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Serial entrepreneur Hannah Wrixon was already managing demanding dual roles as a busy CEO and mother-of-three – but a decision to ‘make some room for herself in her own life’ and undertake further education proved transformative.
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A drive to know more and understand more has always pushed entrepreneur Hannah Wrixon to greater heights.
“I've always been a curious person. I love learning. I think every day that I'm learning, I'm improving as a person. And I think that if I surround myself with really clever, interesting, and exciting people, then I can grow as a person myself.
“It's almost like something starts in me and that little seed then grows and grows and grows. I'm a big researcher, so if I get the kernel of an idea, I will just go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
“As a child, I was always taking things apart, breaking things. My parents were very unhappy with me!
“I just wanted to know how things worked.”
At the point of returning to education (for a Professional Diploma in Strategic Leadership), Hannah was already in a COO role, and had successfully founded and sold multiple startups. So why opt for a formal qualification?
“Strategy for me is so important in everything I do. A business strategy, to me, is how you launch business, how you scale the business, how you hire your team, how you grow in the market, how you even come up with the idea in the first place.
“And then the leadership piece… I'm just so interested in the theory around leadership and what makes a good leader. I was also curious to know if I fitted into one of those boxes, and I was delighted to find out that I did, that I was almost organically practicing authentic leadership.”
It wasn’t necessarily a case of the time being right. As so many will identify with, there was no ‘good’ window, so Hannah had to make one.
“When I decided to return to study, I had one child that had flown the nest and two very young teenagers. A busy, busy schedule, with lots of running around. My husband works away a lot of the time, so it's down to me – the camogie training and the soccer training and the hockey training and the basketball training and all of that. Feeding them and keeping them alive and homework… a lot of that falls on me.
“So, it was a huge decision to make, to embark on this course of education. But it was really important to me that I did. I felt I had become a little stagnant in my thinking. And it was important for me that I felt that I was doing some personal development.
“The fact that my course was delivered online meant that I could throw dinner in front of the kids, run upstairs, have the first hour, maybe drop someone to training, come back, finish off the hour.
“There was a lot of flexibility around it, and that made it really accessible.”
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Available time wasn’t the only potential barrier to entry. For many people, the thought of further education comes with an element of fear.
For Hannah, that was a ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ moment.
“Our whole family is neurodiverse. We have ADHD and all of my kids are affected in some way or another. So, there's a big Imposter Syndrome that goes along with that and not feeling good enough, not feeling clever enough.
“For me it's really important that I challenge myself all of the time in that. And I think being neurodiverse is a superpower. I think that the ability to think outside the box is so beneficial from a corporate perspective, from a life perspective.
“Everything that we do, if we can come at it from a different angle or we can be the person in the room who offers that different perspective, that's so important.
“You can overcome everything; no obstacle is too big. I'm a big believer that if you know your big, hairy, audacious goal, there are so many different ways to get there. You don't have to go in a straight line.”
Once her decision was made, Hannah found the educational environment she had initially feared to be really focused on real-world application.
“We had amazing lecturers and support staff as part of the course. Not just academically, they were also very well-versed in actual industry experience, which was really important.
“They brought speakers in from industry, they included leaders that we know, and we all looked up to, so it was really immersive.
“I was dreading the ‘academic speak’. And even though I love researching, I was worried that I would spend an awful lot of time looking up things I didn’t know.
“In reality, things were delivered in bite-sized chunks. There was checking-in happening all the time. Had we understood it, could we process it, could we apply it to our real-life situations?
“We spent a lot of time doing assignments that were based on our own work at the time, and I was working full time in a CEO role. So, I was able to look at my team and apply what I was learning as I was going. That was great.”
The experience was so positive, in fact, that Hannah’s further education journey was only getting started.
“I suppose what studying did for me was open up the possibility that I could study more, which was scary and great at the same time.
“I've gone on to do a diploma in corporate governance since. I have years and years of experience, but it puts a qualification around it. So, I can sit on boards now and beneficial to others with those skills. It opened up a pathway for me.”
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Creating pathways for others is another passion that fuels Hannah. Currently mid-launch of her fourth start-up, she is especially focused on supporting women.
“This year we launched Kella Leadership, a network for corporate women.
“An incredible 67% of women in corporate positions would say they feel lonely and unsupported. And that's not good. I'm a big believer in ‘if you can see it, you can be it’. And we need to have more women in these roles, so that other women and girls coming up on their career journey will be able to aspire to these women.
“We're currently at about 30% for the gender balance in C-suite positions. It's not good enough.
“Stats will show that companies who do have higher proportion of women in leadership positions do better. They're more productive, they're more profitable. So, it doesn't make any sense that that's not happening.”
One of the reasons Hannah is so passionate about supporting women in particular, is her experience with mentors to date – on both sides of that relationship.
“I've had amazing mentors in my career and I'm still so close with those women and men who have been my mentors. Now, I’m a lead entrepreneur for the Going for Growth community, which is an amazing community of female entrepreneurs developed by the amazing Paula Fitzsimons. We meet once a month and I have some ace entrepreneurs on my team. I'm also a lead entrepreneur for the Bank for Business Community Banks.
“We all know that the network is the most important part of business in Ireland. It's who you know not what you know, as the old saying goes. So, what we're doing is we’re working through a series of challenges, but also developing a network where these people are supporting each other and supporting other entrepreneurs as part of this community. They're coming out with a ready-made network. It’s so important. And I just love us. I absolutely love us!
“I'm also an EI mentor. I mentor a lot of the entrepreneurs doing the New Frontiers program. And again, I just love it. I feel like I'm making a difference, and all the knowledge that I have gained just from experience and feeling a loss and falling and having to pick myself up and dust myself off and get on with it… that actually is beneficial to other people.”
For anyone considering a return to education, Hannah has some words of wisdom to share.
“It's really hard to put yourself first when there's a million other demands. But what I would say is, it's so important to make some room for yourself in your own life.
“I always think women feel selfish and they feel guilty and all of these horrible feelings that their partners may not necessarily feel in a lot of instances, they don't feel it and they don't understand it.
“So, I think we can learn a lesson from our partners in that, and I think that we should be taking a leaf out of their books.
“I would never begrudge someone who takes time for themselves, because it’s so, so important.”
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