My Lesson in Growth: Inspire Growth to SEI
This is the story behind my pivot from Inspire Growth to SEI, and the lessons learned.
In April of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up I launched Inspire Growth. Actually, I launched a growth consulting and coaching business; it wasn't Inspire Growth quite yet. By the end of 2020 things were going well, I was growing. It was time to establish growth goals and a game plan for 2021.
In December of 2020, I set two primary goals for the business:
Create a brand that accurately communicated my purpose and mission.
Scale and amplify my impact by helping more advisors realize their potential and grow.
A year after launching the business, I relaunched as Inspire Growth. Over that first year in business, I learned a lot about myself, the impact I wanted to have, and how to best support, and add value to advisors and the financial services community.
I was confident in my purpose -- to build meaningful relationships, push my and others’ limits, and help my clients unlock their full potential to achieve sustainable growth. It had also become clear that sales and high-performance were the areas I loved the most, and where there was the greatest need I could address amongst the advisor community.
By the end of April, after a lot of work and support, I had a new firm name, website, and sales and high-performance focused newsletter. I felt good about checking goal #1 off the list.
Now it was time to make progress on goal #2, to scale. As you know, scaling is not easy, especially when you are selling a service based on your expertise.
How do you scale yourself?
Honestly, I wasn’t 100% sure. I had a lot of ideas and inspiration but I hadn’t cracked the code on how I was going to do it -- until now.
A couple of months ago, a practice management role at SEI came across my LinkedIn feed. I hadn’t looked at or even considered a corporate role since starting Inspire Growth in April of 2020. I was determined to make the business successful and things were going great.
However, I knew the person running the team, John Anderson. He is someone I have great respect and admiration for, so I followed my intuition to reach out. I was very clear with John; I had no intentions of leaving Inspire Growth.
As I learned more about the role, SEI, the people and their mission, I realized that this was a unique and exciting opportunity to scale my impact. The team at SEI has built an ecosystem for advisors to thrive -- a deep platform of outsourced investment solutions, front and back-office technology solutions, custodian services, and resources to support growth.
This was certainly not what I expected when I set out to scale myself in December of 2020! However, in business and in life you often receive things when you least expect it, in ways you could have never dreamed when you maintain an open, growth mindset.
I am thrilled to announce that I have joined SEI as their Head of Practice Management.
Today is my first day on a new path working toward the same mission -- help advisors, their teams and clients grow in meaningful and sustainable ways. With an ecosystem of relevant solutions and an amazing group of people to partner with I cannot wait to up my game for all of you.
Through this experience and reflecting on a number of my clients’ experiences, I can say with certainty that clarity of goals -- being intentional about what matters to you and who you truly want to become -- is essential.
In this journey of life and business, plan and be open to pivot when the right opportunity presents itself.
This is the last Inspire Growth blog post. However, I fully intend to keep the growth, sales and high-performance advice, tools and resources coming. To continue to receive growth and sales resources from me, subscribe to SEI's blog, Practically Speaking.
Opportunity is everywhere if you are open to it. In my case, a guest blog post with SEI in January of 2021 changed everything. That blog post is how I met John and became aware of the work he and SEI were doing to support advisors’ growth. If there is one piece of advice I hope you take away from my story is to be clear on your big goals, take action towards them and trust that the dots will connect when you look backward — they always do.
Thank you for your support and trust.
—Shauna
