Jenn Lofgren is the founder and CEO of Incito, a firm providing leadership and executive coaching, whose professional journey is an unexpected one filled with courage, conviction, and resilience. While she never dreamed as a child of becoming an entrepreneur, and established herself quite successfully in the information technology field, she eventually followed her passion which led to the creation of her current expanding business.
In this interview, Jenn Lofgren describes her road to success and offers insights into the unique nature of Incito and its services, shares the lessons learned by starting her company during difficult economic times, stresses the importance of continuous business development, and explores the challenges that she has faced and overcome throughout this journey.
Download the full transcript here
Podcast highlights:
- Despite establishing herself in a successful career, Jenn knew that she was not passionate about it, but that she was passionate about growing and developing teams.
- Incito offers leadership and executive coaching one-on-one with individual leaders, and also provides executive and team coaching services to leadership teams to elevate how they lead collectively.
- All of their coaches are certified coaches with the International Coach Federation and they also have a few coaches that are licensed psychologists.
- As a firm, they’re a team of coaches, that takes a shared approach, although they each have their own individual style.
- Starting her business during an economic downturn built resiliency in Jenn, and taught her how to grow a strong, sustainable business that would succeed through both positive and negative economies.
- To ensure continuous business development, Incito engages with the business community in person and online, and also participates in thought leadership by writing articles and newsletters.
- Incito’s team is comprised of coaches who are all considered contractors with their own practices as well, and they own their office to the community of coaches to help those who are trying to build their businesses as well.
- As an entrepreneur, Jenn believes that you need to establish hard boundaries that allow you to both grow your business, but also carve out time for other interests so that you don’t burn out.
- The top leadership quality is a sense of humility where you can let go of always needing to be right, be liked, or win at all costs.
Quotes:
“I was passionate about growing and developing my team.”
“I did see a lot of entrepreneurship growing up and what it could mean for a family, both in providing benefit to family and also the sacrifices that were required to live an entrepreneurial lifestyle.”
“I think one of the important factors about our firm is we don’t do anything else. We only do leadership and executive coaching.”
“I don’t believe everybody needs a coach – if you’re really good, things are going really well for you right now and you don’t want to push yourself further.”
“Yeah, here I was a brand new mom, economic downturn and in hindsight it’s about the very best time that I could have started the business.”
“To this point, we haven’t directly prospected. What we do is participate in the business community.”
“The challenge was the economy at the time and being a professional coach I was fortunate to have the foresight and have a coach right from the very beginning.”
“Although we’ve got a team of eight coaches that are core team, we also have four other coaches that we reach out regularly to depending on the client load and the right fit match for those clients.”
“A leadership coaching assignment would…groomed to become more of a leader in their company or in their industry. Whereas executive coaching is more of a senior individual who needs more of a thought partner, someone that he or she can bounce ideas and strategies off of and get some feedback from you and your team.”
“You’re also going to need strong boundaries and being honest with yourself about those hard boundaries that you need so that you don’t end up working all the time when you are required to reach out and ask for that help or hire on that first employee.”
“I’d say the world is full of good leaders and is desperate for many, many, many more good leaders. And the qualities of leadership, I think the first and most important is a quality of humility.”
“People who have money buy things, people who don’t rent things.”
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