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Excerpt
Sean:
Why The Construction Coach? How did you come upon that title?
Elinor:
That was a universal download, long story, short. But for the podcast – when I was navigating the start of my career, I felt lost and overwhelmed and generally confused at the magnitude of the industry. In Australia, there are many players, there are many different tiers of organizations. There are many different types of projects that you can have exposure to.
And within all that. There are just so many people and personalities and people doing so many different things and that all felt, as I said, confusing. So I was navigating my career, but I was still a person who was perceived as successful, but I didn’t feel that. Of course,
that develops. And when I graduated from my master’s degree at Melbourne university, because apparently not there, but here you study construction. Not that you needed, agreed to achieve massive career success in any industry, especially not construction. I started tutoring because I always need more to my life. I love doing more and I fundamentally love mentoring.
So I said, look, I have a surplus of time. I finished my hectic degree. I’m going to go to tutor. And I did that for two years, but the conversation we’ve made really turned from the technical into the mentoring. And I would find that people would always come to me. Elinor, how do I build my career in construction? I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to do it. How did you do it? What is this? What is that? And I’m sure you’ve had it before. You should always build a business around what people come to you for.
And that’s exactly what I did. So I got to a point in my tutoring, it was just not feasible to be doing one-on-one anymore. It was time-consuming. It’s not a scalable model. It wasn’t working.
So I asked the universe a better question. How can I reach more people? And that was in February 2019. And in April 2019, we had time off from work.
I need a lot of space to think. I’m a thought leader and thinking is the fundamental practice of what I do. And we were away from work. I had time and I just got a universal download, the Construction Coach. I was up till 5:00 AM that morning, filling an old book with ideas, registering an ABN – Australian business number and filling a notebook with ideas, and designing a website.
Just figuring out how to a website. I had no idea. A month later I launched, but it was only a blog because you think small, what will people think, what will society think? I don’t know if this is going to work so on, so forth, you know, the negative conversation with yourself, a year and a half later, it’s turned into a business that is being featured on Yahoo finance.
I released a book on Friday as well. I have a podcast. I run masterminds and multilevel mentoring within the construction industry, as well as full-day workshops, events, and whatnot. It has just organically grown quite quickly because what I found is that I’ve hit on a niche. Not in the marketplace, but in the industry, because there is nothing like what I do in terms of career development specific for the construction industry.
But not just career development because 70 to 80% of people in the world have average careers. There’s nothing average about what I do and what I want for my community. This is about building exceptional careers, where anything is possible.
