I won’t go too much into that in this post.

Another route Orva could go down is to focus on teaching code, but expand to children as well as adults. Since 2014, the UK government has made it mandatory to teach children computing in schools. We could create tools and resources for schools to help them teach coding better. My wife briefly worked as a TA in a primary school, so she has some experience creating child-focused designs. Again, doing a bit of digging, it seems that schools may have this covered, or covered enough for them to be satisfied.

The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to try them both and see which one works.

I’m a huge fan of doubling down on a niche, so for a creative agency, we’d need to focus on a specific sector, possibly charities and education, but we’re figuring that out.

At the moment, this post is a massive brain dump of what’s been on my mind for the past few weeks, but I’d love for this to be a dialogue. If you have views, please feel free to share them with me by replying or sending an email. Also, I’d love for you to follow us on this journey, so feel free to subscribe to our socials for updates.

Until next time 👋