We were lucky to catch up with Janine Dennis recently and have shared our conversation below.

Janine, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

My mantra for life is everything happens in its own divine time. Nonetheless, I can see how starting my business even just a bit sooner could have been beneficial. When I started my business, I was three years into working for Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and a mother to a Kindergartener and one-year-old. When I took the job at BNL, I had hoped it was a place where I could continue to hone my skills and be comfortable for a while. At the same time, I was two years into making a name for myself via blogging, speaking, influencing, and creating a brand via social media. It was the efforts I put in online that truly were a game-changer for me because it not only opened my eyes to business beyond my HR desk at the time, but it connected me with a global network of people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Blogging took me from a locally known HR professional to a globally sought-after HR leader. I was fortunate to meet a few people who were further in their careers than I was at the time and who became both mentors to me and dear friends. BNL was not a difficult place to work for like the jobs I held before but it was a place where your career went to die if you were an out-of-the-box thinker, ambitious, or high-achieving. As further confirmation, I was also sternly warned by my mentors at the time that my star was beyond that which BNL could handle or sustain and that my career would die a slow and untimely death if I remained there. The message from everyone in my network was to start the business now, not twenty years in the future as I once thought. Between late 2012 and 2013, there were serious talks of a potential government shutdown which would have included the national laboratories. I remember the then Laboratory Director saying that we could shut down and that there was no guarantee of backpay as was the case with other government agencies. I was two years into owning my house and thought to myself I don’t like this feeling of being beholden to fickle politics or someone else being responsible for my livelihood. My seed money to start my business was a gift from my mom and my aunt, however, we had the misfortune of Hurricane Sandy here in New York in October of 2012, so I was displaced from my home for a few weeks and had to use it. Thankfully, they both were kind enough to give me the money again later that year and I took the leap to get my LLC. Talent Think Innovations was born in January of 2013.

I am a planner by nature. Before I started my business, I thought I needed to have twenty-ish years of corporate experience to be respected as a consultant. My plan was to rise the ranks in HR and by the time my then-husband was ready to retire, I would comfortably bow out of the rat race and start my business. Plans are cute and then there is real life which doesn’t care about anything being clean, symmetrical, linear, or going according to what we want. I ended up leaving BNL in 2014 to run the business full-time in lieu of also having my third child. So much started changing at the lab that the comfort of digging in that I initially wished for was an impossibility. I divorced said husband five years ahead of his retirement. So much for that part of the plan. I say all of this to say, I kept running into annoying up to and including disastrous bosses in different bodies. The work I was doing in my career was by no means a measuring stick for what I was capable of. It all came down to me having an absurd outlook on what was possible and not dreaming big enough. Having spent ten years this year in business, I look back and see how many things I created, businesses, and people helped, and I know I was selling myself short by not starting my business earlier. More importantly, I started having fun again once I started my business, and that in and of itself is enough of a reason to have started earlier. Your life’s work should bring you joy. I know that now.

Janine, 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 high school, my focus was to become a biochemist working in a lab initially. I was a part of a small group of students in my high school who were accepted into the Intel Program, so I always had a genuine passion and interest in all things STEM-related. Somewhere between calculus kicking my behind and chemistry labs sucking my soul in undergrad, I switched over to psychology. In switching over to clinical psychology I thought I would be happy and fulfilled diagnosing people in a clinical environment daily. I was great at diagnosing, but diving deeper into that lane let me know it wasn’t for me. In speaking to a dean at a university I was applying to for a Master’s, I had some questions about other facets of psychology. She pointed me in the direction of industrial psychology which is the study of how people think and behave at work. I was hooked after my first course and went full speed ahead pursuing a career in Human Resources (HR) in 2005. From 2005 to 2014, my career in human resources took me through healthcare, staffing, pharmaceuticals, home care, and R&D filling various roles. I found myself less interested in the programmatic function of HR in organizations but rather energized by solving the humanistic problems that were inherent in work. This is where I jumped head first in with strategy as it was the place where I found I could marry my psych background with business and have the most impact.

In 2013, I started Talent Think Innovations with the support of family, at the urging of friends and mentors and in hindsight to step into my destiny as an entrepreneur, creative, and leader in my own right. While I learned a ton working in corporate spaces, it was limiting and soul-stifling in ways I hadn’t noticed until I went out on my own.

Building Talent Think Innovations gave me the opportunity to build a practice that allowed me to express the full spectrum of my interests and talents on my terms. Today, Talent Think Innovations provides solutions and strategies in the areas of organizational design, future of life/future of work, technology advisory, digital marketing/transformation, learning and development, and startup mentorship. I help companies create human-centric business strategies and solutions that inspire spiritually nurturing work environments for people and sustainable practices for the business.

I am personally proud to have made it ten years in business and over 18 years in a career that has never ceased to amaze me, excite me, and one that I can honestly say I have made my own. Talent Think Innovations is my baby and she is revving up in her 10th year to have a greater impact in new industries which is a blessing. I’m still playing, learning, and creating through my work. If I did nothing but set an example for others that work can be fun that would be enough.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I learned one year into building Talent Think Innovations, that my safety net of wanting to provide Talent Management and HR Operations Consulting was not incredibly different than what other consultants were offered. I had to be honest with myself that I chose the spectrum of Talent Management which focuses on processes from how someone gets hired to succession planning which looks at how we organize people over the course of their careers in a way that supports the business’s growth and objectives, because it was safe. Although I was being audacious in striking out on my own, I was still constraining myself by not thinking big enough to touch the areas of business I knew I was capable of influencing.

I landed an opportunity to work with IBM in 2014 within a small incubator where they pulled together what felt like The Avengers of Work to reimagine work and life as we knew it. The experience and work I did with them reminded me not only of my ability to innovate but also how necessary it was for me to bring my full self to the work I did through Talent Think Innovations. That next year, I added tech advisory, digital marketing, and transformation to our service offerings. I had colleagues who told me that the mix of what I was offering was confusing and seemed all over the place. Ten years later, I can share it worked out fine. Oftentimes in business, you have to believe in your vision long before others jump aboard.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In the early days of deciding what Talent Think Innovations was going to be, I was still working full-time. I was a mom to three kids under the age of 6. Many of my fellow women business partners thought I was nuts for going as hard as I was in business while having children so young. When my son was an infant, I took him on a speaking gig with me because I was still breastfeeding and didn’t want to be away from him. I enlisted my aunt to meet us in Buffalo so he was with family while I did my speaking gig and networked. I used my lunch hours and PTO to do radio appearances across the pond, podcasts, and webinars. I would work long after my kids went to bed on articles for various platforms and my own blog. I was building training and talks in the wee hours of the morning only to get up the next morning and work an extremely responsible full-time job.

I made a lot of sacrifices in the early years of Talent Think to see that it was successful. I worked and traveled so much that I burned out in 2015. I’m not one of those business owners who is advocating for you to make yourself sick to achieve your dreams. I am however saying that it isn’t glamorous and as with anything in life, there are risks and rewards you will have to manage if you are to be successful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://talentthinkinnovations.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MzJanineNicole/
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/janinedennis
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MzJanineNicole
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MzJanineNicole
• Other: Author Website: https://talentthinkinnovations.com/the-absurdity-of-doing-you/

Image Credits
Steve Zak Photography (for the 2nd bunch of professional shots)