We recently connected with Donna Shields and have shared our conversation below.
Donna, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today The more we talk about good leadership the more we think good leadership practices will spread and so we’d love for you to tell us a story about the best boss you’ve had and what they were like or what they did that was so great?
As I left grad school with a unique master’s degree in Nutrition Communications from Boston University, I was dying to work in New York City. I landed an interview with the Good Housekeeping magazine, an icon in the publishing industry (this was the early 80’s). The editor-in-chief was well-known in the field and I thought she would be a terrific boss to learn from. With my best suit on, I thought the interview went really well. She didn’t hire me. Fast forward 3 years later, she changed jobs, became a VP at a large food company, and it just so happened I was interviewing for a position that reported to her. This time around, she did hire me, and it ended up being a fantastic working relationship. I even invited her to my wedding; that’s how much I liked this woman. As we all know, timing can be everything with careers and relationships. I think it was the combination of my having matured and the latter job was a better fit for my skill set. A great boss, especially when starting a career, is an invaluable educator and role model. She taught me how to manage the politics of the office and, like a parent rearing a child to fly on their own, she promoted my professional growth and wanted me to move on. A good boss doesn’t try to keep you for themselves; they help foster situations that are best for you.
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.
I just love the twists and turns my career has taken, from Army dietitian to nutrition spokesperson, cannabis educator and now an expat living in Mexico helping others step out of their comfort zone. A stint as a clinical dietitian quickly told me I wasn’t cut out for hospital work. A graduate degree in Nutrition Communications at Boston University opened my eyes to the myriad of career opportunities in food, health and wellness with food companies, public relations firms and eventually my own cookbook with a large NY publisher. Most of this was as a solo entrepreneur but a teaching gig at the infamous Culinary Institute of America, NY, helped solidify my credentials. The corporate experience I gathered while working in-house at The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, was a bonus added to my consulting career. I moved to Key West in the 80’s and continued to work with corporate clients before working remotely was a thing. Itching to get involved with the expanding cannabis industry because its therapeutic values were not well known to health practitioners, I moved to Colorado and co-founded the Holistic Cannabis Academy; an online training platform for health professionals.
Throughout all of this, I’ve always been a travel junkie. I’d spend my last nickel on exploring new places and did a lot of it, especially through worldwide home exchanges. So now, in what will likely be my last business venture, I’m taking my lifelong travel habit and turning it into a travel planning business, Open Mind Adventures. Because I’m also a veteran home renovator (as in I’m on the ladder doing the work not just picking out paint colors), my recent home-hunting experience in Mexico taught me a great deal about buying and renovating property in that country. I’ll also be offering a relocation service to help other expats shortcut this time-consuming process and avoid some of the mistakes I made.
I’m also taking my experience and love of food and travel, and combining them into another new venture; the creation of the Oaxaca Food, Wine & Mezcal Fiesta. Patterned after the wildly successful Key West Food & Wine Festival, these events will appeal to food lovers wanting to learn about and enjoy Oaxacan cuisine.
All of these careers had a few common threads that are critical for anyone building a business, solo or with partners. Self-discipline is such an important characteristic because it’s way too easy to get distracted and sidelined from your goals. Being flexible and open-minded is also key; we all think we know what the client or customer wants. You have to be willing to shift gears and redirect based on customer feedback; they are in the driver’s seat with their opinions and their wallets.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I was sure having a business partner who was a lifelong personal friend and, whose skill set was similar to mine, was the right foundation for building a business. Nothing could have been further from the truth. If I had to do it all over again, I would make a very different decision on a business partner.
About 9 years ago, I relocated to Colorado, from Florida, as a co-founder of the Holistic Cannabis Academy, an online training platform for health practitioners. One of us needed to be in a state where cannabis reform was born, and I was happy to relocate.
While I thought having similar educational backgrounds, work experiences, and expertise would be a plus, it turned out we were duplicating effort. Business partners should bring very different skill sets to the table. We were both health professionals who understood our audience and their needs, but we lacked a co-founder with experience in finance and investor pitching, online marketing, and IT capabilities.
It also had not occurred to me to have a frank conversation about money mindset, from the beginning. This is true in business as well as personal relationships. As a start-up, funds are limited. Everyone needs to be on the same page as to what are the priorities for spending money. I don’t mind staying in a cheaper hotel for business travel and I don’t want to spend money on promo giveaways that are a nice-to-have, but not mission-critical. And while there is something to be said for the fake it until you make it approach, my business partner and I had very different perspectives on how to spend our budget.
When choosing a business partner, make sure you both can be all-in. Does one partner have another job while the other is making the venture their solo career path? Does one partner have family commitments that take precedence over investor meetings, standing weekly meetings or business travel ? These are the nitty-gritty details that can derail a relationship and a business. For me, I decided the hurdles were too difficult and walked away after 5 years in. Yes, it ruined a friendship but I kept my sanity and my personal integrity.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Having invested 5 years in building the online cannabis training for practitioners program, I walked away and asked myself “What next?” The pandemic made that decision for me. I returned to Florida, where the restrictions were not as tight as in Colorado, thinking there would be more opportunities to earn money. I shifted gears and, with my life partner Gary, purchased a house in Key West that was a major renovation project. The plan was to renovate and flip to generate a profit.
Gary is very skilled in construction so we knew he could do the bulk of the work, but I also had to have a hands-on role. So for the next 12 months, I spent every day (and I mean every day) on a ladder scraping, sanding, patching, and eventually painting the entire exterior and interior of the house. I learned how to run a table saw, order wood, manage the roofing crew, and did anything that needed to be done. It was dirty and exhausting work. There was no time to slow down the pace; the house had to be ready for sale by the following winter months when snowbirds arrived looking to purchase their Key West vacation home.
I found the process incredibly gratifying; taking something ugly and turning it into something beautiful again. I liked the tangible hands-on work where you could actually see your progress unfold in front of you. We sold the house making a well-deserved profit, bought a new motorcycle, and headed to Mexico for our 3-month, 11,000-mile scouting trip to find our new hometown.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.openmindadventure.com
- Instagram: @openmindadventuresintl
- Facebook: Open Mind Adventures
Image Credits
Donna Shields