Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Agata Serocka. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Agata, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

To me, being successful means creating a life that I don’t need to escape from—even the tagline of my business’ Instagram account reads, ‘Helping you communicate with confidence & work smarter to build a career you’re proud of and stop living from holiday to holiday.’

So, the first step has always been to define what ‘success’ means to me. Not to my parents or random people on LinkedIn or Instagram, but to myself. And surely, a crucial part of being successful to me means building financial freedom, but judging my ‘success’ only by the numbers feels pretty reductive. To me, it’s essential to enjoy the work that I’m doing, trust and like the people I work with and have enough time, energy and resources for my relationships, hobbies and interests. I feel successful when I end most of my days thinking ‘This was a good day, I’m proud of myself’.

But it hasn’t always been this way. For the longest time, I subscribed to the old-school vision of success fueled by external validation.

One of my first full-time jobs was in a scale-up in Berlin. I moved from Poland to Berlin, I was good at my job, energized, and wanted to prove myself. I got a promotion after only 6 months, went to business trips to the US with the managing director & leadership team, and I knew I could go after the next achievements and department head position relatively quickly. But inside I felt empty. I was constantly tired and lacked vitality. The second business trip to a conference in Austin? All I wanted to do was to sleep. At first, I blamed it on the jetlag, but somehow the rest of the team got fit after 1-2 days and I felt exhausted the entire time. I was waking up dreading the day ahead, living on autopilot and not having the energy to do anything fun. I was completely disconnected from myself, following someone else’s recipe for success, but not mine.

Now I am grateful for this burnout experience, because it was a very powerful wake-up call for me to redefine what success really means to me – building a life on my terms. So far, it has been the most exciting process I’ve ever attempted.

So, to answer the original question after this slight detour – what does it take to be successful? In my opinion:

– intentionality, knowing your needs and values
– resilience to follow through despite rejections, quiet periods, new challenges and failures
– believing in yourself and being your own biggest cheerleader, even when (well-meaning) people around you don’t necessarily understand it.
– forgiving yourself quickly when you make mistakes,
– courage – to fail, experiment and try out new things,
– time, consistent intentional effort and a fair dose of luck :)

Agata, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a Berlin-based Salesforce specialist with 6+ years of consulting and project management experience.

My business is a combination of two different service groups working with different audiences.

1) SALESFORCE MENTORING & INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN / ENABLEMENT

I’ve been a Salesforce consultant for the past six years, two of them self-employed, building applications for companies using this technology. Since I’ve always been passionate about teaching/mentoring and simplifying complex topics, I combined these two disciplines to create a niche for myself in creating comprehensive Salesforce training materials/enablement projects for both higher education institutions and companies.

After having delivered more than 50 system implementation projects, I’ve noticed that at the very end of the project companies deprioritise the necessary trainings or don’t have any learning process in place, which results in low system adoption, general animosity towards the system and in the end – waste of money.

Frankly, I haven’t seen that many people doing what I do, the focus in the industry is mostly on configuring systems and adjusting them as time goes by, but there’s very little focus on education. As for what sets me apart in the industry, it is the combination of my teaching experience and simplifying complex processes with vast technical knowledge.

My second Salesforce-related service is 1:1 mentoring for industry newbies. I’ve helped folks get their first jobs in the industry and thrive in their roles, which makes me incredibly proud! I help them find ways to build their workdays and processes in line with their talents and personality traits (taking into account intro/extraversion etc), as well as improving their technical proficiency, acting as their ‘sparring partner’ reviewing their solutions and supporting them with their communication & productivity habits and other challenges they face in their new role.

What became clear to me after mentoring new Salesforce specialists is that, yes, technical proficiency was a part of our conversation, but the core value from our sessions was technology agnostic and revolved around communication, collaboration standards (or lack thereof) and productivity.

Which brings me to the 2nd branch of my business which is:

2) CAREER / PRODUCTIVITY MENTORING

I help folks new to tech and consulting on how to improve collaboration and work with more intentionality to make their day-to-day less stressful and more enjoyable. Some of the topics I cover are: handling ‘difficult’ clients, running effective meetings, setting effective cross-team collaboration standards & using values-based week planning.

I draw on my 6+ years of consulting experience, but I don’t impose any specific methods. My focus is on guiding them to identify the best paths for advancing their career in a way that feels right to them.

If you’re an introvert, I’m not gonna tell you to be louder or sound like someone else. Quiet, thoughtful presence can be equally powerful and we’ll make the most out of your unique traits.

I won’t tell you that inbox zero, GTD or any other method is always right and you should fit into it (ugh…) – I prefer to review together how you manage your workload and discuss what method you will be comfortable using. But my years of experience building effective systems and improving processes give me plenty of tools in my mentoring tool box that we can test.

Together, we’ll create a plan, and I’ll keep you accountable to ensure you achieve your goals. :)

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The lesson I had to unlearn is relying on online experts’ opinions more than my own judgement and intuition.
There’s so much advice floating around on the Internet – do this, follow this framework, that strategy, post that many times a week, day, hour… At first, I tried, I really tried, but these LinkedIn post frameworks, fitting into templates, following concrete scripts, treating networking as a surface-level numbers game… I just can’t. I didn’t want to, I felt drained trying to fit myself into a box, but hey – they are experts, and I’m just a little fish in the pond with little experience, so they MUST know better.

But in reality, how can these experts know better? Not in general, but in my specific case. They don’t know me, they don’t know my business, my life circumstances. So it was – and continues to be – a huge unlearning process to stop outsourcing my decision-making to experts, but listen to myself. How do I want to run my business? Client relationships? Projects?

The longer I was running my biz, the more I was asking myself questions – do I agree with this point of view? would that work for me? is that how I want to run my business?

Here are some examples of when I decided to follow my intuition rather than rely on the most popular online expert advice:

Am I a person who thrives in huge events, like conferences? No. I prefer 1:1 and small group gatherings. It may not be scalable, but so what? Does everything need to be, when it works fine for me?

Certain templates and hooks convert best? Well, maybe, but they bore me, because they are devoid of personality and make everyone look and sound the same. I also have evidence (eg. in my email analytics) that the best response came from emails where I wrote in my flow, not restricted by some templates.

Should I be pushing my prospects to buy and create fake scarcity? According to many experts – I should. But I don’t want to do it, for a fact – one of the biggest flexes in my business is the retention rate and feedback from my clients that they trust my honesty.

Should I make my content controversial to go viral? But I don’t want to go viral, my work is mostly 1:1, and I deeply care about what type of clients I want to work with, so why should I create fake controversy and attract some randoms who wouldn’t resonate with me at all?

…and so on. Just because a method worked for someone else, doesn’t mean it will work for me. The same goes for the examples I shared above – they work for me, but I don’t have a monopoly on the truth either – they might not work for you. But you won’t know, unless you give yourself permission to experiment.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

My current network! I think new business owners sometimes can overcomplicate things, but reaching out to folks who already know us, trust us, and even like us is already such leverage. Word of mouth is a powerful lead source.

Even though I hate LinkedIn as a platform (don’t even get me started on this one….), it is a powerful platform for many industries, including mine.

– Posting regularly on LinkedIn helped me remind people from my network of my existence and what projects I am working on.

– Scheduling regular no-agenda coffee dates with folks from my network (starting with simple messages like: ‘hey! it’s been a while since we last chatted, how are you, would you be up for 15 min virtual coffee or in real life catch up?’ or similar. I don’t treat these meetings as my pitch or with a sole purpose of selling my services, I treat them like a catch up. Naturally, we often talk about our professional endeavours and often these no-strings-attached conversations lead to referrals or connecting me with different potential clients, but I keep my intention clear.

An important (and painful….) lesson I’ve learnt is that you need to make these connections BEFORE you need them. One of my mistakes in running a business was focusing solely on delivering my projects, while neglecting business development.
I’ve recently had a person come back to me after 2 years (!!) from our initial conversation. So yes, it’s a long game. And no, you don’t want to go through the same financial stress as I did :)

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agata.serocka/
• Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/agata-serocka-52604495
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AgataSerocka
• Other: My newsletter is my main communication platform and favourite source to connect and share my observations and inspirations:

  https://subscribepage.io/agataserocka-newsletter

  📚 Since I work a lot in front of a screen, I’m the happiest to spend my time off as far from the screen as possible.
  As a book worm & innately chatty person who likes to share her opinions everywhere I go, I organise regular book club events and share reading recommendations for a Friday night in:

  https://www.instagram.com/readinginberlin/

Image Credits

Photos (except the last one in green jumpsuit) by Duo Chen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/duo-chen-8342998a/)