Danielle and I were both graduates at PwC and so yes, this is another episode with an old friend of mine (we’re not that old really"!). Danielle and I have been on different continents since we both left PwC but I’ve seen her rise and in an age where we’re talking about role models in Female Entrepreneurship, I thought I’d break this one out of the archive and showcase a lady that has risen to the top of her industry.
Danielle failed computer programming at university, then got hired by PwC as a programmer anyway. From there she walked away from a promising corporate career in London to teach English in Japan for a year, and that one detour set the pattern for everything that followed. Contracting across Europe, a move to New Zealand, a “three month” contract in Australia that turned into a passport, and eventually an online education company, Moncel, that she scaled from Australia all the way to Canada.
What You Will Learn From Listening
Why walking away from a secure corporate job can be the making of a career rather than the end of one
How to choose a market by targeting what customers have to do, not what they want to do, and why food safety training was the answer
The two things that actually break when you scale a business: people and processes
How the Scaling Up approach of quarterly themes and “rocks” keeps a distributed team pulling in one direction
A practical playbook for expanding into a new country, including the free government agencies that will help you set up
How to hold a company culture together across two continents and near-opposite time zones
What it is really like to be a female founder in rooms still full of middle-aged blokes
Why “give it to me, I’ll figure it out” beats hiring an expert for everything in the early days
Memorable Quotes
“The one thing I failed at uni was computer programming. Then PwC hired me as a computer programmer.”
“The only way I could get to the World Cup was to give up the fancy corporate job and go teach English in Japan for a year.”
“We wanted to do something people have to do, not something they want to do.”
“Luck is just making yourself available for opportunities.”
“Don’t be afraid to learn things that seem intimidating. You can learn anything you put your mind to.”
Summary
Danielle’s story is a case study in what happens when you refuse to let a job title decide your life. She fell into IT almost by accident, discovered she loved it only after stepping away from it, and built a career on the willingness to move somewhere new and start again. That instinct, to make herself available for opportunities rather than wait for them, runs through every chapter of the conversation.
The business itself grew the way a lot of good businesses do, which is to say not according to plan. What began as a small outfit building mobile apps that integrated with SAP morphed into websites and digital marketing, then into online training, and finally into a food safety e-learning company that quickly dwarfed everything that came before it. We get into the growing pains behind that, particularly the constant shortage of people and the slow, necessary work of documenting processes as a casual startup matures into a real company.
We also dig into her expansion from Australia to Canada, from crunching the numbers to the almost absurd bit of luck where she met the Canadian Trade Commissioner in an elevator the very day she finished the business plan. Danielle is refreshingly honest about the parts that are harder than they look, from maintaining culture across time zones to being, quite often, the only woman in the room.
If you are sitting there wondering whether it is too late to change direction, or whether you really need an expert for every gap in your knowledge, this episode is a useful antidote. Danielle’s answer to both is the same, and it is worth hearing her say it.
