Women Thriving in Business

Episode 208: Explore and Experiment in Business | Alison Chisolm

May 19, 2021 Nikki Rogers Season 2 Episode 8
Women Thriving in Business
Episode 208: Explore and Experiment in Business | Alison Chisolm
Show Notes Transcript

Life circumstances are always changing and there are times in life when you have the opportunity to take a leap, explore your interests, and experiment in business. When getting started, you should consider factors like expertise, competitors, demand, costs, and pricing. Questions to ask yourself include: What am I great at doing? How do I choose a business model? How can a business partner support success? 

In this episode, Alison Chisolm, a multi-passionate and multifaceted business owner, shares how she reinvented herself, and how experimenting with the type of business contributed to finding the perfect one for her. We also discuss how a business partner can help you develop and succeed, and why it's important to understand your beliefs and risk tolerance in order to be aligned in your business.

She brings us along her journey on what helped her start and find business success, gave tips to build and scale your business using your competitors as teachers, and put boundaries around your work.

If you’re an aspiring business owner who’s unsure of your true passion and don’t know where to start, Alison's various business experiences and passion for helping women achieve their dreams will truly motivate you.

Thriving Points:

  • You have to be a little bit risk-preferring to be a successful entrepreneur.
  • The most important thing is that we share values about how to run a business and what we're in it for. We are very open about how much money we each need to make. 
  • Be ruthless about the financials, particularly about the value of your time.
  • If you can step away, feed the other parts of your life, and put boundaries around your work. You will ultimately be more successful and more productive.
  • There is potential in every person and I help them reveal that potential.

Get to Know the Guest:

Alison Chisolm is the co-founder of the Inline app, Head of College Counseling for Ivy College  Consulting, and is the coordinator for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program at River Valley Community College.  Her professional career has taken her from law practice into higher and secondary education, social services, and entrepreneurship. She helps women author their own stories and achieve their dreams.

Connect with Alison:

A Team Dklutr Production

Nikki Rogers: Welcome Thrivers to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcast.  My guest today is Alison Chisolma who is a multi-passionate and multifaceted business owner. Alison is the co-founder of the inline app, Head of College Counseling for Ivy College  Consulting, and is the coordinator for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program at River Valley Community College.   

Alison's professional career has taken her from law practice into higher and secondary education, social services, and entrepreneurship. The common theme in all these positions has been in serving women and the underrepresented through advocacy and coaching. 

Alison works to help women author their own stories and achieve their dreams. During our discussion, Alison shares how she was able to reinvent herself and how experimenting in the type of business that she wanted to have led to discovering the right business for her. We also talk about how a business partner can support growth and success, and why it's really important for you to know your values and your risk tolerance and be aligned on those so that you can thrive in business. We had a great time talking about Alison's various business experiences and her passion for helping women achieve their dreams. Listen out for some great tips on how you can build and grow your business.  Let's go.   

Nikki Rogers: Hello Thrivers. I like to welcome my guest today, Alison Chisolm. Thank you so much for joining us today, Alison. 

Alison Chisolm: I am so excited to be here. 

Nikki Rogers: Alison and I are in a mastermind together, and she has also been one of the Stalwart listeners through Season One, so I definitely want to appreciate you for that, Alison.

Alison Chisolm: You made it easy because it's such a fun podcast to listen to. I feel like I've met a whole bunch of new women friends that I didn't know that I needed, but I did.  

Nikki Rogers: I love it. Alison, tell us about your businesses, I know you have a few but tell us about your businesses, and tell us about what inspired you to become an entrepreneur?  

Alison Chisolm: I'm going to share that just yesterday, I offered a workshop on how to craft an elevator pitch when you have what I call, multiple business disorder or MBD. I've been practicing my elevator pitch.  My new elevator pitches that I help ambitious women achieve their college and business dreams, and the way that I do that is really a coaching practice that has expanded to include workshops and other kinds of supportive services.  I get to do that by having my own business with a partner, another fabulous woman business person, and by working with a local community college that has campuses and three towns in New Hampshire that serve both the New Hampshire and Vermont communities, because we're right on the Connecticut River, so we are at Twin State kind of enterprise.  What inspired me to go into business for myself?

I think it was a combination of a few things. My dad had his own law practice and my mom was a stockbroker, so they both did business for themselves, and I grew up in a family where you came home and the dinner table conversation might be,  we're not taking a draw this month and so everybody we're on family locked down for spending because the rule in my parents' businesses was that the employees always got paid first, and the owners always got paid last.

The businesses that my parents built were very community-minded and family-minded, and they had long-lived relationships with the people they were in business with. My dad was in partnerships, my mom was working through a brokerage but had her own assistance and that kind of thing. So that, I guess set the groundwork for knowing that I could do it, but for a long time, I didn't do it. I'd worked inside nonprofit institutions that were all about helping people realize their potential. I really liked doing that, and then my husband took a job in Northern New Hampshire, and the work that I was doing just wasn't available.

I was either faced with having a commuting marriage or trying something new. I decided to try something new, and luckily I had a little bit of an economic cushion because we moved from downtown Chicago to Rural New Hampshire, and the cost of living went way down so I wasn't as responsible for contributing to our household bottom line as I had been.

The other thing was my father had died in the year previous and had left me a little bit of money. I knew that he would love that I would take that money to bet on myself, and so that's what I did.  I have to confess that I wasn't totally wildly brave in that. I also got a part-time job, because the whole idea of not having a paycheck freaked me out. I didn't ever want to be fully dependent on my husband for my livelihood. I thought that that would distort our relationship in a way that I just wasn't comfortable.

The other thing was that I had stayed in contact with this woman, who is now my business partner, and she had launched her own business several years before, and she was working and based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I also started a conversation with her and went to work on a lease-to-own kind of basis which was, if this works out let's make it a partnership.

I was going to develop a different aspect of her business, reach a different market than she had been able to reach before, and at the same time, I was going to try on my own. I launched three different consulting practices in that time period. Played the game of whichever one takes root is the one that I'm going to keep, and also whichever one I like the best. 

I was hoping that those would be the same thing, and luckily I didn't have to confront the, "Oh, I really love doing this one, but it's not making it."  So that's my story of how I got into business for myself. 

Nikki Rogers: I heard a couple of things. One, there was a life change that necessitated you to rethinking your career, so to speak, and then having some financial, I always call it runway to play with but you also got a part-time job, so you were like, "Okay, I'm going to also still leverage other people's money to fund your dream", and then I heard a lot about experimentation.  You started three different businesses, you were thinking through who you were going to partner with, the type of work you were going to do, what was actually going to be successful, and what were some of the things that you tried or what was some of the metrics that you were using in order to figure out that this one is the one that I'm gonna take off on?

Alison Chisolm:  That's a great question.  We're going to talk about two different metrics. We're going to talk about the process and what I liked doing, and then we're also going to talk about the economics of it and what made sense from that. The economics of it was pretty straightforward in that because all three of them were consulting practices. There were two basic drivers for the economics of any kind of consulting practice, one is who is your customer, and did I have a network that would feed customers? Could I easily establish myself as a thought leader in that area?  Did I already have some work that I could advertise and play from, and then what price will your customers tolerate? Or how much do you have to give of yourself in order to yield the engagement? Because as you know, because you've done services businesses too, that thing about services businesses is your time is a limited resource. Particularly, if you are running the business too, you have to have the time to do the business and grow the business, and you also have to have the time to deliver the service. 

So I either had to have a service that I could deliver without much effort or time that would yield a high price, or I had to have a service that I could scale in some way so that I could leverage my time.  Part of my background is practicing law and being a business development director for a law firm practice, so I knew the economics of consulting work.  Law firm it's a specialized consulting practice, but it's a consulting practice and it's driven by the people power, and one of the things that I knew for sure was I did not want to be in a position of having to build 3000 hours a year or do any of those things.

I knew that my hourly rate had to be really high in order to justify the practice so that immediately defined my customers to some extent. One of the things that happened for one of my consulting practices was that it was geared at organizations.  Two of them were geared at organizations, and I didn't have the strong network that I had in the Midwest. For those organizations, I was going to have to compete against a lot of people who were very well entrenched in New England, out of Boston, and because I wasn't even in Boston.  I wasn't going to be able to do the kind of networking that yields the customers.  I was looking at how quickly invest could I yield customers or clients. Now, one of the interesting things is the consulting practice I ended up with is not a consulting practice that you have clients for years at a time.

It's a one-and-done kind of consulting practice, so you're always having to get new clients.  That has its costs too.  All consulting practices and I think all services practices are to some extent relationship-based, and so that's what I felt like I needed to have the foundation of relationships that would yield more relationships, and then I also needed to have the wherewithal to keep growing those relationships.

On the process side, on what I liked, that was pretty easy. If I got up in the morning and I wanted to do it, that was a good sign.  If I had to actually put boundaries around my work, that was a good sign, and then there were just some lifestyle things.  The consulting practice I ended up with that I launched, went virtual long before the pandemic. We were virtual, and that was essential to me because it meant that I didn't have to travel and that I can work from home, and that I could live the life that I wanted to on the personal side, and have a full and robust life at home because I had done the, you're only home three days a week or whatever, and it's hard. It's hard. Some people love it. I turned out to be a homebody but didn't. 

Nikki Rogers: I think if we can recap, I think you shared some really great points that people should think about as they're building their businesses and figuring out if things are going well or not. But even before that, how do you choose a business? So you talked about competitive analysis, you talked about the price points such that you'll be able to charge, and depending on your revenue goals, will the market bear what you want to charge for your services?  The continual marketing piece, how are you getting clients? So thinking about whether your business development efforts will yield a long-term client, or if it's going to be short-term and you have a lot of turnovers. And then thinking about your network, and do you have the network that is necessary to support the success in the business that you're looking toward? So I think those are some great things to think about as you're building a business, so thank you for sharing those. When you were either first starting out or during the intervening thirteen years, what are some of the challenges that you faced as you were building your business?

You talked about being in a new location, new business, potentially a  new partnership, but as you got in, what were some of the things that maybe you were surprised about, or it took longer to work through than you originally thought? 

Alison Chisolm: I think the old adage is certainly true that you are constantly fighting between working on your business and working in your business and finding the right balance for that. In the beginning, you're working on your business a lot, a lot, a lot for a payoff that you hope is going to come but you're not sure is going to come. And then when you start to have some success, I think it's really hard to learn where to draw the lines and how to limit because then you end up working in your business so much that you can't work on your business.

The hardest thing for me was finding out, and the challenge that persists, I think, is finding out what the sweet spot of a client load that I can actually bear.  How many clients can I actually manage at the same time, and what does that mix of clients have to look like? Because sometimes it's not just about the number, it's also about the mix and what you're doing for each of them.

Once you get to the place where I can't manage this number of clients, am I going to scale and start training other people? If so, then I have to find the time to train them and if you've just been doing it, oftentimes you don't have the materials necessary to train. If you want people to have the same experience but with a different person, you have to have a method and an approach, and all of that. I would say one is finding the right balance of how many, then figuring out when and if you are going to scale, then once you scale realizing that your work is different work and letting go of the other work. The thing that I think a lot of people find challenging that I actually found exciting and then kind of an obstacle for me is I like learning new things, and doing new things and having my hand, so I was upset when I had to give over bookkeeping because doing the bookkeeping kept me right on the pulse of what was happening in the business. I knew if there were weirdnesses right away. 

Likewise, I was upset when the first person we hired was an intake person, to do the modulating of the clients and all that. I was upset because I loved hearing the client's stories and finding out what that was, and every time we grew I stopped to say, "I don't have to grow". I could decide that I want this to be a one-person show and I get to keep the mix of things I'm doing. But if I do that, then what has to happen is I have to say no a lot more often. 

I didn't like saying no to people that needed help and that I thought we could help, and so that's been my constant challenge. I will say that there was a year that I thought I was going to jump off a building because the way I found out how many clients were too many was to have too many clients.

The good news was that because the engagements are time bounded and they ended, and I didn't have to take new clients on, but that was a bad year. 

Nikki Rogers: Oh goodness. 

Alison Chisolm: That's hilarious because it was a great year.  In terms of monetary success and everything, it was the year that I knew that this was going to go, but it was also a terrible year because I thought I was going to die. 

Nikki Rogers: My goodness, I heard you say that there's this tension. First of all, I will say you're the first person ever to say, "I don't want to give a bookkeeping".

Alison Chisolm: I know, I know. That could have been another business I start.

Nikki Rogers: But I hear you saying that there was this tension between you wanting to do all the things because you were genuinely interested in doing all the things. But in order to actually serve more clients, you had to give up some of those business management things. I  feel like that's an interesting perspective to have is like, "Am I going to do the business that I've created, or do I want to sit here and manage the business," and having to give up that control or delegate those things to other people.

When you think about that year where you were financially successful but really a bit overtaxed, what was the one thing you gave up then that you were like, "Okay, in order to be able to continue to serve my clients in the way that I want to and have the impact that I want to have, I have to give up X." So either who was your first hire, the first activity that you outsource, or what did you do to get out of that treadmill or the hamster wheel that people honestly find themselves on, when in corporate America and they're an employee? So talk to us a bit about how you got off of that treadmill? 

Alison Chisolm: It was another experimentation cycle. But the very first thing I did was write down everything that I'm doing and decide what somebody else could do as well, or better than me, that it did not require me to do it.  There went bookkeeping, there went some of the web maintenance, there went some just day-to-day administrative stuff. I found new tools for calendaring and streamlined certain things in order to make it so that I had to spend less time on them. We tried four different models and we've kept three.  Model number one was to draw the line under the number of clients and sell out and be firm about that.

That only made people want us more, which was the thing that was a little counterintuitive.  It helped actually because in the conversations we could say, we will hold this spot for you for this long after that I can't promise that we'll be available. I understand that you're not ready to commit and that's okay, but people hire us early and that's the way it goes. In order to draw that line, I did hire somebody to document the sales call process, like the intake call process that I was doing so they would listen to me and they documented it, and then we created a script out of that.  We created an outline of what is to be covered in what we call the pre-engagement consultation, and we experimented with some people charged for that pre-engagement consultation. That's part of the way that they manage it, and we tried that and we didn't like doing that. 

So that is still free, but I hired somebody to do it.  I took all of those off of my plate, which then enabled easier no's because I wasn't the one having to deliver the no.  I couldn't get talked into just one more. This person is so compelling and I would really love to help them. So I hired an intake person that documented that process so that we didn't lose sales, and created a limit. Those two things we have kept and it has been very successful. 

The next thing that we experimented with was how to leverage my time.  We really needed more consultants, so my time was better spent developing the training materials and bringing on new consultants, and training them.

I did not want to give up all of my clients because I really feel like having a finger on the pulse is important to continue to train and support the consultants that we have. But what I did do was, I doubled my price, so I'm twice as expensive as all the other consultants that work for us are. You really have to want to work with me, and I only work with three clients a cycle. I have a very small bandwidth, and that accomplishes all of the things that I want to accomplish. That's what I did. 

Nikki Rogers: Yes, I love that you're being very intentional and you're saying that I can actually design the job that I want within my business. It doesn't have to be either-or, it can be both -and, or you've just figured out that I want to work with clients, but they have to really want to work with me, and so you're creating the people who are seeking you out are going to find you. 

Alison Chisolm: I will also say that it was really important to me from a values perspective that I also keep a pro bono practice, and I've had that forever. I also give away my time to a select number of clients and some organizations because it breaks my heart. I don't think that dreams are only for those that can afford them.  That has always been a part of my practice, and my business partner is equally committed to that and we are committed to that with our other consultants.

That's what gave me the courage and fortitude to charge an extraordinary amount for my services.  They are not readily available. I could not afford to hire myself, let me put it that way. It was important to me that there were others that could be served, and that was a really important driver in my business too.

So when I talk about capacity, I'm also talking about making sure that I have the capacity to do the stuff that I want to do for free. I consider that a necessary part of my business, not an add-on happy part of my business that if I couldn't do that, then I couldn't be in business for myself so we're done.

Nikki Rogers: I really appreciate that taking that into consideration as you're thinking about your pricing. I think a lot of times we think about the time that we're spending with the client, but you're also adding in,  "I want to be able to provide services to those that can't afford to pay me my going rate", and that's baked into the discussion pricing decisions that you make. 

Alison Chisolm: Although I will also say, Nikki, and this has been a counterintuitive lesson, or I don't know. This lesson is one that I resisted learning. I say that I have a pro bono practice, actually, it's not true that I provide services for free. I have a very low-cost, very accessible offering that you basically have to be income qualified to receive, but what I have learned is that because what I do is give advice, people don't value free advice. Even when they're getting it from people who you know, successfully charge a lot to give it away.

I'm like, "Okay if you need the incentive to value, I think somebody, it might've even been you in our mastermind group. Talked about how you train people how to treat you, and I'm not free. 

Nikki Rogers: Right. 

Alison Chisolm: I'm not free. I'm low-cost, I'm affordable, but I'm not free.  

Nikki Rogers: I think you bring up a great point around having the clients and customers that you work with have an investment, so if you are putting down your money whether it be $25 or $25,000, I think that is a psychological incentive to do the work. 

Alison Chisolm: It's a psychological incentive to respect the time and effort that I'm offering, and that's been particularly important because the bulk of my consulting practices with adolescents, that's particularly important with teenagers to help them understand the value of other people's time.  When you're a kid, adults give their time to you very freely, and it's hard for you to understand, "Oh that's a limited resource that they're sharing with me. I need to be mindful of that." 

Nikki Rogers: Exactly. I love that. Alison, can you talk about the importance of having a partner, why you thought that was important?  How do you think that has helped you be successful in business? 

 Alison Chisolm: Together, we're fearless. I think that is what makes it, because you have to be a little bit risk preferring to be a successful entrepreneur, in my opinion. Some people are just risking preferring, and  I'm a little bit that way but I'm not completely that way. The first thing is that it creates the right risk profile to be successful, I think. The other thing is that you know other people can see things that are staring you right in the face, but you don't see.

The other thing is that we have some complementary skill sets, and there are things that she loves doing that I'm like, "Oh, that's pulling teeth for me," and there are things that I love doing.  For example, she is an amazing writer. I'm a good writer, she's an amazing writer,  and so we wrote a book together. I would have never taken on writing a book if I didn't have Anna to be my co-partner in that writing exercise.  She is not surprisingly a writer type. You put her in a hundred-person networking event and she wants to just go anywhere, like lock herself in her room and read her book.

I'm the one that goes, "Of course, I'll go speak at that convention. Oh, of course. Yes, that sounds awesome. I can't wait to meet all these people," I'm the one that comes. In that way we have this really nice compliment, the thing that she would least like to do is I'm totally up for, but we still challenge each other to do both.

She's like, "I'm not going to do all of the writing" and I'm like, "I'm not going to do all of the networking."  We have that, and we've made each other better like I've shown her tricks of how to work a room and she's shown me tricks of how to generate a blog post. But there has to be a huge amount of trust, and we have definitely had our moments where we have to say hard things to each other. 

She moved to California, which meant that we weren't going to get to see each other on a regular basis.  You have to constantly evolve. It's like an intimate relationship and you have to treat it as such, and you have to spend time on it. But there is no question that without Anna, I would not have been as successful, but I'm not even sure I would have lasted. I think I might have fallen prey to the three to five-year cycle that I just couldn't get off the ground, because I think there would have been a risk that I wouldn't have taken, or I wouldn't have pushed myself in certain ways. 

Nikki Rogers: It really sounds like you all have developed a relationship that is complimentary, that you all fill in the gaps between each of you. I think that is a testament to being successful, and I think that's the challenge that a lot of entrepreneurial space, like do I bring in a partner? Who do I bring in? How is this going to work?  

Alison Chisolm: I do think that the most important thing is that we share values about how to run a business, what we're in it for,  we are very open about how much money we each need to make. We're very open, but we also like the values of having some low-cost options, like she has her pro bono practice that I'm super proud of. She was a founding member of an organization called Service to School that works with vets.

She has done remarkable things. There are hundreds, if not thousands of vets who would say that she was instrumental in their educational dreams coming true. 

 Nikki Rogers:  Alison, what would be two or three tips that you would offer to my audience, the Thrivers, as they either start to build their businesses or look to scale their businesses? 

Alison Chisolm: One is to be ruthless about the financials, particularly be ruthless about the value of your time. I like the title of your podcast because I see way too many women out there who are just trying to survive instead of thriving. They get very caught up in the, "Oh, I can't make the product that costs that much," but that's how much it costs to make the product profitable.

If you can't do it, then you can't do it but let's not get lost in the, "You're supposed to sacrifice yourself in order to have your dream."  I think that there's a lot of cultural norming out there that women are supposed to sacrifice in order to have their dream, and I'm like, "No, no." The first thing is to be ruthless about the financials and pay yourself well. Live a life that allows you to thrive.  The second thing is to put boundaries around your work and observe them because you will ultimately be more successful, more productive if you can step away and feed the other parts of your life. Even though it seems like you should be working on it 24/7, you shouldn't. You need to put it away and do other things.

The third thing is if they've figured something out then replicated it, but just do it better. Make it your own.  There's nothing wrong,  imitation is the highest form of flattery but you don't need to keep solving the same problem in order to make it yours.  We now have six to eight coach consultants that work with us in the college admissions consulting, and each of them has a different flavor but they're all using the same process, and the deliverables are the same. But they're different and that's their secret sauce, and that's why some people want to work with coach A as opposed to coach B, and why we take some time to match them. 

Just because you're offering the same service or the same product, you can make it better, you can make it your own. You can make it have your special sauce, so don't get caught up in that mythical thing that you have to create the unicorn.  No, to be successful you can just do what somebody else does your own way, and as well or better. Those would be my tips. 

Nikki Rogers: Alison, those are great tips. Just to recap, being ruthless about the financials and that's money and time so I love that. Putting boundaries around your work, and then using your competitors as teachers.  I feel like that should be on a poster. Those are all great and wonderful tips, and I think they're helpful whether you're just starting out or if you've been in business for a while. So I really, really loved that.

One of the things that we ask every guest is about what songs are on their playlist. So can you share with us two songs that are on your power playlist, and why? 

Alison Chisolm: I should have prepared for this and I didn't. First of all, without question, my power playlist always has a Tina Turner song on it, and it varies which one but I do love Nutbush. It has a super grindy thing that makes me excited, and I can just hammer stuff out to it. It reminds me about humble beginnings and that we all, or at least not everybody, that great things can come from humble beginnings.

And then, this is a song that I just added to my playlist, it's Poor Lost Souls by Jimbo Mathus and Andrew Bird. I heard an NPR interview with them. They're both incredibly successful musicians in their own right and then they collaborated on this most recent album that they did. Poor Lost Souls is the story. It's a story song about passing by the homeless on Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles and seeing the homeless there.  Jimbo Mathus who lives in Mississippi and everything, and was in LA to work with Andrew Bird found this incredibly poignant touching horrible thing.

 There's a refrain in it that is about, "She's just a lump of coal, but she could have been a diamond," and that reminds me that there is potential in every person. I'm on this planet to help them reveal that potential, and so that is to some extent, a theme song for me right now. I think particularly because of the pandemic, homelessness I think is even more tragic in my volunteer life. I work with some more affordable housing organizations, and because I also did some work with homeless teams, and homelessness is profound.

If you don't have a home, there are parts of you that don't even survive so forget going from surviving to thriving. But it's a beautiful, beautiful song with some really poetic language. So Poor Lost Souls, those two. Tina Turner's Nutbush. I guess I do have a theme. I didn't really think about it, but I do have a theme. 

Nikki Rogers: There is a theme, one last question before we let you go, Alison. What is one book that you would recommend to help others thrive in business? 

Alison Chisolm: It's an oldie but a goodie. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think that he nailed it, and that habits are the key to unlocking the creative spirit because the more you can put on habit lock, the more space you have for trying new things and doing those kinds of things.  I will say that that's the book I would recommend, but for all of those women business owners out there, I am a big fan of all memoirs and stories of women, so Michelle Obama's book. There is an old book by Catherine Graham who ran the Washington Post, and through the Watergate Era,  there are some wonderful memoirs by a woman named Jill Ker Conway, who was the president of Smith College.  I strongly recommend any memoir by a woman, go for it. 

Nikki Rogers: Perfect, Alison. Thank you so much for being with us today. I love chatting with you and look forward to seeing all the great things that you're going to do going forward. 

Alison Chisolm: Thank you so much, Nikki. It has been a blast.  We could talk for hours, but we're not going to.