Meet Stephanie Judd of Wolf & Heron in Buena Vista

Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephanie Judd.

Stephanie, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My path has been circuitous, but also not all that unexpected in hindsight. I graduated with a Computer Science degree because I was good at it, but it didn’t take long for me to figure out that being an engineer and a developer wasn’t a great fit for me. Then began a long journey of soul searching that took me to several countries on three continents across four different industries (I worked in public health, energy, micro-finance, and in the nonprofit world). I finally went to grad school in Michigan partly because I knew I needed a “comma” in my career so I could reflect and regroup. While there, I finally articulated that my favorite part of every project or experience I’d taken on until that point had been getting others inspired to care about it too.

After graduating with my MBA, I joined a consulting firm that specializes in motivating employees to care about the organizational strategy. I had finally found work that was meaningful to me: I was helping leaders of organizations tell compelling and inspiring stories about their businesses to engage their employees. How cool is that!?

The decision to launch Wolf & Heron came later. The call of the Colorado mountains and sunshine eventually became too strong to ignore. It was time for me to relocate to the geography I had always known would be my home one day. Because of the way the cards fell, I wasn’t able to take my job with me. Around the same time, Kara, who had been a colleague of mine at the same firm and a friend from grad school, was going through her own transition to her place of belonging in upstate New York. We talked to each other as friends and as colleagues as we honed our resumes and began the arduous task of searching for jobs in our new locations. But neither of us could find anything that inspired us the way we wanted to be inspired, nor offer us channels by which we could inspire others.

Our grad program at Michigan hosted an alumni reunion in October of 2016, and they asked for volunteers to provide programming. Kara and I were both unemployed and tired of the job hunt, so we welcomed the distraction and decided to offer up a workshop about how to tell an inspiring story. We knew the content like the backs of our hands because storytelling was foundational to the consulting work we had done. Plus, we had years of facilitation experience and knowledge of behavior change that we’d picked up in grad school to add to our point of view!

We had 25 attendees join us for our first delivery of “Influential Storytelling,” and out of that single event, we were surprised to land several leads to deliver that workshop within their organizations. By December of that year, we decided to go into business together, and we launched Wolf & Heron in January 2017. Our job search was officially over, and happily, today, our “Influential Storytelling” workshop is our most popular leadership development experience. We’ve delivered it to 1000s of participants, and honed it into an interactive learning experience we’re both extremely proud of. We look back, on occasion, at the materials we built for that first workshop years ago, and marvel at how far we’ve come.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No! Of course not! But that’s what makes it exciting. At first, the biggest challenge we had was an intellectual one. Coming from a consulting background, we had a lot of experience in the corporate and professional worlds, but we’d always had the brand and expertise of the firms we represented to back us up in terms of credibility. When we launched Wolf & Heron, our credibility as an organization hadn’t been established yet, and that affected our confidence. Now that we’re a few years in, we’ve landed big-name clients like Delta Air Lines and Facebook and developed a robust program for the University of Michigan, we’re feeling a lot more confident.

Now we’re working on streamlining our services and focusing our efforts on just a few things. When we started, we took whatever work we could get. Now we want to become more refined, so we have to say NO to work that isn’t in our focus areas. That’s extremely hard to do.

I’m so grateful to be anchored by a solid business partnership with Kara Davidson as we work through the challenges that come our way. She’s been my rock through all the ups and downs. We complement each other well, and every day that we have another conversation where she checks me and I check her, I am grateful for the friendship, partnership, and support that she offers. Not only does she make the business better, she makes me better as a human.

Recently we had our annual business retreat and we had a long conversation about how much “hustle” is the right amount to devote to our business. We’re both ready to do what it takes to build a business that succeeds, but we also want to make sure that the business we build supports the life we want and not the other way around. If our business doesn’t afford us the time to be with our families, travel, and do other things in life that give us meaning, then we’re building the wrong business. A few weeks after our retreat, I sent Kara a text lamenting a day of non-productivity (and therefore non-hustle). In classic Kara fashion, she turned that text into a small coaching moment. Did I want to feel shame for being non-productive? Did I want to commiserate? Or was I texting her in the hopes that she might help me find productivity tomorrow? These small interactions are what makes Kara, and our relationship in general, so powerful.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Wolf & Heron – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Wolf & Heron helps build inspired organizations–not just “functioning” organizations, or even “optimized” ones. We want the organizations we work with to become inspired. An inspired organization has three important components: Aligned leaders, motivated employees, and uplifting managers. We help organizations achieve all three of those components by facilitating executive retreats, designing interactive experiences for employees, and delivering professional development workshops that teach the tools and skills of inspiration.

What sets us apart is our approach. Because of what we know about influence and inspiration, everything we do is designed to involve people’s bodies, hearts, and minds in a coherent and comprehensive way. Many executive retreats end up being a series of drawn-out presentations, but we design and facilitate them to be interactive team experiences where everyone is involved in contributing and participating from beginning to end. Not only does that guarantee more alignment, it also increases creativity and builds team connection. When we motivate employees, it’s by designing interactive experiences that involve art and visualization, movement, small-group discussion, games, and other activities. This design principle ensures participants come to their own conclusions about how to think and act, rather than sitting through a presentation from a leader who is telling them how to feel and what to do. For our professional development workshops, they’re also designed to be highly interactive. We put the experience into the hands of the participants, thereby ensuring their engagement and increasing the stickiness of the learning. Our clients often comment on the intentionality of the materials we use in all the experiences we design and facilitate.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
Our challenge for the future is something I’m sure many small businesses–especially service providers–struggle with: how to scale without working ourselves ragged. We can only facilitate so many leadership retreats or deliver our workshops so many times before we run out the clock. We’re currently developing a product we’re calling “Meetings in the Mailbox,” which we’ve designed to serve as fully-formed, dynamic, professional development experiences that can be purchased off the shelf. The topics we have so far include Giving & Receiving Feedback, Organizational Values, and of course, Storytelling, and Influence. Selling something directly from our website, however, requires different skills and a different pipeline than our typical sales process. We’re still learning and feeling our way through that.

Beyond that, we’re hoping to expand our reach into the startup space. Many of our clients are well-established businesses, yet we believe there’s so much potential to disrupt the marketplace if small startup teams are well-aligned and armed with the tools and skills of inspiration early. Mission-driven companies, in particular, have an opportunity to leverage their mission as a source of inspiration, both internally within the organization and externally within their marketplace. We’d love to be a part of what drives their stories forward.