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Interview: Paul McLoughlin talks to Promise Phelon

January 5, 2009 | Author: Promise Phelon | Filed under: Job Hunting, Layoffs, Moving Up, The Networking Habit

Hear about UpMo.com on the radio!

Paul McLoughlin interviewed UpMo.com CEO Promise Phelon for his show McLoughlin at Work on WebTalkRadio.net. The interview covers a number of topics, including:

  • How UpMo.com works to help people GPS their career
  • Why it’s particularly important to map out your career in today’s economy
  • The two factors that help many professionals succeed
  • Learning how to emulate, not replicate, proven paths of success
  • The new certainty of career uncertainty
  • How habitual networking dramatically increases the odds of success

Here are some highlights from the interview:

Paul McLoughlin: We’re going to be talking about careers with a person who has designed a system to GPS your careers. I’m here in New York with Promise Phelon.

Promise Phelon: Thank you. This is Promise Phelon, founder and CEO of Upwardly Mobile, UpMo.com. We have built a career GPS that allows professionals at various stages of their careers to determine the path of their career … . The unique part of what we’ve done is that we’re helping individuals get to their career destinations by leveraging the lessons learned and decisions made by hundreds of  successful executives, entrepreneurs and folks in the not-for-profit space. So a user would come to Upmo.com, get access to our application and solution, and GPS their career: figure out where they are today and … navigate to that destination with turn-by-turn guidance that we provide.

Paul McLoughlin: The symbol of that GPS … Those are the positioning systems that people have in the front of their car … that help you get around when you’re blind.

Promise Phelon: When you’re lost, and you never want to be lost … we want to keep you on the path that will get you to your ultimate destination … We’ve realized that most professionals at every stage and level get lost — they take a job that was wrong, they get underemployed — and it’s hard to get back.

Paul McLoughlin: It’s great timing for you … There are a lot of lost souls out there, who didn’t anticipate being lost.

Promise Phelon: We never do … I look at a career as the most rapidly appreciating asset (you have). Why wouldn’t you manage that more carefully? Why would you take the risk of going to the next job, and the next job without a clear plan? We’ve reverse-engineered the patterns of successful executives and entrepreneurs, that I or any mid-career person can navigate to.

Paul McLoughlin: Sounds like a Harvard Business School case … I’m going to be devil’s advocate here … We have to be a little bit edgy here, Promise Phelon.

Promise Phelon: (laughing) We are in New York, so you can push back as you like! There’s something tangible about every success … . Yes, there are parts of who you are that I cannot emulate … the situation you grew up in was different than mine, we’re in a different generation … but at the end of the day, what we can do is take the steps and decisions that got you from where you started to where you are today, and overlay that with the educational things you’ve done, the steps of how you’ve networked and built relationships, the quantifiable attributes of who you are, so that they can emulate and replicate those things. The timing is different, your personality’s different, but it’s all about the path and the steps.

Paul McLoughlin: I’d like to reverse-engineer the conversation a bit, how you got to developing this. What is it about what you have done in your career that led you to the career and networking business? Give us a brief on yourself.

Promise Phelon: The last company that I ran, I started in 2002. It was a management consulting company, the Phelon Group, which still exists today. I sold it to a group of partners who worked with the organization. That business was a multi-million dollar management consulting company. Do you know how I did it? It was all networking. It was all building relationships, all about sustaining partnerships that were mutually beneficial.

Paul McLoughlin: And the expertise in this company?

Promise Phelon: The expertise was around helping companies identify and replicate their most profitable customers.

I had the opportunity to work with a lot of executives. The fascination for me was always, “How is this person -  in a tough economic time - successful and the other people aren’t?” … Over those six years, it was both a study of building a successful management consulting firm, but also looking at these executives who had such different outputs and results from their careers. That’s where (UpMo.com) started to form.

Last year, I was sitting on the beach in Cambodia with my husband, and we got into this conversation about “What is the secret?” There isn’t a secret, but there are a couple of factors that I saw over all those years of working with companies.

There were two that were key for me: The individuals that were upwardly mobile … always had an inkling of where they wanted to go and they didn’t spend a lot of time being lost. Secondly, regardless of their style of doing it, they were constantly building and managing a network of relationships … .

Paul McLoughlin: It’s never too late to start this (networking), is it?

Promise Phelon: It’s never too late.

Click here to listen to the full interview.

Note: These interview highlights have been edited for length and readability.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 and is filed under Job Hunting, Layoffs, Moving Up, The Networking Habit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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