I want to share with you how to go from intern to the president of a company in less than five years. My name is Natalie Dawson, and I am, in fact, the president of a company that did over $125 million in revenue last year, has over 220 employees in the parent company and hundreds of employees across our subsidiaries.
And over my career, I have figured out how to invest in myself and develop myself in order to be ready for opportunities as they come and not just be ready for them know how to spot and create them. So I want to share with you what I would do if I could do it all over again, so that you can be successful in a shorter amount of time than I've been able to be successful. So let's dive in. The first thing that you want to do
is take full accountability. You cannot blame anybody else for what you don't know, what you don't have, how you respond to things, the situation that you're in, anything that goes wrong. Take full accountability, even if it's mostly somebody else's fault. What could you have done differently? How could you have foreseen the opportunity differently? How could you have looked at the problem differently? People talk about accountability as if like, oh, I'm just going to take accountability. Taking
full accountability is entirely different than just assuming accountability. A good example of this is I had a team member very recently who said, oh, I wasn't able to hit my end of year metrics because I was given a bad set of clients. It wasn't the ideal list. I had to make do with what I was responsible for. And so that's why I didn't hit my targets. Okay, hold the phone. If this person was taking full accountability, shouldn't they controlled what clients got to them? Couldn't they
have figured out, oh, man. Well, I don't have any sales skills. And because I don't have any sales skills, I let somebody else pick the clients that were going to be inside my group. And therefore I got sucky clients. So I actually, by taking full accountability, recognize moving forward, I'm going to pick the clients moving forward. I'm going to find those relationships, bring them in, have them understand it from my perspective so that I can get the
right lot of clients see that person. That's the difference in that person's approach. One is taking full accountability for the outcome, and the other is saying, oh, well, I got handed this and I couldn't do anything with it because this is what I was handed. You don't allow
somebody else's decisions, somebody else's outcomes, to impact yours. If you're taking true accountability for a situation, as you're figuring out how to take accountability, what you will find is there are a lot of things that you don't know. If you are really honest with yourself, you might not know how to sell. You might not know how to market. You might not know how to interview people, how to
read financials. There's just a whole variety of things moving from intern to president that you are not going to know. And instead of having the urge to shy away, the urge to think, oh, somebody else knows better or worse yet, the thought that I'm not smart enough to figure this out. As soon as any of that happens, you just have to nip that in the bud. You can figure it out. The things that you don't know only holds you back
to the extent that you don't know them. So why not take the approach of I'm going to learn these things, I'm going to figure these things out. I'm going to take it as my responsibility to identify what I don't know and figure out those things. Now, once you take on this new mindset of I don't know what I don't know, but I'm going to figure it out as I go. My little tip on this is prioritize the things that make money that is so important. Prioritize the
things that make money. You becoming the best at organizing something is going to pay you less than you figuring out how to sell something, or how to get attention, and how to promote and create awareness around a product or service. So you have to think strategically as you move along in steps of your career, like what is
the most valuable use of my time? Project management. Although you can make a great living in project management, you are not going to make the same as somebody in head of sales or head of marketing or head of product as you are as a project manager. And so if you're really keen on making money, follow the money, solve problems and gain skills. Identify what you don't know. That's in relation to money. Not just organizing or structuring
or creating processes for. Things, those things you can make good money in. But if you're really looking for how do I make the greatest jump in my income? How do I make the greatest jump in my responsibility? At some point, those things tap out because your ability to find money, make money, attract money into an organization are the skill sets that pay most and are with the responsibilities of the highest level of an organization are responsible for.
So why not just choose to learn those skills instead of prioritizing the others as you realize that you don't know everything? I know it's hard to admit you don't know everything. I love to think I know everything, especially in my early 20s. I just thought I had all of these courses under my belt and I was gonna leave college. I didn't finish college. I'm one semester, sure, but I was going to be one semester short of college and join my corporate career. And I just had
everything figured out. And I had studied a handful of books but had no real experience. And it was a huge wake up call around all the things that I didn't know. I'll never forget being in the office with somebody that I respected so much. I watched this woman as the CTO of our company, just like kick ass in meetings, and she was so efficient and effective, and she was just like, she figured it all out. She
was my idol. She was my mentor, and she was teaching me about project management, like the basics of project management. As I ran into her in the hallway and she spent 15 minutes talking me through how to look at statuses and how to proactively measure and judge if a project is going to be off track, or if it's going to hit its timeline and milestones and all of
this stuff. As she was saying, things like milestones, KPIs, tracking, reporting, like, I had a basic definition of these things, but I didn't have a full understanding of how I was going to roll out a project and actually utilize all of those components. So what I did was I took courses and I read books, and you're going to have to do this too as soon as you figure out what you don't know, the first thing that you do, instead of being a victim of, I don't know how to
do this, look it up on YouTube. Watch some videos about how to figure these things out. You have to take the mindset that you can learn anything. And as you identify these things by books, by courses, don't spend money on stupid stuff. I made this mistake. I spent my money the very first time that I had like a real paycheck. I thought I was like living large. I was 20 years old. I had just gotten my first big paycheck. And what did I do? I went to the Louis Vuitton store and I bought a duffle
bag for travel. Ridiculous. Now, luckily, I had enough income at the time to not have to sacrifice buying the bag with courses and self-development, but I should have been spending so much more money on courses and self-development and no money, and no time and no energy on a dumb bag. I would never recommend somebody to do that today, go all in on the courses and oftentimes they don't have to be that expensive. You can research things on YouTube.
You can buy really basic books. One of my favorite series of books is the For Dummies books. I've at least read 20 for dummies books. Accounting for dummies. Finance for dummies. Marketing for dummies. Taxes for dummies. Because I want to learn these things and you have to recognize that you need to learn things. That's what you're doing right now. You're watching YouTube videos. So you've already you're
already way ahead of where I was. But you have to learn these things and add these skill sets in order for you to be more valuable. One hack that I used to impress people early on, and still serves me today, is as soon as I was done with a meeting, I would take notes on that meeting and I would send a recap as quickly as possible. I didn't care what the meeting was. It could be an onboarding training. It could be an orientation, it could be
an actual meeting that required notes. And I wasn't the person responsible, but I still did that anyway, because prompt follow up impresses people. Most people do not follow up. Most people receive things and sit in meetings and our participants, but they don't actually show up and follow up afterwards. And so you don't know what they took away from
the meeting. You don't know what their thoughts were. I was amazing at always taking notes, taking those opportunities to learn, but more importantly, setting the expectation with everybody around me that I'm on it. Because I was the first to follow up. I had a two hour follow up rule. As soon as the meeting was over. Within two hours I was responding with, this is everything that happened. These are the questions. This is what I took away. These are the next steps. Am I on track with this?
And that really impressed people because it gave transparency into what I was thinking, what I took away, and if I was wrong, I was willing to be wrong so that somebody could correct me and give me actual feedback.
My notes, strategy and that follow up strategy really served me when it came to my mentors, because even that conversation I was mentioning earlier with the CTO, as soon as she spent that 15 minutes with me telling me about project management, I followed up with her instantly saying, hey, this is what I took away. Hey, this is what I learned is this is this the right direction that
I'm going down? Because when you have mentors and you look at people in an organization, you look at people around you that you want to spend time with, the only way that they know that their time is being spent well with you is through your implementation. So how can you take massive action? But first you have to recap it right? Like first recap and then take massive action to be able to demonstrate to them that the
time that they spent with you actually produced something. That's what every mentor wants out of somebody that they're mentoring, to not just have it go in one ear and out the other, it actually becomes fruitful. And so not only what I take those notes as soon as that meeting was happening or as soon as that feedback was given.
But I'd remind myself every month, hey, I should give progress on these initiatives, and that would hold me accountable to actually ensuring that I was following up on the things that they were telling me to do, not just taking it for, oh, I'm getting mentored and not doing anything with what they actually told me to do. Speaking of mentors, my husband is my greatest mentor. I've had the unique opportunity to work with my husband for over
a decade, and he wrote this book. It's called nine Figure Mindset How to Go from zero to Over $100 million in Net Worth. And this book is filled with his life lessons and experiences of what he had to do to go from having nothing in his bank account to having over $100 million net worth. This would be an excellent example of a book that you should read on your path. And if you're really following my advice, maybe even write a summary email and you shoot it
to info at Carton ventures.com. Because I have a feeling that if you do a really great job summarizing it, it will get to my husband and he'll probably give you some feedback because you did your part, and actually reading and taking notes on something that was important to him. Oh.