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Joseph Liu
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Setting Realistic Expectations with Chinwe Onyeagoro
Finding the right balance between pushing yourself to achieve and not overextending yourself is never easy. In this episode of Career Relaunch, former McKinsey consultant turned CEO of PocketSuite Chinwe Onyeagoro will explain how she made some tough choices to bring a better balance to her life and approach her work with even more joy. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll talk about setting reasonable expectations for yourself so you can maintain a sustainable pace to your work and life. Key Career Insights Rather than spreading yourself too thin, focusing your energies on one particular sector helps you add significantly more value. Instead of simply chasing credentials and resume building, focus on what you can learn and what exposure you’ll have to people with the functional skills you’re hoping to develop. Given all the sacrifices you have to make whenever you’re devoted to a professional cause, you have to approach your work with a sense of joy. Otherwise, it’s simply not sustainable. In order to turn a side gig you have for supplemental income into a real, full-time business, you have to enjoy finding clients and building a business. Returning to full-time employment after running your own business can be a tremendous opportunity, but it may involve re-skilling up and training again so you can reintegrate into your former industry that’s potentially evolved. Resources Mentioned What makes a workplace experience “great.” (according to Great Places to Work): Purpose– People have pride in what they do. Camaraderie– Sense of connection with others. Trust-believing other people in your organization “have your back.” For unique insights on how to start and run your own business, you can text PocketSuite at +1 415-841-2300. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to take stock of all the key work activities filling the hours of your day, then loosen your grip on one of them. Allow yourself to just slow things down with one activity you regularly invest your time and energy into. See what happens, see how you feel, and most importantly, see if dropping from 110% to 90% effort ends up benefitting you in some other way. About Chinwe Onyeagoro, CEO of PocketSuite Chinwe’s the CEO of PocketSuite, who sees an opportunity to give early stage independent service professionals specific and useful tips to help them grow their businesses. She’s been the president of Great Places to Work, a top management consultant, an advisor to Fortune 1000 executives and the U.S. Small Business Administration, and a TEDx speaker. She currently serves on the boards of private equity firms and lending institutions that have invested more than $1B in small and medium enterprises that create good jobs in underserved communities and is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Chinwe has co-authored publications with the Pepperdine School of Business, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, focused on business financing and financial health. She’s also written for Entrepreneur Magazine among others. Follow Chinwe on LinkedIn & Twitter. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Chinwe know! Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners! Leave Joseph a Voicemail You can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting Career Relaunch A2 Hosting allows you to offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I would work from sun up to sun down every day. The good news was that it gave me such joy to do this work. It’s something that I think you have to be intentional about doing, and you got to do it with a sense of joy, because if you don’t, it’s not sustainable. Joseph: Good morning, Chinwe, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show. Chinwe: Thanks so much, Joseph. It’s great to be here. Joseph: We are going to talk about a few different topics today. We’re going to talk about your career pivots from consulting to your time at Great Places to Work to eventually co-founding your own company. I was hoping you could start by telling us about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life, just to get us kicked off. Chinwe: I am the mother of two sweet kids under the age of two. That gives you hopefully a clear picture of what my days look like. As I think about my career and what I’m focused on today, what I’m really focused on is really helping entrepreneurs, primarily independent professionals, live their best life. We have an app, a mobile app that is used by tens of thousands of entrepreneurs around the country to communicate with their clients, to schedule their clients, and to get paid by their clients. It’s a really, really gratifying feeling to wake up in the morning and to see business happening on something that we built. We process about $80 million of income for these entrepreneurs a year and schedule about a million appointments for them a year. This is for everyone from your local dog walker to your fitness trainer, to your life coach, to your therapist – anyone who’s making a living, working on their own, delivering their talent to you and your community using our app, which is called PocketSuite. Joseph: I want to hear a little bit more about PocketSuite at the end, and so we’re going to come back to that. Before we go back in time, I did have a question about your life. You did mention you have two kids under the age of two, and I’m just wondering if you can tell us how you go about balancing motherhood and parenthood with running your own company. Chinwe: There’s no such thing as balance, Joseph. I wish there was. It’s a field of dream, get out. What I’ll say is that guilt is a really, really powerful motivator. What I do is I think about the things that I want for them, and then I really try to execute that in the moment. Rather than doing a lot of planning and feeling a lot of angst, every day, I try to just make progress in their presence. One example is I’m originally from Nigeria, and I always loved languages. I speak my native tongue, which is Igbo, and I really want my kids to speak our native tongue. Rather than hoping to hire a tutor one day and have them go to lessons somewhere in Nigeria, which isn’t going to happen any time soon, I spend 30 minutes every morning doing numbers and colors and alphabet with them in Igbo. Throughout the day, I just speak to them only in Igbo. My husband jokes. He’s like, ‘You know, if they were going to go to university of lingos, I’d be thrilled about this, but I’m concerned about their SAP scores when they speak better Igbo than they do English.’ We joke about it, but I feel so proud to just be able to carve out some time, a little time each day for a gift that I really want to give them, which is the gift of bilingualism. That’s just one example of how I just try to find moments and be present in those moments in a way that fills me and hopefully fills them. I don’t try to do it all. I forgive myself for all the things that I’m sure I’m not doing as a mother that also has a career. Joseph: I’ve heard that you can always be doing more, and at the same time, you can’t do everything. I’ve heard the term today for the very first time, ‘work-life blend,’ instead of ‘balance’ because they really do run into one another, and I certainly experienced quite a bit of that myself. I think that’s great that you’re doing that, and you’re absolutely correct. The bilingualism is a gift. I wish I was better at Chinese than I am, but that’s life. I think it’s great that you’re doing that. Chinwe: It’s never too late, Joseph. Joseph: I continue to work on it, and I’m trying to give some of that Chinese to my own daughter right now. I’d like to go back now and talk a little bit about the start of your career, because you haven’t always been the co-founder and CEO at PocketSuite. I was wondering if you could tell us about your time way back during your days at McKinsey, and then we can move forward from there. Chinwe: I joined McKinsey & Company, which is a global management consultancy, right out of college. I went to Harvard University. When you graduate from a school like Harvard, there are a couple of options for you in terms of what they deem as success half-wise. When I was coming up, really, that was investment banking, management consulting, going into medicine, or going into law. Those were really the paths. Anything else is kind of nice. I checked box number two, management consulting, and I went on to McKinsey & Company, which has a tremendous reputation, and it’s well-deserved. It’s a strategy consulting firm. We work with large, large companies that are trying to continue to grow and maintain their market share. We joke that we’re coming out of college,
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