Today we’d like to introduce you to Andora Hinton.
Hi Andora; so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, how can you bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Within six years, I had just about every life-changing event happen. I was married in 2014, was laid off from my job in 2015, started a business in 2015, separated from my husband in 2016, moved to North Carolina in 2017, remarried, and became a bonus mom in 2020. Those experiences were mixed with loss and much gain as I began learning the new person I was to be as a divorcee, an entrepreneur, a North Carolinian, a new wife, and a mom. Every one of these events taught me valuable lessons I’ve learned to glean as I journeyed through my new entrepreneurial world.
I am an accidental entrepreneur. Becoming an entrepreneur was never a goal for me. When I started my business, I knew nothing about running a business. Still, my background in sales from working at a large newspaper company for 15 years, coupled with my background in learning and development, helped launch me into an unknown world that would be the most extraordinary experience of my life. The major changes in my life and stepping into this entrepreneurship world allowed me to see life differently. It allowed me to challenge my past thoughts and develop new thoughts based on the experiences I encountered. It allowed me to be open to new people and experiences that have stretched me in unimaginable ways.
We cannot foretell the future, and I am so thankful for that; however, I didn’t realize until early in my entrepreneurial career how my past work experiences would shape me into the business owner, I am today. When I worked in the corporate space, I traveled for several years for my job. That travel allowed me to travel to many places around the country, but it also allowed me to meet so many different people. When I started my business, I worked as a contract facilitator for a training company I had known for years. I also had a mentor who helped me get started by allowing me to license content from him – he, too, had a large training company. These relationships I had formed in my past were the ones that helped to propel me into my unexpected future. Nine months after starting my business, I got my first client, who, 8 years later, is still a client today. When I started my business, one of the first things I did was let my network of people know what I was doing. Many of those people I used to work with had moved on to other companies, and when I shared about my new adventure, many of those people became my clients and my advocates as they began to refer me to their friends and colleagues. I am so grateful to those who knew my abilities, believed in me, and trusted me enough to know I would serve them well.
There are two great lessons from all of my challenges that I live by daily.
- Recognizing how critical it is to surround myself with people who are more intelligent and wiser than me and love what they do. Putting aside my belief that I have to do everything and be the person at the forefront all the time has allowed me to grow my business personally and professionally.
- One of my core values is impact, and no matter who I am working with, no matter how large or small the company is, and no matter the level of employee, my focus is always on impact. That is what I did in my corporate days, possibly not as aware as I am today, and that is what I do today—for me, having an impact as my driver has helped me throughout my entire career and has helped me to build a growing and thriving business that will continue to be sustained by the support and trust of others. I am better today because of the people who have supported me along the way and the people I surround myself with daily.
Let’s dig deeper into the story – has it been an easy path, and if not, what challenges have you overcome?
It has been much smoother than I imagined; however, my biggest struggles were marketing and branding. When I started the business, I had a different company name.
Two things happened:
1) I didn’t know the business’s identity and therefore didn’t know my identity as a business owner.
2) People needed to learn how to say the name, so it was called so many different things with no consistency.
3) My business name was yet to be discovered. I was known, so from a business perspective, I was the business.
Even without much guidance, I knew I needed an identity as a business owner. I needed people to be able to understand how to say the name of the company. In the way I wanted to grow, I needed people to know the company, not just me. In 2020, I began the journey of changing the company’s name, branding, and logo. It was one of the most challenging but most rewarding things I did in this business. I hired someone to support me with a marketing strategy and help me with a logo and new website design. Coming up with a name and logo took a lot of work. I hired someone to help me, and unfortunately, we could not get there. We worked collaboratively on both, and it just didn’t work out. We eventually parted ways, and I learned a hard lesson about partnering with the right people with the right skills to get you to the right place. I also knew how important it was to understand where I was trying to go on my journey. The person I hired couldn’t get there, but I, at the time, also could not help this person get there either. I took full responsibility for this failure and quickly moved on – because in business, that’s what I’ve learned, we have to do.
I am thankful to the CEO of the company who created our logo. When I asked him to help me develop a name for the company, he said, “Stop trying to make your company fit into what you do; think about who you are and then go from there.” That was the best advice I could have ever been given. And so, after many souls searching and thinking about who I was, who I wanted to be as a business owner, and how I wanted people to feel by working with us, Willow North Growth Partners was born. Today, people still know me, but because of all the branding and marketing, we do, they mostly know Willow North, and even though it was one of my greatest struggles, it was so worth it.
As you know, we’re big fans of Willow North Growth Partners. What can you tell our readers who might need to be more familiar with the brand?
We are a boutique consulting firm focused on Leadership Development and Sales Training & Development. We specialize in Communication & Collaboration, and when potential clients reach out to us, it’s in one of those areas or both where they are most interested. Our goal is to help people transform their professional and personal lives in a way that would make a monumental difference in their holistic work. We are most proud that our virtual and in-person workshops are experiences. We want people to walk away feeling positive about their introspective work and focus on starting the process of making sustainable changes tomorrow!
Our services are designed to help people think about how to change their behaviors and how to think differently about how they engage and communicate at work. Our team has several certifications that assist us in helping to support clients and our participants, some of those are lead now!, Ken Blanchard Channel Partner, Tilt Assessment, DiSC Assessment, Five Behaviors of a Team, Emotional Intelligence, SHRM Recertification Provide & InsideOut Coaching.
What changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
As companies continue to have their employees work remotely and teams continue to have communication challenges, we will continue working in virtual and in-person spaces. Leadership development will change to focus more on human skills like empathy and compassion. How people learn will change, and development will become even more critical in the upcoming years. I’m excited to see where the future takes us and how we can support people in different ways. We thrive on being innovative. As the world changes, so will we!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.willownorth.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/willownorthgrowthpartners/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WilllowNorth
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/willownorth/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChy6G0i5FzqPxD9ybFgd4Cg
