JESSICA SHAANAN ON SHAKE THE COSMOS (PART 1/2)
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Jessica Shaanan shares her personal and professional story of breaking through the barriers and limits and making career pivots. She shares her journey of starting a coaching business, working as an entrepreneur, and navigating unchartered territories at startups, and landing a dream corporate sales job. Hit subscribe to follow for another episode with Jessica next week.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
ABHISHEK: Hi everyone, this is Abhishek from Shake the Cosmos, and today’s guest is Jessica Shaanan.
JESSICA: Hi.
ABHISHEK: Hi, Jessica.
JESSICA: Hey.
ABHISHEK: How are you?
JESSICA: Good, good to be here.
ABHISHEK: Thanks for making the time to hang out and record this podcast.
JESSICA: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. I’m excited for it.
ABHISHEK: Yeah, you gave me an excuse to come out to Del Mar and see the ocean a little bit as well.
JESSICA: Yeah. As we’re sitting here, Abhishek can see the ocean right now. You can. Right there.
ABHISHEK: Yeah. I feel like we’ve come at an opportune time where you’ve got a lot of changes happening already, and exciting stuff. You’ve been sharing some of that with me. What are some things you’re excited about right now that are happening?
JESSICA: Ooh. A lot. One is my own transformation. That’s always happening, and I’m going through a big leap right now. It’s January, 2020, so I think a lot of people, a lot of my friends at least, people who I’ve been in contact with, have felt huge shifts of their own in 2020. Even this morning, I was telling you earlier, that I had a transforming conversation this morning.
It’s happening almost daily, so I’m excited about that because I think when the force is strong in that way, and you let it run through you, and you allow it not just to be, but go with it. It’s just very powerful. It’s almost, in a way, effortless, because you have to. But I guess you don’t have to, it’s always a choice.
So, that. My own career transformation, as well. I’m actually transitioning… I’ll never be completely out of the personal growth, personal development space, ever. As a matter of fact, I intend on marrying it with anything and everything I do for the rest of my life. Because it’s just at the core of who I am, and how I’ve always been since as far back as I can remember
But I am jumping into a new role, starting February.
ABHISHEK: Congrats.
JESSICA: Thank you. I’m very excited about it. And career wise, my life has felt very in-transition, actually, for roughly the last five years. So I’ve had some stability there, but as an entrepreneur, stability is kind of funny. It’s a funny thing, it’s a little elusive. We know it’s an illusion.
So I’m excited to jump into this next thing because I think a lot of people, especially in our age range today, if we’re talking about millennials and the generations younger than them, and even maybe a little bit older as well. There’s a fad, I think. Personally, I see it as a fad of people leaving their corporate jobs and going to start their own thing.
And I think that it’s actually very important. It’s deeper than a fad. Fad’s not the right word for it. But it’s an important transition, because we’ve come from these mom and pop shops to huge corporate conglomerates, the Wal-Mart’s, and the Amazon’s, and all those guys. And now we’re making a new transition back to mom and pop. It just looks different. It’s digital.
That’s really an exciting thing, and I’ve been in that transition for the last five years. And I’m actually transitioning out into corporate, funny enough, as my own personal growth. It’s a personal growth decision, as well as a combination of personal and financial growth decisions. So I’m excited about that, and lots to come.
My sister’s having a baby soon, one of my best friends is having a baby soon. I’m going to an amazing, big wedding this weekend. It’s a three day long awesome wedding in LA, Beverly Hills. Lots of cool things happening.
ABHISHEK: Wow.
JESSICA: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: I think the audience is really jealous now with all these happenings in your life.
JESSICA: I’m very lucky.
ABHISHEK: I’m just picking up on one of the things you said was you’re going into the corporate world, into an exciting sales role. For the audience, I just want to give some more context, with your background. There’s this whole Connection Queen that comes up.
JESSICA: Mhm.
ABHISHEK: Can you tell me a little bit more about what you were doing before?
JESSICA: Yeah, absolutely. I love Connection Queen, by the way. I love that brand and I love what it stands for.
When I left college, my father is actually, as far as the design world, he’s a fairly famous industrial designer. He built his company from the ground up in Canada, became one of the best known designers in the world and brought his company here to San Diego. Lucky me, I got to move when I was 15 because my parents decided they wanted to live in a warmer climate, so we did. I’m originally from Montreal, Canada.
In my junior year of college, I left to travel for a while after that, came back. And going through my senior year, I had done the internships, and the jobs, and all that stuff. Going through my senior year, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I studied business because I was one of those people that wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and business felt safe.
My dad said that he wanted me to come work for him, so one of my internships two summers prior was working with him because, again, I had traveled, and by the time I had come back, all the internships that I had applied for were gone. So he and I worked together just for the hell of it, and it was really fun. I had a great time working with him.
ABHISHEK: You were helping him out with the different projects?
JESSICA: With his projects, yeah, at his company.
ABHISHEK: Wow.
JESSICA: Yeah, in his San Diego office. I didn’t realize at the time that his intention was actually to sell his company by the time I graduated, and he wanted to start something new. So he and I actually started something upon my graduation. We started a different version of what he had before, just me and him in the office. It was great, it was so fun.
I was one of those people that couldn’t wait to stay late at the office, because I couldn’t wait to be a grownup, if you will.
ABHISHEK: Yeah. People come to you, they’re like, “Hey, it’s eight o’clock.”
JESSICA: Yeah, “You can go.” They were doing it all the way up until I left my dad’s office, by the way.
ABHISHEK: And this is San Diego.
JESSICA: This is San Diego.
ABHISHEK: San Diego, okay.
JESSICA: Where the work ethic is like, you leave at 4:00 so you can go surf.
ABHISHEK: Okay, yeah. All right, so you were definitely breaking the work ethic.
JESSICA: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: Okay. That’s exciting. So, new company, new foundation.
JESSICA: Brand new company.
ABHISHEK: With your dad.
JESSICA: Right. And to make many years shorter, I was with him for eight years. Essentially at a startup for eight years.
ABHISHEK: Oh, wow.
JESSICA: And we actually started a new startup within the startup in those eight years.
ABHISHEK: This is like inception at this point.
JESSICA: It was amazing. I worked on everything from baby products… Honestly, it was so funny, when I was 25, my friends who were older were having babies and I needed to use them as test subjects. It was hilarious. I know, I was 25 working on baby products, but it was great. We did a great job.
ABHISHEK: Did you offer them something? Are they still your friends?
JESSICA: (laughing) As a matter of fact, they are.
ABHISHEK: They are, okay.
JESSICA: Yes, many of whom I saw last month.
ABHISHEK: Oh, perfect. That’s great.
JESSICA: I know. They’re great.
So I worked on everything from baby products to companies like Qualcomm, coming to us saying, “Hey, we have this technology. How do we make it consumable? How do we sell it?” Because Qualcomm is not usually B2C, they’re usually B2B. So they wanted to go B2C, and they came to us for some of that work, which was really cool.
And I worked on medical devices, so I worked on a lot of amazing things.
But the whole time that I was there, and my dad knew this, I felt like I had this itch, and I felt like this wasn’t the right place for me. But it was “safe”. And he was probably harder on me than he was on anybody else, equal or harder on me. But I appreciated that, and it was good. Because I remember before we hired our first employee outside of me, I said, “You’ve got to treat me equally.” We both wanted to have the same conversation. It was great.
But there is obviously more flexibility when you work for family, so it has its pros and its cons. But ultimately, I loved working with him.
ABHISHEK: Would you say he’s also like a mentor at this point?
JESSICA: Of course, yeah. He was my first mentor, my whole life, of course. Yeah. Also, I took mentorship from some of the people that we worked for. The people who hired us, I’d be in all those meetings, and without them really knowing, I was learning from them. Just learning through the work.
ABHISHEK: Yeah.
JESSICA: Just to give you a little background on my own personality, personal growth has always been a huge thing for me. I remember being as young as five, that’s really as far back as I can remember. But my early ages, like before I even hit ten, I remember having conversations with my sister, and anytime an argument would pop up between me and my sister, or me and a parent, after things were said and done and settled down, I would always go back to them and say, “What was it that made you so upset?” Or, “How can we avoid this next time?”
And here’s the thing, I was usually met with a response that went something like, “Jess, I’m over it already. Move on, get over it.” Something like that. My family were completely different, all of them. It was me, my sister, and my two parents as our family. And I was never met with that same desire to dive into, “Hey, what happened? So we don’t have to go there again, or so we could resolve the core issue.” That being at my core since birth, I always looked at every situation as a growth experience, and as a learning experience, even today.
I knew in my core that I had to leave. There were signs inside me, such as these feelings of knowing that I’ll never have the relationship that I want if I don’t grow in this way. I will never have the happiness. I might make the money, but I’ll never have the happiness that I want because I won’t have grown in the way that I know I need to grow now.
That is the straight reason why I left the company. There was no conflict, there was no bad vibes, nothing wrong. That was just why I left.
So on my 30th birthday, my dad knew it was coming. And three months after that, I left. I made the beautiful mistake of not having any financial net underneath me when I left, thinking, “I’m gonna start a coaching business.” And knowing that I had a lot of friends at that time anyway who were already in the coaching field, they were successful enough to at least support themselves and a little bit then some.
I had seen other people be extremely successful in the field. I didn’t know why they were successful, but I just knew that it was possible.
So I hired a coach and took that year to try to build my first coaching business. I probably had like ten clients total. It was not successful, as far as supporting me financially. But it was very successful as far as a learning experience.
After that, I went to look for another job. I had only known the startup world, so I was very comfortable in the startup world. I had applied to a lot of different things, I think marketing, and… Feel free to interrupt me.
ABHISHEK: All right, the coaching business started, and you’ve got ten clients, and this coach that’s helping you, also.
JESSICA: Mhm.
ABHISHEK: All right. Okay. But there’s something itching that you’re not… This learning is not generating enough revenue, then?
JESSICA: Right. There was something misaligned inside of me, again, my gut feeling, there’s something not aligned.
ABHISHEK: Yeah.
JESSICA: Usually that results externally, as well, when things are not aligned in a relationship, in business, whatever.
ABHISHEK: Mm.
JESSICA: So I decided to go get another job, which I did. I got another job at another startup. And I eventually left that startup because I completely disagreed with how the CEO was running it. And as spoiled as that sounds, if you had time for me to give you the whole history, you’d be shocked. But I was very proud of that, because again, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that anybody jump off the cliff without having a net secure underneath you. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that most people don’t do that. But I’ve also heard one million times people suggesting, “Hey, don’t do that.” But I did, you know? So I can say whatever I want til the cows come home. People are gonna do what they’re gonna do. I’m just saying it’s not necessary to have that financial stress. It’s not a necessity.
What is a necessity is that you actually get started on your business, regardless of the financial situation that you’re in, and the work situation that you’re in. So for a lot of people, they want to start something on the side of their full-time job. But they don’t, because they don’t give it the time. Because by the time they get to it, they’re tired, their friends want to go out, whatever it is. And you just need to give it the time.
ABHISHEK: I’m just gonna backtrack a little bit. You’ve got the coaching business, and now you’ve transitioned into a startup, and you said it was about a year long. Any learnings that came out of that?
JESSICA: Besides what I just shared? Yeah, of course.
ABHISHEK: Because you pivoted, essentially. That’s the story I’m telling myself.
JESSICA: I did pivot. Yeah. You mean the pivot back into a startup?
ABHISHEK: Yeah.
JESSICA: Gosh, I think probably if I was gonna offer any one thing, from that experience, which obviously there’s a lot, I would say that when you are starting a business, no matter what kind of business it is, you need to have a period where you will test and verify your product or your service. You must have that period.
You don’t know how long that’s going to take, because you’re dealing with a combination of other people, technology, changes in the marketplace, and learning not only what your product is going to be, but who you’re going to sell it to. How are you going to sell it to them? All of this stuff needs to come into play before you will actually be able to create a successful business.
That’s probably the number one thing that I learned. It’s like this stuff is obvious. It seemed obvious to me. If you had said this to me ten years ago, I’d be like, “Yeah, that sounds really like… Duh.” But I do think that a lot of people jump without doing that basic groundwork.
ABHISHEK: I think you’re right, because even in my own current situation, I hear a lot of feedback. And I still have to keep it focused on who my customers are. What are they saying, versus what my entire friend network is saying?
JESSICA: Exactly. Exactly.
ABHISHEK: And I think that you bring up an important point that there are a lot of people that run into that, especially small businesses. So if they follow your advice around, I think you said test and what was it?
JESSICA: Learn who your market is.
ABHISHEK: Learn who your market is.
JESSICA: Nail down your product. Nail down your service. Learn who your market is. Learn how to connect with them, the kinds of content that they connect with. Do they receive your emails well? Or do they receive your YouTube better? Decide how and where you want to market to them.
ABHISHEK: Yeah.
JESSICA: And then you’ll start seeing money coming through the door more consistently, because you’ll be able to build a machine around that. You’re really only able to systematize money-generating activities and automate them when you know those key things. And those are just the basics. There are lots of other things you just have to learn. But the basics are, who’s your customer, what is your product or service, and how are you selling it to them? And are they buying it there? How are they buying it? And then you can automate.
For me, like I said, I jumped off the cliff without really having any of those things, and wish that I would have given myself more of a way to learn what that would be.
ABHISHEK: Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that, because I think that’s important, first of all, in businesses to have that mindset. Now you’re, again, going from coaching to the startup world.
JESSICA: Mhm.
ABHISHEK: What are you helping them now with?
JESSICA: I was helping them with marketing and sales. They hired me at first for marketing, and they saw my personality, and I was naturally bringing in interesting people, interesting leads. So they put me in sales. They put the sales guy in my role, and me in his role. So that was fun.
When I started working for them, what was really interesting about that transition is that they didn’t have their product or service or market nailed either. And I was not only able to see this from the experience that I had, but I could see that our CEO was going in circles. And there was no end to that circle.
ABHISHEK: How can people see that? Because I’ve heard this multiple times from other people who worked at startups too. There were some times like, “Oh, I was at the startup and I could just tell that the users were not getting it. The leadership was just not seeing it.” What is it about that experience, having worked at a startup myself?
JESSICA: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: Because it sounds like you had an insight already.
JESSICA: I did.
ABHISHEK: Yeah.
JESSICA: And unfortunately there was one person on our leadership team who understood it, but he wasn’t there as often as our CEO.
ABHISHEK: Okay.
JESSICA: What were the signs, you’re asking? Like, how did I know?
ABHISHEK: Yeah.
JESSICA: It’s really easy to tell when people are not engaging with your product.
ABHISHEK: What do you mean? does the revenue not show up?
JESSICA: We weren’t even doing it for revenue yet. We had plenty of funding, so the money actually didn’t matter at that point. What mattered was proof of concept. Are people gonna use it, and are they getting results from it? And we successfully got it into many hands, like hundreds of hands. But very unsuccessfully kept them as users beyond seven days.
ABHISHEK: Yeah. I think you’re really pointing at something, I guess I’m catching myself, it’s like a really obvious question. What wasn’t working was the people weren’t engaging.
JESSICA: Weren’t engaging, yeah.
ABHISHEK: And sometimes people can forget that.
JESSICA: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: Okay, okay. Was there another pivot coming up after this startup?
JESSICA: Yeah, I left my startup. I had actually sold my condo at the time, at the top of the market, which was really amazing. Yay! So I had money to live off of, and then some, which felt really good. I left, and I just knew that wherever I ended up next… I knew I had learned so much from that experience, and that I didn’t want to be at another company where…
I knew the leadership mattered a lot to me. If I was gonna go work for somebody else, the leadership had to be what I wanted.
ABHISHEK: And how can you tell? Like, somebody who’s interviewing…
JESSICA: I’ll tell you exactly how I could tell.
ABHISHEK: Okay.
JESSICA: Let’s fast forward three years. Since leaving that startup, I have traveled, restarted my own coaching business completely differently, I was much more successful at that. I realized, you know what? This still doesn’t feel totally aligned, and I can do more.
ABHISHEK: Hey, everyone. Thank you for listening. Please hit the subscribe button. We’ll be back next week for part two of Shake the Cosmos with Jess Shaanan