What started as an off-hand comment in a workshop session has quickly become the modus operandi for Perth’s newest business strategy coaches as they prepare to help businesses of all sizes tap into individuals’ entrepreneurial spirits.
Blow Your Own Mind is the brainchild of Lisa Smith and Vicki Hodgson, who together bring more than 50 years of academic and commercial experience to their new venture.
Discussing the three-month-old business, Lisa told Startup News their tagline of ‘authentic business growth’ is all about helping people tap into their own potential.
“We work with the person behind the business and we enable them to believe in their own innate ability to succeed, whatever that definition of success is for them,” she said.
“A lot of business owners, we’ve found, … get stuck because they actually don’t know what they’re trying to achieve and they don’t know what success does look like for them.
“So we teach the same skills as everybody else, but with the difference being we work with the person to get them to understand their why, their motivation, what their values are, what their circle of proximity is to enable that success.”
Lisa Smith
Finding purpose
With two clients already under their belt, the duo aren’t wasting any time in helping blow people’s minds.
As their list of clients grows though, Lisa said she didn’t want it to be just startup founders seeking their services, with many of the skills they equip participants with being essential for all of us.
“If you don’t know yourself and what your purpose is, how on earth are you going to convince people to buy whatever you’re selling?” she said.
“We do encourage our clients to look at themselves because I think if you can’t do that, with this age of disruption that we’re in and we’ll continue to be in, rigidity of attitude, a lack of agility and lack of self-knowledge are going to be a killer for people.
“You’ve got to be able to work with people, and if you don’t know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at you’re going to fail pretty quickly.”
Harnessing intrapreneurs
Lisa said another specialty of the venture would be working with businesses to identify staff whose entrepreneurial skills can be put to use internally.
“[Intrapreneurs are] those people in an organisation, for example, who have all the ideas and they’re always wanting to change this process and do something different, but the bureaucracy that exists within an organisation, or the policies, don’t allow them to work that way,” she said.
“Organisations can really tap into intrapreneurs because they’re the ones that the organisation could benefit from because they are future-focused, they’re ideators, they’ve got the passion for the business, but they don’t have to take the risk personally.”
Lisa said while it can be comfortable sticking to intrapreneurship, both she and Vicki know first-hand how rewarding it can be to step out on your own – another experience they share in their workshops.
“I know, and also Vicki, how frustrating it is because we were those intrapreneurs down there all over the place and getting demoralised when our ideas weren’t taken forward,” she said.
“I guess the journey for us now has been to back ourselves and believe in our own innate ability to succeed, and it’s already paying off in dividends.
What’s in a name?
Lisa said the business’s name has received nothing but rave reviews so far, and came about a few months back when she was working with Vicki on workshops for entrepreneurial women.
“In one such workshop we said to them, ‘can you imagine, ladies, what your life would look like if you blew your own mind?’” she said.
“Then we went to the coffee break and I said to Vicki, there’s something in that name, so we wrote it down on the whiteboard and then I actually, there and then, brought the URL not knowing what I was going to do with it.
And the rest, as they say, is history (…in the making).
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Click here to learn more about Blow Your Own Mind.
Main Image: Keane Bourke, Startup News.
