Active Peers AI recently hosted its third YouTube Live on “Flipping the Entrepreneurial Switch: Transferring Personal Skills into Entrepreneurship Skills”. This Livestream is based on a knowledge-sharing session that our CEO and Founder of Active Peers AI, Susan HayesCulleton, facilitated for AwakenHub for female entrepreneurs. This session was aimed at enabling female entrepreneurs to showcase personal skills that can be applied to business development and an entrepreneurial mindset.

During the session, Susan used Active Peers AI technology lots of times. For instance, Susan used the Active Peers AI Survey Tool to help the group identify their strengths and their areas of improvement and then match people accordingly to spread knowledge around effectively. Susan also used the Custom Prompter to help the participants learn from each other and share their wisdom. Apart from a Q&A session with Susan, we also had a special guest Mary Carty, the co-founder of AwakenHub, join us for an interview with Susan.

Interview with Susan and Mary

During the interview, Susan and Mary covered a range of topics related to AwakenHub, SheGenerate, and the Active Peers AI knowledge-sharing session:

• Mary mentioned that AwakenHub is a community that was founded in the middle of the pandemic in July 2020. The co-founders are a group of friends who came together to set up AwakenHub as they have always said that they would use their network for good. During the pandemic, women had a hard time in business. Thus, Mary and other co-founders set up AwakenHub to help them, especially women who were in the very early stages of their businesses. AwakenHub develops educational programmes for female entrepreneurs in Ireland and Mary called the SheGenerate programme the accelerator light of AwakenHub. Over the period of 8 months, the female entrepreneurs who joined SheGenerate developed their ideas and strategies, and they build out their viable businesses which are ready for investment and more team members.

• Susan remarked that AwakenHub has achieved a lot in a short period of time and according to Mary, part of their success is attributable to the fact that the founders are a very strong team and they have a large network of people that they can draw on to help. Mary said the founders were very specific about what they do and what they are about. Mary also thought it was important to have a welcoming open space for collaboration and conversation. According to Mary, many women nowadays are the first person in their families and localities to start their own businesses but they have no one to turn to ask for help. Thus, there is a very strong demand for what AwakenHub and SheGenerate do.

• In regards to the Active Peers AI knowledge-sharing session, Mary said that the Survey Tool worked really well as it is always good to find a point of commonality whenever we bring a group of strangers together and are creating a strong bond between them. As the participants had to rank themselves regarding their areas of strengths and weaknesses, it gave a point of commonality for them to talk about in their conversations. Mary also pointed out that as humans, we are inherently good at teaching and passing on our knowledge. However, oftentimes, Mary claims that we don't know what we know and that we know more than what we give ourselves credit for. Therefore, Mary believes that the session was a great way for the participants to tap into their knowledge. Mary also thinks that getting to know other people during the session and sharing and listening allowed the participants to take tangible knowledge with them. Moreover, Mary points out that as a founder, people often draw on the personal skills that they have developed in their lives but might not necessarily be looking to work on the skills that they are lacking but are needed in their careers. Hence, Mary thinks that the knowledge-sharing session gave participants the space to talk about what they were really confident about but also explore areas that they felt unsure about.

• Susan and Mary also touched upon the results of the survey during the session. Mary said that one thing that surprised her the most was how low "Teamwork" was ranked in the survey results. Mary assumes that this is because most participants have gotten into business by themselves so they have no experience in working with others. Moreover, Susan points out that although running a business by yourself can be a solitary time, it does not have to be lonely.

• Regarding the participants' assessment of the knowledge-sharing session, Mary points out that most of them said that they have taken away very practical and valuable insights from the session. Most of the participants also felt less "lonely" after attending the session as they realized that there are a lot of other female entrepreneurs who are in the same boat as them.

Q&A Session with Susan

During the Q&A session with Susan, the audience posed the following questions:

1) What personal skills have you observed to be the most important to cultivate for success as an entrepreneur?

Firstly, Susan believes that resilience is important. According to Susan, you need to have a lot of resilience in an environment as times often get tough. This does not have to be a very difficult situation but could be even situations where you are having issues with a staff member or you just do not find your work as exciting anymore. Secondly, Susan thinks that curiosity is an important skill as well as you need to be hungry to understand the customer's problems. You also need to be curious to understand what motivates and drives your staff members. Lastly, enjoyment is another skill that Susan reckons everyone should have. Susan believes that it is important to enjoy running your own business otherwise it can become relentless, making you run out of energy and passion. Thus, for personal sustainability, it is vital to learn how to experience more joy in what you do.

2) Where can entrepreneurs learn from each other?

Firstly, Susan mentions that there are a lot of networks, such as Awakenhub, which organize networking events so you can join to learn from other entrepreneurs. Secondly, you can watch an educational video, or listen to a podcast or a talk, such as a TED Talk, to learn from others. Susan reckons that learning from others online is just as effective as learning from others in person! There are a lot of online libraries where you can find a variety of content. Lastly, Susan believes that joining a structured mentoring programme, including the SheGenerate programme, is a great way to learn from others.

3) If entrepreneurs are getting started in their own businesses, they may not have "peers" to reach out to. What do you suggest they do?

Firstly, Susan recommends you to look out for in-person environments where there is a common interest and where you can learn from others, including networking events that are tailored to what you want to learn. Secondly, Susan points out that there are now a lot of online networking events you can join and online communities that you can turn to for help, such as the Slack group channel by AwakenHub. Lastly, Susan also touches upon turning fleeting light connections into semi-permanent ones and she mentions that a great way to do this is to connect with others on social media, especially Linkedln.

4) Lots of people are hungry to learn from others but may not know the right ones to ask. Where do you find great questions to ask?

The first piece of advice that Susan has is to know what you actually want to learn. Is it about making new connections or international networking or strategic thinking or solving a problem? The second piece of advice is to imagine that you can find out the answer to your question and then reverse engineer the answer. If you did have that answer to your question, what would you do with that information? The last piece of advice is to listen to the questions that other people ask as learning from others is a great way to improve yourself.

5) If you start your own company, it can feel like you're drinking from a firehose as you learn so much. How do you categorize that or not get overwhelmed?

Susan recommends you to not try and get everything in one day. You should prioritize your tasks and do one task at a time to prevent you from getting overwhelmed. You can also adopt the mentality of ”I must do that today” as one thing that you have done well is better than ten things that you have just started on. Moreover, you can use a framework to help you prioritize your tasks and work on those which are urgent first.