In Today’s Menu for Knowledge-Hungry Business Professionals 😋…

• OpenAI’s Sam Altman returns

• Canadians are using Black Friday deals to buy essentials, rather than luxury items

• Amazon is offering free AI training and scholarships

• Exclusive interview with Bakari Akil, who helps TriMech buy engineering software businesses and inspires Black digital nomads to work abroad (podcast)

• Success story: The power of networking and embracing change

• Interactive: When your tech doesn’t work. And costs a life.

• 3 Ways AI Can Supercharge Your Small Business

• Opportunities: International trade fair, MIT Bootcamps

• 1-minute polls

Weekly Catchups

News | Industry Insights | Trends

• 💁‍♂️ OpenAI’s Sam Altman returns: 
  OpenAI's leadership upheaval, with CEO Sam Altman's firing, triggered a massive employee response, with over 700 of 770 threatening to leave if not reinstated. This led to a board overhaul, replacing Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley with Bret Taylor and Larry Summers, while Adam D'Angelo stays. Despite changes, OpenAI's core team remains. Satya Nadella's crucial role and a significant AI discovery before Altman's exit spark speculation about the future.

• 📈 Canadians using Black Friday deals to buy essentials:
  This Black Friday, Canadians are tightening budgets, prioritizing essential purchases over luxuries due to the cost of living. Conflicting reports on spending trends emerge, but personalized deals and discounts on needs drive shopping. Younger generations plan budgeted splurges. The focus is on meaningful bargains, online and in-store.

• 🎓 Amazon offers free AI training and scholarships:
  Amazon is offering free courses on generative AI through its "AI Ready" project, aiming to train two million people globally by 2025. The initiative includes scholarships, partnerships, and various free courses for students and working professionals. The program aims to democratize AI education and prepare individuals for the future job market, predicting a 47% increase in salary for those equipped with AI skills.

Nurturing The Leader Within

Personal Development | Success Story

The power of networking and embracing change

Karla Congson's remarkable career, shaped by unexpected twists, directs her from comfortable positions in corporate leadership to entrepreneurship. Embracing 'random collisions,' she finds success in surrendering to life’s transformative unpredictability.

Much of Karla Congson’s major career pivots happened by accident. In the late ‘90s, fresh out of university, she received an offer for an entry-level job to collect taxes for Revenue Canada for $20K.

“I look at it now and realize that this would have been a poor career choice for me, but when you're 22 and it's a recession and you have a guaranteed job, it sounded amazing,” Congson, who now has an extensive 25-year background in marketing, shared in an interview with Horizon Search.

Soon after accepting the job with the government, she stumbled upon another job at a career centre. It was for the position of an account executive. “I didn't even know what kind of job it was but it looked like fun and I decided to apply on a whim!” she said.

It turned out to be a junior role in an advertising agency, and from that point onwards she never looked back.

“That one random role ended up progressing to other opportunities and blossomed into a career that I’ve loved because it's both creative and strategic. I've reinvented my career a few times, but all within that realm of business and marketing,” Congson said.

Major breakthroughs and feeling lost

That was just the start of it. What started as an accidental encounter set the stage for a career that would evolve over the next three decades.

In her 25 years working in the marketing industry, Congson has served as a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) in two financial services organizations and EVP, Country Lead, managing the Ford of Canada account for WPP (an advertising holding company representing several agencies) in Canada.

But that initial spark and idealism was lost after more than two decades of managing corporate politics and bureaucracy.

In 2016, she decided she to leave a successful career in the corporate world to experiment with a new venture. A risky decision given the comfortable stability that a senior executive job provides.

Here comes another accident.

Unsolicited advice from a stranger

Congson finally decided to leave her job and look for better opportunities, and the power of her intention led to another defining moment — unsolicited advice from a stranger.

At the time she was the CMO of Dundee Corporation, another financial services company, and was entertaining offers from two professional services organizations.

You’ve probably heard of the phrase “food fixes everything.” In Congson’s case, it was one fine dinner with a friend-of-a-friend.

The conversation took a neat turn as he instead attentively listened to her “wild idea” about a different brand of consultancy.

“He listened to this wild idea that I had about this different brand of consultancy, and he gave me this advice, which is: you'd be great at these new corporate roles you're exploring, but within a couple of years you're going to be at the same level of frustration because of the politics, the bureaucracy, the infighting in those organizations. But I notice you light up when you talk about this paper napkin idea about a new kind of consultancy,” Congson relayed.

Not only did he encourage her to move forward with her idea, but also offered to look at her business plan.

“I threw caution to the winds and got really excited about creating this marketing agency, and here I am seven or eight years later,” Congson said.

But that was the easy part.

In the journey of an entrepreneur, planning is usually the easier part of the rough journey of making an idea come to life.

“It looked great on the napkin, but then I needed to put the scaffolding underneath it: creating a strategy, creating a business plan, understanding product market fit and then going out and being able to sell the services and then creating the infrastructure, the partnerships, which are the freelancers and partners that we work with, and then finding clients and pitching them on where we could provide value,” Congson explained.

These critical steps transform a paper napkin idea into a real-world and robust implementation plan, and there is no shortcut around the effort to actually go into the real world and implement that plan.

Finding the right business partner

Where there’s will, there’s help. Congson found an excellent business partner who specializes in operations while she specializes in new business growth, client operations and strategy, it was an excellent match!

The power of networking

Congson strongly believes in the great power of networking, as do millions of other entrepreneurs across the globe. It’s often the key driver of success.

Congson used this same strategy to get her first client within a few months of leaving her job. This, in conjunction with hard work, led to her next breakthrough of making $1 million in the very first year of her new marketing agency without any external funding.

“We self-funded and had clients within a matter of months and within the first year it was more than a million in revenue,” she said.

The name of her new marketing agency, OpenGravity, comes from her belief that the future of work would be open networks, and her model is the source of gravity for this open talent.

“There are a lot of freelancers, a lot of independents, entrepreneurs who are working by themselves and that's scary. It’s hard when it's just you and you don't have a regular paycheck and a big company that's looking after you. I wanted to be the source of gravity for the best talent that was out there,” she said.

Congson is currently providing free workshops on AI in order to support her freelancers to stay on top of the transformative changes in technology that are reshaping the marketing industry.

“To be a successful business owner you need to lead well, you need to support your people, you need to be amazing with your clients and you need to be one step ahead of the technology,” she said.

3 Strong pieces of advice

1. Believe in yourself
   “You will go through many moments of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. You’ll wake up at two in the morning wondering what the heck did. You need to believe in yourself - mental resilience is half the battle as an entrepreneur. Self-confidence and belief in what is is what will allow you to run this marathon.”

2. Create a strong board of advisors
   “Spend some time building a really strong board of advisors, or as I like to call cheerleaders. There's a phrase I love, which is 'you are the sum total of the five people that you spend the most time with.' Build that board of advisors and cheerleaders that can help you up when you're down and give you great advice and share their knowledge with you.”

3. Invest in your network
   “Invest in your network. Give back as much as you can. Start from a position of the value that you can provide versus the value that you can take from your network. One of my firm beliefs is to help anyone that you can because the energy that you put out there will come back tenfold. Trust is earned and if you build your reputation on always providing value your network will take you to unprecedented levels of success.”

Strategies | Tools | Marketing Tips

3 Ways AI Can Supercharge Your Small Business

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't just for tech giants. It's a game-changer for small businesses too.

Here are three key areas where AI can make a significant impact on your small business.

#1 Marketing

AI transforms marketing strategies by analyzing data, identifying trends, and optimizing campaigns. Enhanced market research, improved audience segmentation, and predictive marketing analytics are just a few ways AI empowers small businesses to compete with the big players. The Drift survey shows that 74% of marketers believe they will be intelligently automating more tasks in the next five years, showcasing the growing reliance on AI in the marketing realm.

#2 Sales

Sales teams can leverage AI to automate manual tasks, forecast demand, and enhance lead scoring. By automating routine tasks, sales representatives can spend more time on actual selling, as highlighted in a Salesforce survey where it was found that sales reps spend less than 30% of their week on selling activities. AI enables efficient lead management and personalized outbound email campaigns, ultimately boosting sales effectiveness.

#3 Cybersecurity

Small businesses are not immune to digital threats, and AI-powered cybersecurity is the shield they need. Unlike traditional programs, AI security systems proactively look for unusual activity, stopping attacks or raising alerts earlier. This not only protects against potential losses but can also uncover opportunities. For instance, an AI system could identify unusual orders, leading a plumbing supply company to discover a new market for industrial shelving units and light fixtures.

Remember, while AI can revolutionize your business, it's essential to balance it with human expertise.

Don’t miss it!

Networking | Business Development | Entrepreneurship

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