We recently connected with Cyndy McDonald and have shared our conversation below.

Cyndy, appreciate you joining us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

My mission as an educator and entrepreneur started early. I had a desire to go on in my education. I would be the first person in my family to get a college degree. My father didn’t have a high school diploma, let alone a college degree.

As a 17-year-old, I had to stand in front of the president of the University of Colorado and petition him to let me into the university. Fortunately, he said “yes” and I enrolled as a very young freshman. After setbacks and struggles, I eventually transferred, and later graduated with a college degree from a small, liberal arts institution.

This experience and subsequent life’s lessons, taught me the importance of viewing life and challenges with your life’s mission firmly in view. Now I serve entrepreneurs and educators, helping them to find and embrace their own “Why”.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My journey as an entrepreneur started by chance. I was having a conversation with my neighbor, a farmer. He was worried about how he would pay for his children to go to college. He shared thoughts and plans I knew, from my own experience, were based on misinformation. It sparked an idea: “Why not help others like him”. As a fellow farmer, I approached the local farm bureau and proposed an informational meeting for farmers in our area. They loved the idea, and offered a date, time and meeting place. Almost one hundred people showed up at that first meeting. It was then I knew there’s a need for more information on paying for college.

Fast forward to forty years later, my idea has grown and expanded to teaching others about accessing higher education, finding the right careers and building a business. I provide instruction on how to advise students as an instructor in an online, UCLA certificate program, and I teach entrepreneurs how to run their businesses as a business coach.

The field of educational entrepreneurship is fairly young. I have been at the cutting edge, as a thought leader, helping to shape and grow the profession. For years I helped students and families learn how to open doors to their future by exploring choices. Now, I help other small, client and service led entrepreneurs learn how to create their own destiny.

The needs of educational entrepreneurs are different from retail or other business entities. When your revenue is based on service alone, there is an added component to the equation for success.

As I have grown my business, I have learned the value of building your business through focusing. As a business, you have embarked on four journeys simultaneously. These journeys are:

• The Prospect’s Journey: how you market to potential clients
• The Client’s Journey: how you manage the client’s experience
• The Consultant’s Journey: your journey as a business owner
• The Organization’s Journey: setting and achieving goals for your company

The best way to grow or build your business is to focus on one journey at a time.Trying to focus on all four at a time is a recipe for failure.

Currently, I assist educators and entrepreneurs to address their journeys in three ways:

1. Friday Forums: On several Fridays each month I interview experts. I have conversations about current topics with other thought leaders in business or higher education to keep abreast of issues and to introduce cutting edge ideas. These interviews are offered free and available on my website and youtube channel. It is my way of giving back to the industry and being a thought leader. They are geared towards professional educators and business owners, but parents, students and other interested parties find the interviews informative and enlightening too.

2. Small group workshops: I offer mindful oriented, transformative and interactive workshops to small groups. These workshops are a way to tackle goals one topic at a time.They are designed to maximize time and outcomes through their interactive and focused nature.

3. Individual business coaching. I help entrepreneurs write their own success equation by finding and writing their unique story. This helps them establish a vibrant and enduring brand.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I can point to four times in my life where I had to make major pivots. Each of these pivots came from seeing a need, and trying to find a way to serve that need. When I did not find an available solution, I created one.

Founding a National Organization
Years ago, as I was starting out as a college advisor, I saw a need to provide professional development to educators on a national scale. This led to founding a national organization Higher Education Consultants Association (HECA). Today HECA serves educators/entrepreneurs across the country and the globe. It offers professional development at conferences, through webinars, online and more. It’s mission is supporting the growing industry of college and career counseling.

Female Technology Founder
I saw a need for a technology tool to organize and make access to education easier. No tool existed at the time, but I knew it was possible to use technology to support my students and my business, because my spouse was a computer scientist. This led to the founding of a technology company, MyCCA.net. With this company we launched a new educational technology industry. When we started, no one was using technology as a part of their college planning tool kit. We showed people how to save time by using technology for college planning. Now, over sixty percent of people in our industry use technology in their business, and there are multiple companies offering technology as a solution in this industry.

Being the female founder of a technology company was often challenging. I learned how important it was to stick to my vision. Others will try to talk you out of things, because they are hard or have never been done. One feature I knew was essential took five years to get implemented. It took technology time to catch up with my vision. The wait was worth it, because that tool became one of the most popular tools on the platform.

Becoming a Producer on Youtube
During Covid I saw a need to bring people together to bring calm to the chaos. I started out producing a monthly show with conversations about the pandemic, it’s impact on students, and how we could support students, families and each other in the time of uncertainty and isolation. I also wanted to bring in other voices, experts in business and education to gain perspective and inspiration. I thought the show would last a few months. Now, almost four years later, the show reaches hundreds of viewers. I have interviewed NY Times journalists and best selling authors, thought leaders in education and business, and colleagues who have willingly shared their thoughts and journeys, similar to what Canvas Rebel is doing. I never imagined myself being a producer of a monthly youtube show, but it has been a joy to offer it and a learning experience too.

Change in Life’s Status
During the height of covid my spouse of over forty years passed away suddenly from a heart attack. It was a devastating blow to lose my life’s partner. It was especially hard to experience this during the full shut down of covid. My children lost their father, and I lost my best friend. We couldn’t even have a service for him, due to the covid restrictions. What does it mean to be a widow? I was suddenly thrust into a new chapter of life, one I was not prepared for.

You can lay down and pull the covers over your head during these times of loss and roadblocks, or call on your core strengths and find paths forward. I was able to do the later, and found leaning on family, especially my children, colleagues, my faith and my community was crucial. It was a great blessing and provided much needed support. I am still navigating the path to the future, but this one event led me to business coaching. I realized others would benefit from the knowledge I gained from my journey. Helping others has helped me.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

As the owner and founder, you always have lots of ideas for moving your business forward. This is especially true for a technology platform. It is easy to program feature after feature, creating a list of items your technology can do for customers. One of the best ways to introduce your technology to potential customers is through demonstrations.You can tout the virtues of your product and demonstrate all the nifty features it offers.

I realized after many long demonstrations that trying to demonstrate ALL the features we offered was futile. No one had the 10 hours or more it would take to go through all the features. Which ones should be emphasized? Which ones should be left out? It was always a struggle. As the owner and founder, I had my own favorites, and ones I thought were “must haves”. The demonstration script for myself and team members centered on our ideas of the “best” features of our software.

We soon learned our customers had other ideas. Their needs, their goals were different. They were not the same goals or feature requests person to person either. I began to realize my time was better spent listening to the customer in order to learn their needs. What were the pain points they were trying to solve? Tracking time? Keeping a calendar? Researching majors or college programs? If I listened to the customer, I could tailor the demonstration to their needs, to answering their questions, rather than answering the questions I thought they might have. This approach increased sales, reduced time and helped drive prioritization of the development of tools/features of our platform.

It is a principle I teach now. As business owners, it is key to put the customer in the center of the story. My role as the owner or sales person is to be the guide. Helping the customer find the solution and celebrating their win helps grow a business faster, easier and makes it a stronger competitor. It draws the focus away from just pricing to more intangible but vital factors. It is a simple concept, but a hard one to implement. Building your authentic brand’s story is based on who you put at the center of the story. It has to be the customer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cyndymcdonald.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cyndysas/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cyndycoach
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyndymcdonald/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CyndyMcDonaldsChannel
• Other: Interactive Workshops: https://mailchi.mp/cyndymcdonald.com/workshop Individual Coaching: https://mailchi.mp/cyndymcdonald.com/coaching

Image Credits
Jen Little