Value Driven Data Science: Boost your impact. Earn what you’re worth. Rewrite your career algorithm.

00:00:00 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Hello and welcome to value driven data science brought to you by Genevieve Hayes Consulting. I'm doctor Genevieve Hayes. And today I'm joined by David Shriner Khan to discuss making the leap from employee to entrepreneur. David is the podcast host and community builder.
00:00:20 Dr Genevieve Hayes
From smashing the plateau, an online platform offering resources, accountability and camaraderie to high performing professionals who are making the leap from the corporate career track to entrepreneurial business ownership.
00:00:37 Dr Genevieve Hayes
David, welcome to the.
00:00:38 David Shriner-Cahn
Show. Thank you, Genevieve. It's great to be here.
00:00:42 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Data science is among the most high demand skills of the 21st century, with opportunities existing for data scientists to make a difference and earn good money as an employee in a wide range of industries.
00:00:58 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yet there has also never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. But for data scientists who have never experienced the entrepreneurial life and who are used to the security of a steady paycheque, making the transition from employee to entrepreneur may seem like an impossible.
00:01:19 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Regardless of how desirable it may seem, helping people to make the move from employee to entrepreneur is something that you, David, help people to do through smashing the plateau. So to begin with.
00:01:36 Dr Genevieve Hayes
David, how did smashing the plateau first come to be?
00:01:41 David Shriner-Cahn
Well, Genevieve, first of all, your description resonates with me personally, because it's also my story. I was an employee for the 1st 28 years of my career. I started my business in 2006. I had never been an entrepreneur before.
00:02:00 David Shriner-Cahn
That, and I actually made the transition quite abruptly. Many people make it much more gradually and more gently than I did, but that was 17 years ago now, almost 18, and I'm still. I'm still here. I'm still in business, I'm still working and still still paying the bills so we can be done.
00:02:20 David Shriner-Cahn
And smashing the plateau evolved both by design and by circumstance. So in my case I went from my last job, was in the nonprofit sector.
00:02:32 David Shriner-Cahn
I was an executive. I was primarily responsible for the finances and operations of the the agency that employed me, and I started my business as a nonprofit management consultant focused on helping organisations with their finances and their operations. That was what.
00:02:53 David Shriner-Cahn
What I knew best, that was my network. That was my world.
00:02:57 David Shriner-Cahn
And I was off to a good start. I did start to get clients fairly early on. I wasn't fully booked the first day that I was in business. But by the end of the first year, I was doing fine. And as time went on, I I looked around at other consultants that I thought were ahead of where I was.
00:03:17 David Shriner-Cahn
And and were in places you know where that I aspired to get to and I started looking. OK, well, what are they doing that I'm not doing? And in particular, they were visibly creating content. And in those days, you know, we're talking like 2010, 2011.
00:03:34 David Shriner-Cahn
Even they were mostly writing blogs or producing still print newsletters, and there were some email newsletters but not like it is today. And so initially I thought and I wanted to be more visible and start to create an audience. So I started the blog and then the blog turns into a podcast.
00:03:55 David Shriner-Cahn
Which is now pretty long running. We're about to enter our 10th year and my business also started to shift. I started picking up some business clients from mostly small privately held.
00:04:08 David Shriner-Cahn
This is and I was still serving nonprofits, but I'm going to say let less and less of of my business was the the nonprofit sector more and more was the privately held business sector and among the privately held businesses. I started getting requests from Solopreneurs people who were consultants or coaches who had businesses.
00:04:29 David Shriner-Cahn
Like mine and wanted some help to try to grow their businesses and over time between the content creation and the podcast and people that I was interviewing and a larger and larger portion of my client base. I became personally really drawn to help people.
00:04:50 David Shriner-Cahn
Who are?
00:04:50 David Shriner-Cahn
Are leaving corporate and trying to to run and grow their own businesses because what I saw was like in my case, the reason I started my own business was I wanted more control over my career, more control over my time. I wanted more control over who I served. So basically I wanted to do more of what I love.
00:05:11 David Shriner-Cahn
And get paid what I'm worth and I, you know, overtime felt more and more compelled to help people that just wanted to do great work doing what they love doing, what they're competent.
00:05:23 David Shriner-Cahn
That and make a reasonable living doing so, so that they're able to support their lifestyle, and I've have found that there are ways that people like this can accelerate the journey and can do better, faster, as I'm sure you know, being an entrepreneur is not necessarily a slam dunk.
00:05:43 David Shriner-Cahn
It's not so simple in many ways, and we could be, you know, but I'm sure we'll talk more about this many ways being an employee can seem easier. I certainly succumb to that for the 1st 28 years of my career, but there's nothing quite as rewarding as being an entrepreneur when you can get it to work so that it serves your.
00:06:04 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yes, I would agree with that. Are there any common factors you've noticed with regard to, say, employment background or demographics of these sorts of people who come to you for advice and assistance?
00:06:17 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, there are definitely some demographic patterns. So I would say the most common thread in our audience is significant work history. So typically 20 to 40 years in corporate, somebody who's 25 and in the early very early stages of their career, they typically haven't experienced.
00:06:39 David Shriner-Cahn
Enough of corporate.
00:06:40 David Shriner-Cahn
Sure. And particularly the toxic part of corporate culture that affects people that are, I would say, more mid to late career. So yeah, so I would say work tenure is a big part of our demographic and also there's a mindset commonality which is a strong desire.
00:07:02 David Shriner-Cahn
To make things work on your own terms.
00:07:05 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I'm guessing a lot of people who come to you would have been let go by their previous employers or ended up in a situation where it was just they had to leave because there was no other choice. Is that right?
00:07:19 David Shriner-Cahn
I'm gonna. I'm going to say it's a mixture, a mixture of people who get pushed out, who leave voluntarily because they've kind of had it with what they've experienced and there are people we have people in our community that are working full time getting a paycheck.
00:07:34 David Shriner-Cahn
And doing something entrepreneurial.
00:07:36 Dr Genevieve Hayes
OK, that's interesting.
00:07:37 David Shriner-Cahn
Yeah. So yeah, so there are some that they see that you know particularly you know, let's say you're 5055 years old and you're you're in good health. The likelihood that you're going to want to work and probably need to work for decades into the future is there.
00:07:57 David Shriner-Cahn
OK, so if you're, you know, let's say you're 55 and you're, you think you're going to work until you're at least 75, that's another 20 years.
00:08:06 David Shriner-Cahn
And if you feel like you have kind of maxed out your growth in corporate, that stagnation is gonna eat at you. And so even though you right, you might not be in any jeopardy of being pushed out and you might be adequately compensated, you know that you need to do something so that you don't find yourself when you're 65.
00:08:28 David Shriner-Cahn
Suddenly, out on the street, because the longer you wait to start something entrepreneurial.
00:08:33 David Shriner-Cahn
You know, the harder it may be to kind of get it off the ground.
00:08:37 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Are the people you deal with, mostly executives, or is there a mixture of executives and non executives there?
00:08:45 David Shriner-Cahn
It's a mixture and I would say they're most commonly professional. So. So we appeal to knowledge workers, right? So these these are not people in manufacturing who are actually like assembling goods. They're not blue collar workers. They tend to be white collar professionals who have at least college degrees if not.
00:09:05 David Shriner-Cahn
Higher level degrees or some kind of professional certification? These are.
00:09:11 David Shriner-Cahn
Aren't well qualified. People who work hard do good work, but they realise that corporate life is not the best thing for them. For the next, let's say, decade plus.
00:09:26 Dr Genevieve Hayes
What you've just described there is the typical data scientist. What I find interesting with data science. So many people go into data science because they want to build models and make a difference with data.
00:09:39 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Better, but if you look at your typical data scientists growth trajectory, you've got your data scientists. They go to university, they graduate, they get a job with big corporation and start doing the stuff that they want to do, which is building the models, but then they.
00:09:59 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Get to a point where the ladder that they're on cuts out, and in order for them to keep growing financially, they need to go on to the managerial.
00:10:12 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And that's often taking them away from exactly what it was that they set out to do. And they can either remain doing technical work under a manager or climb up the corporate ladder themselves, which is not what they want to do and.
00:10:31 Dr Genevieve Hayes
That can happen very early in their career. So I think going the entrepreneurial way and finding a way that they can keep doing what they want to do.
00:10:40 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Do is something that a lot of data scientists think about but don't know how to do.
00:10:47 David Shriner-Cahn
Well, that was that was actually my early career trajectory as well. I I studied engineering. I have a master's in chemical engineering from Cornell, which is a great degree from a very good school, and my career trajectory was exactly what you've described, which is go to work for a big corporation, cause big corporations hire a lot of engineers.
00:11:08 David Shriner-Cahn
And particularly when I graduated, it was commonplace to to assume.
00:11:13 David Shriner-Cahn
That if you're an engineer doing good work and you're in a big.
00:11:16 David Shriner-Cahn
There are lots of opportunities to move both laterally and hierarchically up the ladder. And yes, management is one of the tracks. You can be a contributor as an engineer for a long time. But what I saw was even early in my career, I saw that there were a lot of engineers.
00:11:36 David Shriner-Cahn
That were getting pushed out in their 50s. They had sort of maxed out something changed in the corporate structure and they were suddenly out and they were financial consequences as well. And particularly in those days, different countries have different.
00:11:51 David Shriner-Cahn
Different ways of handling the social safety net, but in the US, particularly in those days, the assumption was that you would work for usually 30 plus years and if you were in the same corporation for the entire time, you'd be eligible for a pension. And I saw these guys that were getting pushed out and they were mostly men in those days.
00:12:11 David Shriner-Cahn
Getting pushed out in their 50s and they were a little short of being fully vested in their their retirement plans and I was like.
00:12:20 David Shriner-Cahn
I don't want to be like that. And and the AHA for me came just after my second review in my second job where I got a very strong performance review and a nice raise. A month later I was out of work because the company that I worked for had lost a lot of business and they had to fire a huge portion of the staff.
00:12:41 David Shriner-Cahn
And my boss called me into his office. He's David. I have good news and bad news. The good news is you're doing a great job. The bad news is you don't have a job here anymore. And that's when I started looking around at my career trajectory and thinking. I don't know that I wanna do this corporate thing in this environment anymore because I don't want to end up getting pushed out like, at that point, I was in my late 20s.
00:13:01 David Shriner-Cahn
I don't wanna get pushed out when I'm in my 50s and I'm have a mortgage and and paying tuition, college tuition for my kids so that that's when I went into the nonprofit sector.
00:13:11 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And you see it all the time in the newspapers, you know, thousands or hundreds of tech workers are suddenly out on the street because either the companies gone bust or they've outsourced the jobs to another country, or they're just cutting costs, like in the case of a Google or an Amazon.
00:13:30 David Shriner-Cahn
A lot of that's going on.
00:13:31 David Shriner-Cahn
Right now as we speak.
00:13:32 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Before you're mentioning mindset.
00:13:35 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And that's something I'd really like to explore because.
00:13:39 Dr Genevieve Hayes
One of the things I've found from my own experiences is that one of the hardest parts about making the transition from employee to entrepreneur is making the shift in mindset, and that was something I was completely unprepared for when I set out on this journey.
00:13:59 Dr Genevieve Hayes
What I'm talking about is when you're in a standard employee type job working at a corporation or whatever, you've got that whole totem pole type relationship going on, where anyone who's more senior than you, you do whatever they tell you to do, and then you can.
00:14:19 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Construct people who are below you in the totem pole to do whatever it is that they're meant to do. I think one of the things.
00:14:27 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Is that is challenging to get your head around is that you no longer have that totem pole set of relationships you're suddenly dealing with horizontal relationships. One author I was reading referred to it as Deep Boss and yourself for someone who has spent, say, 1020 thirty years.
00:14:47 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Being in a bossed relationship at work, how do you change your mindset to deal with the entrepreneurial life?
00:14:56 David Shriner-Cahn
Ohh can be quite challenging. You know you you you've kind of described it quite accurately, Genevieve. So you you know you go from a place where you're responsible for what you're responsible for and there's a team of people both up and down the hierarchical ladder and also around you as a data scientist. You're responsible for data science. You're not responsible for.
00:15:18 David Shriner-Cahn
Ordering supplies for the office. You're not responsible for HR issues. You're not responsible for making sure that the heat and the air conditioning works, and when you go out on your own, particularly if you are starting off as a company of one, which is what I think we're.
00:15:35 David Shriner-Cahn
Talking about here.
00:15:36 David Shriner-Cahn
You go from a place where, first of all your your work is prescribed. Your calendar is full. You're busy all the time. You know what? You're supposed to. What? What? What is in your lane? What you're responsible for. And you know that there's a team of people that will take care of all the other stuff. There's also this built in social structure that provides the.
00:15:56 David Shriner-Cahn
Emotional support for you to be able to do what you do well and not have to worry about the other stuff. And in addition as a data scientist, I'm gonna guess that you're probably not responsible for marketing.
00:16:08 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, when you start your own business, all of a sudden that full calendar is now empty. You're overflowing. Email inbox is now empty. The social structure is gone. You spend all this time alone and you have no team of people to assign anything to. You have to take care of all of it. The stuff that you're good at and the stuff that you're not good at.
00:16:28 David Shriner-Cahn
And then you have to get up and market and sell something that you've never had to sell before as a business, namely yourself. And I find even people that are corporate refugees that come from marketing and sales roles in companies, it's very different to try to market and sell the company that you work for.
00:16:46 David Shriner-Cahn
And then to try to market and sell yourself, because it's very personal and part of the mindset is you've got to get used to hearing no a lot because even when you actually get leads for business, they don't all convert into sales. They certainly don't all convert into sales. Right now. You've got to have a thick skin and realise that no, doesn't mean.
00:17:09 David Shriner-Cahn
No, I'm doing a bad job or no, I'm a bad person. It means that this potential client isn't ready to do business with me, right?
00:17:17 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Now also what you're saying about marketing a lot of data scientists tend to be more introvert.
00:17:23 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Inverted and marketing and sales is more of an extroverted type activity, and unless you're a grandiose narcissist, then it's probably going to be very challenging for your average data scientist to go out there, have conversations and say look at me, I'm the most wonderful.
00:17:42 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Person in the world.
00:17:43 Dr Genevieve Hayes
You should buy my service.
00:17:45 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, exactly, it would be.
00:17:47 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Very challenging. So how do you make that mindset shift?
00:17:50 David Shriner-Cahn
Well, one way to do it is you've got to find your people. One of the reasons why I started smashing the plateau in particular started the community that is part of what we do is I experienced how powerful it is.
00:17:53 Dr Genevieve Hayes
OK.
00:18:07 David Shriner-Cahn
When you hear from your peers feedback that will support you in these kinds of challenges, for example, if you are willing to share with your peers when you have a prospect for new business and you're working on a proposal, if you're.
00:18:26 David Shriner-Cahn
Charging too little, which I see happen way too often. If you're if you're charging too little, your peers will call you on it, right? And if you're with the right peers, they'll do it in a loving, supportive way.
00:18:38 David Shriner-Cahn
And let's say you know you're providing a much greater value in this potential contract than you're proposing, and here's a way to rethink it. So I've seen that that kind of thing happen or when you're having conversations with prospects and suddenly you don't hear back from them, which is another thing that happens very frequently.
00:19:00 David Shriner-Cahn
And our common reaction is to is to take it personally and think that they're they don't want to do business with you and most of the time that's actually not the reason. It's more like other stuff has come up like they have a problem that they can't solve themselves.
00:19:13 David Shriner-Cahn
Those and they're having a hard enough time trying to deal with the fact that this problem exists and they don't have a solution for it. And then trying to find a consultant that can work on it and make a deal with the consultant is like an added piece of work. So they may be just just be stretched very thin. It may just take them longer to work on their end of closing the deal.
00:19:33 David Shriner-Cahn
And again, your peers will talk you down from the ledge when you're thinking that. Ohh, you know well, what was me? This is not going so well. And they'll say no. No, just, you know, maybe you should just reach out again. They haven't responded to an email. Pick up the phone and make a phone call. Yeah. So I would say the biggest help is.
00:19:52 David Shriner-Cahn
Going to be being with the right people.
00:19:55 Dr Genevieve Hayes
One thing I tell myself when someone doesn't respond to me, you know, the natural tendency for your average human is, you know, they hate me. I've done something wrong, etcetera, etcetera. One of the things I always tell myself is this person doesn't know me. In order for them to hate me, they'd have to know me. They can't be anything personal.
00:20:12 David Shriner-Cahn
That's very smart.
00:20:14 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And if they're speaking to me, to quote for them, they clearly don't hate me either.
00:20:18 David Shriner-Cahn
Exactly. And I can tell you I've had conversations with prospects that have gone on for a very long time. I'm thinking of one that I was in touch with on and off for a year before they became a client, and they became a really good client. But it took a year of, like, constant nurturing the communication.
00:20:37 David Shriner-Cahn
To get the deal.
00:20:38 David Shriner-Cahn
Done and it was definitely worth it.
00:20:40 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And the fact is, if they're willing to take your quote straight away without having further conversations, you've probably priced it too low.
00:20:49 David Shriner-Cahn
Right. Yeah. If you don't get, if you never get pushed back on your prices, you're pricing too low. You you should be getting some pushback on pricing.
00:20:57 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yeah. I mean, obviously if you charge $1,000,000 for $100 job, they're probably going to Stonewall you anyway. But as you said, I think most people under price rather than overprice.
00:21:08 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, consultants for sure. Most people under price.
00:21:11 Dr Genevieve Hayes
You say that your primary audience are knowledge workers, and that fits in with data scientists very.
00:21:18 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Well, is consultancy the main way most of your clients go into entrepreneurial work, or are there other avenues that these knowledge workers can use to create a business?
00:21:34 David Shriner-Cahn
There are other ways. The vast majority probably like 80 to 90% of our audience. They stay in the same field and they become consultants of some sort. We have a member of our community who went from being a practising attorney.
00:21:49 David Shriner-Cahn
To work in the health and Wellness field as both a coach and a leadership development expert, that's a shift. It's not a shift for him personally, because he was actually doing this concurrently with being a lawyer, but it wasn't the business right. So it was taking something he was really good at and he love.
00:22:09 David Shriner-Cahn
Of and creating a business around it after he just stopped practising law. But I would say like that, that's the exception rather than the rule. Most people go from being a data scientist and a corporation to being a data scientist as a consultant.
00:22:23 Dr Genevieve Hayes
What would that potentially look like? Because you know, I'm thinking of this from the point of view of someone who's worked everyday of their working life at Big Corp building models or whatever, and they're now out on their own as either a single person or with a small number of partners.
00:22:43 Dr Genevieve Hayes
They would be going up against.
00:22:46 Dr Genevieve Hayes
People like BIG4, consultancy type organisations.
00:22:50 Dr Genevieve Hayes
How would you envisage someone like that framing their services so that companies don't just look at them as being this sole person and laugh?
00:23:03 David Shriner-Cahn
Well, not every company is going to want one of the BIG4 firms for a variety of reasons. Pricing is 1. They're not going to get the same level of attention from a BIG4 consulting firm that they're going to get from.
00:23:20 David Shriner-Cahn
A solo preneur or a firm with a a handful of people in it. So attention is a big issue. Customization, a big firm, is probably going to be I'm going to say more cookie cutter in their approach and also smaller companies often don't have the budget that these big firms require.
00:23:41 David Shriner-Cahn
You know, cause they're they're notorious for creating lots of meetings with lots of team members that cost a lot of money.
00:23:48 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Ohh yes yeah.
00:23:51 David Shriner-Cahn
Right. And, you know, a solopreneur or small firm is going to spend most of the time focusing on.
00:23:56 David Shriner-Cahn
In the work.
00:23:57 Dr Genevieve Hayes
One thing I'd say from my experience is that if you're planning on going out on your own, it's probably best to focus on smaller, self contained projects initially rather than big year long projects, because otherwise you're effectively becoming an employee again of albeit of your clients organised.
00:24:17 David Shriner-Cahn
I would agree. I would agree. And yeah, those bigger also the bigger long term contracts take a long time to sell and you also you do run the risk of having too many eggs in one basket if you're focus on just getting those big contracts cause you eat how many of them can you actually handle as a solopreneur.
00:24:36 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I I would imagine that you'd probably only be able to.
00:24:39 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Handled to it at the same time at most, and that would be a challenge.
00:24:41 David Shriner-Cahn
Right.
00:24:44 David Shriner-Cahn
Right. So one of the things to think about, right as an entrepreneur is right, you have the disadvantage of not having the.
00:24:50 David Shriner-Cahn
Paycheck. So your cash flow is subject to fluctuation in a way that it doesn't happen when you're an employee, but you also have the opportunity to develop multiple sources of revenue. So if one source disappears or gets reduced drastically, you still have other sources of revenue so that you can stay in business.
00:25:11 David Shriner-Cahn
And you can keep feeding your family.
00:25:13 Dr Genevieve Hayes
By multiple sources of revenue, are you saying multiple clients or by having something like doing consulting work and having, I don't know, a coaching business on the side or a training business on the?
00:25:26 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Right.
00:25:27 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, and all the above, any any, any way any way you know whether it's different elements of your business model.
00:25:34 David Shriner-Cahn
Like you, yes.
00:25:35 David Shriner-Cahn
You could have consulting. You could have coaching simultaneously. We have a member of our Community that is doing work primarily with one corporate entity, which is risky but has developed.
00:25:48 David Shriner-Cahn
Relationships with liaisons in the company that have different budget lines. So if one budget line drives up, there's another budget line that's available.
00:25:58 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Oh, that's interesting.
00:26:00 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So that must be a very big organisation that they're working for.
00:26:02 David Shriner-Cahn
Yeah, it's a big it's a big corporation, right? So whatever you can do to diversify your revenue is going to make your business healthier.
00:26:09 Dr Genevieve Hayes
It's basically the same principle as investing in the stock market. You don't want to just invest in one stock, you want to have that combined portfolio of a dozen or more stocks.
00:26:21 David Shriner-Cahn
Correct. And when you're an employee.
00:26:22 David Shriner-Cahn
You are investing in one stock I.
00:26:25 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Read in one book. Everyone is a small business of one. It's just the majority of people only have one client and that's their employer.
00:26:34 David Shriner-Cahn
Exactly. The other thing you you have to think about, you know, when you do go out on your own, you know, we've talked about how you're.
00:26:40 David Shriner-Cahn
Responsible for everything.
00:26:42 David Shriner-Cahn
You can't spend 100% of your time doing work. That is, that's paid client work. You have to actually spend time running your business. So you do have to spend time doing marketing and sales and operations and relationship building.
00:26:55 David Shriner-Cahn
And and all these other things you really have to devote time to it. Those things don't happen on their.
00:27:00 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Own one of the things I found when I was an employee.
00:27:05 Dr Genevieve Hayes
There'd be times of the year when your calendar would be completely full with actual real important work, and then there'd be the down times of the year where you'd have maybe 10 to 20 hours of real work per week, and then all that excess time so often during those times. My goal as an employee was.
00:27:26 Dr Genevieve Hayes
How can I keep myself occupied for 40 hours per week without just staring blankly at my computer screen?
00:27:33 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And so prioritising tasks wasn't really a big deal then, whereas since going out as an entrepreneur, one of the things I've found is there is always 40 hours worth of good, solid work to fill in the week and then it suddenly became a matter of how do I prioritise these tasks.
00:27:55 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Because some of them are going to benefit my business and others, it won't matter. A crumpet if I don't do them at all.
00:28:03 David Shriner-Cahn
You are so.
00:28:04 David Shriner-Cahn
Correct. There's always more to do when you're running a business and and you have to be really careful about how you prioritise your time. Yeah, you can always make more money, but you can't make more time.
00:28:15
When I.
00:28:16 Dr Genevieve Hayes
First heard you speak. It was on Jonathan Stark's podcast ditching ally and one of the things you mentioned in that interview was.
00:28:26 Dr Genevieve Hayes
You're talking about sabbaticals. I found that idea really interesting because I'd previously just thought of sabbaticals as something that only academics did. Could you talk about how you envisage A sabbatical working in the context of someone?
00:28:47 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Transitioning from regular employment to entry.
00:28:51 David Shriner-Cahn
I used to think that sabbaticals were only for academics as well, and one of the things that I realised is there's actually a process to getting further along in the career journey where you're doing more of what you love and you get paid what you're worth. And I actually have kind of boil it down to five steps.
00:29:11 David Shriner-Cahn
And the five steps are.
00:29:13 David Shriner-Cahn
Reflecting where you're identifying what's most important to you, aspiring where you're setting clear goals that will guide you way into the future. Planning where you're creating short term objectives that are very specific and metric driven that work towards your goals, right. The goals are the long term and and then the objectives are very short term and metric driven.
00:29:36 David Shriner-Cahn
And then there are the last two steps are implementing and iterating, and particularly as a data scientist I I think you'll really appreciate the iterating part, but implementing is when you map map out the activities that are going to help you achieve your object.
00:29:51 David Shriner-Cahn
And iterating is what you do on a very short term basis. And I I like to think of it as maybe setting an objective for 90 days and iterating one week at a time. I think a week is a nice cadence. I think there's a reason why humans have established that a seven day a week is something that's universal.
00:30:12 David Shriner-Cahn
They all, regardless of politics and and geography, everybody in the world follows A7 day week. Nobody fights over that right and so.
00:30:22 David Shriner-Cahn
This the whole idea of you create a plan, you take a step, you look at the results, you see what's working well and what's not working so well, and you make a small tweak in your plan for the next week and you keep doing this. And if you do this long enough, you're gonna see fabulous results. Takes a lot of discipline to do it, but that's.
00:30:42 David Shriner-Cahn
The basics. That's the basic structure. These five steps and the beginning part is very as I said, the first step is reflecting so that in the beginning you have to do a lot of deep thinking about yourself and what is really important to you and what will make you happy.
00:30:58 David Shriner-Cahn
And if you just jump into implementing and iterating, you are more than likely going to be going in the wrong direction. So the sabbatical is designed and the reason why I like the term sabbatical is you actually need to take a break from what is causing you stress and what is kind of keeping you on this.
00:31:19 David Shriner-Cahn
Hamster wheel. And if you think about it, for example, in the seven day week, whether you observe 1.
00:31:24 David Shriner-Cahn
Day of rest.
00:31:25 David Shriner-Cahn
Or maybe, like most of the developed world has a, you know, two day weekend.
00:31:30 David Shriner-Cahn
The whole idea of the of the weekend or the day of rest is that we have a break from the day.
00:31:35 David Shriner-Cahn
To day which?
00:31:36 David Shriner-Cahn
Gives us a chance to sort of recharge and you think about, for example, meditation is supposed to be a chance to recharge and kind of separate yourself from the stuff that is.
00:31:50 David Shriner-Cahn
Keeping you from from doing what is most beneficial in the long term to this right, the sabbatical is it designed to give you space to do some self reflection where you can kind of recharge and decide what's really most important.
00:32:07 David Shriner-Cahn
And if if you look at what your goals are going to be, that will carry you for the rest of your life. You can't just do that. You know, in a few minutes, you can't do it while you're trying to take care of your kids or commute to work or do a high demanding job. You need time and space.
00:32:27 David Shriner-Cahn
Actually do some deep thinking.
00:32:30 Dr Genevieve Hayes
How long have you found that typically takes people?
00:32:33 David Shriner-Cahn
It depends on how much space you can actually carve out to do it. Like if you're in a corporate job where you are finding it stressful and you feel like the environment is toxic, you're probably going to need at least a few months to kind of detox from that. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't produce income while you're on sabbatical.
00:32:54 David Shriner-Cahn
You don't have to stop your life, but what I think is important is if you can financially afford to take three to six months to not have to stress about how you're gonna produce income, that would be great. I've had some guests on my podcast.
00:33:09 David Shriner-Cahn
That have taken what they call they say I've taken a year off, which you know, they're really taking 12 months where they're not worried about how they're gonna produce income. Many people can't afford to do that. But even if you take what is a a short term job or maybe a contract work that is, you know, is time limited.
00:33:29 David Shriner-Cahn
And you know, it's not going to be your main focus. So you don't have to really stress over it. It'll give you more space to do some of this deep thinking. So, yeah, I would say three to six months is a good time frame to think about. If you can do it.
00:33:42 Dr Genevieve Hayes
What I'm thinking as you're saying this is I don't know if you ever saw King of Queens the TV show.
00:33:48 David Shriner-Cahn
I have not, no.
00:33:49 Dr Genevieve Hayes
OK, there's this part in it where the main characters wife, Carrie, she loses her job and she decides to take a break before looking for a new one. And she has all these great plans of what she's.
00:34:01 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Going to do.
00:34:02 Dr Genevieve Hayes
That it ultimately ends with her spending all day lying on the couch watching TV.
00:34:07 Dr Genevieve Hayes
How do you make sure that the sabbatical doesn't devolve into something like that?
00:34:13 David Shriner-Cahn
Well, again, if you connect with the right people where you have some regular accountability and you tell the people in your again, you could join a community like we have. You can do this with a an accountability buddy. You you could join a small group and this could be again doesn't have to be something necessarily that you're paying for, but it needs to be something that you're committed to.
00:34:36 David Shriner-Cahn
If you tell other people that this is what my plan and my plan is to go through this self reflective process for the next six months and here's what I expect to happen over each month over the next six months. And then you have it built in reporting mechanism, you're gonna be way more likely to actually complete.
00:34:56 David Shriner-Cahn
The self reflective process and come up with your goals and then be well set to launch something new at the end of this initial period. I would say connecting with the right people and having a strong.
00:35:08 David Shriner-Cahn
Sure to report regularly can be the key to not dissolving into a couch potato.
00:35:16 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Would you have certain questions that you set yourself to answer? So for example, what are my goals and just, you know, have a day when you just think, OK, I'm going to think about that maybe for an hour.
00:35:29 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Each day for a week for.
00:35:32 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. The first two questions are what's most important to you. And for most people, I'm going to say it's like, yeah, usually like 6 to 8 major categories. It's probably not more than 10 things like physical health, emotional health, relationships, financial health. And then once you identify what's most important to you could write.
00:35:53 David Shriner-Cahn
A goal statement for each one of those and the way I define a goal statement is that it's an ongoing process that is not metric driven, so you're never.
00:36:04 David Shriner-Cahn
Finished. You know, for example, in your work, if your goal is around utilising data to impact the world in a positive way, you could probably create a goal statement where I am spending my working time building models that utilise data.
00:36:24 David Shriner-Cahn
And if you have a particular area of focus, that's really important to you that you want the data to be able to impact the world in a positive way. Know, for example, climate change, you could talk about how you would love to be creating ripples through the the use of data.
00:36:41 David Shriner-Cahn
That spur political decision makers to make healthy decisions with regard to our environment, right? That could be a goal statement. You could work on this for the rest of your life. There's always going to be more to do.
00:36:53 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Then once you've got those goals, you would take those and map out your plan. So for example, if you had that wanting to use data to impact the world in a positive way, that would inform who your target market is, which would be.
00:37:11 Dr Genevieve Hayes
People who are wanting to use data for social good, for example.
00:37:18 David Shriner-Cahn
Correct. OK, right. And then yes, you can break that down into measurable objectives that are short term. You can identify organisations that are doing the kind of work that you want to support and perhaps an.
00:37:30 David Shriner-Cahn
Objective could be.
00:37:32 David Shriner-Cahn
I want to develop key relationships with 10 organisations over the next two years.
00:37:40 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And then once you finish your sabbatical and start going out to the implementation stage, you would then be working out OK, these are the 10 organisations I want to focus on. How do I meet people?
00:37:52 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And build those relationships.
00:37:55 Dr Genevieve Hayes
That's actually a good segue into another question I.
00:37:59 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Many people, when they start their entrepreneurial journeys, don't have the big networks and don't have a track record of delivering results in the consulting space. And they're also still trying to figure out their product or service offerings. What advice would you give to people who are just getting started?
00:38:20 Dr Genevieve Hayes
In building those networks.
00:38:23 David Shriner-Cahn
Start a podcast. You get to interview some awesome people.
00:38:27 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I would agree with.
00:38:28 David Shriner-Cahn
That yes, you start a blog, start writing. Reach out to people on LinkedIn and find people that you can follow. Comment on their posts. LinkedIn is a great tool to develop relationships. If you identify a small number of people that you want to follow, you can follow them and start commenting on.
00:38:47 David Shriner-Cahn
Their content. Yeah. Anybody who is creating content you can follow and start to interact with them around their content. In today's world, I think it's, although it seems like everybody is super busy and it seems like spaces.
00:39:01 David Shriner-Cahn
Are really crap.
00:39:01 David Shriner-Cahn
Added the way we interact because of content creation and social media in some ways makes it easier than ever to try to reach people.
00:39:09 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I would agree. I I don't know how I would have started this business 20 years earlier before social media.
00:39:16 David Shriner-Cahn
Yeah, I think it's.
00:39:17 David Shriner-Cahn
It's easier than ever to start a business.
00:39:19 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So suppose we've got someone who has heard this episode and thinks OK, great. I wanna go off and do the entrepreneurial thing and they quit their job, start their business and.
00:39:33 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And get things started. How do they know if the well firstly, how do they know if this is the right move to make before they pull the plug on their job, but also once they've started, how do they know if?
00:39:46 Dr Genevieve Hayes
It's working for them.
00:39:47 David Shriner-Cahn
Well, you could probably start your business while you're still getting a paycheck. That's one of the easier ways to do it. I didn't do it that way.
00:39:55 David Shriner-Cahn
I would say it's a lot easier to start a business in parallel while you're still getting a paycheck and try to build up your business income so that you least have some proof of concept that is working so that that would be one way to do it. If another way is one question I ask myself, and I ask others when you're faced with a situation.
00:40:16 David Shriner-Cahn
That has kind of unknown risks, like you're quitting your job to start a business you don't know how well the business is going to do.
00:40:21 David Shriner-Cahn
Is what's the worst thing that could possibly happen? Answer that question, write it down. And then next question is OK. So if the absolute worst thing happens, what will you do? I've had lots of guests on my podcast that have gone bankrupt and I've had guests that have lost their homes. And by the time I was interviewing them.
00:40:43 David Shriner-Cahn
They had built a new business back up and they were doing just fine. In many cases, they were doing better than they were the first time around. So yes, things can.
00:40:52 David Shriner-Cahn
So South and lots of businesses fail. But think about what would you do if what you think is the worst case actually comes to fruition and write that down and that will help you with your plan.
00:41:06 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I would also add to that if you're going to be asking yourself what's the worst case that could happen if you became an entrepreneur?
00:41:14 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Also ask yourself what's the worst case that could happen if you remained an employee?
00:41:21 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I think people underestimate the risk of remaining an employee for too long.
00:41:27 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, yes. And you know, you could. You could also create a decision matrix where you, you know you you go through the whole process of particularly for data scientists, right where you're assigning different weights to different scenarios and you could score the whole thing and decide which path to take based on your the results of your decision make.
00:41:47 Dr Genevieve Hayes
This is reminding me of those risk assessment matrices that we used to have to deal with when I was working in my office.
00:41:52 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Job, you know.
00:41:53 Dr Genevieve Hayes
You'd have high risk, medium risk and low risk and high probability medium probability and low probability, and you'd assess how severe the risk was based on where it fits in the matrix.
00:42:06 David Shriner-Cahn
Yes, but the most important thing as an entrepreneur is being able to sell, right? If you can sell, chances are, if you're a smart person, you can figure out how to deliver what you've sold for most knowledge workers that I know, the harder part is the selling, not the delivery.
00:42:21 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And is there any advice you'd give to those people on learning the selling part?
00:42:25 David Shriner-Cahn
Just keep trying. Yeah, don't. Don't wait, don't hesitate. Just just try. Just know. Know that you're going to get a lot of rejections and you may fail a lot. But if you don't keep trying, you'll never succeed.
00:42:38 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And the fact is, I mean I think about, you know, everyone is so afraid of cold outreach.
00:42:45 Dr Genevieve Hayes
But you know, I've received several cold outreach emails about things relating to my podcast, and one thing I find interesting.
00:42:54 Dr Genevieve Hayes
As a entrepreneur, I feel nervous about cold outreach. But when I've received some of these cold outreach emails about things that I'm genuinely interested in, I'm actually quite happy to speak to the person who sent me the email because they're offering me something that.
00:43:10 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Would be of value.
00:43:12 David Shriner-Cahn
Right, particularly if they've done their homework. So I get the, you know I get the same kind of outreach and I can spot in a nanosecond when somebody has actually done their homework, they've looked at our website, they may have listened to an episode and they've written something that actually is very much tied to what the show is all about.
00:43:31 David Shriner-Cahn
As opposed to these very generic mass emails that mean nothing.
00:43:36 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Ohh yeah, I got one the other day where they're saying my videos are not trending on YouTube and it's like, yeah, of course they're not trending on YouTube. I don't put videos on YouTube.
00:43:46 David Shriner-Cahn
Exactly. Yes, I get those all the time. You.
00:43:48 David Shriner-Cahn
Know we we.
00:43:49 David Shriner-Cahn
Have a a form for anyone who wants to be a guest on smashing the plateau. If you just go to our website, it's right at the top of the menu. If you know if somebody actually takes the time to go to the website and sees that there is a form for guests and puts their information in, that's very different than a mass email where they.
00:44:07 David Shriner-Cahn
Whoever wrote it has no idea what my show is about.
00:44:10 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Well, it's like applying for jobs. You don't spam people your resume.
00:44:15 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So we're getting close to time, but one last question, what final advice would you give to data scientists who are considering making the leap to entrepreneurship?
00:44:26 David Shriner-Cahn
Well, Genevieve, no surprise, I've already said this a number of times, and and obviously I'm a big believer in this, but join the community. Perhaps join more than one cause. Every community has its own culture and personality and will serve your needs differently, but it's really important. I personally have been a member of Communities my entire life.
00:44:46 David Shriner-Cahn
And I've always found them to be super beneficial. I was just having this conversation with somebody today who's starting a new community.
00:44:53 David Shriner-Cahn
I said you can tell how valuable a community is to you when you're going through a distressing time. It's like when times are good, you you might actually not need the community a huge amount, but being present and being a giver in the community is really important because when you need to be on the receiving end.
00:45:13 David Shriner-Cahn
Then you put something out that you have a challenge and you really need to.
00:45:16 David Shriner-Cahn
Help your community will respond, and then you'll really appreciate that you belong.
00:45:22 Dr Genevieve Hayes
For listeners who want to learn more about you or get in contact, what can they do?
00:45:28 David Shriner-Cahn
Go to smashingtheplateau.com. We have our podcast, which we're releasing episodes weekly, and we also have on our website all of the episodes we've ever produced so you can get at this point, it's over 800 episodes. Going back almost 10 years. They're all there. The good, the bad and the ugly. That's free we have.
00:45:48 David Shriner-Cahn
A newsletter that comes out every weekday, so five issues per week. I try to keep them short and helps.
00:45:55 David Shriner-Cahn
So it's mostly, you know, stories and strategies that deal with all the things we've talked about in this episode that's also free. And then we have information about our community, which is, you know, it's a paid membership, but that that's there as well. We do have periodic workshops. We're going to be most likely running.
00:46:15 David Shriner-Cahn
These workshops you could you could sign up for just one to get a taste of what this is all about, as opposed to just joining the whole community so that they happen periodically in their listen on the website as well.
00:46:26 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And how does that community?
00:46:29 David Shriner-Cahn
So it's an online platform that's private. So in order to communicate with other Members through the platform, you need to log in. So it's not on social media. It's not not a Facebook group, this is, you know, a private membership site and then we have live events that are a combination of helping members go through the process.
00:46:49 David Shriner-Cahn
And described to make sure that their goals are clear.
00:46:52 David Shriner-Cahn
They have short term objectives that are achievable and then we have sessions where Members talk about what they're working on, get feedback from other members. So that's the sort of the goal setting and accountability portion. And then we have learning sessions on topics that are important. So we have one coming up shortly that's going to be about personal branding. We have another one.
00:47:12 David Shriner-Cahn
Coming up on what are the most important financial metrics and strategies to use for a consulting or coaching business? We had one on on storytelling. Storytelling is really important for marketing and sales. So yeah, so a lot of learning sessions as.
00:47:31 Dr Genevieve Hayes
That sounds really good. Anyway, I thank you for joining me today.
00:47:35 David Shriner-Cahn
My pleasure, Genevieve. Thank you for asking me.
00:47:37 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And for those in the audience, thank you for listening. I'm doctor Genevieve Hayes, and this has been a value driven data science brought to you by Genevieve Hayes Consulting.