The Skills I Learned from Living with an Entrepreneur
My creative and digital-tool-savvy husband influences me in many ways, and I picked up the following professional skills from him.
My husband is a co-founder of the successful and award-winning start-up Monito. Together with his brother and friend, they started their company from scratch eight years ago, and I have been with him during the whole adventure. Their learning curve was steep, and I was fortunate to benefit from that.
Discussions around work and his concrete advice on my projects helped me improve my creativeness, productivity, and relationships with my colleagues. Despite working in a completely different economic sector- I am a molecular biologist- I have learned the following professional skills and life lessons from living with him.
How to pitch an idea
One of the most important skills an entrepreneur needs is to convince your audience. You will be unable to turn your brilliant idea into a meaningful product without investors, customers, or employees.
Knowing how to be engaging and convincing — in meetings, performance evaluations, or job interviews- can decide your professional career's success.
I learned that the key to convincing communication is to identify your main message. What is the one thing you want to address?
Then structure your thoughts and bring logic to what you are saying. Make sure everyone can follow your thoughts. Consider what information is important for your audience to understand your idea, but don’t overwhelm them with facts. Cut any unnecessary clutter from your presentation that is not important to understand your message. Think about potential questions that might arise and be prepared to answer them.
The best way to test if our presentations are convincing is to practice them in front of each other. Combined with the benefit we got from listening and giving each other feedback, we strongly improved our presentation skills. The more often we practiced, the better we got.
As a scientist, I gave many talks in front of my peers. Some people think good results speak for themselves. I could not disagree stronger. In my experience, without clear and efficient communication, your results will not get the credit they deserve.
Believe in yourself, but be open to change
Be confident in yourself and your ideas, but don’t be afraid to adapt your product. Monito’s cofounders' initial business idea was to create a money transfer company like Western Union and Moneygram, but cheaper. Once they realized that there were numerous options available, they quickly changed their project to a comparison website.
During my academic career, I had to adapt my hypothesis and experiments to account for newly published results and navigate logistical and technical problems.
In one case, I had worked on the characterization of a protein for months without success before deciding to stop wasting my time and focus on a more promising project.
It was hard to let go, but I found it helpful to see that it is ok to fail. The importance is that the failures don’t dissuade you from going on. Maybe you did not achieve a specific goal, stay positive and go on to the next.
Don’t be afraid of feedback and learn to incorporate it
I learned the importance of feedback not only from your peers but from everyone. Being in charge of Monito’s product, a key part of my husband’s work is to collect feedback to improve their platform's user experience constantly.
Customer feedback is not a personal criticism, and it does not make him doubt their product; he uses it to get better.
Similarly, they encourage candid feedback amongst colleagues to build more efficient teams.
I still find accepting criticism difficult, but I make an effort to listen attentively, then analyze if the criticism is true and how I can include it to become better in my job.
The importance of good design
In the sciences, text alone can fail to convey a message. Difficult concepts are much easier to understand with good illustrations. We all like to look at beautiful things.
Instead of including schematics from other publications (with correct citations) or making simple sketches, my husband helped me with more complex illustrations. These were capable of representing the real biological situation and helped the audience better understand my results and conclusions.
I felt more confident presenting visually appealing slides and posters, comparable to wearing good-looking clothes for an important event.
Fancy tech tools to boost your productiveness
I am not skimming Product Hunt. A few days ago, I had never even heard of this website where you can find all sorts of tools and apps- but my husband does.
Over the years, he has introduced me to many useful tools. Without him, I would still scribble on paper notebooks digital horizon would stop at the Microsoft Office suite.
But now, I use Whimsical to design a flowchart allowing me to illustrate complex workflows to my colleagues, use Notion to collect and organize my writing ideas, and Grammarly to check for spelling and punctuation mistakes.
Welcoming and empowering company culture
He inspired me to think about how company culture can boost your employees' motivation and productiveness.
Since the last year, despite the pandemic, Monito’s team has doubled in size. Mostly they worked from home, so they have hired coworkers whom they have never met.
But despite social distancing and lockdown restrictions, they make efforts to create a welcoming company culture and get to know each other.
They introduced a tool (Donut) in their communication system to keep in touch, which randomly connects people to schedule a common coffee break. But since small talk on Zoom is even more difficult than at an office water fountain, it offers you a topic to break the ice and get the discussion going, like “The best trip you have ever been on” or “What secret hobbies do you have to relax.”
This approach takes you out of your social isolation and forces you to connect with others.
Making an effort to get to know and connect everyone shows their employees that they are more than just a workforce necessary to get tasks done.
I found this to be something not every employer is doing at the moment.
During the pandemic, I heard companies mistrusting their employee’s sense of responsibility and dedication to their work. Some keep denying home-office requests despite health authorities' guidelines to retain control over their employee's working habits.
At Monito, even before the pandemic, they had flexible work hours and remote working options, leaving it up to their employees to come to the office or work from home.
I am fortunate to live with someone who is so inspiring and has introduced me to so many tools boosting my creativity and productiveness. He has shaped where I want to work in the future and how I imagine a fulfilling and motivating job.
If I got you interested in my husband’s startup, check out the job offers on monito.com. Unfortunately for me, they don’t need a molecular biologist.
