Today Africa had the opportunity to chat with Claire Holden and Taryn Marcus, co-founders of Reinvent CoLab, a company that specializes in helping clients embrace and thrive in change.
Meet the co-founders
Claire Holden is passionate about people and helping them reinvent how they lead themselves, their teams & their businesses to maximize talent, leverage strengths & embrace opportunities.
With a career spanning more than 20 years, and two continents. Consulting to large multinationals, medium sized companies and small start up’s. She’s passionate about offering up-to-date, bespoke solutions and strategies that allow people to perform at their best and add maximum value to their organisations.
Claire has worked with EDF Energy, Liberty, Santam, Disney, Massmart, Toyota, and MTN among others. And has coached leaders from multiple industries across the globe.
Taryn Marcus prides herself as a devoted change agent and positive disruptor, with an enterprise perspective. She collaboratively works to create organizations where people perform better, feel engaged, deliver customer value, and have fun – all at the same time.
Taryn has a special focus on methodologies that aid individuals, teams, and organizations build mindsets, skill sets, and toolsets to make continuous reinvention a competitive advantage.
She brings almost two decades of Human Capital experience in both established and emerging markets. 15 of which have been at Executive management level for listed complex multinational (pan-African, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North American) organizations. Taryn is a registered Industrial psychologist and Harvard Business School Alumnus.
Tell us a bit about yourselves
Claire: I’m Claire Holden and Taryn and I are founders of a company called Reinvent CoLab. We’re based in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are happy to be with you today exploring a little bit of our journey.
Taryn: Claire and I have come together in this organization with I think very different skill sets and that’s perhaps what brings us together so well. Claire’s deep love and passion is in coaching and mine is in the corporate space. And I think between the two of us both having worked for ourselves and worked in corporates is probably why the two of us have worked so nicely together.
What inspired you people to start your company?
Taryn: (smiles) Perfect. I think what inspired us was really around a deep-seated belief that we had a role to play in helping people to transform and innovate in the companies that they worked in. Both Claire and I have worked in various sectors and we witnessed firsthand the challenges that organizations face in adapting to change.
And I think that we saw the opportunity to create a consultancy that specializes in guiding these businesses through these complex transformations in a more clear and creative manner.
Claire: Taryn and I have worked together a lot. And because we have different skill sets, we have a wonderful way of working together and sparking ideas for each other. When we are working together, there’s a huge amount of flow and excitement and innovation and the solutions that we craft. And I think that it brings us joy to work together. I think it’s also something that means that we add additional value to our clients because of that synergy.
How did you meet each other?
Taryn: We were actually introduced. I was going through my own personal transformation at the time, having had my second son. And coming back into a corporate environment where I was feeling completely overwhelmed by having to juggle two children and a career promotion and the likes. And someone that I was doing work with said to me, you know, I have to introduce you to Claire. She is a coach and she comes from a place of appreciative inquiries.
So she doesn’t ignore the negative, but focuses more on the positive and the possibilities. Claire and I then just started working together 11 years ago. And I think just naturally our relationship just transformed from being one of coach and coachee to one of actually being quite collaborative and talking about different corporate or business activities. And we just really enjoye the energy that we found when we collaborated together.
Claire: Started with the coachee-coach relationship. But I think often we’re great coaching relationships, or we’re coaching is so effective when there’s a real synergy between people. And so that kind of similar interests and passion and different ways of thinking. But wanting similar outcomes in terms of creating spaces where people can thrive really meant that we’ve been actively looking for ways to leverage our strengths together.
What key changes did you observe in the industry that influenced your approach at Reinvent CoLab?
Claire: The single biggest change that I’ve noticed over the last 35 years is the way that we look at change. When we started in business, change was a project. It was usually a one-off thing. And it had a start and an end date and a clear delivery at the end of it. And I think that that’s changed.
The latest, I think it came out two weeks ago. Accenture’s Pulse of Change Index found that the rate of change affecting business has increased by 183% over the last four years. So change is so prevalent at the moment that everybody’s having to do it all the time. We’re having to continually reinvent in order to stay relevant.
And I think that that’s really what’s influenced Reinvent CoLab because we’ve said, we can see people struggling, we can see people not knowing what questions to ask to reinvent and not keeping up with the pace of change. And so really for me that’s the single biggest thing.
Taryn: Claire and I started talking about just the sheer volume of, I want to say, strategic business processes the two of us were being called into. And more often than not. It was a situation where the consultants were standing in front of the audience and saying, well, this is what you should do. And almost forcing it on them, as opposed to saying there’s a collaborative way of doing things.
How arrogant could I be to stand up in front of this room and pretend to know more about the industry? Or more about the organization and the very people that are in those industries and in that organization?
And I think certainly from my perspective, I just felt so frustrated by those processes that I thought there’s got to be a far more collaborative and holistic approach to problem solving than what we were currently experiencing in our corporate environments.
And that’s certainly what we’ve taken into Reinvent CoLab around offering a facilitative experience that is very much nimble to move with what’s happening in the room on the day. As opposed to a very fixed way of doing major changes.
How did your previous experiences shape the vision and mission of your business?
Taryn: We felt that if we could wake up on most days and feel like we’ve empowered organizations to actually thrive in this rapidly changing world. Disruption is here to stay, it’s not, it’s just a constant. Then I feel that Reinvent CoLab has actually done something meaningful. Because it just empowers organizations to be ready for any unknown that comes their way.
Claire: What I’ve realized is you can have brilliant plans and brilliant strategies. And if you don’t take your people with you, you’re not going to be successful. Taryn, an industrial psychologist, thinks there’s that shared experience of needing to get people on board.
And the collaboration and the creating spaces of connection – creating spaces where every voice at the table has an opportunity to contribute and be heard has really impacted the way that we show up and work with our clients.
Where we create spaces where everybody contributes and people are smarter together and come up with solutions that everybody buys into. Because that’s where the magic happens and that’s where people really get fabulous outcomes.
Tell me more about reinvention talk and how will it benefits your clients?
Taryn: We talk about reinvention talks but what we see them as is really interactive sessions. You know there’s nothing worse than sitting and doing a death by powerpoint which you know so often happens you have you know the expert that stands up and goes through a whole bunch of slides.
But what we try and do is make it really practical around people understanding that they in fact can build the competencies to cope with constant disruption. And through that, we show them an assessment around learning strategies around how to anticipate change, design for change and implement for change.
And we’d like to think that at the end of it, once people realize that actually how people respond to what they can control and influence. They ultimately leave feeling really inspired. Hopefully creating a bit of a spark of a new idea that they want to try and tackle. And more importantly, that it becomes something quite actionable to do. As opposed to what was lovely in theory, but got no idea how to go home now and apply this. So it’s like an interesting hour of my time and put it on the top shelf and never revisit it.
Claire: I think what we want is people and our workshops or talks or designs that people recognize that they’re not the only ones who are experiencing a lot of change. That most people are feeling quite overwhelmed by it at the moment. And if they can get some tools and skills in the time that we spend together to deal with that change more effectively. Then it’s a great outcome.
And also when we do our talks, we always wear lab coats. We’ve got white lab coats that we wear to try and encourage people to be curious and to adopt a scientific mindset. Where you say things are changing so fast, let’s get curious about what’s going to work. Let’s run experiments in our businesses, let’s do trials of things.
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We don’t have to see the future clearly in order to take action and to do something. And so a lot of the time that kind of idea in a lab situation, there’s some things you can control. You can have your safety goggles and some structure in place, but you’re also testing hypotheses to see what works.
I think that that’s quite fun. And a lot of our clients are excited by the lab coat idea. And I mean, we had a client last week who said to us, he’s gonna buy lab coats when he works with people to try and encourage them just to be curious. I think that for us, that’s the joy of the work that we do because we allow people to go away as Taryn said, with that sense of awareness of what they can control and where they have to embrace the unknown.
Assume that a Nigerian entrepreneur decide to consult people to help them navigate the current economic situation in Nigeria. How would Reinvent CoLab help them navigate this situation?
Taryn: It’s a great question because Claire and I actually did a workshop last week. Where we were talking to mentors who have got young mentees who are all in the entrepreneurial space within the South African context. And it was quite interesting. The conversation first that we had was around talks of helping them understand that there are three kinds of buckets of competencies. Anticipating change. Designing for change. And implementing for change.
And I think it’s a great exercise to do for any entrepreneur. Because I think it’s a case of saying; am I actually scouting the horizon around things that are coming that I might not necessarily be aware of if I don’t create the time to pause and look around me?
Am I actually doing enough because as we know, entrepreneurs typically run straight to implementation. I’ve got a great idea. Let’s quickly go and implement. And at some point, they hopefully are able to build an organization where they have to take a team along with them.
That’s where they often are at risk because they aren’t great at designing for change. And we’re not saying designing as in creative work. We’re talking about actually taking their teams on the journey with them. And so that’s often where we see entrepreneurs failing to scale because they’re not actually able to have that conversation to actually move them along. So I think that is something that any entrepreneur ultimately can learn.
Claire: We’ve got an assessment that people can do to actually see where they score on the anticipate design and implement. To see how well or where their strengths lie, and to give them some ideas of how they can develop those competencies if they’re lacking them. And as for working with people, we do a lot of our work online.
We’ve facilitated workshops online, I think from our perspective, it’s relatively easy to work with people from anywhere. And people can reach out to us either through LinkedIn, so the Reinvent CoLab has a LinkedIn page. I think that’s how you came across us or to our personal profiles, if they’re interested in learning more.
Have you raised funds before for your business? And if you have, how do you raise funds for your business?
Taryn: I actually started off by reaching out to some key people in my network to say, this is an idea. This is what we want to do. And would you be open to potentially funding? And I think in truth, the first question that most funders want to know is that, do you have a long list of clients all lined up and ready to go? So how quickly am I going to see my return on investment?
And I think in a way some of the the no’s that you get along the way kind of just spur you to want to do it even more. Because now you go, okay, well, you’ve said no, but let me show you that I can still make a go of it. So I think certainly at the beginning, it’s been around personal savings.
And I think that having a very deep belief and trust that what you do is going to actually materialize into something great. I think by having that positive attitude, I do believe that you kind of attract that positivity to you. And we’ve been very fortunate to have, you know, kind of been able to get going with a reasonably small base of personal savings having to be used.
Claire: I think we were quite fortunate. Well, it makes it slightly difficult from a scalability perspective. But we’re fortunate in that we sell time. We haven’t had the challenge that a lot of entrepreneurs would have in terms of being able to buy products that we’re selling to people to manufacture products.
I think from our perspective and our kind of business. It’s time-based and consulting, the startup costs are that much lower. The one thing I would say is that there’s a potential for women entrepreneurs. But Lionesses of Africa does amazing work in trying to cultivate African women-owned businesses. And they’re quite effective actually, I think, in also trying to help women access funding. So that is one of the options.
The Lioness network is a fabulous network. We’ve written an article for them and been to a number of their online meetings and things. So they’re a great resource for entrepreneurs in Africa, specifically women.
What are the challenges that you are facing in your business and how did you overcome them?
Taryn: I think it’s a great question. And I do wish that at some point we don’t have those types of challenges, that it just kind of hey presto, everything works. I think like the example you gave, market traction is always your initial challenge. Because I think certainly in our space, even the word reinvention, people like I don’t know what that is and what does that actually mean?
So there’s certainly a longer timeframe that it takes to actually explain to people what it is and why it’s so important and why they need it. But I think we’ve been fortunate in the sense that we’ve tried to address those types of challenges by partnering quite strategically with NGOs who themselves need the kind of support that Claire and I are able to give around thinking about how they rethink their own environments.
And we’ve used that as an opportunity to test our offerings, to kind of fine tune how we run workshops, how we give talks and the likes. That has given us the opportunity to also market the efforts that we have done with some of those NGOs.
And I think just one step further is that both of us are qualified reinvention practitioners and that actually connects us to a global team of practitioners. What’s been amazing is that there’s ongoing learning that we get from that global network of people who are doing reinvention work in very different industries, perhaps to what we’re playing in or very different markets to what we’re playing in.
We take those learnings to apply to the clients we find here. I think quite nimble and agile and challenge us both to think differently and to ensure that we’re learning on an ongoing basis.
Claire: I’d also add that I think and I think this perhaps helps like the woman graphic designer in Zim. We need to leverage our networks. You know, so Taryn and I spent years in the corporate world before we went out by ourselves. But it’s saying who do I know in her case who might want some graphic design work done and start small?
Contact the people who you’ve worked with before or people who you might know personally if you’re really at the start of your career. See what they’re willing to pay. And I think people always need to pay something for your services. I think that it’s really important to get into the habit of not undervaluing yourself. But leverage your network and then use social networks, whether that’s LinkedIn, or Instagram or whatever.
I think for a lot of people, this is the difficulty, and you need to showcase what you can do. So nobody’s going to hear about you if you’re not telling them. Go on to social media and showcase your work showcase, tell people what you’re doing and how you can solve their problems. Because nobody’s going to hear about you. I think that this is the really important thing of becoming your own ambassador and spending time and effort on marketing.
How do people attract and retain your clients? And do you people consult for all niches or you people have a target niche or industry?
Taryn: I don’t think we’ve perhaps made ourselves a niche in terms of which industries we would work for. Because reinvention applies to everyone. So there’s not a limitation in terms of which industries. But I think to what Claire was saying earlier on is that both of us, have had quite successful track records in the different companies we’ve worked with.
Definitely the starting point was to go back to our networks to say, you know, by the way, this is what we’re doing. These are the skills we offer. Is there an opportunity, let’s just go and have exploratory chats. And I think what we’ve learned is that when someone says no, it doesn’t mean no, that’s it. Never go back. You still carry on building those relationships because no just means no, not now.
We’ve been in situations where we have put forward proposals that the client is going, absolutely, this is what we need, but it’s just not now. There’s a lot of things that they’ve got on the go that have to happen first. And so we continue to then go back and go, when are you ready, anything that needs to be refined. But we certainly try and ensure that we don’t go into any briefing session, if I can say it like that, with a cookie cutter, predetermined idea of what needs to happen.
We go in with a genuine curiosity to say, let’s understand what are the symptoms. But then more importantly, how can we help you address the root cause? Because that’s actually how we shift things in a more sustainable manner that I’d like to think is why we then get called back to say, geez, that was really impactful. Can you now do the next thing and the next thing? So it just all builds on from that.
Claire: I think it’s about developing those relationships. So as Taryn says, particularly in consulting, it can take a long time before an initial conversation or a lead translates into business. But I think for any entrepreneur, you’ve got to continually be talking about what you do and cultivating relationships with people.
And you’ve got to find ways to stay front of mind. Because people might not want to do it today or have the budget today. But when they do have the budget or when they do have the challenge. You want to be the people that they think about and come to. So I think that being in it for the long game is a really important thing. And I think the other thing is, what do you leave people with?
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So from our perspective, as Taryn said, it’s the really bespoke solutions that we craft for our clients. And we’re agile in the way that we deliver it. As we’re in a room, if we feel like we can see we need to go in a different direction and adjust our approach to get the outcome the client wants, we’re going to do that. And even in the conversations we have with clients, our approach is very strength-based.
As Taryn said earlier, using appreciative inquiry as the foundation, which means that the energy that we create and the ideas that we spark for our clients, the questions that we ask, get people excited. And that makes them want to work with us because we don’t spend time focusing on what’s wrong.
We lack energy to be spent in creating solutions about what great looks like. I think when you leave people with a feel-good. They’re going to be much more likely to phone you back again as well. And really want to build on the ideas and the work that you do.
How do you market your business outside social media?
Taryn: We look for all opportunities. For example, we’re speaking at a conference in about two weeks’ time. Obviously, there’s marketing that gets done through the conference from that perspective.
Again, some of the charity work that we’ve done, they are obviously also. Then marketing it to their client base and also some of those people in those charities who are giving up their time working corporates themselves.
So then those corporates then become familiar with the work that you’ve done. Because of what you’ve been exposed to through the charity work that you do. Yes, we’ve made use of LinkedIn to help market us and even working with people like yourself, Today Africa.
How do we find people who are thinking about the world differently? How do you partner then with people who see the world differently like you do? So it’s about finding, I want to say, saying yes to everything and then working out better what are the things you should say no to.
Can you walk me through your process of developing and delivering your services to your clients?
Taryn: I think we were mentioning earlier on, when we start the conversation, it’s typically more the beginning around educating people around what is, in fact, reinvention. It’s a far more positive rebranding of what change management is ultimately about. We do spend some time engaging people around thinking differently around change and how to approach it. So there’s always that piece.
But then more importantly we sit and we genuinely listen and we dig deep. Sometimes it takes more than one conversation to understand what it is that the potential client would like to solve for. And actually, you know, what is the first step and what is the manageable chunk? And then how do we then progress it going forward? So there’s no one size fits all. It’s very dependent on the situation that we find ourselves in.
Claire: I think the big thing is curiosity. I think that we’re never the experts in our clients’ environment and it doesn’t matter what that environment is. It doesn’t matter what the business is doing. Or whether we’ve got years and years of experience in that industry or whether it’s an industry that’s new to us. The reality is that the client is always the expert in their environment.
Our job is to ask the right questions, to really uncover what they feel they need, and to sense-check whether their feelings about what solutions they need are what everybody else in the organization thinks, and for us to craft solutions based on that.
So it’s a lot of curiosity, a lot of questions, a lot of uncovering, and whenever we put a proposal to a client, we usually do it in kind of blocks of work. And we always say that this is block one, which is quite clearly crafted. This is where we think block two will go and how we want to design it. But clarifying block two will be dependent on the outcomes of block one. So it’s very collaborative.
And although with our expertise, we’re very clear on what solutions people need. We need to be able to adjust if the situation requires it. As we said at the beginning, context changed dramatically. And so our commitment is working with those clients on an ongoing basis to make sure we meet them where they are.
How do you balance the demand of running a business with your personal life?
Claire: I think it’s the challenge that every entrepreneur has ever faced. I mean, not only entrepreneurs, I think it happens for people who work in corporate as well. Look, I think it is challenging, and I think it’s about discipline. It’s about recognizing what’s important to you and being intentional about what you gift your time to.
For me, part of the joy of being an entrepreneur is that you’re able to choose how you allocate time. So on our emails, we both have a little line at the bottom of our email that says; “my working hours might not be your working hours, please reply to this email when it suits you.” We’re very aware of the fact that as entrepreneurs, we often do work at night or early in the morning.
My habit is to be at my desk at about six in the morning and I get work done. Then I go for a run usually at eight or nine o’clock which is much later than most people. But it’s warmer and Joburg’s been freezing. It means that I’ve built that flexibility that says I can collect my children from school.
But does mean I might choose to work after they go to bed at night. I think that’s the joy of being an entrepreneur, but we have to say, each of us, what are my priorities and how do I manage my schedule?
So that my schedule reflects those priorities. Because there’s no point in having the stress of being an entrepreneur and that hustle and the uncertainty of your cash flow if you’re not leveraging the upside of that as well. And I think the upside is the work-life balance that you can have if you choose to prioritize it.
Taryn: I laugh at myself because I do time management to a point where I even schedule my children into my schedule. Because otherwise, like, you know, things just blend. But I think it’s also just knowing when to actually say to the network that’s around you to say, I’m actually going through a really busy time at the moment.
And it does mean I’m going to have to work through weekends. But this is when it’s going to come to an end. So if it’s constant, it’s a problem. But if you can actually demonstrate that it’s just a period at a time, a sprint at a time. Then there’s normally more understanding than if they just feel like they’re being neglected.
What are your future plans and aspirations for the company?
Taryn: I think like any entrepreneur. We all want to expand our footprints and I think deepen our expertise and our practice. And to continue empowering more organizations to thrive in this ever changing landscape.
For us, it would be enhancing the well knownness. If I can say it like that, of reinvention and to be part of the kind of leadership team that actually spearheads reinvention across Africa and broader.
Because I really do think that it’s got an incredibly transformative impact. And I think that if we get to a point where our clients are saying that reinvention is part of business as usual activity. That would be an enormous success for us.
What advice would you give to someone out there who wants to start their business, more especially in your industry?
Claire: The first thing is to know what you bring to the table. You’ve got to be clear on what you’re offering. And you’ve got to be confident in the way that you sell it to people. I think you’ve got to have an abundance of persistence and perseverance.
So you’ve got to be passionate about the value that you add, because it is going to be a hassle. It is going to be hard at times. But if you cultivate a radical growth mindset, and if you have a passion for ongoing learning and development. And if you’re clear on the value that you can add to people. I think that all stands you in really good stead.
Taryn: You need to make sure you have a strong network. When it comes to anything in professional services, knowing who your network is and who you could approach. You just need one person to say yes, and then everything will just kind of snowball from there. So I think that’s just really quite key.
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