We recently connected with Brittany Canaski and have shared our conversation below.

Brittany, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

One of my biggest pet peeves about Corporate America is that organizations tend to promote individual contributors into management roles without providing any management or leadership training. Just because an individual contributor is excelling in their role does not mean they will automatically excel in a management position. There are very different skills and responsibilities required. In reality, you’re setting the leader and team up to fail.

I see it a lot with my coaching clients who are new to management that they don’t understand why they aren’t able to manage their new workload and are struggling to delegate. Typically the issue under the surface is that for the first time in their career, their role is no longer about their own success, but now it’s about other people’s success. And since we all think, work, and talk very differently, what worked for you isn’t going to always work for your employees. So you need to learn a whole new set of skills to learn to empower and coach others. Without this, there becomes a lot of frustration and resentment on both sides.

Once my clients and I are able to better understand the holistic view of their new responsibilities and their team’s goals, we’re able to quickly assess what’s working and what’s not working. Over time I see my clients able to prioritize the workflow across the team, delegate to their employees with ease (on both sides), and see greater team performance while working less hours.

Brittany, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Leadership Coach and Trainer at my own company, Hello Velocity. My origin story starts back in 2019 when I was working in Corporate America and had my ‘quarter-life crisis.’ I was working my way up the corporate ladder but felt unfulfilled and knew something was missing but didn’t know what. So I worked with a life coach for the first time and learned so much about myself and found the experience really life-changing. I knew then that if I could help one person the way she helped me, that it would be more fulfilling than anything I could do in Corporate America in the next 30 years.

So I took an intensive, year-long leadership and coaching training program to learn as much as I could about coaching and how to coach others. What started as a goal to help one person quickly turned into helping multiple people and starting a business. Hello Velocity was officially born as an LLC in February 2020.

Since then I’ve worked with a variety of individuals and groups to help them accelerate their goals. Now, I specialize in helping women who are leaders in Corporate America to gain the skills and confidence they need to be their best. Typically we are working through topics like leadership skills, strategic planning, and prioritization.

I’m most proud of helping so many women find their voices, show up confidently at work, and create more time to spend with their loved ones at home.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn in several ways is that just because it worked for someone else, that doesn’t mean it will work for you. It involved a lot of unlearning what other coaches, business owners, or industry experts told me as THE way to do business.

Business owners see this all the time when starting a business, people that say things like “follow these 6 steps to make 6 figures in your first 6 months in business.” It’s so easy to want to absorb as much advice and steps and programs as you can when you’re first starting out. I thought to myself all the time: ‘well they figured it out so they must know more than me and it must be better than whatever I could figure out on my own.’

I learned the hard way by spending thousands of dollars on various programs that did not return the ROI they promised that there isn’t one way to success as a business owner. If it were that easy we’d all have it figured out by now.

Instead, I had to learn that in order to make my business work at it’s best, I need to lean into my strengths, continue to experiment and pivot, and never give up.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

In early 2023 I launched a new 12-week group coaching program. It was popular with coaches then that in order to scale you have to be doing group programs (another time I listened to other’s recommendations instead of my gut). I spent weeks building and promoting it and was so excited. Then… I ended up with only one person signing up. After all the marketing materials and sales calls I had, I felt like such a failure. But, I decided to continue the program with one person and the client actually appreciated the shift because they felt that they were getting 1:1 coaching at a discounted rate.

The person got a lot of value from the program and after reflecting with a fellow coach and friend, I was reminded how I really do prefer 1:1 coaching as an offering and as a consumer myself. So I decided to make some tweaks and re-launch the program, but this time as a 1:1 program. I marketed it as a limited-time offer just to test it out again, and ended up very quickly getting three people to sign up within a matter of two weeks.

These clients got even more value and I was quickly sold myself on the success of the program. It is now one of my two core offerings for individual coaching clients and continue to have steady clients choosing this program.

Long story short – you don’t have to offer a service just because everyone else is doing it. Offer what aligns most with YOU, your zone of genius, and your client’s needs! Failures are always just learning opportunities.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hellovelocity.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hellovelocityco
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittany-canaski/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hellovelocityco