Interview with Carolyn L Burke

Interviewee Name: Carolyn L Burke
Company Name: Integrity Incorporated and Iguana Books
Website: http://www.integrityincorporated.com/, http://iguanabooks.com

Interview with Carolyn L Burke

A few years ago, I interviewed Carolyn L Burke along with nine other interviewees with the intention of updating my book, Tales of People Who Get It. I did not update my book, and now I am writing a completely different book. One of the things that I am noticing with the invisible mentor interviews is that most of the information stays relevant because of the types of questions that I ask. I have known Carolyn for many years, and what I love most about her is her mind. Like me, she is a voracious reader, and I learn a lot from her.

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Carolyn L Burke: I’ve led an interesting life. I like to pursue anything that interests me as it comes along. That’s included running some businesses, consulting and having an extensive academic career. And I’m sure it will include a lot more things as it goes along. I want to live as fully as I can and tryout whatever intrigues me as I go.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Carolyn L Burke: My typical day is pretty relaxed now. I have a number of clients who I work with on a fairly regular basis. I schedule work with them around all the things I’d like to do. My typical day starts as 4:00 am, which is just a natural time for me to get up. I take an hour to read and have some breakfast, and catch up on my email so that’s when I’m prioritizing my day. After that I look at my schedule and decide if I’m prepared for everything and if not, I make very rapid preparation for whatever I left out. I’m most awake first thing in the morning so that makes sense for me because by 3:00 pm I’m ready to quiet down no matter what I’ve been doing.

And then I’ll go to the various meetings, clients, go to the gym in between and hang out with friends after all that’s been done so that’s my typical day. Maybe three hours of work, three hours of preparation and the rest is time for me.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Carolyn L Burke: I work on things I enjoy. What motivates me is what I find passion for. One day it might me glial cell, the next day it may be macro-biotic cooking and I’ll learn a lot about it then try it out. I’ll learn about the community of people involved so I’m constantly learning and researching, sometimes it ties into the work I’m doing and sometimes it doesn’t.

Avil Beckford: What are glial cells?

Carolyn L Burke: There are neurons and the synapses, and in between there are axons connecting them and they are covered in glial cells, and it turns out that 90 percent of brain mass is glial cells so they are starting to take to take it more seriously.

Avil Beckford: What prompted your interest in that?

Carolyn L Burke: I hit my head and suffered some side effects of that, not good ones and I wanted to understand what the biology and the biochemistry of the problems were, so as it turns out my axons are stretched.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Carolyn L Burke: Nothing! I’ve lived my life with no regrets; I live each day to my best and I can’t second guess it afterwards because I did my best.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Carolyn L Burke: : I’ve been reading Tom Clancy novels and in the current book, one of the generals leading the Russian army was talking about tactics of his battle and he’s a strategic thinker so him talking about tactics was odd and then he said, hold on a second I made a mistake, I don’t care about the tactics of my command, I care about the logistics, the process to keep them going. And I think that’s going to be a revolutionary idea for me and this happened in the last two days.

And to answer your question, I think I’m going to be looking at business architecture and strategizing for the long-term efficacy of the business more from a logistics point of view. Previously I’ve looked a lot at how a business grows, how it acquires a client, marketing, sales, positioning, and now I’m going to think a little bit more about the process of getting there, the process of getting the right people, the right products, the right skills to the client at the right time through the marketing and sales effort. So I don’t know where this is going, this is a big change.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Carolyn L Burke: I don’t think there have been any advances. I consult to businesses on how to be more effective, and so the skills I work with clients on are basic – people management, financial management, logistics. There aren’t any revolutions in that. There are a lot of business books, there are a lot of new thinkers touting new philosophies but I don’t think they are revolutionary, I don’t think there are changes. It’s just another way of looking at the same set of problems and possible solutions. It’s not an industry that changes rapidly. The last big change in business model was when the Internet started. Micro-financing might be another new kind of business model but the core of what a business is hasn’t changed even in those cases. It is a way for the owners to provide services or products to customers and there are a lot of bells and whistles you can add on to that basic core, but doing that well doesn’t change.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Carolyn L Burke:

1. I think there are internal and external threats. Internal threats come from me and the people I work with, what is our vision, where we are going, are we coordinated, do I have the right team together, and that’s always an issue. As people’s roles in life change over time, and when those fall out of alignment that can become a serious threat to the business and the growth of it.
2. Externally, I used to be in the high tech industry, computer security and there were constant competitive threats – new players, new products, big players coming into the arena that they had stayed out and that was exhausting. It was an ever moving target to stay in business, to stay afloat to remain competitive so I re-examined the business model I was looking at and picked an area where the external threats, the competitive threats are small if you know what you are doing helping other companies grow then there isn’t so much competition, it’s more based on referral and word-of-mouth so I’ve eliminated that kind of threat by switching industries.
3. The recession is a threat but not just to my business, but to all of us, in that it changes the playing field, the spending patterns that other companies have. And if you don’t know how to manage through a different willingness to spend then you may have to close your doors or shrink, and I’ve managed to avoid that problem essentially by squirreling money away as the business is doing well in order to finance it through the difficult time. And I’ve done that a few times now. And I do it not only in consulting but in real estate, so monitoring the general ebb and flow of the economy and how it will affect your business become important. Curiously computer security was an awful lot about risk mitigation and so I’ve taken a lot of learning from that, and a lot of what I do is managing risk. I’ll make business decisions to lower risks as opposed to boldly going somewhere now.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Carolyn L Burke: : Integrity Incorporated offers experienced guidance in areas where a business owner is week. What’s unique is that the key consultants all have gone through those different experiences. They’ve owned a business, they’ve gone through financial hard times, they’ve re-jigged their operational structure, they’ve laid people off, they’ve gone through the hiring process and they’ve learned by experience, so I’m dealing with consultants who have learned the hard way. They haven’t learned business through school, but rather through making things work themselves. And so they have examples to share. They have experiences that they can draw on to explain how something could work better. They have mentored people through running a business, so they are in a better position to mentor someone else through who are running their own business.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Carolyn L Burke:: I think you have to keep your eyes on the ball. At the end of the day the business owner has a goal and you have to help them achieve that goal. It might not be that the business needs to succeed, you would think so, but just as often, an entrepreneur will want the personal freedom to hire and fire who they work with, or to choose the clients to work with. And that’s not a financial goal, and if that’s really the strongest goal running a business because they do not want to work for someone else you have to respect that. So I try to listen very closely to what the person I’m working with what their real intention is. I’m very happy to help them make more money, sell more products, get more clients, but that’s not always the immediate goal.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge that you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Carolyn L Burke:  I’m going to answer the question from my own business career, rather than from within the business. A number of years ago I sold my company and suddenly I had nothing to do. I chose not to stay on and I left entirely, sold my shares and cashed out. I was left with some money and a lot of time and feeling the euphoria because all the responsibilities went away.

It was absolutely wonderful, but I wasn’t ready to retire and I didn’t know what to do. I was 37 years old and it was like being a little kid again, what am I going to do with my life was the big question. After a couple of years I chose to start another company. In the interim, I tried all sorts of other things to see what life was really like. I travelled for the first time, and I got into philanthropy donating money to may alma mater and helping then do fundraising as well. I did a lot of volunteer work with people, and really I was playing, I was finding what interests me, and I found was what interests me was being in business which was very ironic.

I missed it and so I started another company. I structured it differently. I wanted it to be very small with a handful of people. I didn’t want to grow something big again, at least not at that point in time. I wanted to work with really good top-of-the-line people, so I tended not to hire junior people, but just to work with senior, experienced people. And that’s worked really well, that a lot of the headaches of running a business with twenty-somethings doing the legwork with the client went away, a lot of the management hassles went away, so that’s been a lot of fun.

So I think the biggest challenge for me in the last decade was letting go of one business and finding that next one.

Lessons

Carolyn L Burke: It was a shock to me to have to do everything myself again. When you have a company of 60, 70 people everybody has a role and it is divvied up and you’re left with a small piece yourself. When you start something from scratch, which I had done in 1993, when I had started my first company, you’re doing everything and I had done that in ’93, there was no problem and I was good at it, it grew and when some part of my responsibility was too big I hired a person to take on that part. Well, going in the other direction was a lot harder, because it was almost impossible for me to remember to put a stamp on an envelope or find a number to phone. I had to relearn all the basics skills that I hadn’t had to do for so long. I had nothing against them, in fact, I believe in knowing how everybody does their job and doing it myself first, but actually having to do it again was a great shock so I had to learn how to prioritize my time. Even though I knew how to do it at an executive level I had to learn again how to do it when you are the sole entrepreneur, and to slice up time so I’m doing the billing properly, and doing the sales calls and doing the work with the client. It’s an odd lesson, but I’ve gone through both sides of it now.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Carolyn L Burke: I gave it to myself. In university, I was going down the US to do graduate work and another guy in my program had just finished his PhD so I was one degree behind him. And he didn’t get a grant, had one all the way along and he was doing amazingly well in school and expected a post-Doc with funding attached. He got the post-Doc but didn’t get the funding and this was the end of his career in his eyes. I said no let’s find other ways to make money. So he dusted off a company he’d had when he was a teenager, a consulting company, opened it up again, found some clients and started creating money working for clients to fund his post-Doc and me through my expensive American education, and that worked.

So our big break was being really plugged into the Internet at the right time in the early nineties and consulting about it to fund our academic careers. That’s where my first company came from. It came from that idea that we could make money outside the academic structure, and it turned out to be true. And it was so much true that we both ended up leaving the academic world within two years to running and growing the business.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Carolyn L Burke: I failed in engineering school in university. I went to Waterloo which was a co-op program and it overwhelmed me. I moved away from home at 16 and there was so much new and hard work and the world changed for, me and within a year and a half I had failed, and I was asked to repeat a year and it took too much for it to work and I’d always been perfect. And it shocked me that I could fail. I felt it was because I wasn’t paying attention, and I wasn’t doing homework, I wasn’t doing any work at all. I wasn’t interested in engineering.

It took years for me to deal with that, and I started studying things I was interested in as opposed to things that were attached to my ego. Eventually, I got a degree in linguistics, which was so easy and fun and I went on into philosophy which was even more fun and I was finally doing the sort of research that I enjoyed instead of stuff that I hated.

The lesson was that I had to find my own passion and follow that rather than letting my ego drive where my life was going, so it happened very early in my life.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Carolyn L Burke: I’m more self-actualized than that question and that’s my answer. I spent 10 years after I left home learning about who I am and looking at all the motivation I have, the failures I had encountered, and cleaned up my act. I did all that hard work back then, and it’s still very useful. I look back on my life and do not see that I regret something or that I would do something differently, so I cannot answer the question and I’m feeling very frustrated.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Carolyn L Burke: I think all the tough decisions were mental. They were all inside me learning to grow up, hard choice. External decisions, I make them very easily. I believe it is more important to make a decision and to get it right, so part of my business strength, given all the known factors, here pick one and if we’re wrong we’ll adjust, so that’s the way I act. And so it makes decision-making very easy, so the hard stuff is things I can’t control as easily or at all, and that is who I am as a person.

Here’s a game I play, say I’m working with another company, a client, and there are a number of directions that I can go in, and I know them, and I like some and I don’t like others. That’s not a good situation to be in because I can’t control what they do, so what I’ll do is that I’ll start to arrange my affairs, my company, the options we provide, however it works, in such a way that I don’t mind which direction they go in. And they make their decision and I’ve positioned pieces so that it doesn’t affect me, I like the result no matter what.

To be specific, let’s say I want to work with a company and I know they can afford my services but I don’t know that they are sold on the idea of going through this, so I will offer them several options, and I’ll push for two options. Here is my regular services, here is the price, time commitment and what you can expect, when it is over the next year, and I know they’re not going to say yes to that, but I like it, so then I position it in another option and say here is half my time, half the money, half the success, your results will be less than half, but you will see some, so it’s a baby step. I’m happy with it as well because I have to put in less time and effort and, and the end of day, I know they’ll ramp up. So it’s a basic sales strategy and I give them two choices and I don’t mind which one they pick. To me it’s equivalent because I still have my time free for other things. It’s like chess, it’s fun arranging reality so that I don’t mind what happens and so I don’t mind which way the decision goes.

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Author Bio: Avil Beckford, an expert interviewer, entrepreneur and published author is passionate about books and professional development, and that’s why she founded The Invisible Mentor and the Virtual Literary World Tour to give you your ideal mentors virtually in the palm of your hands by offering book reviews and book summaries, biographies of wise people and interviews of successful people. Connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.

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