We recently connected with Athena Adkins and have shared our conversation below.
Athena, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
We changed our name to BetterWorld Partners in 2018. Previous to 2018 we were known as the very creative sounding Adkins Consulting Group. As our business grew, we began to consider two things: How do we build the infrastructure of the business so it relies less on my personality and contacts AND how do we think about all of the “things” we wanted to do. During that summer, we had 4 employees. We were all interested in and focused on different parts of the business. We shared purpose and values, and we came from different professional experiences and had different ideas for how we would live into our collective purpose and values. One of my colleagues had a boyfriend who was into making word clouds. We asked him to build a word cloud for us during a staff retreat. Our prompt was to write down all the ways we wanted to impact the world and why. After a furious 5 minutes of writing down everything we could into the tech the boyfriend provided… we hit enter and this beautiful word cloud came up. Words like sustainable, energy, healing, story, purpose, look, find, be… all beautiful words–some larger, some smaller… the two words that were the largest in the word cloud (which denote that we all had used them in our brainstorm) were BETTER and WORLD. We talked about it for a while–was it hubris to name our company BetterWorld? Did we have the energy, the vision, the ability to make a better world? We were nervous to put that name out there, but we also felt a call to be bold and to challenge ourselves. That day, around my dining room table, at the end of a long afternoon of work planning and strategizing, we became BetterWorld Partners. Our tagline is “We Are Here For You” and we are guided by the purpose in our name and in our stated values. Combined, they keep us pointed towards our true north. I am so grateful to my team mates for their creativity, ideas, and participation.
Athena, 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?
Gen X-er, Latina/French Canadian, Southern by birth. Midwestern by geography. Daughter. Wife. Mom. These are some of the identities that may give you some insight into who I am and how I ended up here. I left corporate life in 2008. I was a new-ish mom struggling to balance everything, fit in, and succeed in a culture that wasn’t toxic on purpose, but still held values that were counter to what I felt was important.
I opened BetterWorld Partners in September 2008. The market crashed that month and 5 months later as I was establishing my business, my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. Family is a guiding value and we were his main caregivers. Life got really messy really fast. I didn’t have the bandwidth to show up perfect and polished everywhere I went. I started to go to meetings with my new baby in tow. When my older son stayed home from school-I had to bring him to the meeting I was facilitating. I was in front of the room holding space and asking questions and my son was off to the side playing on his device. I was embarrassed to show up so differently and worried that it would hurt my business–I would be labeled as not serious, unprofessional or other unflattering adjectives. Then I got mad. Why couldn’t I have a serious conversation with a baby on my hip? Why did my husband get kudos if he brought our son to work, and I got slammed for the same behavior? Then, a colleague told me that I was an inspiration to her. She recounted a strategic planning meeting she went to that I facilitated. I brought my infant son and ran the meeting with him in my arms. I nursed during the breaks and passed him around when I needed both hands to facilitate. She hadn’t seen that before.
That kicked off some self-discovery. I began to understand that many of my identities were “in-between.” I was never fully one thing or the other. I was a mom and a business owner. I was mixed culture. I was the in-between Gen X generation. I was reared in the south, but lived in the midwest. I was taking care of parents and children. I could have felt the pinch of that but decided instead to be a bridge. I stopped feeling mad and decided to be unapologetically me.
For BetterWorld Partners, that meant that we had to get clear about who we were. We spent time thinking about what we enjoyed doing, what we were good at, and what was uncomfortable for us. We thought about what we didn’t like doing and why. As we got clear about that, our values came into stark relief. Relationships matter; Intuition and experience are valid ways of knowing; We care for ourselves and others; we are infinitely hopeful. These values not only guide our work and our interactions with each other, they also help potential clients know us so they can decide if we are a good fit for them.
The services we offer are also exercises in being real, unapologetic, and effective. We offer three services: narrative strategy, intercultural organizational development, and authentic leadership. We do our work in three ways: we coach groups and individuals, offer workshops and other learning experiences, and co-create experiences within organizations to help them meet their goals in our service areas. As consultants, we are outside of the day-to-day, giving us a unique perspective to coach organizations on how to be more authentic, abandon perfect and go for learning and growth, and embrace the messy in meeting missions, building community, and fulfilling visions. Each of us intrinsically knows that we are interdependent and that our strength is in our connections and community. When we enter larger organizations, though, we sometimes forget or have policies and practices that try to strip our humanity in service of rules or fairness or misguided attempts to reward “good” and punish “bad.” Our work at BWP is to remind our clients that it is only by seeing our humanity and embracing the mess that we can deliver on our goals and create durable change that will serve more of us. Writ large we focus on not only what organizations are trying to do but also focus on HOW they are doing their work.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
We had one near-death moment. One of my values was to pay people what they were worth. I didn’t want to have a company where the talented people who worked for me didn’t also financially benefit from our work. I also didn’t know how to pay people a salary because what happened if a client ended the contract but I was still on the hook to pay the staff person? I ended up paying employees a percentage of the contract, so it was essentially a commission. Unfortunately, I forgot about taxes–the ones the business pays. The split worked for about a year, but then the margins got narrower and narrower. I didn’t understand what was happening. I was embarrassed not to know my numbers enough to be able to analyze what was happening. The day I couldn’t pay myself was the day I finally asked for help. A local business advisor told me that the split was too generous and that I would have to pay a smaller percentage to my staff. I felt the air leave my lungs. How was I going to have THAT conversation? I put it off… for months. I borrowed money to cover expenses. The day I couldn’t borrow any more money, I finally told my staff. It was a rough conversation. I offered a small bonus to help offset the immediate drop in income, and I apologized and told them I understood if they left the company. They all stayed. We reconfigured payroll to include a set salary with quarterly bonuses to “true up” to a percentage of company profit. In the short term, employees were paid less, but over the long term, they made more money, and they had peace of mind knowing what their weekly checks would look like.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Word of mouth built our reputation in our market. We are a boutique firm in a location where people like to work with people they know. All of our business comes from referral–which is awesome! The downside is that we are only as good as the people who have worked with us say we are. We are very conscious of our reputation and work hard to ensure that–even if the work doesn’t go well–past clients will still say that we did our best, that we went over and above, and that we took care in our relationships and expectations.
Not every client engagement will go well, but I rest easy knowing that we did the best we could, we went over and above and we keep learning and growing.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.betterworldpartnersmn.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/betterworldmn
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18761988/admin/