Ep. 87 - Building the Business of You - with Connie Steele — Connie Steele I Future of Work Expert

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“Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup” releases in just a few days. It’s the first book to help professionals and entrepreneurs navigate the uncertain, post-pandemic world of work, while aligning personal purpose and professional advancement.

In this episode, the Strategic Momentum team, Alan and Alexis, flip the script on Connie to get a preview of the book, as well as learn about her own career journey. We discuss how Connie has overcome inertia along her path and how her experiences have shaped her career and business philosophies. Most importantly, we dig into the concepts in the book and the inspiration behind them, which stem from a mix of personal and professional experiences, interviews she’s conducted on this show, and trends she’s studied in the workforce over the years.

Learning to Spot the Trends and Bridge the Gap

While Connie embraces the nonlinear career path today, she acknowledges that her own journey had a linear beginning. As a Chinese American, there were expectations early on from her family to pursue a quantitative path in college and then progress on to graduate school before entering the real world. This led to her earning a math and statistics degree yet she struggled to figure out what she would apply it to. She wanted to identify some profession that would excite her.

That desire to find some type of fit resulted in time spent sifting through vocational books in the library where she discovered marketing and a specific discipline within the field that naturally aligned to her quantitative skills yet creative nature - marketing research.

“And a light bulb went off. I absolutely loved the discipline because I could finally see how the quantitative side and analysis of really people in their behavior could be used to make decisions on the products and services that were on store shelves and in the advertising that we see.”

After getting her graduate degree in applied statistics, she started her career in market research at a top CPG company. While she enjoyed being able to apply her education to real-world scenarios, she quickly found herself feeling unfulfilled. She was also unprepared to manage the big-picture dynamics in her company. School had not taught her to effectively navigate the office politics that often decide who ‘make it’ in the corporate world. Not only did these factors put her in uncomfortable situations, they also led her to underperform in the eyes of management.

Fortunately, Connie was able to leverage her soft skills by asking people for help, and in doing so, started to build her village. This helped her build confidence as well as skills which then elevated her to the next level. She then began to look for opportunities to engage her right brain after being on the left brain path for so long. She wanted to make the switch to marketing.

At the time, she was also intrigued by the enigmatic world of the Internet. Jumping on an opportunity to go into tech, she moved to AOL, where she fell in love with the fast-paced, agile tech environment. “I just loved it. It felt like a new found freedom. It felt as if I could be creative, I could try. I could, frankly, be entrepreneurial.”

Parallel Pathing to Create the Fluid Career Path

Connie initially thrived in the tech world. She was able to test and learn new skills, and embrace her entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial sides. After several years working at AOL followed by a few years leading various marketing functions at another tech firm, she headed up marketing for a start-up company where she was faced with managing a 100% remote team (well before the pandemic normalized the virtual workforce). While she excelled in her C-suite position, the demands of the job and the internal politics made her question how great of a fit the position was.

“Having two young children, it became very clear that this path had its limits. I wasn't able to be present for my kids. I felt it was a situation which I had to choose between my work life and my personal life. At that point, I made the decision to make another pivot and it was to pivot out of corporate to find more flexibility, to regain more control over my career.”

Connie pivoted into consulting and founded Flywheel Associates. Since 2012, she’s helped mid-size, Fortune 500, and even startup companies scale up their marketing and strategy efforts. It’s given her the opportunity to sample a lot of industries, expand her network and skillset, “but more than anything, it's also giving me the opportunity to try other things outside of the consulting business, to be able to mentor startups, to honestly even create my own podcast as part of wanting to provide thought leadership content.”

Today, Connie is parallel pathing being a consultant, business leader, podcaster, and now author, not to mention being a mom, among other jobs. And learning to be fluid in her own career and be her own boss is what ultimately has helped her gain the perspective needed to lay the groundwork for Building the Business of You.

Building the Business of You

Connie was fortunate to be at the forefront of the tech boom, where she learned that optionality, agility and flexibility were possible for both companies and individuals. And not only were they necessary for rapid growth, they would also shape the future of work.

Today, Connie has seen that many younger leaders are rejecting being boxed in. They are looking for flexibility and control in their careers. Realizing what millennials wanted and were already doing eventuated in the notion of a career mashup. Many were simultaneously pursuing multiple interests to fulfill their passions but also hedge against risk. Others were channeling all of their past experiences into providing incredible value to their roles because of the diversity of experiences and capabilities they possessed.

Drawing from her own experiences, along with these observations and her own research, Connie realized that the future is the career mashup. Yet, some still struggle with letting go of career expectations and embracing a truly fluid career path. This is why Connie developed Building the Business of You and the Fluid Career System to address the emotional and operational challenges of career development and help people move toward achieving their career goals.

Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup consists of five components:

Spotting the Trends
Preparing for Change
Creating Your Compass
Networking Towards Your Path
Build Hard and Soft Skills

Each of these work together to help you create your plan and then develop the confidence, network and skills to realize it. “This fluid career system really is about strategic planning at the end of the day, to get to where you want to go….No different than how a corporation or a company runs.”

Ultimately, with this book Connie hopes to help people find clarity where it might've felt like chaos. She hopes that it “helps people build a defined roadmap, a way forward when there isn't clarity on what road to even take. Many may have felt that their windy, twists and turns of a journey might not amount it to something that they feel has given them what they've been looking for,” but if you take a step back, you may realize that “they might have just been building blocks for you to guide you to where you ultimately want to go.” Visit bizofyou.co to get your copy of the book and learn more about turning your dream career into a reality.