Small Business,
Big Mindset Podcast
Episode #30
How a Personal Business Strategist Operates
Our guest this week, Jodi Hume; who focuses on decision support for entrepreneurs growing their businesses, grew up in a family of entrepreneurs dating back to her grandparents. How cool to have such a background that you can ask your grandma what it was like to run a business in the 1940s?
After college, Jodi found herself employed at an architecture firm where she stayed for 17 years moving up the ranks from Marketing Director to COO. Anything that wasn't architecture at the firm, Jodi ran it. Through those leadership meetings and facilitating conversations of decision-making as well as fixing previous decisions, Jodi had an extraordinary learning experience that brought her to where she is today - a personal strategist and facilitator for busy leaders and their teams.
The Start
- Surrounded by an entrepreneurial family
- Business conversations with the dinner table conversation du jour
- After college, grew from Marketing Director to COO of a growing architecture firm
The Shift
- Due to COVID-19, in-person facilitations and workshops were out
- Adopted online facilitator tools to adapt
- Continued roundtables via Zoom
- Every client from past and present came out of the woodwork at the beginning of COVID
- Personality profiles were either of those comfortable in uncertainty and thriving or those paralyzed because of it
The Strategy
- Saw a need to support business leaders who didn't have an unbiased resource to help decision making
- Sought to help entrepreneurs avoid wheel spinning, a toxic and draining aspect of business
- A entrepreneurs make progress in their business, new problems arise
- Learning to celebrate new problems as a sign of progress
The Action
- Roundtable framework used - speaker tees up the issue, others only ask questions
- Best thing you can do for an entrepreneur - be curious, ask lots of questions to get at the real problem
- Focus on the problem, not the symptoms
- Avoid comparing solutions rather than honing in on the actual problem
The Mindset
- To keep her mind and body fueled: sings in a band, performs vigorous strength training exercise
- Monitors her energetic and emotional capital, listens to her body - plays strategic hooky when necessary
- Goals and Vision
- Launching a service at a scaled level - supplying business owners with someone to talk to on the business side, talk an element through that is holding them back so they can move on
The Wrap-Up
If you could listen to only one music artist for the rest of your life, who would it be?
Where can people find you online?
BONUS: Jodi has graciously offered a free 20-minute call for business owners to talk through elements of their business. (This is not a sales call) Book your spot here: https://bit.ly/2SuJk5g
