Lisa Anderson, president of LMA Consulting Group, Inc., Claremont, CA, and co-executive director of SAC and her partner Linda Popky, president of Leverage2Market Associates discuss female business partnerships and why they believe their partnership works so well.
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We talked in last week’s blog about the challenges and successes of a female business partnership through the lens of Betsy Polk and Maggie Ellis Chotas, business partners and co-presidents of Mulberry Partners. We know the subject well from our own partnership in writing together for more than 30 years, far longer than many marriages. But we wanted to hear how other women achieved work nirvana, so here are two other teams that show how to manage the formula well.
Co-Executive Directors Linda Popky and Lisa Anderson
Linda Popky, a strategic marketing expert with her own business, Leverage2Market Associates, and the author of Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters, and Lisa Anderson, a globally-renowned supply chain expert and the owner of LMA Consulting, have been co-executive directors of the Society for the Advancement of Consulting (SAC), an LLC, since buying it more than a year ago. SAC focuses on offering boutique consultants a community to share ideas, best practices and to participate in online and in-person events.
When the two women took over the 15-year old organization, it was in maintenance mode, says Popky. Before purchasing the LLC, there were limited programs offered and member interactions were all handled manually–resulting in low engagement and high member attrition, she says. “We scrapped the old web site, introduced new web and in-person programs, streamlined the membership process, and refocused our marketing. As a result, we’ve been able to grow membership fivefold to nearly 200 members in 13 countries in less than 12 months–and we think we’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s possible. We’ve done all this, even though we live in opposite ends of California (Linda is in Silicon Valley and Lisa is in Claremont) and work remotely almost all of the time,” Popky said. Since each woman has her own business, some months they devote 110 percent to SAC if there’s an event or program taking place and other months, they might work 25 percent of the time on SAC.
They believe their partnership works so well because:
- We have different areas of expertise that complement each other nicely;
- We both respect each other, understand the other’s working style, and are careful to work out any disagreements in private, not in public;
- We have a very clear understanding of what our goals are, and we’re in agreement about how we will go about achieving them;
- We have very similar decision-making styles. We raise an issue, quickly review the options available, make a decision, then move forward. We don’t ruminate on things or worry about what would have happened if we’d taken a different path;
- We really do see this as a partnership, not a competition. We succeed or fail together, and we’ve chosen to succeed.
Published in Life Lessons at 50 Plus on April 12, 2019