Partner Up! - Julia Langkraehr (Entrepreneur, Coach, Speaker)

Julia Langkraehr is a dynamic entrepreneur, an executive coach, speaker, and facilitator. She’s a veteran of the entrepreneurial roller coaster; after founding her first business in 2001, she built, lost, restarted, and sold it before expanding to Russia and Germany and merging the business with a public listen company. She has founded and built three multi-million pound businesses in three different countries and uses her experience to share the lessons she’s learned with other business leaders and entrepreneurs. In her jam-packed Paper Napkin Wisdom, Julia shares her favorite sound bites and why she feels they’re important. The first sound bite she shares is a quotation from Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Julia has adopted this as a personal philosophy and applies it in both her business and personal life. She finds that it’s driven her to take bigger risks than she normally would have and as a result, she says, she’s gotten to places she didn’t expect. Julia believes that you have to be prepared to end up in places you don’t expect. This is part of the reason behind her next sound bite. She says: “Build your network before you need it.” Julia is a consummate networker; building deep and meaningful relationships with people is highly important to her and it fuels her. She has deliberately created a widespread and diverse network and through it, she constantly tries to help people, connect with them, and support them. She feels that through helping the people in her ‘business network’ she can connect with them as people so that when they do business together, they have a great basis of understanding and maybe even common values. Having a great network is a strong asset because it means that when you need help, you have a lot of resources available to you. This is especially important in regards to her next sound bite: Dream big because sometimes life conspires to help you achieve them. Julia says that it’s important to deliberately imagine what could be. She makes a conscious effort to imagine what she’d like if anything at all were possible. Doing so can lead you to unexpected places. If you have big dreams and a great network, you may find yourself in a position to achieve those dreams or at least in a position to start trying to achieve them. One of the biggest and potentially most important aspects of Julia’s business philosophy is centered on partnership. A lot of people shy away from partnership, but Julia has found great success in embracing partnership. She says that partnerships will grow your business exponentially and taught her a great deal. She’s had four sets of partners and has learned from each of them. There are two important pieces of advice she keeps in mind regarding partnership and they go hand in hand: Treat everyone like a potential partner. You never know who your next partner will be. Julia never knows where her next partnership is going to be or what it’s going to look like. She says that ‘What if’ is an important mindset to be in regarding partnership because that’s how you find unique opportunities to collaborate. Sometimes your next partner is the last person you would have expected, you never know where your next partner is going to come from; if you keep yourself open and try to figure out the upsides and downsides of working with someone, you open yourself up to amazing opportunity. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take and for Julia, people are those shots. She makes a conscious effort to make sure she doesn’t miss any of the people around her, ever. It’s through this open mentality that Julia has built three multi-million pound businesses in three different countries. If you embrace the possibilities of partnership and keep yourself open to the possibilities around you, what might you accomplish? Listen to the conversation with Julia here: