Amy Feind Reeves is the Founder and CEO of JobCoachAmy, where she leverages her 25+ years of experience as an executive and hiring manager to help professionals at all levels of their careers find and keep jobs that make them happy. Her corporate consulting practice focuses on career coaching for Millennials and Generation Z, as well as consulting on practical approaches to implementing improved Millennial and Generation Z management practices.
As a highly sought-after expert, speaker, and career coach, Amy works globally with clients across a wide variety of industries including finance, consulting, media, consumer products, technology, and healthcare. Her functional expertise–gained from nearly two decades of working with companies and organizations to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve processes–is significant across all areas of business operations.
She has been featured in countless media including the Wall Street Journal, BusinessInsider, Yahoo News, Upjourney.com, Hive. com, The Baltimore Sun, Chicago Herald Tribune, Yahoo News, and Job-Hunt. org. As a speaker, Amy has spoken at City Year, Dartmouth Alumni Women’s Leadership Conference, is also a regular speaker for undergraduate and new alumni groups, as well as is a speaker at women’s conferences and Canyon Ranch.
Before focusing full-time on coaching in 2012, Amy held a variety of positions including commercial banker, global management consultant, entrepreneur, corporate executive, and non-profit executive. Her long-held passion for supporting others in their careers comes from the difficult time she had found her way after college and when she needed to change careers after finding herself a single mother. She has become an author to expand her reach and passionate advocacy for people seeking to find their paths to success in the professional world.
College to Career, Explained: Tools, Skills & Confidence for Your Job Search, Amy’s first book, will debut this summer. It provides insightful strategies and common-sense tactics to help job seekers make a smooth transition from college to career. Using a proven methodology and unique insight that only someone who has sat on the other side of the interviewing table for many years can provide, College to Career, Explained is ultimately for the young professional or new grad looking for career guidance, or the more seasoned professional looking for pointers or to brush up on basics.
Committed to helping improve her community, Amy served as a board member of The Philanthropy Connection, a women’s collective giving organization, as well as an organizational development advisor to the founding Board Chair. She established a model for young women executives to become philanthropists which have been replicated in other similar organizations and personally mentored many young women to help them reach their highest potential.
Currently, Amy supports the Anaya Tipnis Foundation in scaling its operations nationwide and developing its career services workshops. The Foundation offers scholarships, mentoring, and support to first-generation college students as well as provides internship and networking opportunities. Amy also serves as a Trustee of The Nature Conservancy of Massachusetts, where she supports staff development and oversees the conservation and preservation of land and water in Massachusetts.
What is JobCoachAmy all about?
My company is about providing people what they need to find and keep jobs that make them happy. Whether you are a new grad, a mid-career professional, or a C-Suite level executive, you can and should find a job that gives you financial and personal satisfaction. I provide the tools, skills, frameworks…whatever you may need depending on the stage of your career.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I had a long and winding career that allowed me to learn about a lot of jobs in a lot of industries. As a banker, global management consultant, entrepreneur, executive, and non-profit executive, I was lucky to always be working in new companies and industries to catalyze revenue growth or cost reduction. Alongside that, however, I had two personal experiences that planted the seeds for wanting to build JobCoachAmy.com.
The first experience was just out of college, when failing to land the Wall Street job I wanted left me miserable, humiliated, and, frankly, flummoxed. I had done everything I was supposed to do up to that point by working hard and being successful in the classroom and out. I spent my first year out of college working as an admin and teaching myself how to interview. The next year, I got the job and really liked it but was also good at it. What was the difference? There were just a lot of things I did not know the year before, and there had been no resources for me.
The second experience came when I unexpectedly became a single mother in the middle of my career. I had always had jobs with heavy travel, and I was the main breadwinner. I needed to find a job where I had to reduce travel but could not reduce my pay. Again, I could not find the resources I would have liked but did find a way to teach myself to find what I needed.
Years later when I had the opportunity to focus on something that I really wanted to do, I chose to start JobCoachAmy because I know the resources I offer are still not available today. There is a lot of free advice, and a lot of good advice from human resource professionals and trained career counselors. What I have to offer, however, is unique as I offer the perspective of a hiring manager and a professional who has been through the process personally.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- The ability to pivot. Certainly, the ability to accept that you are not going to get your value proposition right the first time and pivoting to deliver what the market is asking from you. I see a lot of entrepreneurs sticking to their original plans long past the time it has become clear that the market is not responding. Personally, I moved away from targeting undergrads (“I’ll figure it out myself”) to recent grads (“How did I wind up in a call center and how do I get out?”) as they were far more motivated.
- Shameless self-promotion. I’m working on this one because it really matters. Note that seems to come quite naturally to Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.
- Sacrifice. You are going to be doing a lot of work on all aspects of the business from facilities maintenance (you still have to clean your bathroom even though you are working 18 hours a day), to revenue generation (sometimes you can spend endless money and time trying to convert leads, then run into someone while walking your dog and land a big new client), to cost cutting (almost all entrepreneurs have stories of having to give up cable or dry cleaning or restaurants to keep their doors open)
What are your plans for the future, and how do you plan to grow this company?
I’ve just published my first book College to Career, Explained: Tools Skills & Confidence for your Job Search. It’s a comprehensive guide for anyone looking to identify how they can add value in the workplace through to starting out well in their new job. I hope to reach as many people as possible with my methodology at a lower price point than I have in the past when I’ve only worked with private clients, also by offering supplemental online courses and downloadable products.
Once all of that is up and running, I’ll move on to expanding my product line into other sectors I serve including transitioning professionals and corporations seeking to increase employee retention.
How have the pandemic and Lockdown affected you or your new business?
I certainly was no longer able to see clients live, but I have always had a business with national reach, so it was normal for me to meet with clients by teleconference. I did need to adapt my methodology in several ways. The most obvious was the switch to teaching people how to interview online rather than face-to-face. That required a different kind of training for clients but did not stray too far from the basics. I have been asked a lot about shifts in the market away from hiring overall or hiring in certain segments, but I held firm to the idea that there are always good jobs for good people, and I saw that translate into the jobs my clients were getting.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
I am unique in my market in that I offer the perspective of a hiring manager. I have been a line manager making budget decisions on hires for a lot of years, not an HR business partner consulting on hires or a recruiter seeking the best candidates to present to the decision maker. The distinction is powerful.
Additionally, I have been in the shoes of my clients and can completely relate when they get frustrated or nervous about a particular aspect of the search process.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- I tried and tried to market my services on a lot of different platforms, but in the end, I had to accept the fact that I have a word-of-mouth business and the best marketing tool I had at my disposal was to give short, free talks to potential candidates either one-on-one or in groups. With my book and several new online products coming out, this has started to change. But it is how I had to start to ramp up.
- I also did not realize that the product I put together for new grads was entirely applicable for all professionals at all levels of their careers. Quickly, I realized that I had limited myself to a market that was too small and pivoted to a much broader audience for my expertise.
- Lastly, I would say it was a mistake to not track my time more closely. Because my budget items were mainly time and materials (and very light on materials), I was not initially tracking my margins on clients based on the number of hours I spent with them. I wanted to spend as much time as possible with everyone until they landed a job they wanted. This only worked while my practice was very small; I had to scale back my services as I grew.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Finding clients. Everything was in place. I had built it and I was waiting for them to come. As I said, I needed to pivot away from going to College Career offices and working in partnership with them to meet rising seniors and recent grads. My real market was with grads who were two to three years out and my target audience became parents who wanted their couches back.
Again, my business became largely word of mouth. Thankfully, word of mouth was excellent, so a steady stream of clients was not far behind. I would often get clients in “clusters.” One person would find a job with me, and all their siblings, friends, and neighbors would be calling next. I loved that; I got to know a lot of different friend groups and families that way.
What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
I worked with two partners early on to build an organization that developed CRM processes to complement the major CRM software platforms that were being developed and integrated at the time. This was close to first-generation platforms and long before Salesforce. We had a few good clients and sold the firm while it was still quite small to a larger conglomerate. The challenge was getting our value proposition across and making clear why a software-neutral third party would be the best hire for the role. I’m proud of how far we were able to take it.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
I’m learning how to scale my business using online platforms and downloadable products. It is HUGE for me to be learning this with my partner from Marquet Media. I did not think my business was scalable and I am thrilled to be able to reach a much broader audience at a much more accessible price point.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
I would have started with a wider value proposition to all career professionals, and I would have focused more on using my core consulting skills to offer corporate services to increase employee retention. My hunch is that is going to be a big market now, and I could already have a bigger foothold and track record in it.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
You can’t get away from LinkedIn. It has become the lingua franca of business knowledge. It is one-stop shopping for finding jobs, relevant talent acquisition specialists, potential network contacts, and anything published by someone you are about to interview with. Check it first, no matter what the question is.
- Indeed.com and idealist.com: These are the two best job boards for corporate and non-profit jobs, respectively. There are local and specialized boards that can be better for individual searches, but comprehensively and nationally these are the best for general searching and for setting up alerts with keywords.
- Owler.com: A key part of researching and interviewing, or knowing if you want to interview, at a company is understanding it business, its market, and its competitors. Owler serves this up in common parlance with just the right amount of detail.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Change up where you work. I know people like airplane mode or special software that filters out email, etc. but I still get anxious about what may be coming in. For me, I can work for really long periods at my desk and then get excited to take my laptop to the kitchen (okay, my life is not particularly exciting). Changing the light, the chair, the environment, what you are looking at…. the change serves to make me happier and allows me to focus a little better.
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs?
Thinking in Bets, Annie Dukes would be the book. This is THE book for people who need to bet on the odds. And it’s a great read.
My best podcast is All-In with Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. I learn incalculable amounts from these guys every Saturday, as does every entrepreneur I know. They are fun, and engaging, and present all sides of the political spectrum which is sorely lacking in most of today’s media.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Wow, good question. Well, with that budget I could probably disintermediate SOMETHING. I would spend up to $200 dollars on a MailChimp survey asking people what they would be interested in buying directly in the “farm share” model. Then work with a producer of the most-selected products to get a contract that bypasses traditional distribution channels (on spec). Spend another few hundred dollars on a shoestring marketing campaign (farmer’s markets? Sandwich boards? Inexpensive digital?) to get people to sign up, and hopefully, have about 40 percent left for operations.
I would need to budget out a breakeven point before starting of course to see if this could work and where it would be possible to cut corners. Starting with one product could potentially lead to others. If you know you can’t do anything unless you have $2,000, then you have at least had a budget and proven idea to show an investor.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
The idea that my products and services really make a difference in people’s lives. My business came to be because I wish that I had this resource available to me at two vulnerable points in my life.
What is your favorite quote?
“Just relax,” from my father. He had five daughters and a wife who were all wound tight. He’s gone but I still need this advice. A lot. I think all entrepreneurs do.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
Do your homework. Align your plans and your numbers. Be prepared.
But then be prepared to scrap it all in Week 2. For that reason, don’t spend all your time behind your desk. Talk to people. Take the first step. Don’t think that things will play out the way your numbers, or your assumptions suggest they will. And know that that’s ok.
Who should we interview next and why?
My 18-year-old daughter! She is interested in anything and everything which makes her incredibly interesting. She went through high school during COVID, but if you asked her what she feels she missed as a result, she would probably say that it never occurred to her that she missed anything. Did it require adjustment that was difficult at times? Of course. Did she miss the human interaction? Certainly. But did she do everything she could to make up for it by collaborating with her friends, teams, and colleagues on extra-curricular activities to make sure they had the best experience they could? Absolutely.
What is your definition of success?
Finding the right balance of having enough money to enjoy life, enough time to spend it, and enough friends and family with whom you enjoy spending both. All three of those things come attached to a job you love and sets those things in motion, which is why I love doing what I do.
How do you personally overcome fear?
By remembering that fear is a choice. It can either paralyze you or lead you to action. Being afraid of something is usually, I’ve learned, a good sign that an opportunity is at hand. If you can take action to conquer the fear at hand, it will almost always be rewarding to you.
How can readers get in touch with you?
All my contact information is on www.jobcoachamy.com. I’m also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @jobcoachamyf.
