From Consultant To Entrepreneur with Sara Redmond-Neal

Sara started off in consulting. In time she realised her mission is to make sustainability simpler for small businesses. In the consulting world, there was so much support for the large corporations down the big end of town to become more sustainable. But small businesses were missing out on that support and advice and missing out on the benefits that came with being sustainable.

And that’s how Sara went from a secure and steady career as a consultant into the risky, fast-paced entrepreneurship space. From what we’ve seen, entrepreneurs are always born out of a frustration with the current system and a drive to make a change.

But it’s not easy. According to Sara, it took a complete mindset shift to go from being a consultant to being an entrepreneur. Usually she’d be paid for her expertise and the advice she was giving. But in the startup space, it’s not about being an expert, it’s about being an experimenter. You need to test your assumptions, conduct experiments and test to find evidence that your business idea is in demand and people are going to want to buy your product. And that’s the entrepreneurial mindset - all about testing and iterating.

Not only is that applicable when you’re building a startup, but it’s applicable to when you’re building any business and can sometime be extrapolated into every day life. The key factors of the entreprenerrial mindset Sara pays particular reference to are:

1. Test your assumptions - it’s not about having a great idea, it’s about putting your idea out there to test and validate your assumptions before you invest too much time and money into something that might not work.
2. Be customer focused - for any business you need to understand who your customers are, what they need, what are the jobs they’re trying to do, and how is your business serving that need in a way that no one else is.
3. Always seek to understand- whenever you’re going into conversations, ask questions, try to understand and use the knowledge you gain to feed that back into your assumptions to continue growing and evolving the business. Don’t assume you know everything.

Sara’s journey is a super interesting rollercoaster ride with lots of learnings and key insights. Well worth the listen how a few pivots have led her to success.