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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I am so excited about today's guest.
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We've been talking off the air and her energy just gets me so excited for all the things that we're going to be discussing, and I will very transparently share with you that, as soon as our team saw the very name of her business, we said we need to have this amazing entrepreneur on, because her business is called Abundance Leadership Consulting.
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What a great name, and I think it reveals so much about her attitude, her energy, her values, the things she prioritizes and, quite frankly, she's just amazing as a person and as an entrepreneur.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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Her name is Jennifer Sconyers.
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Jennifer founded Abundance Leadership Consulting to facilitate connections and to break down systems hampering social impact.
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Her entrepreneurial journey was born out of her own experiences of feeling overworked, stressed and isolated in previous roles.
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Having worked over 20 years in for-profit and national nonprofit sectors that provided different forms of client engagement and training, jennifer saw how organizations were often hindered by disconnects.
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This inspired her to found her company to help organizations and teams not just perform better, but to see themselves as part of a larger community ecosystem.
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She pairs her more than 20 years of experience with a master's degree in political science and a bachelor's degree in communication from the University of Illinois at Springfield.
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She also has her certification in mergers and acquisitions from the Wharton School of Business, which we're so grateful to be partnered with on this show as well.
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Her educational background, along with her years of experience in creating a high-performing team, provides her with unique expertise to lead abundance leadership, consulting Now, whether you've got a team yet or not the way that Jennifer thinks about people and connections and creating a culture where people succeed.
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It impacts all of our businesses.
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So I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not gonna say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Jennifer scone.
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Yours all right, jennifer.
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I am so very excited to have you here on the show.
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First things first, welcome.
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Thank you for having me.
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It's exciting.
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Heck.
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Yes, you do such cool and meaningful and important work and I'm excited to dive into it.
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But before we get there, you've got to take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Jennifer?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Well, thank you.
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Yeah, so essentially I'm a person who's naturally curious and I'm curious about people and how they behave and interact.
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I also really love community.
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So I grew up in an environment where my parents just really encouraged me to connect with folks who weren't like me to understand their stories, weren't like me to understand their stories, who they are, what moves them, what motivates them, and so that curiosity is something I've taken throughout my adult life and it's taken me to interesting places.
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So before I started this business, I worked in politics and campaigns for years in public policy and advocacy.
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I worked in television for a while, but all that was from this space of curiosity and through that I learned a lot.
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I learned how teams work and how they don't work.
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I had my own experiences on teams, as a team lead and also as an employee and figuring out like what do I need to be successful?
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Is this group going to be successful?
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So all of that really brought me to here.
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I think also it's important to say is that I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
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So since I was 15 years old, I knew I had my own business.
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I didn't know what it would be Back then I thought I would sell clothes and shoes for extended sizes because that was my jam back when I was 15.
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But I always knew I wanted to run my own thing and make a positive impact.
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Yes, I love that overview, especially because that entrepreneurial bug, once it's in there, the only way to satisfy it is to launch your own business.
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And, jennifer, I'm going to humble brag for you for a little bit, because you didn't just start your business.
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You are nine years into what it is that you're doing.
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That's a huge impact.
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Take us through there, because I think, personally, it's my big belief that we need to celebrate longevity in entrepreneurship so much more than we do, because everyone the media loves to talk about you know these seemingly overnight successes, but you've been impacting people for nine years and creating value in the marketplace.
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What's changed during that time?
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That's a huge celebration, jennifer.
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Well, thank you for that.
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It's so interesting.
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So I started my business April 1st 2016.
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I joke about that because it's April Fool's Day, but this was not a joke.
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I went down to my local small business development center, where I actually knew the folks there, and they helped me start ALC.
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I didn't know what I was doing, but I had an idea and a dream, if you will, and I literally sat down on my couch and mapped out what's this business going to be and what's the impact I need to make.
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I think, more importantly, who do I need to be as a leader?
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So I like to say that, because when I coach people who are entrepreneurs, who want to figure it out, it doesn't all just come to you.
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There's a series of learnings and breakthroughs and I had to transform myself essentially in the process, I had to work through my own stuff.
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I call it those negative conversations that we might have on our own heads about what we can't do or it's too hard, and I had to work through all of that.
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I think the other thing I had to do early was compare OK, this journey I'm choosing to be on versus past jobs and every day I chose into entrepreneurship.
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I think that's important.
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At no point did I say, oh, it'd be easier if I just had a main gig again, a W-2 somewhere At every point in the journey, I've said, okay, this is exactly where I need to be.
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Even though it's hard, it's not as hard as when I was employee somewhere else.
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I have agency, I can make an impact, and that's been super useful, as well as having people in my corner.
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So I didn't do this alone.
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I had a network of people here in Columbus, ohio, where we have a lot of opportunities for small business owners and small business incubation, and I just lean on the wisdom of other people just to learn learn, what do I need to do, what should I try?
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And then I think, also just being nimble, being strategic about risk taking and taking risks and having an idea and testing it out and, you know, getting client feedback and making the adjustments.
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So it's been that nimbleness that's been helpful for us.
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What I will say, though and it's now 2024, almost 2025, the conditions of this year are very similar to the conditions when I started the business.
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In terms of public conversations, political conversations, what's happening in the zeitgeist, if you will were very similar to how I started.
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So it's kind of one of those things where I feel like the more things change, the more things stay the same.
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Alc has gone through this evolution and we're going into what I'll call our next evolution of growth and so really just taking all these years of learning and experiences and client feedback to inform where we go next, Gosh, jennifer, there's so many things I love and appreciate about that overview that you just gave us.
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I want to call this out, though, because you shared something with many things I love and appreciate about that overview that you just gave us.
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I want to call this out, though, because you shared something with us that I don't hear from many entrepreneurs, and that is very early on.
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You recognized that you needed to ask yourself what type of leader do I want to be?
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What type of leader do I need to be, jennifer?
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I would argue that most people, when they start their business, they obsess about their product or their service and the people that they serve, without recognizing the important role that they're stepping into.
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Take us behind the scenes there.
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That's powerful stuff that I think we all need to confront and answer in our own journeys as we begin our businesses.
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Yeah Well, I, you know.
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One of those things I did in the very beginning was I just knew and this is when I was still working for someone else there were things that were I was getting my own way in a certain way, like there was a certain way that I viewed the world, the certain ways that I was navigating things, addressing challenges that would have me stuck or stymied.
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So I did some really intentional emotional intelligence work.
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I got coached, I went to trainings, I asked for support and advice from people who were further along on their journeys and I wanted to address head on the things that had me stuck.
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I had a narrative in my brain about what I thought I could do and accomplish in my life, and that was informed by, maybe, what my parents taught me or what I got in the environments I was in.
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But I knew to be an entrepreneur required me to think very differently, and so it was a stretch, it was hard.
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I'm not going to say this was easy, and this is also why I chose the name I did Abundance Leadership Consulting.
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So having that abundance mindset was going to be really important and a really reminder for me, because I realized my thinking had been quite scarce and that I've been very limited in terms of what I believe was possible or what I could do or the impact that could be made.
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So the word abundance was important.
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The crux of our work is leadership.
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So leadership in all forms individually, in teams and communities.
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So that was also a signal in terms of the work that I wanted us to do, and the consulting framework was one that's broad enough where it allowed us to do all the things we do.
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So coaching, facilitation, training, planning, all those things.
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But I had to be really intentional, I guess, to answer that question and seek the support, advice of people who are further along on their journeys, who've done that transformational work and, yeah, just kind of use them as examples and figure out what would that look like for me?
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Yeah, I really appreciate those insights and behind the scenes story.
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Jennifer, I do want to go deep into the work that you do with Abundance Leadership Consulting because, as you heard me say in the teaser of this episode, it was the very name of your business that made us, our team, say holy cow.
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Let's look deeper into what Jennifer does.
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This is important stuff and meaningful work that she's doing, and right on your website.
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I want to read from the headline I'm a big fan well-crafted headlines and I know that it didn't come to you overnight.
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It's obviously because you're in the work, but it's so hard to craft these headlines and you did it so succinctly Happy staff, healthy organization, bringing teams into meaningful community.
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Now, jennifer, you talk about the larger discourse, societally, and I feel like somewhere along the way, we've lost our sense, in so many different facets of today's society, what community means, and we don't often think about work or organizations as our communities.
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Heck, a lot of people don't even think about their neighborhoods as communities these days, which is so sad to see.
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Why is that word so prevalent in your messaging?
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What is it about community?
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What does that mean to you and how does it fit in as the aspirational goal that we should be working towards.
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Absolutely Well.
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At the core of our work at ALC is relationships.
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So I often tell people none of us are floating in a bubble above a cloud.
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We are interconnected and that is essential in building healthy relationships.
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Those can be personal, they can be professional.
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The work we do at ALC is focused on the professional side of relationships, but the work impacts all the relationships.
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I think you know we're going through so much as a society.
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There's been so much change when I think of the last eight years, even just like the last four with the pandemic, and we had to navigate that change.
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And now we've had another major national election.
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There's gonna be even more change.
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Change is something that's the ever constant.
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But to navigate it well, we actually can't do it well alone.
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We actually do need others around us, and not just for the purpose of having a series of transactions to get things done, but actually so we can collectively move forward.
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So that piece around relationships I think is important, because if we can actively support one another and moving our communities and society forward, I think we're all better off.
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So we all do better and we all do better.
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That was a quote from Paul Wellstone, former senator from Minnesota, and that is actually something that I think of, and that's actually the root of what we do at ALC.
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Yeah, I love how you articulate those things, Jennifer.
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Obviously, you're very well versed, having done the work for so long, but when I think about the nature of your work, it feels like a double-sided coin, which is one.
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We need individuals to do the work and we need to guide people.
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I love hearing the way you talk about abundance, because that's a challenge we all face, not only as entrepreneurs.
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But we can extrapolate any of this into just our lives and us as people.
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We need to have that abundance mindset.
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So you're simultaneously working with teams, which teams are comprised of individuals, but then also that team, that collective element of it.
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How do you navigate those waters of both sides of that coin?
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Yeah, well, I see it as a both and not an either or.
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So teams need strong leadership, and so it's really ensuring that folks who are leading those teams so we look at managers, supervisors, executive leaders, business owners making sure they have the support and tools that they need to lead effectively, while also working with the team as a whole.
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So what's the team wrestling with or struggling with or working through, and how can the team collectively come together?
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So for us, it's both of those things.
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When working within an organizational system, I think the other piece that makes us unique at ALC is that we know that that organization or that university or that company isn't by itself.
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It's engaging and interacting with other businesses, other humans, other people, and they have to figure out how to navigate in those systems well.
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So our approach is also a systemic approach.
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It's a both end of individual teams, the people who lead them, as well as how they navigate and relate to the systems around them.
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Yeah, jennifer, whenever I get to talk to people like you, who are amazing at understanding all of these very complex dynamics that we're talking about here today is, I love asking about the underlying motives, and especially for you, I've been really excited to have this conversation with you because you've worked in the for-profit sector, you've worked in the nonprofit sector and I think that, just to make a big generalization, it's easy for us societally to say well, the non-profit space is very much fueled by their mission.
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They're very much fueled by the impact that they want to have on the world.
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It's in the very name of the business model, which is non-profit.
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Profit is not the main motive there.
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However, in teams, everyone has their own motives.
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Some people do prioritize I want to get financially stable.
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Some people prioritize freedom I want to travel more or spend more time with my family.
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There's so many different motives, jennifer, and in any team setting, there's people with all different types of motives.
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How the heck do we, I guess, one, make sense of those motives and understand what drives people and then two, have them all work in harmony together?
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For sure.
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Well, something that everyone has is what you named, and I like to call it self-interest.
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So everyone has a self-interest.
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It's the thing that motivates them, that moves them, that drives them and motivates them to take certain actions.
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Those actions can be actions of their personal life, their professional life or both, and so, I think, in a team.
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This is why having clear vision, mission and values is just so important, because in a team you do want values alignment.
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I might have personal values, but I'm on this team.
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I need to know what are our team's values.
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Do we all know what those are, what they mean and, more importantly, are we aligned to them?
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So you know, before we do any deep work with groups, we really dig into what some of those values are.
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We do that different ways.
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We can do an assessment.
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We could have one-on-one conversations.
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I should say that oftentimes we're brought in because teams are in conflict, so they're wrestling with some of these issues of the different motivations and interests.
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So a lot of this is really figuring out where there is values alignment, seeing what's possible and then kind of moving from there.
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So if we understand that what motivates people, we can then begin to start a process of okay were the conditions required for you to work through these differences and challenges you're having.
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Yeah, jennifer, hearing this, it brings me back.
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I only worked in corporate America for 10 months.
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It was after I graduated from college and I couldn't help but smirk.
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You know, I'd been running my own businesses at that point.
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I was already had one foot on the way out because I was already launching my next business, and so, with that in mind, I couldn't help but smirk in the corporate meetings when the CEO would say these are the things that we believe in, and it was kind of that mission statement.
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And then I would go back to the building that I worked in and that's where hundreds of us were located in those offices.
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And, jennifer, what the CEO was saying didn't come to life in our day-to-day work because it was merely words.
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Where's that gap?
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Why do those words and those missions that I think we all, on paper, we all are just like?
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Yeah, of course we subscribe to those things, but getting it embedded in our culture, in our work, in the way that teams operate together, it's an entirely different thing.
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So why is that so hard?
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Where does it get lost?
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From words to action?
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Absolutely Well.
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I think this is some of the work we do at ALC is that you know, it's not just about defining what the values are, but getting really explicit and what it means to live those values and not live those values.
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And this is something that you can use in the evaluation process.
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If you do employee evaluations or 360s like where, like, is this person living these values?
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It's something that the team can actively check in on.
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So, if you're scheduling regular checks with your team and you should if you're not, it's really having those values in the backdrop, where they are explicit, like are we living this or not?
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If we're not, like, what do we need to change?
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In the backdrop, where they are explicit, like are we living this or not?
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If we're not, like, what do we need to change?
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So it does allow for the conditions to have some really important conversation as a team to ensure that you're living them.
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And I will say, employees are super smart, like they know.
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They know if company leadership is walking the talk, as it were, right.
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They know if their manager or supervisor is walking the talk and living the values or not.
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And for those who are leading the teams, it's really important they lead by example.
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So if a CEO or anyone in the C-suite is not living those values, the whole company or team is going to suffer because they're saying, oh, that person's not even living that.
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This is true for anyone who's leading a team.
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So a team lead or a supervisor or a manager, it is important that they embody those values but are also equipped with how to work with team members when they're struggling with that or they can't.
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So there's so much we do around culture of feedback.
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What does that mean?
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Like how do you create conditions to have constructive feedback in the space that you're navigating and working in, and not only bet that's corrective in nature, but to give praise.
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You know, when people do things well, or if there's some minor adjustments folks need to make, like, how do you do that well?
00:19:03.449 --> 00:19:05.476
And then what is purely corrective?
00:19:05.476 --> 00:19:07.500
Like, how do you do that in a way that can be heard?
00:19:08.383 --> 00:19:18.942
Yeah, super important stuff, and I will say it's kind of this recurring theme behind all of our conversation today is that we are leaders, whether we have stepped into that role or not.
00:19:18.942 --> 00:19:20.507
Others are watching.
00:19:20.507 --> 00:19:22.776
You talk about leading by example, jennifer.
00:19:22.776 --> 00:19:27.086
Most business owners, most leaders, have never been taught how to be leaders.
00:19:27.086 --> 00:19:28.942
They observe leaders along their way.
00:19:28.942 --> 00:19:38.060
But I often think about the nature of our careers is that when we're, when we're good at what we do, we get rewarded by being promoted and then we become a leader.
00:19:38.060 --> 00:19:41.460
But the reason why we were good at what we did was because we were good at the work.
00:19:41.460 --> 00:19:45.296
Leadership is an entirely different skill set that we've never been taught.
00:19:45.296 --> 00:19:50.195
So break that down for us, because obviously it's a big word and there's a lot of literature about it.
00:19:50.195 --> 00:19:56.926
But, jennifer, from your perspective, you've seen all different types of leaders well, so how the heck can we boil it down into?
00:19:56.926 --> 00:19:58.970
What is that function of a leader?
00:20:00.234 --> 00:20:07.140
Yeah, well, we have trainings at ALC and I know we'll talk later in terms of things we might offer anything you want from us.
00:20:07.140 --> 00:20:09.612
You can probably find our website, jennifersconiersorg.
00:20:09.612 --> 00:20:17.449
But essentially we have whole like coaching models and trainings on management versus leadership and really breaking down what that is.
00:20:17.449 --> 00:20:23.648
And I think when we think of managers we think that kind of in a vacuum, with someone who is being very directive.
00:20:23.648 --> 00:20:29.367
It's someone who's just making sure that as a whole, that the team is getting the job done.
00:20:29.367 --> 00:20:34.539
This is a person also can give course or provide course correction for the team, et cetera.
00:20:34.539 --> 00:20:36.902
This is a person also can give course or provide course correction for the team, et cetera.
00:20:36.902 --> 00:20:40.486
So they're the person that really holds that bottom line of that team production that sets on their shoulders.
00:20:40.525 --> 00:20:56.096
As a manager particularly middle managers they really shoulder that burden In leadership and I want to say it's a both and right In leadership.
00:20:56.096 --> 00:20:57.520
It's actually bringing people along and getting them to follow you.
00:20:57.520 --> 00:21:01.777
So that's actually a very different kind of mindset versus being directive, telling people what needs to get done, making sure that the thing gets done.
00:21:01.777 --> 00:21:13.167
A leader is someone who understands the team members, individual motivations, what moves them, what drives them where they're struggling, that leader will coach them.
00:21:13.167 --> 00:21:22.403
Right so that leader can provide some coaching around areas of improvement, but also trumpeting that employee's success.
00:21:22.403 --> 00:21:41.221
And they'll mentor them, too right or provide opportunities for them to be mentored by other people it could be peers or folks in the organization or outside right so that leader is actively developing that employer, that staff member, a manager is giving direction.
00:21:41.414 --> 00:21:44.726
So effective management puts both those two things together.
00:21:44.726 --> 00:22:01.369
You're both being directive in terms of what needs to happen, have a clear roadmap, have clear benchmarks for the team to meet, while also seeing where your team members are, making sure they have the coaching, the support they need, the feedback that they need to be successful.
00:22:01.369 --> 00:22:08.787
So, when we think of leadership in the context of how do you manage a team, you're doing both those things.
00:22:08.787 --> 00:22:11.130
You're both managing and you're leading.
00:22:11.755 --> 00:22:23.739
Yeah, jennifer, the more we talk about this, the more I realize we're introducing all of these important players and pieces into the conversation, which, of course, reveals why this stuff is so complicated and why it's so hard to get it right.
00:22:23.739 --> 00:22:25.261
We're talking about management, leadership.
00:22:25.261 --> 00:22:32.662
We've talked about values and mission and motivations, and all of these different things are all playing at the same time.
00:22:32.662 --> 00:22:39.066
So I'm going to ask you this question because I feel like when we talk about culture so many people it's an intangible thing.
00:22:39.066 --> 00:22:45.494
You know, we always we've heard that word, we understand what culture is inherently, but how do we make sense of it?
00:22:45.515 --> 00:23:00.875
And I'm going to put you on the spot here as our trusted expert because, jennifer, you walk into other businesses and you help first identify what is the culture here, and then you start, of course, helping organizations build towards the culture that they want so that everybody can succeed.
00:23:00.875 --> 00:23:02.641
But let's talk about that first step.
00:23:02.641 --> 00:23:07.019
How do you walk in and make sense of something that is so intangible?
00:23:07.019 --> 00:23:09.586
It's just in the air inside of a team.
00:23:09.586 --> 00:23:11.336
What are the things that you're looking at?
00:23:13.039 --> 00:23:15.505
Yeah, I mean I think there are a few things.
