Powrsuit pulse check

The topics we cover every week fortnight (see update below!) are not just our message, they’re our method. To get where we want Powrsuit to go, we practice what we preach: a continuous loop of learning, acting and reflecting. We do it on a small scale, just like you do with giving feedback, managing your manager, or honing your storytelling skills. Once we learn something, we take action, then evaluate what worked, what didn’t and what we need to do next.

But (as we all should), we also practice the learning loop on a larger scale. After a year of research, and another launching, iterating and improving, it’s time for another round of reflection.
 

Our three big focus areas

It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but this year we received the best birthday present: being chosen as a case study for over 20 Executive MBA students. The ask: help us define our global growth strategy. The final presentations, along with some pointed questions from our advisors, have helped us define three key focus areas for the months ahead. In the interests of modelling practice over perfection, we thought we’d share what they are: 
 

1. We need to clarify who we’re for

This challenge was best put by an MBA student who said, “we’re all in different industries and roles… And we’re all asking, ‘Is Powrsuit for me?’” 

The first rule of launching a new company is identifying your niche. While some early critics felt ‘women’ as an audience was too niche (🙄), most of us agree that half the population is actually too big. As the old saying goes, “you can’t be everything to everyone without becoming nothing to anyone.” 

To scale globally, people need to be able to quickly understand whether we’re for them.

2. We need to convey our special sauce

Calling your company a ‘career accelerator for women’ means listing a bunch of loaded words and hoping people share your interpretation. 

We know when we say them, you’ll immediately have a preconceived idea about what we do. It could be anything from complaining about men to shouting about ‘girl power’. Depending on your experiences with professional development and ‘women’s groups’, you might assume what we do is fluffy, boring, ineffective, innovative, exclusive, irrelevant or impactful. 

We know how valuable a Powrsuit membership is, as do our members… Once they’ve joined. However, we need to make it easier to understand our value before experiencing it. It’s a noisy world out there, and we aren’t yet clearly and succinctly conveying our special sauce. 

3. We need to kill some to-dos

We have a tiny team and big ambitions, and the sad reality is, we can’t do it all.  Currently, every single thing you see from Powrsuit is done by the two of us. We’re not going to list it all because it would freak us out. With every task on our to-do list, we have three options: do it, delegate it, or eliminate it.

To have a laser focus on where we want to go, we need to ruthlessly prioritise our rocks and say a sad farewell to some of the important-but-not-critical stuff we do.

In the last few weeks, we have a new planning process, hired a podcast editor, begun plotting our next hire and tightened our guidelines for events we say yes to. That has helped free up some valuable space on our plates, but not nearly enough.

So the final change we’re making for the foreseeable future is to send this newsletter fortnightly instead of weekly. This was a tough, but needed call – we love hearing your stories (and the new subscribers we gain after you share our articles 😅), but we need to free up almost a full extra day a fortnight.