To leap or not? Steps to prepare for and make the most of change
Lisa Henderson, Founder of She Can Health, highlighted elements of taking leaps that apply regardless of whether you're a founder. Read on to hear how she demonstrated how to acknowledge challenges, know and build your expertise and do your own research along the way.
We recently caught up with Lisa Henderson, founder of She Can Health, a womens health company. Lisa’s journey to starting She Can Health has been a winding one, including her own personal health journey, moving from the US to the UK, considering starting a beauty company but deciding not to, experiencing more health challenges, and ultimately starting She Can Health. Along the way, Lisa has exemplified three aspects of taking a leap that provide a good roadmap for people thinking of starting their own venture or taking a similar leap –
· Acknowledge your personal challenges
· Apply expertise you have and build expertise you don’t
· Do your research but don’t take everything as fact
Acknowledge your personal challenges
Too often, people feel like their personal challenges have to stay personal – that they are something to be ashamed of or should be hidden. However, it is very rare and practically impossible for someone to be experiencing something no one else has experienced before. Lisa found that as she was experiencing health issues that no one was speaking about them despite statistics indicating their prevalence among women. By acknowledging her personal health challenges and talking about them openly not just with doctors but with other women, Lisa was able to realize her experience was not isolated. She received the treatment and care she needed, and this experience and comfort with speaking out helped prepared her for noticing and speaking up about health issues later on, which set the foundation for She Can Health.
Apply expertise you have and build expertise you don’t
Lisa had experience working in consulting which, as she described it, helped her understand how to break apart big problems, think logically, and build a foundation in analytics and communication skills. However, she knew she wanted to start her own company and would need additional skills to complement her existing skill set. To do so, she gained additional experience by joining a start up and working in product management, helping her learn more tactical skills around creating and managing a business producing a tangible product. When Lisa had the opportunity to start her own company, she considered the leap to starting a beauty products company but then arguably made a bigger leap by deciding not to. When she applied her own expertise about the market dynamics and her own understanding of industry, she realized that differentiating in such a saturated market would be difficult, and that now wasn’t the right time for her to do that. However, she didn’t let that defer her from her desire to start something, instead combining her personal experiences and health challenges with a gap she identified in the market.
Do your research but don’t take everything as fact
Once Lisa decided to start a women’s health company, starting with Scream Cream to address women’s libido, she was researching advertising and marketing channels. She received guidance from an industry contact who told her that she wouldn’t be able to advertise the product because of differences in regulation for men’s versus women’s health advertisements. Lisa could have taken this as reason to stop there, before she had even built a webpage, but decided to do her own research and test the validity of what she had heard. As she got deeper into it, she learned about the different regulations of different sites, the nuance of search terms that are more or less censored, and discovered the movement to move regulations along so that women’s health had the same ability to advertise as men’s health products. Ultimately, she did find ways to advertise her product, despite initially hearing it wouldn’t be possible. Lisa did her research and met with experts in the industry, but since no one was doing exactly what she planned to do, she set out to get her own answers, learning a lot more in the process despite the guidance she received.
Lisa’s journey highlights elements of taking a leap that are applicable not only to startup founders but to taking both professional and personal leaps generally. When changing organizations or roles, or embarking on something new, all of these lessons would still apply and be relevant in helping evaluate and succeeding in the new position.
Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash
