We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Sconyers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer below.

Jennifer, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

The biggest risk that I have ever taken was starting my business. I’ve always known that I wanted to run my own thing. From the age of 15, I dreamed of running an entity where I would sell clothes and shoes for extended sizes. I even had a name for it, Jelaine Enterprises. I would imagine the type of merchandise that I would sell and the types of customers I would have. As the years went by, I still held to the vision of having my own company, but the vision of what it would look like changed.

One of the promises I made to myself while I was at school was to allow myself to explore new experiences and opportunities. I allowed myself to experiment with different career paths to see what I would like. My interests varied from being a biological scientist, to teaching elementary school, to becoming civically engaged and working in politics. This led to some really interesting career opportunities in both the public and private sectors. Through it all, I knew I wanted to start a business, I just wasn’t certain about the timing.

On October 6th, 2015 I was in a near-fatal car accident that I was fortunate to walk away from. I name this as a significant life event, because it forced me to take a closer look at my life’s purpose and the impact I wanted to make. Up until that point I had experienced career success, but I did not feel that my life or my time was my own. I was working 100 hours per week for an organization, and I had gotten into the unhealthy habit of making work my entire life. I simply didn’t have time for anything else. The pressure that I both felt from past employers, coupled with the pressure I put on myself led to health related challenges, burnout, and now this near-fatal accident. I saw this as an opportunity to have a second chance, and to get really clear on the vision I had for my life and the impact I wanted to make. Simply working hard for someone else was not on the menu, instead, I knew I wanted to be clear about what I could do to make a positive change in the world and to do it at scale. This led me to leaving my job, and using my severance and retirement to start my own business.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ll start with my company’s name: Abundance Leadership Consulting. This name was set with intention. Throughout my work with organizations and teams over the last 20+ years one thing has been true: most organizations are running scarce. This may have to do with resources, or fears about what the competition is doing, or concerns about employee development (i.e,. if we develop people too much, they might leave us). This scarce thinking led to all types of inequities – certain people being passed up for promotions who were fully qualified, while others were given opportunities. Not being conscious or aware of the homogeneity of the folks who make decisions and the impact this has on the organization, its stakeholders, and clientele. I would see and experience this in every environment that I was in. I would also see the burnout of folks who were taking on disproportionate amounts of the workload (both visible and invisible) and the impact that it would have on their teams. This transcended across industry and sector, and I knew I wanted to help solve it. This is where Abundance Leadership Consulting came from. Ours is a consultancy where we focus on leadership development of organization and teams. We provide training, facilitation, planning and coaching services to do just that! Our secret sauce is that we focus on the relationships and help people work across their differences, and not avoid them. Because people and relationships are central to our work, it’s only natural that we include the values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in our work as well. We believe each organization is interconnected into a greater system, that it’s not floating on a bubble above a cloud somewhere, which is also why we use a systems approach.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to learn early on is that sales and enrollment are two different things. Sales are transactional – you hear what a customer wants and you provide them with a product or service to meet their needs. Once that transaction occurs, the relationship is over (at least until you want to sell them something again). Enrollment is something different entirely. Enrollment is about understanding the values of that person or entity, and truly understanding the scope of the challenge or problem they want to solve. The sale comes from you understanding that challenge, being able to speak to it in ways they understand, and having a product or service offering that meets that need. Enrollment also means staying in a relationship with that potential client, whether an initial sale is made or not. Enrollment and sales are two distinctly different processes, and when I started my business I had to learn to become good at enrollment.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The beginning of my business wasn’t easy. I didn’t suddenly have a sky drop of clients to start with. As a matter of fact, I often didn’t know how I was going to pay my rent. I name this to say that the journey looks different for everyone. I had to live off of my savings, and my retirement. It took 18 months for me to generate momentum for the business and start a cascade of enrollments. It meant that I spent time going to networking events, joining organizations like NAWBO, and attending small business meetups. I was able to leverage my network and ask entrepreneurs that I knew, who were further along in their businesses, for advice. I tried a number of things, some that didn’t gain traction, but I learned from those experiences anyway. I am the sole income earner for my household. There was no safety net, which made the stakes really high for my success. I also chose to put everything into the business and not take on another gig. I put everything into what I was building and it eventually paid off.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jennifersconyers.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-sconyers-0776955/