Heidi Alexandra Pollard is CEO and founder of UQ Power.
Heidi is a Futurist and Company Culture Architect
At UQ Power they work with companies to design and build strong company cultures that build their brand and market share through sustainable relationships both internally and externally.
You can find out all about the amazing things that Heidi and her Team do head over to UQ Power website http://www.uqpower.com.au
I spoke with Heidi recently about her StartUp story
To listen to the interview click right here on the Healthy Numbers blog
Click here if you want to listen on Stitcher
Click here to listen on iTunes
Or you can read the entire transcript here.
My guess is that you are here because you are curious about what it might be like to start a business?
Perhaps you’ve been wondering if you have what it takes? If your idea will work or even how much it actually costs to build a successful business?
I’ve written a book that can answer pretty much all your questions “So You Want to Start a Business” and you can download the first 20 pages at www.thestartupsteps.com
15 years of experience working with start up businesses are condensed into this book.
It’s your step by step guide to launch your business smarter and faster and I’m so excited to be sharing it with you and can’t wait to hear about your progress.
Are you ready to grab your excerpt? Click here www.thestartupsteps.com
Happy reading! Now here is the full transcript of the podcast.
Ingrid: OK, here we are today with Heidi Alexandra Pollard, welcome Heidi.
Heidi: Thank you, nice to be here.
Ingrid: Lovely. Let’s just start with What business are you in? What is your business?
Heidi: So our business, UQ Power, we’re Company Culture Architects, and business or workplace futurists. Now those are all a bit unusual terms, I guess, that aren’t that common. What we really do is help people design their workforce of the future, and envisage what they want their business to look like and help them get there.
Ingrid: Fantastic. So when did you start this business?
Heidi: So I started back in 2005 and I originally started part time, as I was working for an employer then and a good role, but I knew that the entrepreneurial path was for me. I was a little bit risk adverse, so I started talking to them about, could I work part time, and that’s when I began the business, so I worked so many days a week for the company and so many for myself.
Ingrid: You said that the entrepreneurial path was for you. Why did you start your business?
Heidi: Why? Because I saw a real need and something that wasn’t kind of being served. I saw a lot of people working in toxic workplaces and cultures, I saw the rise of depression, bullying and harassment, and people struggling. Managers not knowing how to have a conversation with a staff member, staff members feeling belittled or controlled or contained, and for me I decided there had to be a better way to do business. And so I kind of went on an exploration for were there companies in the world that treated their staff as equals, that had good company cultures and how did they strive and survive. And so it was more that interest in what else could there be that started me going okay, and what could I create around that.
Ingrid: How lovely. What did you want from that business? You were looking at workplace cultures and how that could be, but what did you want from the business?
Heidi: What I wanted I guess was, like everyone who starts a business is a different lifestyle. I actually had been commuting, you’ll cry when you hear this, six hours a day, and I’d been doing that for seven years. And on top of that I was working for a company that had a challenging culture and a lot of bureaucracy, and as much as I loved my team and I loved my actual role and my job, I knew that it was slowly killing me.
Ingrid: Six hours a day
Heidi: Six hours a day for seven years. So I knew there had to be a better way and that I could have a life and also be contributing a value to others.
Ingrid: And so you started your own business
Heidi: Yeah, I explored what else could I do
Ingrid: So that exploration started as a part time thing while you were continuing to do something else, when did it feel like you were in business? What was that point?
Heidi: So there’s probably a couple of points that I went, Okay now it’s official. One was, I’d been working full time in my business for maybe six months and I actually opened an office, so I got the premises, and so buying the boardroom table and the chairs and those sorts of things made it feel very real, that I was officially in business so to speak. As much as it’s still a business that often could be a home based business, most of our work is out with our clients in their company, but it felt kind of real buying the furniture. And then the second point I guess when I really went, now I’m really genuinely in business was when I realized that all the clients in my books were strangers, as far as, they weren’t people that I’d done business with prior in previous roles, they weren’t a referral through a family or friend, or those sorts of things, they were all genuinely new clients, who soon became friends and when I looked across my books and thought, oh these are all people I haven’t had contact with before, I kind of went, OK I’ve made it.
Ingrid: That’s a really nice, I haven’t heard that from anybody before in terms of those as a definition. It’s interesting, that question elicits such a range of different responses about when they actually feel in the business. So you’ve talked a little bit about the fact that you could see a change coming with the future workplace, but how did you know that there would be customers for this? Like you had a sense of it, and you could see these conditions happen in the workplace, but how did you know there was going to be customers, how did you do that research and find that out?
Heidi: So initially when I started the company it began as a consulting kind of practice, and I interviewed 40 other coaches before I began to see what kind of business they run, whether they worked as a franchise under someone else, whether they started on their own, and how they ran their businesses. So I looked at their business model as much as people would share of course, and the people who I resonated with I found had a particular style or way of operating and so that’s kind of the path I chose. But I knew there was a need, I guess whether people wanted it was another thing, there was definitely a need, because I was watching statistics, I was looking at you know, ABS data, I was looking at work cover data that showed the amount of bullying, harassment on the increase, the amount of depression, the amount of, the fact that psycho-social issues were what people were having claims about in the workplace. So it was no longer that I slipped over and twisted my back, it was, the scales had tilted, and it was people issues that were causing all of the problems. And a lot of things were basic communications and very simple issues, it’s really stuff we learned in the playground, that we really need to go back to. But I realized there was a growing need, and even today statistics and data and what futurists are showing is that within ten years, by about 2025, depression will be the second largest disease in the Western world, so behind obesity, depression’s going to be the second largest. So for me I just went, there is just such a huge need here. And not that we’re psychologists and we don’t necessarily work with people with depression, but we work with helping people feel strong in who they are, in being tapped into their unique strengths and being comfortable in being themselves in the workplace.
Ingrid: Which is the name of your business, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s a very unique way of looking at the individual.
Heidi: Yeah, because I really believe that, so UQ stands for uniqueness, really I believe that everyone of us have our own unique strengths and skills, and that often position descriptions, workplaces, cookie cutter and put people into moulds, and they’ll not able to do 70 per cent of the job really well, but not the whole lot, and instead if employers look at their employees as unique individuals and went, what’s great about this individual and how do I get more of that, and when we build on our strengths we see our potential and performance increase exponentially. So you could get 50 percent more productivity out of your staff if you worked to their strengths. And so that’s what we’re all about. We’re very much about appreciative enquiry, positive psychology and working with what’s good about people. So we’ll often tell people, we’re not remedial, we’re not here to work with broken people, we’re here to get the best out of themselves
Ingrid: That’s lovely. So in the early days, you bought a table, you got a premise, where did the funding come from? How did you fund yourself and fund that business in the early days?
Heidi: So I’m not sure if my path is similar to other people you’ve interviewed, but like I said I was a bit conservative in the beginning, so I’d actually been property investing on the side, as well as having a career and a job, and I’d been doing that for a good, probably decade, and so what I’d done was purchase a lot of positive cash flow properties, and had moved my portfolio to be that way, and it was when I got to replacing about eighty percent of my income by the income that I was getting from property that I felt safe enough to quit my day job. So there’s a lot of really brave people out there who I really take my hat off to that jump, and you know, don’t have enough savings maybe to even last them a week let alone a month, for me I knew that I could survive for at least a year, and I was getting to the point with some of my property that I could basically survive regardless, I could pay my loans and service, all those sorts of things, and so it meant that when I started the business I had the freedom to be really clear about what I really wanted to do, to take time to build my brand, and to not necessarily be starving and begging and asking for work that I didn’t want to do. Having said that I did still give a bit of everything to everyone and I had to learn to let go of clients that were harder work than they were worth. But yeah, I guess I funded it through my property and through having another source of income.
Ingrid: Interesting that you say that you still managed to be everything to everyone, because it is really, until you find what that is, it’s something that happens to a lot of people, isn’t it?
Heidi: Absolutely, and you know, Oh, they’re going to pay me 700 dollars for that? Well that’s money in the bank, I’ll do it. And then you realize that’s six weeks of work and a lot of pain and not where your sweet spot is. And for me, I’m a big picture person, and until I had staff and team members, when it was just me I wasn’t necessarily practicing and playing to my strengths, I was playing plumber with a leaky tap, I was trying to do everything and whenever a job required a lot of data analysis or report writing or anything like that, that is not my sweet spot, and so it became a chore, I’d procrastinate over it, it took forever, and it meant that really the hours to dollars that I was getting went from being paid 150 dollars an hours to say down to being 3 dollars an hours by the time I finished the jobs. So I learned after a while what jobs to take on and what jobs to ignore.
Ingrid: Oh dear, who wants to work for three dollars an hour (laughs). So you said there that some of your customers were friends and family, they were referrals, and then suddenly you had these customers that weren’t. Where did customers come from? How did you find new customers?
Heidi: So for me, so of them come online, so social media is a bonus and a plus that we have in business these days that we didn’t use to when it was the corner shop and you just needed to know the people in your local area. So as the years have progressed, things like my YouTube channel have really seen some of my reach and customers come from broader than they would have previously. I know when I started doing video our website hits went from 5000 hits a month to 50,000 hits a month, so social media can really really add a lot of value, so long as you’ve got your back end ready and you’re OK to kind of deal with those enquiries, because not all of them are exactly the kinds of people you want to work with. But really in the beginning, and what is still probably my bread and butter is speaking. So whether that be at a local networking group, a business chamber, a group of people gathered together, and in the beginning I spoke for free and I spoke as much as I could. And what’s great about that is you get feedback from people you see whether the audience is staring at you blankly or you see where they smile or when people come up afterwards and say ‘oh my god, that was amazing.’ And so you start to see what is it people are interested in, what do they really want, and there’s nothing more frank and fearless than standing in front of a crowd and kind of getting that feedback. But I found that if I had a new offering, or something I was doing usually if I spoke two or three times, I would find that I had filled my funnel back up with clients. Yeah, so I guess getting out there and sharing my message was probably the most important thing.
Ingrid: In terms of pricing, how do you decide on pricing? How do you know how much to charge for what you offer? Because what you offer isn’t a thing, you know, people aren’t buying a widget, they’re buying a new service, they’re buying a program
Heidi: And they can’t go on eBay and compare shops, necessarily. I think it’s really important to have a look at what the market’s doing, and in the beginning that’s what I was doing when it was more of a coaching practice. I looked at the hourly rates of other people, I looked at what kind of business they are running because obviously some of the franchise people charged a lot more but they had a lot of expensive fees they had to pay, you know my overheads were relatively low, I bought the office that I had, and I halved it and was renting the other half which was essentially covering the cost, and so really I looked at all my costs and my hours, how many hours I wanted to work in a week, and worked out a rough figure from that. Really over time that’s changed, and evolved, and I’ve gotten much, I guess clearer on just being succinct about price. So whereas I used to do the whole psychology of three prices, the people would pick the middle one, make it 497 not 500 dollars, and all those sorts of things, I’ve done away with most of that now and I think that just comes with confidence. Now I’m quite happy to name a price, and it’s usually a round figure, it’s very clear, so it might be 1,500 dollars or 10,000 dollars, and it’s just, that’s the price, take it or leave it. And I think that comes with time, and with being comfortable about what your offering is. But in the beginning, I think it’s really important to work out what your costs are, any hidden costs, I see a lot of people, when really if they looked at their hourly rates, they’re losing money. So I started to look at it and go, why are you even in business, why don’t you get a job, because for the amount of time and effort and energy you’re putting into it, you’re really not getting the return.
Ingrid: Heidi, you’re probably not ready to exit, but one of the questions I do like to ask people, and I ask it of my own clients when they’re thinking of starting a business. What is your exit strategy? Is that something you’ve thought about?
Heidi: Yes, I have and I do with clients as well, and actually I work with a lot of large companies that go through mergers, acquisitions, and sales of companies, and probably for me with UQ Power, although it’s not named after me it is quite a unique thing and I’m not looking to sell that, I’m not looking to build a company that’s got thousands of staff that are going to look to sell, for me it’s my life legacy, and so there kind of is no exit strategy, because I’ll probably never stop talking about it, thinking about it, working on these things. I do have another business that I’m looking at starting this year that’s an online business, and that’s definitely something that I want to build with a view to selling it. So I’ll build it from the beginning as something that I don’t need to work in or really be involved in. But as far as UQ Power goes, that’s just my life mission, so there is no exit from my own scheme (laughs)
Ingrid: That’s exactly right. So let’s go back to the beginning. So 2005, 2006 and if you think back to that, what might you wish you had done differently from the beginning?
Heidi: Probably listen to some of my own advice, so again, the plumber with the leaky tap, here I am with all that uniqueness and yet I’ve found myself copying or modelling off what other people are doing, and it was actually a couple of years in and I’d had a coach in America, and had been modelling and following some of what they were doing, and the market is very different in the States. It’s a very large market in comparison to here in Australia. So even if they only get one percent of the market, they’re laughing. You know, here we’re struggling to get that and it’s a very small piece of the pie. And it wasn’t till I got some feedback, so I had a good size list, I was regularly doing newsletters and sending information out, all about how managers and leaders could communicate better with their staff, how they could build morale and trust and those sorts of things. And I did a newsletter all about a trip that I did to America to work with my mastermind, and it was about the growth that I’d had, but in it I also shared quite a bit of personal stuff, a bit about my room and the flashy hotel we stayed in, and things like that, because I actually saw that my coach did a lot of that to prove that the lifestyle that goes with making this choice, however my clients weren’t entrepreneurs, my clients were corporate people. And I actually had two lawyers write to me, who were on my list, not because it was illegal, and both of them said we don’t give a damn, in stronger words than that, about what flashy hotel you stayed in and lalala, and that we subscribe to your list because we’ve got genuinely good content and it was useful and I could apply things in my daily work, and I’m now unsubscribing because I don’t want to hear about how good you think you are. And so that was really hard and tough to hear, but it was extremely valuable, and it taught me a really good lesson just about being clear about what does my market actually want and need, and that my business isn’t about me, it’s about the service that I provide and it’s about the people that I’m helping. So it really did help me reshape.
Ingrid: I was just going to say, we’re quite different here in Australia, we really-
Heidi: Convicts with the tin cups still (laughs)
Ingrid: It’s really really interesting isn’t it.
Heidi: Yeah. Because in the States they’ll high five and say you’re awesome, whereas here they’re like, what do you think you’re doing. So it is different, and I know I wasn’t thinking about my market obviously, I got caught up in the excitement of what I was doing. The other thing I would say to anyone new who’s thinking about starting a business is don’t even begin to start a business unless you can carve out your unique niche. So that doesn’t mean if you’re a dentist you’re the only dentist, but you need to find is what you do different is how you service people different, is your clients different, and to make sure you can buy your URL. So unless you can buy your www dot whatever your unique thing is, don’t even bother. That’s the advice I give to most people now, when they’re thinking about a business, throwing around ideas, I just sit on crazy domains and say, can we buy the name? Because if we can’t buy the name, and if I Google the term and ten other people own that term already, then you’re not unique enough to stand out.
Ingrid: So who, well you’ve already mentioned that you have had a mastermind group in America, you’ve had coaches, but who has been of greatest influence to you in terms of helping you on this journey over the ten years? Mention names or not, it’s entirely up to you.
Heidi: Sure. So I would have to say that my biggest mentors have been books, and I drink from the cup of books regularly and deeply, so I probably read a book a week, I used to read about two a week when I first started the business. So some of the wisdom from people like Robert Kiyosaki, Napoleon Hill, reading some of those trusted, timeless books on just human psychology, business, on people, really business is a game, and you have to know what game you’re playing in order to know the roles and how to play it. So for me books have been my mentors, but also I’ve watched lots of other people, so I love observing what others are doing and seeing how that works for them, and learning from that. So, as a futurist, me and my team are constantly travelling, so we travel a lot, we learn a lot, every country you go to you see opportunities, see things happening there that aren’t happening at home or could be done differently. So I would say the world has been one of my greatest mentors and just travelling. But also there’s been significant people, I know we met each other originally with Ally Braham, and that was certainly a significant part of my journey because it was when I was brand new in business, so I learned a lot about mindset but I also found a tribe and a community, and I think the first time we arrived at one of those Masterminds in L.A. it was like finding my people for the first time which was lovely. I’ve worked with (Ann McIbut?), who is a billionaire businesswoman and very shrewd, and very savvy, I’ve worked with Simon Reynolds, so yeah, a whole heap of people, I’m now a member of the World Futurist Society, and I’m working a lot with some of those people, who are looking all the time at what Elon Musk and Apple and people like that are doing in the world. And then last year I had the privilege of doing the leadership retreat with a whole heap of world leaders on Richard Branson’s island, and to see how those people married life with business, and the approach that they took and the fun that they had. I learned a lot from that experience as well. I guess it’s about just being open and being willing to take the lessons wherever you see them. And that could even be a local barista. You know, it could be just observing how things are done at your local K-Mart. You can walk into a local business and tell if they’re thriving and surviving. And that’s something we do. We do culture audits for people, and I know my staff and I say it’s an energetic thing and as much as we have a process and a written report that we do, we usually can tell how a company is going within the first three minutes, because you feel it right away.
Ingrid: Wow. Thank you. Who can give you good feedback? Who can give you useful feedback?
Heidi: I think people who are close to you and know you. So it’s always been family. Family has always given useful feedback. When I had Ann McDevit as my mentor, she gave a lot of tough love. Am I allowed to swear on here?
Ingrid: Yeah (laughs)
Heidi: I would say she bitch-slapped me a lot (laughs). So I got really tough feedback from her which was always really useful and made me realize that business isn’t about me. We put our hearts and souls into it so we take everything personally but it’s not personal at all. And actually I would say males. I would say that males are far better at giving frank feedback without lacing it with niceness or teetering around the edges. And I tend to be someone who likes to have something straight up, and then I can go away and think about it. But I find that males in business are better when I’m specific about the feedback I want, and I think that’s really important is, if you’re looking for feedback is to ask for specific feedback. So as I said, I speak a lot, if I’m speaking I wouldn’t say to someone how did I go, because they might say good or that was OK, so I might say, “I’m working on ‘em’ing and ‘er’ing less, so at the end can you give me some feedback on that specifically?” Because then that gives someone something to laser in on. So if you’re asking for feedback in business be specific about what it is you want some help around.
Ingrid: Thank you. So you’ve already mentioned that if you’re giving some- because my question is what would you tell someone that came to you about starting a business, and you’ve already mentioned being clear about what is unique about them and being able to have the URL. Is there anything else you would say to someone who comes to you about starting their own business?
Heidi: I think so many of us start a business just around our own skills and the skills we can do with our own two hands, and what I’m seeing more and more in businesses, and everyone should be as they look around the world is that businesses that are successful are usually built around a pain point, or a need or a demand, not around whether Bill Smith can do this thing with his two hands. So if you think about it, the world’s largest transport company is Uber, they don’t own any vehicles, you know, the world’s largest accommodations provider, obviously is AirBnB, they don’t own a single hotel. So you don’t have to own it, you don’t have to do it to be the best. What they do is match a market need with a polished service that is easy to use. So eBay, easy to use, it’s a portal for everyone, it becomes they go-to place. So when you’re starting a business don’t just think about what can I do, but where is the biggest demand or need right now, who can I help the most?
Ingrid: Who can I help the most, nice. So, three key characteristics, that’s one of my favourite questions, because it just has unlimited answers, really. If you were to think of the three things that you do, have, be, are, that makes you successful, what is that?
Heidi: What are yours, am I allowed to ask?
Ingrid: Me? I think I’m curious, yeah that’s a really good question (laughs), Yes, I think I’m curious, I’m determined and I am passionate. But passionate compassionate sort of mixed together, so this idea of really deeply caring about other people, that it’s a passion built on, how can we make this a better world for everybody, and ultimately everyone is doing their best. So even in those days when I don’t feel so much like that, it’s around that passion compassion.
Heidi: Beautiful. And I have to say in all of our communication there’s always an element of that.
Ingrid: Oh, thank you.
Heidi: And of honouring, which is lovely. So for me, I would say communication skills, and that’s probably more a professional thing because that’s the field I come from. So my degree and my masters were in professional communication, I’ve studied brand marketing, how to communicate, organizational communication, so you know, I think more, that’s more around the fact that I’ve done hundreds of hours of study research practice in that. So communication skills, but also because I think it’s the basic core of everything we do in business. If you can’t communicate, how does anyone know what you have to offer or who you’re helping, those sorts of things. Secondly I would say is similar to yours, is curiosity about the world around me. So I always try when I travel or I go anywhere is to have a teacher’s mind. So I try to be a teacher and a learner at the same time, so especially when I’ll go to a new country or somewhere different that I haven’t been before, I think about what I’m learning, how would I teach it. So what I’m seeing how would I share that with someone else, so I’m alway thinking about the translation piece and it kind of lends for a deeper understanding than just if you’re absorbing it, allowing it to wash over. So yeah, curiosity, and then lastly, an understanding of energy. And I think, everything is energy and if people don’t get that, they won’t realize how much they’re in control of whether their business goes well or not, how much they’re in control of whether they’ll have a good day or not, so it’s so easy, say you get some feedback from a client, or your boss and someone says to you, not happy with that. It’s so easily, to go from having a good day to being at the bottom of the pit. And then to going home and taking that to your family and being grumpy or sitting in front of the TV or whatever it is to mind numb because now I feel unwell about myself. But if we understand that everything is energy and we have an untapped resource within us at any moment, at any time we can actually change our energetic state, the more we understand that, the better experience that we will have, and really that comes with being accountable for your energy and thinking about what am I bringing to this moment, so if I’m in a meeting with my team, who am I being, how am I showing up, what energy am I bringing. And if I look around the table and my team looks disinterested or bored, that’s a reflection of my energy and what I’m bringing. So to really be conscious of that.
Ingrid: Yeah. And we give that away so easily don’t we, we give our energy away, we allow it, you know, I’m sad because someone said something mean to me, or I’m happy because they said something nice to me.
Heidi: Exactly.
Ingrid: And it’s being in charge of that for ourselves.
Heidi: Yeah, and being conscious of, there are some people that are more energy draining than others, so I always say to people, what are the energy drainer and the gainers in your life, and limit the drainers, spend more time with the gainers. And that’s why we do things like go to a Mastermind or work with a coach, or it’s for me they’ve got to be an energetic match. It’s not so much about the skills that they’ve got but will they lift me? Will they push me to be better, will they help me stay in a higher frequency more of the time?
Ingrid: And in terms of the other side, the drainers, I remember, I have a very good friend, who had a very old grandmother, great-grandmother, used to say about her, she used to put her duck feathers on, and that would protect her, and some people are quite visual, and that idea of just protecting yourself with a cape of duck feathers, and things would just wash off, so they can say what they like but it’ll just slide on off.
Heidi: And I use capes, so I might have to adopt that one (laughs), because what I think of at the moment is I use a fly screen, so I imagine that I’m a doorway, and I’m a fly screen so I can let the breeze in and out, and I can see what’s going on, and I can choose to open the door but the nasty bugs won’t get through. But I love the cape.
Ingrid: The cape’s quite nice, it protects us. So thinking about a potential startup, so you’ve talked about your characteristics, but for somebody thinking about starting a business what do they need? From what you’ve seen, and you’ve worked with people starting businesses and you are observing, and particularly from your perspective as a Futurist, apart from being able to see a need and ease a pain or solve a problem, what else are potential startups going to need to be able to be, or what do they need to have?
Heidi: So I would say three Cs, so the first one is communication, so can I communicate? Am I able to pick up the phone, funny but lots of people aren’t in this day and age, people hide behind a text, which is the lowest form of communication, so if you think about it face to face is the hardest form of communication, a phone call the next level and then a text or an email in writing is the lowest form. So can I communicate and adjust depending on the person I’m with, and who I’m with. So communication really comes down to also my listening skills and being able to read what’s going on for that other person, so number one would be communication. Secondly would be clarity, so how clear am I on my offering and what I’m offering and what it costs and what that looks like and how am I saying that, and you know clarity on the market I’m serving, because otherwise we’ll spend a lot of time and energy and money chasing our tails, so I see a lot of businesses buying a 15,000 dollar ad or package, to promote their business that they’ve just started, already that’s put them behind the eight ball, and then you find out that they’re trying to attract women between the age of 45 and 50 who don’t listen to that radio station, so having clarity will help you with everything in your business, because it’ll help you cut the crap and get rid of the stuff that you don’t need to do, and just focus on what’s important. And then the third c is care factor. So to care about yourself, to care about the value that you deliver, to care about the results that you get for people. Without a care factor, you might as well go back and get a job, I would say, because people see through that. If you’re just in it for the money or you think it’s going to be this and that and you don’t really care about genuinely what service you’re offering, you won’t last in business.
Ingrid: That’s lovely, thank you. Coming to the end of our interview, is there anything else that I haven’t covered or I haven’t asked that you think you’d like to add?
Heidi: Good question. I would probably say that the world has shifted, and the trends are showing that less and less will there be nine to five jobs, less and less will there be opportunities to have jobs for life, or a job for three years or more. And so the world actually needs a revolution in the way we do business, and I really believe entrepreneurs and small business people are the way of the future. That the world will begin to operate in a collaborative way following the Hollywood model, so just like Hollywood with movies, they’re putting a production together, they’re pulling in the crew and the specialists that they need, and when the project’s over they disband, and they go on to the next project. So if you’re starting in business what you also need to be doing is working on yourself, building you own brand, personally, filling your own resume, finding your own strengths and skills and being really clear on that, because the world is really your marketplace now that the opportunity truly is to do business anywhere at any time. And so you know really be clear about what kind of life I want to create and where do I want to contribute.
Ingrid: Thanks Heidi, thank you so much.
Heidi: Pleasure.
Ingrid: Just as you said we’ve known each other a while, it’s really interesting what you said about the face to face, because even though I do some of these interviews through Skype or through the phone, I don’t know there’s just something about doing them face to face. So thank you so much for being able to be here today.
Heidi: My pleasure, great to see you. Bye!