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Jesmine Onyeukwu

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Jesmine Onyeukwu | The Remarkable Coach | Boxer Media

Jesmine Onyeukwu gets an unbelievable 90% of her startup clients to win Canadian government grants, she optimizes team performance, and she nearly doubles Net Promoter Scores for her lucky clients.

In this episode of The Remarkable Coach Podcast, Micheal and Jesmine discuss what she learned by failing to win herself a Canadian government grant, what the six components of the Life Harmony Wheel are (and why they matter), and how she masterfully quantifies qualitative data.

A bit about Jesmine:

Jesmine Onyeukwu is a Business Consultant and Leadership Coach. She’s the Founder, CEO, and Lead Consultant at PeakPerfly.

Jesmine had served over 10,000 professionals, entrepreneurs, startup leaders, and business executives across the world. She has been successful in guiding leaders across the world, away from burnout and towards fulfillment.

She currently works mostly with startups and has partnered with business schools, innovation hubs, and entrepreneurship development and investment platforms across North America such as Carleton University’s Innovation Hub, Invest Ottawa, Telfer School of Business, The Founder’s Fund, etc.

Where to find Jesmine:
Website:
https://www.peakperfly.com
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesmineonyeukwu

Book Links:
The Alter Ego Effect – Todd Herman

Where you can listen to this episode:
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Micheal Pacheco 0:00
Yeah, there we go. So here, I want to highlight that. All right. Hey, everybody, and welcome once again to another episode of the remarkable coach podcast. As always, I’m your host, Michael Pacheco. And today with me, I have Jasmine on yuku. Jasmine here is a business consultant and leadership coach. She’s the founder, CEO and lead consultant at peak perfectly. Jasmine has served over 10,000 professionals, entrepreneurs, startup leaders and business executives across the world. She has been successful in guiding leaders across the world away from burnout and towards fulfillment. Jasmine, welcome to the remarkable coach.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 0:44
Thank you so much for having me, Michael,

Micheal Pacheco 0:46
thank you so much for making time to join us here. As always, I like to just kind of kick off the podcast by inviting our guests to tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do and your own words.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 0:58
Thank you so much. I mean, that was a great capture of what I do in summary, but I just want to add flesh to the last part is the part you talked about, that I helped leaders find their way from burnout towards fulfillment. My clients fondly called me the life harmonist. It’s the nickname that my friends have, have given me, just because I’m very committed, I believe I have a mission to help those people who anyone who lead anyone who’s been called to leadership, I am called to help them find fulfillment, because leadership is difficult, it is challenging, it’s a lot of responsibility. And we see leaders over and over again tending towards burnout at overwhelm. So I am the person who helps them navigate their path towards more flourishing peak performing teams, thriving businesses and ultimately fulfillment, because that’s what they should have.

Micheal Pacheco 1:51
And how did you do that? Can you talk a little bit about how you do that? How do you help them navigate that path toward their, whatever fulfillment means for them?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 1:59
Absolutely. There’s a lot of mechanisms in place, there’s a lot of modalities that we use, because at this point, I work with people who lead a business, especially early stage businesses, we have a pathway, we take them through the pathway, because often times when people jump into entrepreneurship, they just go into building a business plan, understanding how to make sales and all of that, while those are great. They need to first of all figure themselves out, they need to understand their talent, what they’re called to do their purpose. They need to have their own sense of meaning in the world before they can make sales or before they can optimize their team and all of that. So there’s a pathway we use to guide them from every from figuring out who they are the self piece before we go into your business plan, business modeling and all of that.

Micheal Pacheco 2:45
Awesome, awesome man, can you tell us a little bit more about who your clients are specifically, like who is your ideal client?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 2:53
So I pick perfectly now we serve executive leaders, anyone who occupies a C suits position in a in an early stage businesses startup and scale up, we can serve anybody, we can serve any business leader, but we just target those people, because we know they have peculiar challenges. And I do client is a CEO, cmo chief marketing officer is Chief Human Resource Officer and a chief operations officer. So these are the four, I would say four key ideal customer personas that we love to serve here.

Micheal Pacheco 3:24
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And how do you how do you get your clients? How do you market yourself to those avatars?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 3:32
Right now, I right now we’re trying to do more of digital marketing. But prior to now, I do a lot of networking events. Most of my clients have come from word of mouth. So the people have served, talking to some other person to say, oh, try Jasmine, she’ll help you clarify these aspects of your business. So prior to now, I’ve done a lot of networking and word of mouth and personal contacts and personal relationships. But we’re hoping to, because we’ve, there’s we’ve skipped, we’ve proven the process. We’ve validated our solutions. We’re trying to scale the solution now and productize consulting. And we’re going to be deploying a lot of digital marketing strategies in the couple from the last quarter of 2022. upwards,

Micheal Pacheco 4:14
around and what what was the catalyst for for that for that shift in strategy.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 4:21
The catalyst was the needs to serve more people. Because at the end of the day, if you have a good product, you you built a technology, you’ve built a solution that really works. And over time, you have people saying this works. I’ve worked with even entrepreneurship development systems here. entrepreneurship development platforms. I’ve worked with innovation hubs here in Canada, and founders and venture leaders say Jasmine, this works. So what I started discussing with my team was how do we scale this? How do we make this kind of support accessible to as many early stage leaders as possible, and the only way to do that is to leverage technology. So what we’ve done is to pay case most of the consulting and coaching solutions that we have into courses, templates, playbooks guides, cheat sheets, and all of that into resources that most entrepreneurs can find on demand they can get access to. So from, you know, q4, 2022, we’re launching that so that, you know, we scale we reach more people, the business grows. So that’s the shift. Yeah.

Micheal Pacheco 5:24
Yeah. Awesome. That that tracks. So you guys are gonna you’re gonna build out an ad funnel that kind of brings leads in that way. And absolutely.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 5:35
someone on my team for that right now.

Micheal Pacheco 5:37
That’s great. What are your What are your target platforms? Are you here? Are you looking primarily at LinkedIn? Are you looking at YouTube? Maybe

Jesmine Onyeukwu 5:45
mostly LinkedIn at this point, and Facebook slash Instagram? Okay. What that?

Micheal Pacheco 5:51
Yeah. Nice. Nice. What is it? What does a typical engagement with you look like for a client? Do they work with you, on a monthly retainer? Do you have like a three month or six month package, that kind of thing.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 6:03
That’s also one of the things we have put together at this point. Previously, prior to now, they would work on a coaching package. And the coaching package could be maybe five coaching sessions, 10 coaching sessions, and once we’re done with the package, they, they just go about their business. But I find that most of the time, the clients who come back to me have worked with me before. So they will finish the 10 coaching sessions, and they will go about their business, and they’ll come back in like three months and suggest me I need more support, I need more help, you know, I couldn’t figure it out on my own. For that reason will be, because that was a little easier for me. I’m a mom, I have a very young family, I have three children. So I couldn’t really take on long term engagements, because you never know life happens. So I just love it was safer for me to do those packages. But we’re trying to do a retainer ship model now, from next year where a client on board with us they can trust that they have a consultant from our team, on their case on a monthly retainer sheet basis. Nice. Yeah.

Micheal Pacheco 7:01
Nice. What’s your Can you talk a little bit more about the you mentioned, you guys use a lot of different modalities and different frameworks for the work that you do? Can you talk a little bit more about maybe some of the some of the tactical ways that you guys kind of initiate your work.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 7:21
So there are two, two main proprietary solutions that we leverage. Within those two proprietary solutions. We have tons and tons of frameworks and models, but I’m just gonna give a brief overview of one of them. So we have a learning pathway. You know, Michael, you would agree with me that if you want to build a business, and this time, so you have to be engaging with content with information with data, this is this is what’s going to guarantee that you stay on top of trends, you make the right decisions. So that’s something that leaders most leaders don’t understand. They just engage with content. However, they don’t even know what they need to learn. So sometimes they come to me and they say, Jasmine, I have people on my team who are telling me to watch this video or read this report or get access to this article. And it’s just too much I’m overwhelmed. So the learning pathway, streamlines the learning curve for our leaders, so we tell them what they need to learn. First of all, you need to learn about yourself, like I said earlier, then you need to learn about how the different actions to take in your business. And there’s four pillars within the actions to take. And you need to have a playbook on the all the action so that you can track you can track your progress and also commit to continuous improvement. It gets complicated, because that’s what consulting consulting is just taking complex issues and making them simple. So when I’m thinking like this, I’m giving a high level overview, but on the inside on the back end is really complex. But we just break it down for clients with, you know, the pathway, and we give them frameworks at every point in time to make decisions better. Yeah,

Micheal Pacheco 8:53
that’s awesome. Yeah. So I have my background is in marketing consulting. And I’ve done go to market projects with like Johnson and Johnson, I did some marketing with Golden Globes. So I totally get what you’re saying about, you know, you want to help guide the client, to whatever resolution they’re they’re looking for, and it’s not always as easy as just doing it. So yeah, yeah. Would you? I’m curious to know more about, I mean, I’m not sure how, how closely guarded the proprietary method methodology, the learning pathway is but would you tell us more about that, like, what is what’s the hierarchy of things that they need to learn, right? You mentioned, maybe you start with the self and you get a little bit of self awareness, and then where do you go from there?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 9:46
Sure. Sure. So within the learning pathway, we have what we call the three key disciplines of the learning pathway, we have the discovery piece, and the discovery piece is is mostly about collecting data on a person Same. So that’s what we call neuro data on neuro data helps manage teams, it helps ensure that talents are optimized for success. So we encourage leaders to collect new data on yourself. How do you think everybody has a unique neural wiring? So the way that your brain works is different from the way my brain works. And we Kevin’s brain works. And we have the President’s brain. So we have different brain types, different brain designs, and you know that we live in a world where people are overwhelmed with work. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the great resignation, the great attrition, the great overwhelm the great everything. Yeah, people are yearning for satisfaction at work. And one of the ways that they can do that is to understand their natural domain, how do they really work? I have three children, I often give this example I have three children. And Michael, it would have amazed me that they they all have different personalities. My last daughter, she’s the communicator. She’s a storyteller. She hijacks people’s conversations, she wants to tell stories. My first daughter, who’s my second child, she’s a nurturer, she cares. She’s always asking how you do it. Mommy, can I help you figure this out? My son was oldest, he’s very critical. Every time you’re telling him something, he’s questioning his excessively questioning and analyzing what you’re seeing. So you can see that I have three different types of performers in my home, and then go into the workplace, knowing how they naturally perform, so that they can make the most of every task and every action they’re taking. So that’s, it gets really complex, and we start to break it down. So within the disciplines, we have discovery, within discovery, we have this collecting new data, then we have other types of analysis that leaders need to do on themselves and help their team members to do as well. So they can make the most of their business and their performance.

Micheal Pacheco 11:44
Why is why is it important to start with self awareness and understanding yourself and collecting that neural data and analyzing that? Why is that important?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 11:54
Great question. Great question. Before now, in previous industries, you know how humans worked. So humans were more or less treated like machines, they just give you an assignment you had to turn on with the era of specialization, thanks to Adam Smith, people just went to factories to turn out work. That worked in the previous industrial revolutions. In today’s world, we are tapping into human intelligence, we’re no longer treating humans as machines, we’re treating humans as the talent required to create value. For that reason. That’s what people are burning out. They’re like, I don’t know, I suck at this job. I hate this job. I hate my boss, I hate everything. The reason is, they haven’t find the job that aligned with them with their person with their own purpose, and a host of other factors. So because of the times we’re in, in the fourth industrial revolution, with web 3.0, and with all the changes happening in our world, people need to find who they are. So they can create value from their humanity, because your human value is what’s going to drive productivity in today’s world. I mean, it’s what is called the productivity paradox. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but it is, where organizations are saying, Oh, we’re deploying technology. We’re getting tools. we’re expending money getting software’s, but our people are not any productive. They’re not any, like the level of productivity has not improved, despite the the, the, the spending on technology. So it was reasonably confusion, what is really going on, if technology is empowering productivity, what can power productivity, and the only way that we can pop it up to be in today’s world is to tap into the human beings. And humans have to understand themselves to be able to create value from the inside.

Micheal Pacheco 13:41
Yeah. That’s great. Can I ask you, I want to ask I want ask a philosophical question. Why do you think that people don’t under don’t already understand themselves better? Is that is that a function you named? dropped? Adam Smith earlier? And that’s, that’s brilliant. Do you think that’s a product of the modern times that people are, are always, you know, busy with something to keep themselves busy with with scrolling social media? And is that part of that or what is your take on on that?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 14:17
It is part of that. Because as a society in general, we weren’t wired to be human focused. We’re wired to be systems focused. So you have political systems, you have religious systems, you have communal systems before now, so you know how humans have evolved. We went from being caveman to exploring technology to this is how we’ve advanced as humans. So the more that we advanced, there is a need on us to tap inwards. This is why spirituality became such a big concept in in the couple, you know, a couple of years ago, people were doing a lot of self work meditation and trying to figure themselves out because as times change as we advanced technologically, we have to go back to be In humans, we have to, you have to get rid of the way that we, we function, we just went to work to earn a living to put money in our pockets. Now we have to go to work to do work that has, connects to our own sense of meaning and be. And so I would say that we were not naturally wired to look inwards. We were wired to look outside, figure out, you know, the job that’s lucrative. What was the society saying about jobs that you should take? But now we’re done with that. We tried, it didn’t really work. So we want to we want to look inwards and have our own inner compass that would guide the decisions were making? That’s a question.

Micheal Pacheco 15:39
No, that’s, that’s great. That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. I love I love this kind of these kind of conversations. But let’s I want to, I want to circle back to to your, your, your coaching and consulting. You mentioned in, in in kind of the application to be to be on this podcast, you mentioned that you had improved a client’s well being and flourishing by 85%. What does that mean? And how do you measure that?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 16:08
I knew I kind of knew you were gonna ask me that question. Because every time I see stuff like that people question it. It’s easier to have metrics for tangible. So when you say revenue, profit, but when you’re talking about wellbeing, when you’re talking about team engagement, people are finding hard to measure things like that. So what we do I pick is we take the qualitative data, and we translate it into quantitative data. And there’s ways to do that. So when this client was on boarded with us, we use the survey, we use polls, we use surveys, we use a question questionnaires. So we asked her, we surveyed her across different areas of life. That’s what we call a life harmony wheel. It is six, this is like life divided into six components. So when asked more questions about each component, how do you feel here? How are you thriving here? How are you flourishing here? And at the end of the will realize that she was able to answer? Good confidence? Yes, for less than 25% of those areas. Okay. So after the coaching piece, after we worked with her, we gave her tools and resources, she had access to our courses or templates, we we did the survey, and this was like four or five months afterwards, in the survey, and we realized that she had boosted her level of understanding of flourishing along those areas. So it’s just about looking for quantitative things, asking the questions and then collecting the qualitative data from from those kinds of engagements. After the coaching, she was able to say, Oh, my God, I’m flourishing here. Now I have more clarity here, my relationships are better. I have to I find a little more fulfillment at work. And it’s still in progress. I so we haven’t started this plans. Since then, I’m guessing that if we had kept up the work with her, we could possibly have gotten her to be 95 or even 100%.

Micheal Pacheco 17:57
Awesome. So those those surveys? Are those? It sounds like those are yes, yes or no questions. You don’t do like maybe like a scale of one to five or something like that?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 18:07
No, yes. They’re like the there’s a scaling system. Sometimes we use four, five, or even sometimes we go to 10. Yeah, depending on the complexity of the situation. But for this particular client, we use the five point scaling system on a scale of one to five, how they feel about this area. And it’s not just one question. So it’s a couple of questions within.

Micheal Pacheco 18:28
Yeah, so that makes sense, then, because you can you’re taking, like you said, you’re taking this, this qualitative data of how someone feels, and then you’re giving it a number, you’re assigning it a number, which you can then make qualitative, fascinating, good stuff. I love it. What are the six components of the harmony wheel?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 18:45
So we have, we have, first of all, we have health, which is physical health, which is the price we ask everybody to prioritize that because if you don’t have health, everything else falls apart. So we have health and we go right into work, just because we spend about 1/3 of our lives at work. So work should come right after health. After work. We have the mental aspect, which is your your psychology and your emotions. That’s the third one. Then after that we have relationships, which again is very important to the human being, then we have finance. And what we often tell our clients is if your work is good, you’ll be able to create value and when you’re creating value, you will you will improve your economy. So that’s the fifth one is a finance which is their economy, then the last one is their lifestyle. Because sometimes we see that clients have good health they are their mindset is on point. Their finances are doing amazing work is great, but their lifestyle kind of sucks. They don’t have time to relax, they don’t have time to recreate time to add some more comfort in and finesse in their life. So those are the six components of the of the harmony wheel, the life harmony wheel.

Micheal Pacheco 19:50
Very cool. I suppose that’s why you are referred to as the life harmonizer

Jesmine Onyeukwu 19:55
Oh, you got it. Now you got

Micheal Pacheco 19:59
to ask What? What sort of things did you first struggle with when you first started consulting?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 20:09
Oh, my God might call that question. I first struggled, I struggled a long time with even calling myself a consultant and coach. Because prior to stepping into this realm of work, I had worked with a ton of consultants and coaches, and a lot of them were amazing. But the struggle that I found was the, because the landscape just became more and more complex, right? So I’ve had clients who said to me, Jasmine, I’ve worked with a ton of coaches, but I still didn’t find the result I was looking for. It’s because of the complexity. So what I struggled with the most was the complexity of the landscape. What do I call myself? Do I call myself a marketing coach? Because what part of what I do for my clients include helping them figure out their marketing sales. Do I call myself a mindset coach? Do I call myself a leadership consultant? What exactly so my biggest struggle was in really deep complexify. And I don’t know if that’s your word, I want

Micheal Pacheco 21:07
to make it.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 21:10
Okay, but just simply find the complex landscape so that I could have a framework that helps people get results, better, faster, and that can lead results that are lasting, that was my biggest struggle. So I spent like four years doing research and building frameworks and roadmaps so that when I stepped in there and said, when I step into the marketplace and say I am a consultant, when someone hires me, I just make their life better. There’s no point hiring me if I’m going to add more complexity or complications to your life. Yeah, yeah. So my biggest struggle was the complexity of the of the space. I’m curious to know.

Micheal Pacheco 21:48
So you refer to yourself as a consultant, primarily not a coach?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 21:55
I do quite well, go ahead. Well, I do both. Because what I tell people is, if you are a consultant, you are operating at the highest level of expertise, that we have this ladder expertise, ladder consulting is the topmost, this is why when you go to the medical field, when you go to the legal field, when someone is called a consultant, they are expected to have the most expertise in that particular field of study. Under that just right under consultant is coaching, coaching, you’re working with someone as a coach, you can guide, you can manage a team. As a matter of fact, all managers need to have coaching skills, because as a coach, you can help people do it. As a consultant, you provide strategies that help the coaches and managers help people do it. So as a consultant where you coach automatically, you decide how you want to function. Do you want to be the one who’s doing the strategies or research and doing the briefs? Or do you want to work with the people? Yeah, well, you can be a coach and not be a consultant. But as a consultant, you are already a coach.

Micheal Pacheco 22:59
That’s interesting. So we’ve had, we’ve had this discussion a number of times on this podcast before and I feel like the most common I like your definition, but I feel like a different definition that seems to be more common in among coaches, specifically, is that the delineation lies in, in telling someone or telling a company what to do as a consultant versus a coach, you’re you’re not using statements as much as you’re asking questions and helping using guiding questions to help guide someone to an answer on their own, if that makes sense.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 23:38
Makes sense. Totally, totally in alignment with what I just explained.

Micheal Pacheco 23:41
Yeah. Cool. I’m curious. What’s your background?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 23:46
I studied economics and education. Okay. All right, coming in.

Micheal Pacheco 23:54
Hence me that’s about would be why you you know, Adam Smith.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 23:57
Yes. Thank you. Yes, that’s how, so I studied economics and education. And when I did education, I touched on psychology. As a matter of fact, I did a lot of psychology courses. Right after university. I had a stint in insurance. I was an insurance broker for a bit. Then I worked with the government, before I decided to toe the line, the path of entrepreneurship.

Micheal Pacheco 24:21
Nice. Why did you? Why did you make that shift? Was you felt a calling or was there a specific reason?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 24:28
Yeah, there were two reasons. It was a calling aspect and there was the lifestyle issues. At that point. As an insurance broker. I got married as an insurance broker. I had my and I was pregnant with my first child. My husband worked in the bank at the time. So the banking work, we lived in Nigeria. It was very demanding. So you had to go out you have to leave for work early. You had to come back late. In fact, all financial sectors in Nigeria are wired like that. They’re very demanding. So when I got pregnant towards the six months of my pregnancy, my boss or the insurance work, which was not going to give me any concessions. I’ve been pregnant woman. So my husband and I sat down. I said, Okay, you don’t want to, you know, continue this way. You want to start figuring out what to do with your life. Because if this child comes, you’re going to be doing this crazy type of shadowed a decision, I now sat down and did like the soul searching to figure out what I was naturally called to do. And I start, I didn’t start out as a consultant and coach. Okay. I started out organizing people’s homes. I yeah, I researched in Nigeria at the time, and I saw no one was helping people get organized. And I used to watch like clean house and you know, the shows like Peter Walsh, who would organize people and create structure in their spaces. I fell in love with that. So that’s how I started Nigeria’s first residential organizing company. Very cool.

Micheal Pacheco 25:51
I think I mean, I can see, I can see I can draw that line, right? Because being organized at home is kind of a foundation to being organized and successful and feeling, you know, just flourishing in life. Sure, which is why I have my my camera here, focus specifically down here, so you can’t see the mess on my desk over here. I get that a lot.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 26:19
You’re spot on. Because at the end of the day, the same principles that apply whether you’re you’re organizing the physical space or mental space, you’re still going to apply the same principles. Yeah.

Micheal Pacheco 26:29
I’ve also got my daughter’s toys all over my office.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 26:32
That’s not clutter. That’s lovely. That’s life. I love the colors.

Micheal Pacheco 26:37
Push them off screen for the for the podcast, usually,

Jesmine Onyeukwu 26:41
you didn’t have to.

Micheal Pacheco 26:45
Awesome. So Jasmine, I mentioned earlier about your improving a client’s well being and flourishing by 85%. Tell us about some other like some other big wins that you’ve had.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 26:57
Michael, are you there? I kind of lost you for a second. Oh. Are you there?

Micheal Pacheco 27:05
Yeah. Okay. Sorry, my internet is doing funny things. I live I live off grid in the Washington State Cascade Mountains. And so sometimes internet comes and goes out here. So what I want to ask is, I you know, we we talked briefly before about the, your client that you improve their well being and flourishing by 85%. Can you tell us about some other big wins that you’ve had?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 27:35
We had worked with an entrepreneurship development platform here in Canada, who works with, of course, startups, early stage companies, and I worked with them in helping the startup founders clarify their market, because sometimes it’s difficult to really know who your ideal customer is to define your value proposition. Because at the end of the day, that’s where you’re going to sell people just jumping to spending money on marketing, but you don’t have to sell the pieces in place. So we help them clarify their markets, you know, clearly articulate their value proposition, and we prepare them to pitch because then when you have your ideal customer figured out, you have your value prop figured out, you can tell stories better. So we will help them deal with storytelling around the problem the customer the value prop, for example, a value prop could be I helped my clients save 40 minutes or 40% of the time, they will typically spend with the task. So I save them. If I save them two hours everyday, that’s a major value prop or I save them 90% of The Walking with competitors. So we help them do all of those, like you have to declare your has to be value. And we with that I worked with about five clients on the program. And they were a ton of other coaches and mentors and a ton of other founders for the I was assigned to five founders. And I ended up with a 90% of my mentees, one grant, they all won the grants from the government because at the end of the day, the panelists the feedback that came was they were very clear on their market, the vision was clear they were able to sell to so these are some of the things we do for startups and we do for early stage companies to you know, get clarity of all these species so they can go out there in confidence and sell sell be the vision

Micheal Pacheco 29:17
they’ll sell sell. That’s great. That’s awesome. So Can you are you are you willing to tell us about some some failures that you’ve had some maybe some some learning points where things didn’t go quite as planned and you you walked away a a better consultant because of it.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 29:40
So right after I had worked with this mentor mentees and they had won their grants, I went to peach for some money and I couldn’t get the money. So you see the irony, I have helped people get money and I couldn’t get money myself because the the panelists had they gave me great feedback. And these were the feedback they gave me One of the things I took into account, when I coached my clients like that feedback, and I’ve added it to my playbook, when you’re pitching, you have to have a breakdown of the funds. When you’re asking for a particular fund, if you’re asking for $100,000, for example, you need to tell the investors how you’re going to spend that money. And then how you hope to get a return on what is spent. didn’t have that clearly figured out before going to pitch, of course, I was pitching at a higher level and for more money. So that’s one of the ways I failed a million when I failed a couple times. But every time I fail, I’ve learned to find the lessons in the failures. There’s never every time I get a no a rejection, I’ve, you know, pitched to a client where the The engagement was for about four months, it was a big client. And I was almost certain that they were going to onboard my company to work with their team, and identity. They said, We’re sorry, we found someone who was a better fit. So I’ll often go back and look at the whole process and what I did what I didn’t do, right. And I’ll always ask whoever is telling me, sorry, it’s not going to work. Please tell me where I could have done it better. Sometimes it’d be like, just me, you were fantastic. You did everything right. We don’t have any feedback whatsoever. But at this point is just not the right time. Maybe sometime in the future. Yeah, I could go on and on. But there are many, many times that I didn’t

Micheal Pacheco 31:25
even get what I wanted. Keep talking about how you screwed up now.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 31:31
It’s is good to be Yeah, it’s good to be open and talk about this. Yeah.

Micheal Pacheco 31:34
Well, I think I mean, you can often times you learn more from the failures, right? Because when you when you win every time, you’re not really learning, you’re just doing what you do. But when you fail, you can adjust course a little bit. And then and then go a little bit further the next time. So there’s a bit of there’s growth and failure, if you’re paying attention to it.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 31:57
Yeah. And someone said something that was profound to me, she said, humans don’t feel human actions fail. So your actions might have failed, the approach you use to address that situation might have failed, but you as a human being you don’t fail, your attempts at that exam might have failed the attempts, the you know, the engagement with that examination might have been a wrong one. But you as a human being human beings have it we fail when we exit, like we feel if we don’t, if life, I don’t even know how to prepare. If we give up on life, then that’s when we actually fail. But as long as we have life and hope our actions and attempts and engagements might fail, but

Micheal Pacheco 32:37
yeah, and that’s, I think that’s important for every, every entrepreneur to learn, because you have to be able to be able to separate yourself from your business and your and your failures. And right, because those are all those are actions. They’re they’re part of, they’re part of who you are, perhaps, but it’s not who you are. Yeah, right. It’s yeah. It’s that’s that I think that’s an important lesson for, for entrepreneurs for, for, for sure. I had something else I wanted to bring up and I can’t remember what it was

Jesmine Onyeukwu 33:17
talking about failure, let me just throw in something. Yeah, let me quickly throw in something. So when you look at the heart rate monitor, and you have the peaks and dips, and you have those ups and down flow, that’s just significant that this person has lived. The moment there is a flatline, life is gone. Right? So that’s thinking with Yeah, we fail, we rise, we fall we get up. That’s just what life is about. If we don’t have those ups and downs, then we need to question whether we’re really leaving.

Micheal Pacheco 33:44
That’s great. Now, I mean, you have to have you have to have you have to have perspective, right? If if you’re always up or if you’re always down, there’s no perspective and you’re flatlined. Totally is not a good metaphor. What, what recommendations Jasmine do you have for new coaches?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 34:08
For new coaches, I would say working with humans is difficult. That’s why you hear many people. There was a time when people were just coming for coaches, like they were criticizing coaches that were saying negative things about the coaching industry, and you would hear psychiatrists or people who are so regulated, you know, say, oh, yeah, you choose to work with this unregulated folks, so you’re gonna get what you asked for. And so for that reason, what I will say to anybody who’s coming into coaching is first of all, you need to have a passion for people. And you need to really master how to solve problems because humans are complex. For that reason humans create complex problems. If a client comes to you have a say, for example, I need help with my customer onboarding process, and maybe your customer experience coach, you need to understand that in order to help them with that customer onboarding process. You need to understand how to do marketing, you need to understand human resource you need to, there are other components that surround that particular area of your coaching. And this is for extremely niched down coaches, because you have a lot of coaches who are extremely niche down in order to solve the client’s problem, you have to have some sort of wide approach to your skills, and to your knowledge, you can niche down and focus on a narrow area. But you need to have a wider perspective, your expertise has to be one foot wide and deep for you to help your clients better. And for me, there are many times clients come to me, for example, I’m not a financial expert, I will never prefer financial advice. But I have someone who is in my network who’s on my she’s, she’s actually one of our experts in residence, who I would say to my clients, I have a financial consultant who can help you address this. So in the area where you can help your clients always have someone you can recommend for them. Because at the end of the day, your job is to help them just achieve the results however you can.

Micheal Pacheco 36:02
Yeah, and building relationships that way, being able to refer someone, you know that the next time, they may not need your services today. But if they remember you as the person who referred them to someone who helped them in, you know, six months, in two years, when they need what you’re selling, they’re going to come back to you because you’ve you’ve fostered that that relationship. Yeah, sure.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 36:29
You need to verify who you’re recommending to your clients so that you don’t get burned. I’ve been burned before. Like the client came and said, Jasmine, why would you refer someone like that she was nothing. She was customer service was crappy. She was on friendly. So I started to verify and validate the people that I would put on my list of recommendations for my will tell on me at the end of the day.

Micheal Pacheco 36:49
Yeah, that’s, that’s super smart. So you’ve also you’ve done some marketing as well. Do you also see the value? And this is not a loaded question. This is a genuine question. So you said you mentioned broad and deep, do you also see a value for new coaches, especially to niche down so that they can maybe get a footing into, you know, into the business before they broaden out? Or do you recommend really, truly that they just broaden out right from the right from the beginning.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 37:23
I would say you have to niche down when I first started consulting and coaching, I branded myself as a leadership coach. So I would do a lot of things on leadership. This is where the self awareness piece, but now I’m a business consultant, meaning I can consult in a broad area of business solutions or problems. So I would say start with a niche, you know, like the city needs the riches and niches start with the niche. Well never seen the niche because of the way that the world is right now. I mean, there’s hyper specialization going on, but you can stand yourself out really smartly. If you are the niche down coach who has a broad expertise. Your clients will trust you more your trust levels will increase if you can do that both definitely start with that niching down first.

Micheal Pacheco 38:06
Yeah, I know a. I know a coach who specializes in she helps physical therapists establish an online practice. And that’s her coaching. She helps physical therapists establish an online practice and she charges $15,000 for her course. And it sells like hotcakes. And that’s like, I feel like that’s a pretty tight niche. So if you can find Yeah, I mean, there’s there’s there’s demand and all sorts of things. And the more you can, the more you can focus and hone in on what you do on what you’re you know, what is your core competency? What are you very, very good at focus on that and find, find the customer that wants to buy what you’ve packaged? In? That’s a great way I think for a new coach to get a foothold.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 38:58
Hmm, can I say something to that point, please. There are many ways to niche down so you can niche down like this client you mentioned she needs. Her niche is based on a market based on a specific target audience, not based on an expertise. So as a coach that helps physical trainers or Pete find the footing online, she has to know how to do when it measures know how to do social media. Because this is all digital online is digital, you’re going to help your clients set up their entire operations online. So you’re going to have a broader array of expertise. So you can niche down by expertise by saying I am for example, I am a communications coach. Or you can say I am a communications coach for medical professionals or for so there are many ways in it. There’s no one way to niche down you can niche down by expertise or niche down by target audience by market or do both at the same time. Yeah,

Micheal Pacheco 39:47
and in this case, I think the gal she did both because she was she was a physical therapist who started her own practice online. And then she created processes and SOPs and basically built out a course based on how She made her business. So now she’s kind of playing both sides of it, which is just super smart.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 40:06
Very smart.

Micheal Pacheco 40:10
Okay, awesome. Jasmine, is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you would like to touch on or

Jesmine Onyeukwu 40:19
I would say, just in closing, I would encourage especially early stage entrepreneurs, because those are the ones that I have a heart for. I love to see small ideas become world changing ideas, I love to see small, small efforts, expand happens exponential growth. So I would advise or encourage any early stage startup leader to do their business differently, especially in today’s world, especially if you are, for example, resource constrained because I come from Africa. And I’m a woman and I’m a person of color. All of these features, all of these attributes really puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to access to funding. For example, because I work with startups and scale ups, you need funding you need support. So if you are if you fit into any of this category, or criteria that I highlighted, you have to do your business differently, meaning you have to find ways to reduce your costs, optimize your processes, optimize your talent, when people come to you, you can’t just treat them however, you need to find a way to get the talent to come to you to make the most of their time with you. Because nobody builds a sustainable business by just having people come and go, come on, walk out, come and workout. So in closing, I would say if you’re building an early stage business, make sure that you find a support to help you reduce your costs, reduce stress, reduce overwhelm, so you can flourish, you can fulfill your potential you can feel fulfilled at the end of the day, while you build a thriving business. Because we know that today’s times called for that these times call for founders and CEOs and leaders who are flourishing and who are helping their team members flourish. And who are also taking accounts, social taken into account social innovation, of social courses, making sure that their business impacts people planet and profit sustainably. So if you need help with that, you know, Michael can give you can help you get connected to me so that we can help you ensure that Yeah,

Micheal Pacheco 42:13
yeah, you gotta be creative. You gotta be creative, no matter no matter who you are. And I also I will throw out throw this out there. I can’t speak to Canada. But I know in the United States, there are federal and state programs for female entrepreneurs, for minority entrepreneurs. And what’s another one I know and for military entrepreneurs, and I’m sure there’s a bunch of other ones, right? So get creative with it, and whatever you’ve, you know, use whatever you’ve got to your advantage, however, you can, however you can. Sure. I know a good a good friend of mine, went into business with his wife, and he gave his wife 51% of the company so that they could apply for all of those government grants. And they got all of this free money because the wife was was the majority owner. And that’s it. It’s it’s super smart. Why not do that.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 43:05
Many men are doing that now, many men are coming behind you, their wives and your sisters and mothers to help them get access. Because the world is opening up. We’re talking about shared prosperity, right? So we have people saying, hey, we want to be inclusive, we want to be diverse. So there’s opportunity out there, but we still have limited access. But the world is evolving. And hopefully one day there will be equality.

Micheal Pacheco 43:27
There’s, there’s steps going in the right direction. I hope. I agree with you. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Jasmine, you also have a a business optimization framework that you would like to share with our listeners and viewers. Ron, tell us a little bit about that.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 43:43
Thank you so much, Michael, for that. So the business optimization framework is what we use to help, especially early stage businesses, but any business in general, any business who wants to make the most of their decision making, we help them roadmap, every action, you want to come to the business landscape, you see that, especially as an early stage entrepreneur, you’re told to do about 101 things 101 Things that are so disconnected, there’s no coordination, like do this and do that talk webpage, go look for someone on a team go higher. There’s just too many things. So the roadmap helps us guide our clients in every action. So there’s what we call the sequential actions that must be taken in a business. So there’s some things that must come before the other, then the actions that need to be taken simultaneously. So they’re like when you’re running the business, when you’ve done your business modeling view, and you’re maybe you’re in a phase where you’re not marketing, you’re actively engaging in digital marketing campaigns and all of that. You need to also be looking at your business model you need you need to be innovating the model just in case you enter the market and you realize, oh, we wanted to serve a b2c client. But we have distribution mechanism issues. You’re going to go back to your business model, you’re going to go back to your go to market approach. Right. So that’s it I guess it gets complex. I know, there are things that needs to be done simultaneously or, and some things that would also require a sequential approach to decision. So the framework has four pillars. Number one is leadership, very important. Number two is the structure, the structure of the business, this is where your business modeling comes in, so that your business has a solid foundation to grow on, you know, what happens is entrepreneurs is what took you to success. So maybe you launched your business, and you now have customers, you’re making sales, there’s money coming in, that is success, what took you there will not take you to scale in order to scale where your revenue is accelerated or at a higher pace than your costs, where your cost is, you know, accelerating or not as as high as your revenue. What’s what’s going to take you to scale is different. When when you get to scale, some people that they’ve scaled, and they relaxed, and you see that some businesses don’t make it past scale, you also need to get to sustainability, where we’re talking about the you know, the popular tech companies of the world, that’s where they got to where they are. So they’ve expanded, they’re so large, they’re too big to fail. So in order to get there, there are different approaches to get there. So we use this four pillars to guide our clients so that once they get the leadership price, the structure is right, operations is running smoothly, then growth becomes organic and exponential.

Micheal Pacheco 46:25
Awesome. I just signed up for it. So I’m looking at it right now.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 46:30
Really, thank you. Thank you for that.

Micheal Pacheco 46:32
Yeah, thank you.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 46:35
You can email me and tell me what you think about what you’re still looking at?

Micheal Pacheco 46:38
I will Yeah, I think I might it’s what do we got? Oh, five pages. And there’s quite a bit of text. So I’ve got some reading to do first, but I’ll shoot you. I’ll shoot you an email. Awesome. Jasmine, this has been fantastic. Actually, you know, one quick question before before we go. What is peak perfectly? Is that is there? Is there a story behind the name? Um, just just to satisfy my own curiosity?

Jesmine Onyeukwu 47:03
That’s a good question that there’s a story behind the name, but I was thinking that he would be easily interpreted. So pick prayerfully is a coinage of two words, which is peak performance. The hope is that someday it’ll become a verb, it would be considered a verb. We say Uber and zoom. When you say I am peak perfectly what you’re essentially saying is I am peak performance.

Micheal Pacheco 47:31
I love it. I’m gonna I’ll make sure that it gets into the urban dictionary. Oh, no, be

Jesmine Onyeukwu 47:39
absolutely great. I’d appreciate that a whole lot.

Micheal Pacheco 47:44
Awesome, awesome. Jasmine on UCO. Thank you so much for joining us on the remarkable coach podcast. Guys, check out her Jasmine stuff. It’s peak perfectly.com. That’s PAKP er fly.com. We’ll have links to her website, as well as to the business optimization framework. We’ll have links to that on the show notes page on our website, Boxer dot agency. Jasmine, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

Jesmine Onyeukwu 48:18
Thanks, Michael, for having me. I totally enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you so much.

Micheal Pacheco 48:22
Thank you, and thank you to our listeners and viewers. We’ll see you guys next time. Cheers. Bye

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