Jennifer Bryan and her 25 case studies

Jennifer has created a unique leadership model, called ABChange Model, which is underpinned by popular Meaningful, tweetable quote. Click To Tweet theories in leadership and change. You can find out more on her approach, articles, blogs and case studies at her consultancy page.

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Anastasia Bartrum: Jennifer, can you describe what your company does and how you personally came up with that idea?

Jennifer Bryan: I enjoy helping people, that’s my big driver. One of the things I was doing a number of years ago was coaching a lot of executives and they would say to me “Yeah Jennifer, I know about all Kotter’s and a lot of the change theories out there, but what the heck do I do with this thing on my desk?” And so I wanted to help people come up with an answer as to what the heck they do with this thing on their desk, how do they lead people through change. So that’s why I went away to research and and came up with an idea.

Anastasia Bartrum:  So is that fair to say that you took something that you didn’t know would work, turned it that into a business idea and ran it as a company based on your academic research?

Jennifer Bryan: That’s exactly what I did. So I took that idea. I did the research with individuals in a particular organization. Ok, that makes sense for that organization but does it work in the real world in the practicality side of things? So I worked with a number of different organizations and tested the model in those organizations to see if that worked for them or not.

Anastasia Bartrum: I know that you wanted to write a book, and for some reason you decided that for this book to be successful, for you even to start writing it you need 25 business case studies based on the work that you do. Is that what driven your effort? Do you think it actually contributed to your commercial success or was it just a result?

Jennifer Bryan: I think to be fair, I did have this magic number in my head: 25 case studies before I could write a book. I think it focused my efforts a bit more.

Anastasia Bartrum: Suggest then that somebody who’s reading this has an academic research and thinks that that there might be some value for the industry. Should they go and start talking to industries? Maybe saying to them “I’m looking for case studies, can I do this piece of work for you just because I’m writing a book?” And that might be an easier way to making a commercial part of your idea without necessarily feeling the need to sell.

Jennifer Bryan: Yes, definitely. That’s really valuable for organizations in the private and in the public sector. If you’re able to come and say “Look, I have this, you don’t need to pay me but I want to see if it works”, there’s a lot of people that would bite your hand off. So as long as it meets their need or they think it’s gonna answer a question that they’ve got, I think that’s a very powerful way forward. One thing that is really quite critical when it comes to approaching organizations is what you’re trying to do for them. It needs to answer a burning question for them, there needs to be a burning platform for that organization.

Leig Woodgate on finding your fire

An interview with Leigh Woodgate, Business Mentor for Female Entrepreneurs and Founder of Business Circle School in Australia

Anastasia Bartrum: How do we approach the task of coming up with an idea?.

Leigh Woodgate:What’s really interesting is that when they’re stepping onto the entrepreneurial journey, most people focus on what they’re good at. And the trick is not to focus on what you’re good at but to focus on what really puts your soul on fire, the things that light you up. The only way to get an understanding of that is to understand what actually drives you based on your values and your principles.

The entrepreneurial journey is not for everyone. It can be challenging and it’s so important to have a framework that you can align to on a daily basis, because on the days when it seems heavy and you feel like you haven’t quite made it, it’s really important to remember why you’re doing what you’re doing. Simon Sinek talks about your Big Why, this is where we start in Business Circle School, we look at your personal framework which is built on your values, principles, mission, purpose, vision, and goal.

The work that I do is the beautiful intersection between working with your innate gift of your intuition and pulling in that business strategy because without strategy you’re not going to get anywhere. So this is the starting point before we actually dive into learning about who your target market is and who your audience is and and how to pull out that idea. We get super super clear on what’s important to you.

Anastasia Bartrum: Back to focusing on what are you passionate about. Suppose I am a change manager but I am in love with, say, sushi. You would say “forget about change management even though you have 20 years of experience. If you’re passionate about sushi, run a business about preparing sushi, even though you’ve never done it before.” Is that what you’re saying?

Leigh Woodgate: Exactly. I mean if you’re super passionate about sushi and that would light you up and that’s something that you want to do every day for the rest of your life and you want to use it as a conduit to creating impact. Your passion is always the entry point to creating that impact. How it looks on the other side of the door is very different from what you’re presenting yourself as. So if Jane, for example, has been in change management for the past 20 years, there will be aspects of the work which she absolutely knows. It’s to bring that experience than into her new path of whatever it is that she’s doing the sushi. Leave the things that you don’t love, leave the things that you’re not so good at, leave the things that hurt you.

Anastasia Bartrum: I remember my dad saying something along those lines: “you work and then you earn the money, and then you spend the money on the hobby.” But you’re just suggesting to leave all of that behind because that could generate money but it’s not what you love and focus on sushi, whatever that example might be, even though you probably won’t make any money for quite a long period of time. I understand. I feel it but I find it somewhat counter-intuitive to what we’ve all learned about how we’re supposed to do it.

Leigh Woodgate: What you’re talking about is the transition, and this is when the strategy comes into play. So I’m not saying “jump ship and leave behind everything that you’ve learned in your life and just jump straight into your passion.” This is why Business Circle School exists. This is why other business enterprises that teach people how to build businesses and become entrepreneurs exist. It’s not about putting yourself at risk and and taking away your financial security. It’s about how you merge the two things, how you merge what you’re good at and what you’re passionate about but not to focus on only what you’re good at.

Once you removed the fear and you understand what drives you, then everything else falls into place.

Leigh woodgate

The transition requires strategy, time, and a framework. To move through that it’s important to build the foundations which come from building that personal framework. Some people call it “a value proposition.” I refer to it as “a personal framework” and it is those fundamental five pieces of your values, your principles in mission, your purpose in addition. Once you’ve got those things and you’ve got yourself out of your own way and you understand what you’re saboteurs are, then we look at mindset. We look at behavioral patterns and once you’ve got that all done, then you can dive into that actual business building.

That’s the simple flow of how to come up with a business idea. Once you removed the fear and you understand what drives you, then everything else falls into place. And only then brings in the skills what you’re good at, what really excites you, who you want to be surrounded by on a daily basis. A lot of people that are transitioning after a corporate job are often surrounded by people that you don’t want to work with. And as an entrepreneur, as somebody who’s building a soul-aligned purpose-driven business, you get to choose who you want to be surrounded by on a daily basis as a person.

Elisabeth Steiger and a Chinese fitness app

Meet Elizabeth and find out how she founded a fitness app for the Chinese market.

Liz Steiger is an interpreter who divides her life between Vienna and Bangkok. She shares her story on how to move from working as a corporate finance manager for Siemens in Shanghai to a “serial entrepreneur”.

Anastasia Bartrum: So, rewind five years ago. You’re in Shanghai, you’re doing finance. You are not an entrepreneur in any shape and form. What happened then?

Elizabeth Steiger: I worked in Shanghai in corporate finance which was a very different field from the field that I later worked in. But my business idea basically came out of personal need. I used to run a lot when I lived in Europe, and in Shanghai I could not do the same sports because of heat and air pollution. As you know, when you work a lot and you only spend time in an office, it’s not the best for your health. So I suffered from back pain and I signed up for a personal trainer lesson at the gym and told this woman that I want to be healthier, that I want to improve my cardio performance or at least keep it at a level that I was used to. And also I want to strengthen my back and then the recommendation was “Oh, just use the Power Plate.” At that point I was not a fitness expert but I knew that was not the right advice.

Then I started to look around the gym. There were people on the treadmill without running shoes and in the beginning I thought “Okay, maybe that is a Chinese thing.” You know, in China some people also walk backwards because they think it’s good for training the brain and all that. But then when I asked the guy next to me on the treadmill, he just said “Oh, I did it because I thought that’s the way to do it.”

I realized there was a big lack of knowledge, especially among women. Women wanted to be thin but they didn’t know what to do about it. I heard the craziest stories from taking medication to eating certain worms to keep you thin, everything that was not healthy. I then started to read more about fitness. Then first I had the idea of just making easy videos for a DVD. This was 2014, so people still used DVDs, and then the apps also came along. Later on, me and my team, we developed it into a fitness app with a gaming approach with brief videos in Chinese to explain people why they needed to exercise. Maybe the first motivation would have been to be thin but then they also saw “Oh, this is good for my health, it makes me feel better, it gives me confidence. And especially the last point, the confidence was the reason why we did it.

Anastasia Bartrum: You realize there is lack of knowledge you really want to improve. There is obviously a gap in the market. You’re still working in the office. What was happening when you actually decided to go and build the app? And did you then left the job straight away? How did that all develop itself?

Elizabeth Steiger: It was a process of several months or maybe a year. It started basically just as an idea on the site and then I did more and more research. I started to make a concept for the app and then the plans for filming everything, putting it online. And I stayed with my job until I realized that this was more than just a hobby. I can’t just do both of them without sacrificing quality on both. At that point, I left my corporate job and decided to do it full time.

Anastasia Bartrum: Your team was local or were you looking for them somewhere abroad?

If you don’t speak that language I would not recommend starting a business in China.

Elizabeth Steiger: The programming team was local in Hong Kong but with a mainland Chinese background. And me and my other co-founder were both from Austria.

Anastasia Bartrum: Do you speak Mandarin?

Elizabeth Steiger: Yes. That’s something that I always say about running a business in China. If you don’t speak that language I would not recommend starting a startup in China.

Anastasia Bartrum: So you said you were drawing app layouts and mock-ups. At what stage did you spend time thinking how you’re going to make money?

Elizabeth Steiger: From the beginning. Maybe that’s my business background because I also have a PhD in business and I came from a very academic side. I was thinking about the business model from the very beginning. The problem with apps is it takes quite some time until you actually make money. You need to reach first or at least follow up business. That was the case and I needed to calculate how long is it gonna take us. Even if these calculations are theoretic and then you might revise them, I would not found a business without thinking about how to make money.

Customers are ruthless, if they don’t like your product they will move on. But if you are a small business and if you communicate the story, people can be more forgiving.

Anastasia Bartrum: I know that you moved on and you have other businesses at the moment. You are a full-blown entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur. Has your approach to funding business changed based on what you’ve learned and how you’ve done the app? Or is it pretty much what you would do again again and again?

Elizabeth Steiger:  Some things I would do again and some things I learned. I think the biggest learning was to work with a minimum viable product first. I’m a perfectionist, and my idea was always to put the best possible product on the market. Customers are ruthless if they don’t like your product they will move on. But if you are a small business and if you communicate the story, people can be more forgiving. Moreover, it’s better to involve the customers very very early. Even from the beginning give some products out for testing, do some focus groups and all that stuff just to get that feedback because the earlier you incorporate your customers’ feedback, the better.

Olga Nechaeva on starting a business by reading books

Olga Nechaeva grew up in Russia before she moved to the UK. She worked on major corporations and her last role was V.P. of global licencing for 20th Century Fox. That’s when she decided to quit her job and start a business in an industry that she had no knowledge about whatsoever and no experience.

Anastasia Bartrum: What were you thinking quitting your well-paid job and starting a business in an area or in an industry that you absolutely had no experience in?

Olga Nechaeva: There was something which kind of triggered me. I was thinking about having some business because I was growing quite bored and fatigued with the whole sort of strategy positions. I like that but I think I also love being hands-on in the business. And there was a trigger. There was a lady in our company, a colleague from another department who, to be very honest, I haven’t thought much of. And I remember one day I was sitting there and doing another board meeting presentation and there was an e-mail coming from her where she was saying goodbye to all the company and saying that she’s leaving to had her own business, an agency she founded a year ago which she’s been developing along with her job and now she’s quitting her job to join that. I was almost startled because I had never thought of her as somebody who would actually do something like that and I thought “Well, if she can do that, I definitely should try.” And then I just went on thinking about what business should I be interested in and where should I go. And I came to property.

Anastasia Bartrum: So how old were you when you actually started doing it?

Olga Nechaeva: Well, I started it three years before I quit. So that would be about 39.

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US showed that middle aged entrepreneurs are far more successful than younger ones. The least successful entrepreneurs are under 25. And the success probability starts to jump after the age of 35. And then again some more after the age of 46.

Olga Nechaeva: I’ve been doing it along with a job for a few years and then finally after three years when I started my second business I have quit that job as well.

Olga Nechaeva: So you started in property. What exactly, are you a real estate agent?

Olga Nechaeva: Not quite. So I started as a portfolio landlord having my own properties and then expanded in managing others’ properties. I went into the industry of house sharing which is quite a big industry in the UK and the second biggest in the world. Lots of people in the UK cannot afford to buy or rent their own space so they share, but generally it’s considered to be quite horrible places. And I saw that trend of co-living a few years ago and I thought that could be a lifestyle choice rather than a necessity to save money. And I started building really cool, funky, interesting, well-managed house-shares, and I currently have a portfolio of them and then I moved on to something else.

Anastasia Bartrum: What then?

Olga Nechaeva: I then saw that there are plenty of landlords like myself and plenty of renters and tenants who don’t have a place to meet and who don’t have a platform which would cater for their service needs in terms of admin and day-to-day management of their tenancy. So at the moment my second business is a tech start-up, and we are about to launch a platform which will cater curated high-quality houseshares all across the country and provide the digital tools for landlords and tenants to live together, manage their tenancies and also build a community which will span across different house-shares and across the country to unite people together in this community of house-sharers.

Anastasia Bartrum: So if I go back first to your first business, does is actually still exist?

Olga Nechaeva: Yes. It walks and it brings me monthly income but it’s mostly managed by other people so I don’t spend much time on that.

Anastasia Bartrum: So how much of your research before you started it?

Olga Nechaeva: I would say about six months. So I am quite a systematic person and analytical in my approach. So I first run a table with pros and cons of different directions because I also looked at having owned restaurants or having a child care facility or something else or consultancy and what not. And I ended with property.

Now, within property I started reading and then after reading different books I tried to analyze each business model in terms of the yield, the risks and the amount of time it would require because it should have been something which would suit my needs. I’m a mother. I have two children, quite young children, and I had a day job at the time so I needed something which would not take all my time, would produce a reasonable and the highest possible cash flow and a reasonable yield, would not be particularly risky, would not require a lot of cash to be invested at once. So that took me to rental sector versus development, and within the rental sector I then analyzed what happens if you start renting holiday apartments. What happens if you actually build a bed and breakfast hotel. What happens if you buy a big house and split into flats. So I analyzed it, and arrived to the conclusion that economically house-shares is the best model for me. And then within house-shares I started looking for a marketing spark like the niche which will make me different and unique from everyone else.

Anastasia Bartrum: What you’ve just told me is that you sat down, you read a book or two or three, you put it all in an Excel spreadsheet. You’ve created a business that actually in a quite highly competitive and I think quite an expensive type of industry, and you’re successful and you’re now developing it into a tech Start-Up. And this all is from a book or two.

Olga Nechaeva: Pretty much, yeah. So I read about 30 books, I guess, and when I decided to do the house-share specifically, I went to a company called Platinum who mentors landlords. So I bought their mentoring package and they gave me specifics of how do you buy the right house, what to look at, what are all the legislation regulations. It’s quite a closed market in a sense, it requires lots of work, lots of compliance. So it’s high yield but also high-touch model. Not every person just from outside could easily step into that because you need to be mindful of a lot of things. So I spent money to learn how to do it properly.

Anastasia Bartrum: So why did you decide “Okay, that’s all well and good. I’ve spent all that money, I’ve learned how to do it properly. Thank you very much. I want to do something else”?

Olga Nechaeva: Because I’ve done a few and it’s been working and stable, could be outsourced. And I think along the way, a bug of being a digital startuper.

For my properties I started researching: what else can I offer my customers? What else can I do for my tenants? Can we do some events? Can we do some community for them, for my own properties and the properties I manage? And I realized there isn’t anything, so I saw a niche. Me as a landlord, I spent the year looking for somebody to manage my properties for me because there isn’t specialized managers for house-shares. It requires slightly different skills from your standard real estate letting agents. There isn’t many of them. So I decided to become one, a digital letting platform for publishers.

Anastasia Bartrum: Have you ever doubted yourself for what you can and cannot do?

Olga Nechaeva: Daily. But at the same time I know this thinking is just a brain virus. Yes, you haven’t succeeded in something but you take the learning and you move on. And as the famous saying goes, it took ten thousand unsuccessful attempts to make one successful attempt, so you just keep trying.

This is something I keep telling my children every day. If you don’t succeed, you keep trying. You keep trying and you keep trying. And there is no stop to that.

Anastasia Bartrum: Suppose you have something and it is not working out. It looks like pretty much a disaster or a big mistake. How to pick yourself up? What one can look for? Anything in their past?

Olga Nechaeva: Well, I think digging down into detail, conversing yourself into an analyst rather than an actor in this situation helps. It helps psychologically because it takes your energy away from being in your own emotions into being in your own rational thinking. This way you cooler and you see what are the learnings and then you think that you’ve just paid for this learning. That was the price. And it means that it’s just been a very expensive learning, the more valuable it is for yourself.

Concentrate on today, today this thing is either working or not. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve spent or you haven’t spent on it. You need to make a decision on the basis whether this thing is working today, not on the basis of what I’ve already wasted.

Things like sunk costs. A sunk cost is almost like a fallacy. If we invest our effort or money into something and we later discover it’s not working, we tend to beat the dead horse. We tend to keep pushing for it to work because we feel that the money or effort we’ve spent justifies it, but it’s not. Concentrate on today, today this thing is either working or not. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve spent or you haven’t spent on it. You need to make a decision on the basis whether this thing is working today, not on the basis of what I’ve already wasted.

It’s one of these key things they teach you in a business books: some cost is a fallacy. Do not get hooked up on what you’ve spent, only think about whether what I have right now or my hands is a workable solution or not, and if it’s not, go to a workable solution because the more you drag, the more you spend on something which is not going to work.

Anastasia Bartrum: How to test for yourself, is it something that experiences a problem and I need to persevere? Or is it something I need to let go? Where is that thin line between them?

Olga Nechaeva: I think it’s honesty. I would say there is no recipe. Otherwise it would be easy and we all will make the right judgments in the right time. In a nutshell, if there is something your customers really want that probably means you keep trying to make sure that it works for them and it works for you or you stop making money. But if it’s something you think is great but your customers do not want, this is when you really need to think if you’re doing the right thing. Customers are king. They need to like it and what will you do. That’s the only measure for me. You can keep tweaking as long as there is a need and somebody wants it.

Anastasia Bartrum: Being a woman, being an immigrant, being from Soviet Union. Is it something that you find beneficial or is it something that actually did hinder you at some stage in you, then knowing you now probably turned into a positive?

Olga Nechaeva: Yeah. We can’t stop people being prejudiced. It’s almost inbuilt from the way they’ve been brought up. Cultural prejudices, they do exist. Most people try not to have them but they still do. As I said, look for the benefits. There is always downsides but there are benefits.

I remember I was in some start-up pitch competition where you get two to five minutes to pitch your idea, and it was exactly the time in the UK when there was a big political tension between the UK and Russia about some Russian spies coming over to Britain and poisoning someone. Basically it was not a great time to be a Russian. And I started my pitch from the joke about that and everyone laughed. And that’s probably a thing that nobody else could afford. I could. Your accent stays. People remember you. Whether it’s good or bad, they still remember you so you being picked up. There was that Russian woman, you know, that crazy Russian woman. And it can be a good thing.

Anastasia Bartrum: I know it might be quite difficult to distil all of your experience and put it into one piece of advice for somebody, but still. Is there any piece of advice you can give to someone who’s moving to a different country and wants to run their own business and just at the beginning of their journey?

Olga Nechaeva: Well, I guess I’ll give them advice I was given once. It actually comes back to that story I mentioned in the beginning about that lady in our company who left and who inspired me to try to do the same.

At the time I was very much against the networking. I felt that’s superficial and useless waste of time, people going and just talking. But anyways I called her because I was very interested how she’s done it. We had a coffee and I asked her for a piece of advice. And she said, “Well, just go like you’ve done now, you’ve just asked me out for a coffee, go and take somebody out for a coffee and ask the question, whatever is your next question. Look around you, there must be people you know or people who know the people who may have something, just ask them out. People like to come out and give you advice.”

And I did that. The first thing I’ve done I thought who knows anything about UK property and I looked around and I realized one of my friend’s husband works in property. I called him out for a coffee and started asking all the weird questions like “Where do I start? Where do I go? What do I read?” He gave me some tips and I started from there and then the next and the next.

Since I’ve been doing this for many years now my network is immense and I know everyone I need to know. I do it so naturally now and I can totally say how important it is. So whatever problem I face the first thing I think is “Who do I know who can help me? Why don’t I go talk to them?” And I think it’s one of the most important things in developing business really, that networking. So I’m totally converted.

Anastasia Bartrum: Would you do cold networking events or would you just go through people you know and people who know people who know people?

Olga Nechaeva: I would do cold one as well now but only those which actually make sense. Over time you filter where it makes sense where it doesn’t. I would say, certain industry events, even though it’s cold but there are lots of right people there. And if it’s quite well targeted to an industry, it makes sense. Or I go to the big events like Web Summit. Those people might  live in another part of the world and do something else but it’s also still very helpful for just broadening your thoughts and broadening your mind about how things work. And they also may know someone, you never know. So my last question in any conversation I have of this type, “Do you know someone who you think might be worth for me to talk to?” Quite often they do, and this is how you build that.