We were lucky to catch up with Carol Deveney recently and have shared our conversation below.

Carol, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I was working in a dream job just outside London when I got a phone call that changed the trajectory of my life. Was I interested in a role in Toronto? Quite frankly I wasn’t. I had never been to Canada. I loved the job I was doing. I worked for a company that treated me well and gave me a lot of autonomy over how I carried out my role. Plus Toronto didn’t have any of the type of project work going on that I liked to do.

I told the headhunter I would be able to recommend some people in my network or professional community.

He called the next day to collect those names and also said his client wanted me to know that they were starting doing the kind of work I love and that is why they were approaching me. Also would I least let them fly me out there and show me around to see if I would be interested,

Most people don’t do a long weekend in Canada from London but that was all the time I had. It was minus ten and snowing most of the time but, despite not liking the cold, I fell in love with Toronto and its people.

Within another month I had a firm job offer to relocate to Toronto. I knew no one in Toronto. I had been for 3 days. I had no network, no family or friends there and no real understanding of the work culture.

I had a very well paid and secure job in the UK and a nice life alongside it.

Leaving a job, a company and the people I loved behind felt like the biggest risk I had ever taken in my work life. I have always been someone who volunteers for projects, opportunities, goes for promotions and takes pride in delivering the impossible projects.

I will take risks at work but this seemed a work and a life risk all at once. Little did I know that it would lead me to have an appetite for even bigger risks, Because with the bigger risks come the bigger rewards.

After leaving the job that took me to Canada in the first place, I went on to start up my own consulting business. That business is 5 years old now. I’ve gone on to publish 2 Amazon best selling books, teach and work around the world and create more businesses. I have also helped a lot of small business owners secure their financial futures by showing them how to win corporate and government clients.

Taking a risk is all about understanding what that risk is, how can you mitigate it, how would you respond if it all goes wrong and seeing that the reward if it goes right outweighs that.

Carol, 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?

When I left my corporate role and started my own business I realised that I needed to have peers in the small business world. I needed people who were on the same path as me who I could talk to about it. I started to join different networks and communities. I quickly realised that many of them did not have corporate or government clients.

Many of them did not even know that they could work with these companies as clients. I started to get asked for advice and began helping small businesses figure out how they could add corporate clients into their pipeline.

As people began to hear about the results and high value orders that people were winning I got asked more and more for help. I was running my project consultancy business though so I had to find a way to make it more feasible than it just being a side hustle or a hobby project.

Many of the business owners I work with are people who are under represented in the board rooms of corporate businesses as well as in the supply chains. They often don’t have a big network or contacts.

They can struggle with knowing how to package what they sell to consumers or to other small businesses for a corporate audience. They also get stuck on how to price it and how to describe the benefits in a way that the corporate audience responds to by buying.

I see people need a clear strategy of what to sell, how to package and price it, how to identify the right clients and then how to get in front of them and make sales, on repeat!

That is what I help with. I teach a group programme on how to do all of those and I also do it on a consultancy basis for maturer business who want to crack that market.

What I love is when clients send me messages telling me that they have won contracts with companies that in their wildest dreams they hadn’t thought they could work with until I showed them how to do it.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

What has helped me build my reputation in all of the markets that I operate in is being who I am at all times, Of course like everyone there are days when I am a better version of me than others. What you wont find is a different version of me. I’ve gotten comfortable with who I am and I get to show that across all of the businesses I own. I talk about my values, I express my opinions, I talk openly about who I do and dont want to work with.

If it isn’t the right fit I tell prospective clients that. I am very visible online, in PR and in my professional networks. People tell me all the time that how I am in person is the same as I how I come across in my branding and any PR they see.

I am always pleased to hear that because I only want to be one of me and I want people to always experience me as my true self. I am a lifelong collector of people and I can do that best when I show them who I am.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

I started planning my business in 2018. We only started trading in earnest late in 2018. March 2019 when the pandemic hit was quite the shock. All of my work was consulting at the time, Whilst not every day involved being in a client office, much if it did.

When the UK went into lockdown I had no idea if my business would survive. It suddenly felt like maybe giving up a very secure 6 figure salary was somewhat mistimed. My husband had been ill and hadn’t worked for some time when I quit my job and started a business.

Despite having modelled the risks and having a good back up plan in place that plan hadn’t factored in a global pandemic.

What would I do if my fledgling business didn’t survive and I couldn’t get a job as many places just paused all recruitment for a while?

It was a scary time. So I did what I always do. I focused on doing a really good job of the task in hand and planned what else I could possibly do.

As the work kept coming I kept saying yes until my order book was full. At times I worked a lot of extra hours and it was a distraction from the world around me,

That gave me the financial injection I needed to see that we could keep going and it also showed me and other clients that there was a lot of work I could deliver completely remotely.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://see-changes.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caroldeveney_/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carol.deveney.5
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carol-deveney/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@getintocorporate

Image Credits
@akpbrandingstories