Changing The Game with Wilson Casado - Jodi Rybicki and Alison Welsh

This episode of the Changing the Game Podcast has a little twist I hope you all enjoy.

Instead of the usual one-on-one interview, this time around I’m going to be chatting with Jodi Rybicki and Alison Welsh.

Both of these amazing women have a career in education, with Alison starting out in the field of child care management while Jodi was in the academic sphere giving lectures in universities (teaching the big kids).

The two of them eventually got together with the mission of completely changing the game by founding Frog Ponds, a business dedicated to “making sourcing simple”.

As you can imagine, they were a blast to talk to, so here are some of the great takeaways I got from our chat.

Working Together

Right off the bat it was easy to see how the two of them got to cofound a company as there is a clear yin-yang dynamic between the two where each fills in for the other in different areas.

This became even clearer as they told the story of how they met by applying for the same job where “Jodie was the one qualified to do it and the one who was persuasive was Alison”.

From there on their partnership only solidified as they leaned on each other’s strong suits to achieve success at work, with Jodie teaching Alison to take notes, while she wrote the emails.

Their relationship is a great example of why I try to hammer the point of diversity home every time. As humans, we all have things at which we are lacking and things at which we excell that come from a combination of our personalities, our identity and our background.

So, by giving different groups of people a sit on the chair, and incentivizing them to work together, we can combine their strengths in a way that would otherwise be unlikely, all the while promoting equality.

The Call to Entrepreneurship

Every entrepreneur has a why, be it tied to personal experiences, a generally creative lifestyle or just a wish to escape the salary worker’s life.

For Jodi and Alison this call came in the form of “an absolute desire to change the space that we were in”, for as they explain, both were at a point of extreme unsatisfaction for the sales process between schools and suppliers.

Where schools work with short budgets and hardly have enough time to look through every email, while suppliers that are actually trying to bring quality products into schools find themselves having trouble contacting them.

This is actually a pretty common start for a new business and a good one at that.

Identifying an aspect of your work or consumer life that you are not satisfied with gives you an idea of the needs that the market is not seeing to, and then you can model your business around tending to these needs.

Planning Ahead

Now, Alison and Jodi were not about to just quit their jobs and start a business out of the blue, taking an enterprise off the ground takes time and they were very aware of that, so they did the smart thing:

“There was an overlap, so we stayed with the company as long as we could, we knew we were going to get a redundancy, so that sort of helped, and then we just poured all our soul, sweat and tears into starting it.”

With Jodi managing the finances and Alison bringing in new ideas, they slowly developed it until they could leave their old jobs to manage FrogPonds full time.

The journey, as they confirmed was full of the inner and outer struggles that come with starting a new business, and yet both claimed with a smile that they would do it all over again.

They reveal the secret to enduring such things a little later by talking about how passionate they are to be solving this issue for both schools and suppliers and how that makes both their lives and the world a little better.

Off The Beaten Path

Despite the fact that the world is filled with start-ups, quitting your day job to have an entrepreneurial adventure is not exactly the norm, and if one actually tries to do that, they’ll find that many people will seek to discourage them.

Both Alison and Jodi went through that as well since at the beginning stages of Frog Ponds there were many instances of people calling them “ambitious” (in the negative sense of the word), for what they were trying to do.

And here too we find a valuable lesson in that, when you are trying to change the game, you can be sure to expect some level of opposition from people that either want to keep the status quo, or are simply intimidated by what you’re doing.

These people will voice their opinions, whether they were asked to do so or not, and if you hope to succeed, you can’t allow yourself to be phased by them.

The Perfect Pitch

Recently, our dynamic duo got the opportunity to speak with a state minister during a small company event, and being honestly impressed and curious as to how that happened I asked them what one could do to get this big of a shot. Their answer was wonderfully simple:

“You ask”

No 4-D chess, no elaborate strategy, just and email with “honest intent and good purpose”, explaining why the state minister might be interested to show up and how their company could contribute to education.

So often are we paralyzed by fear, not of some catastrophic consequence of what we did, but just of being rejected, hearing that terrible “no” that won’t really subtract anything from our lives.

Therefore, sometimes, if we want to get that big break, is just ask.

Conclusion

Jodi Rybicki and Alison Welsh make for one hell of a team, and not just as interview guests, but as forces for change that saw a problem and worked together to solve it, no matter what obstacle opposed them.

There is a valuable lesson about relying on other people here. As human beings we are at our best when we work together to combine our strengths, it’s what we do as a species.

So, for our closing reflection, I’d like you to ask yourself what are your core strengths and shortcomings, and how you can use your talents to help others, versus what kind of person could compensate your flaws.