Siobhan Walsh, Consultant, Siobhan Walsh Consultancy
Siobhan Walsh is a highly experienced business development consultant. She has nearly 20 years of experience working with well-known brand names within the global wholesale, franchise and retail sector, working her way to board level in her early thirties. Siobhan has a solid knowledge of all aspects of retailing and its challenges.
She has extensive experience in building brands, bringing them to market and delivering sales. Siobhan has particular knowledge and understanding of the structure and dynamics of family businesses, having researched this as part of her degree, and spent much of her career working in them.
Her passion is finding solutions to problems and exploring new growth opportunities. She has a strong belief in the power of positive working relationships which she keeps at the core of all business dealings.
What is your favourite social media platform, and why?
LinkedIn for business, it's a great tool to keep in touch with contacts from all over the globe. I also find it a great source of learning and motivation.
For personal use, I enjoy Instagram. Whether it's travel, food, fashion or interiors there's lots of excellent content. On my page, you'll mainly see photos of my dogs!
Tell us about you and your current role or area of interest.
I have my own consultancy business, Siobhan Walsh Consultancy which I founded in 2020. I started the business with a view to working with SME's and Social Enterprises within the Retail and Brand space.
During my career, I found that many SME's do not have the financial resources to hire at an executive level, but this is exactly what they need to push their business forward so it's a catch-22 scenario.
My vision was to set up a consultancy business whereby I could tailor my knowledge and experience to suit their individual needs.
What do you like about your career or area of focus?
I love the variety that my job offers me. I get to work with a range of clients on varying project types and durations, so it keeps me interested. Some of my projects involve a deep dive into company procedures to analyse the business' performance and advise on areas for improvement.
I find this extremely rewarding as it's in my nature to want to solve problems. I often joke that I probably would have made a good detective!
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Stop trying to do everything to perfection, it doesn't exist. A task done to 90% perfection today, is better than 100% tomorrow.
What inspires you, motivates you, or helps you to move forward?
I'm motivated by the desire to make a positive impact on my client's businesses. I find a real sense of achievement in the completion of a successful project that I know will continue to deliver results into the future.
What are you proud of in your life so far?
Feeling fear about starting my own business, but moving forward despite it. I'm a very practical person, and an over-thinker, so to go from a guaranteed income into the unknown was a scary prospect for me.
What is your preferred way to meet new people/network?
In-person for sure. I found virtual networking a challenge during the pandemic. I feel it's extremely impersonal and doesn't give you the same opportunity to make a connection with people.
During the pandemic, it was extremely useful to be able to hold meetings with colleagues and clients anywhere in the world via video call rather than jumping on a flight for a one-hour meeting.
However, I'm a firm believer in building strong working relationships with people, and in my opinion, this is done best by having the majority of your encounters in person where possible.
What skills or qualities do you feel have helped you?
During my years of managing people, I learned that no two people are the same. We all have different things that motivate us in life, and our careers. We learn differently, our brains work in different ways, we produce outputs at different speeds, and we communicate differently.
As a leader, I learned that all of these things were important for me to understand about each individual in order for me to be an effective leader and communicator to everyone.
In my consultancy business, this is just as important. I need to understand each client personally, just as much as I need to understand how their business works. It's extremely important to me that I become an integral part of my client's team during each project.
I'm not the type of consultant who delivers a findings report and walks off into the sunset. I'm there to guide my clients through the process and deliver the necessary changes.
What do you wish you had known when you started out?
It's all about the people. To get true fulfilment from a role your values need to be aligned with the people you work with. When taking on new clients it's important for me that our values are similar, if not the same.
Who do you most admire in business, academic or creative circles and why?
There are really too many people that inspire me to list. But at the top of my list are the SME business owners like my own husband, especially after the last 2.5 years where they have been faced with a relentless amount of challenges and have met them head-on.
Even in the pre-pandemic era small business owners had a long list of hats to wear on a daily basis. They need to understand figures, they're the HR department, and they need to be social media gurus. All of this and more while normally needing to work hands-on in their business daily.
These people are the true backbone of our society. They often underpay themselves in the interest of their staff and suppliers being paid on time. As well as creating jobs within their community they create spaces where people can come together in a warm and friendly environment.
Whether it's having a chat with your neighbour in the butchers, or enjoying the craic in the local hairdressers. Now we find ourselves in a really difficult time for small businesses and I know there is a lot of fear out there so I will be increasing my efforts to #ShopLocal and #ShopSmall.
Outside of your professional/work area, what hobbies or interests do you have or what other areas of your life are of real importance to you?
My two dogs Dexter and Nala are a big part of my life outside of work. I love to get out for walks on the beach with them. There's nothing better than sea air to clear your head after a week at the desk. I also really enjoy gardening, there's something meditative about planting seeds and waiting to see if they will grow.
In a world where instant gratification has become the norm, gardening slows you down a bit. There's a great sense of achievement in the success stories and I'm learning to accept the failures a little more too. I love to walk around the garden every morning or evening to see what has bloomed for the first time, that gives me real joy.
Has the pandemic had a positive or a negative effect on you and/or your business, and how have you managed it?
My business was born from me having some time off during the pandemic. It was the first time in my career that I had the time and mental capacity to really think about how I wanted to shape my future. I had said from a very young age that I wanted to run my own business, but I never knew what that business was going to be.
I think the sense of uncertainty that we all felt during the pandemic was the catalyst I needed to have the courage to start my business. It was my now-or-never moment.
Do you have a mentor, or have you ever mentored anyone?
I volunteer on a mentor programme for students called Career Ready. Career Ready is a UK-based charity whose mission is to 'boost social mobility by empowering young people and giving their talents a platform to flourish.
During the last academic year, I mentored an extremely bright young girl from a local school. I also had the pleasure to have her join me for a two-week work placement during the summer. It was a very rewarding experience and I look forward to following her brilliant career over the coming years.
Now that the new academic year has started I'll be matched up with a new student from the same school which I look forward to immensely. I would encourage any UK-based readers who may be interested in the program to visit the website. This month I am excited to join the Women in Business NI Mentoring Programme which supports female-founded start-up businesses in Northern Ireland. Along with this, I continue to mentor many of my clients to ensure they are achieving their personal and professional goals.
What advice would you have for someone looking to get into the same area of work or interests?
Join some local business groups like your local chamber of commerce, Women in Business groups etc, and network with other consultants/freelancers. I'm very lucky that there is a great community of business people in my local area that are only too eager to collaborate on projects and recommend you to clients.
Speak to people that recently started their own business, they will have little nuggets of information that they will be only too willing to share and will most definitely help you along the way. You will hit some speed bumps on the road, but don't worry. Take the lesson from them and you'll be ready for them the next time!
What do you feel is the most common reason for people failing or giving up?
Again looking at it through the lens of the SME sector and in particular start-ups and early-stage businesses, I think funding is one of the most common reasons that businesses fail, or their owners give up. Start up's are often under-resourced from a staffing perspective yet loan and grant application processes are extremely time-consuming.
Even getting investors on board can be a lengthy process with a significant amount of due diligence required. Compound that with the fact that if you are a female-led business in the UK, research by Startups. has shown that even if you do manage to get the investment you will likely only raise 1/7 of the amount that a male-led business will raise.
Is there a phrase, quote or a saying that you really like?*
"People buy from people they trust." At the start of my career, someone told me that 'people buy from people'. It was the start of my learning that good relationships in business were key.
A few years down the line a colleague elaborated on the saying I had used for years and told me 'people buy from people they trust'. This adaptation to the saying clarified the importance of honesty and integrity in all of your business interactions.
What companies, brands, or institutions do you like or do you think are getting it right?
I love the ethos of the Portas Agency and their 'Kindness Economy'. Mary Portas started out in retail, just like myself and I've followed her career since I started watching her TV programme 'Mary Queen of Shops'. I've always admired her passion for the high street. Having come from a town that had a number of shops close down over the years, and often needing to shop in other towns as a result, this really resonated with me.
The Kindness Economy podcast is one I never miss and has become a source of learning for me from a range of business people that are in my opinion thought leaders and disruptors in the best sense. It's a true movement with people, and not just profit, at the heart of the mission.
How do you define success, and what lessons have you learned so far that you could share with our audience/readership?
Success is definitely a very individual thing. I feel that as I've grown as a person (and grown older!) that my own definition of success has evolved. For me now, success is about being happy, both personally and professionally. It's about having a better work-life balance as I now understand the impact that has on both my happiness and my performance.
Success is also knowing that I've delivered high-quality service for my clients because again this feeds into my happiness. I used to think that success meant an excellent job title, a fancy car, a fancy home, and a very large salary.
As millennials, we were programmed to think that once we had achieved all of those milestones then we had reached the pinnacle of success and we would be deliriously happy. However, the truth of it all is that you usually need to make sacrifices to get there, and they're not always worth it.