#moderndemocracy

After all of our hard work and research yesterday with Modern Democracy, today was time to wrap things up. We started the morning with a sit down interview with Siobahn, the CEO of Modern Democracy to ask her questions abut her leadership style, techniques, vision, values and goals. It was really interesting to hear about her past experiences and how she has gotten to where she is today. 

There were two main things during that interview that really stood out to me. The first was that Siobhan had a really great team of employees for such a young company, and that was because of her network. Most of the employees Siobhan has today were previous colleagues of hers and she was able to convince them of her vision and bring them on board. Because of this, I heard very little talk of people challenges within her business, but more business problems, such as sales and product development cycles. If you speak with many CEOs, they will speak of people problems and how to motivate their teams and ensure everyone is tracking towards the same goal. Since Siobhan was able to create such a strong guiding team early on, she does not have to worry about those challenges as much. 

The second thing that stuck out to me was her diverse background and willingness to take risks. Siobhan studied food science and environment science early on, which is in no way related to her current business. She attributes this to being open to new opportunities and jumping on them. She learned to program after college and took a job as a junior website developer. Through the years of hard work and dedication, she has been able to know start her own business. It can feel scary to take new opportunities when it may be disguised ad something else and not know where it might lead. 

After wrapping up the interview, we were ready to put the finishing touches on our report and presentation. We delivered this to Siobhan and Carmel. Both of them seemed very pleased with our presentation and really appreciated the work and effort we put into it for them. I learned so much from this experience and really appreciated the opportunity to work with this Northern Ireland company. I can’t wait to hear the feedback they give on our project and will be watching them over the years to see how they progress!

It was our first day getting to really work with the Modern Democracy team. It was really great getting to speak with Ann Marie more about the company and the scope of what they are looking for from us. She has so much great insight into the company and really understands the companies values and mission, so this made it easy for us to work with her. We were then given a demonstration of their product offerings by Carmel, the director of sales and Ryan, a new hire at Modern Democracy. I know my whole team appreciated this and this was the point when we really got excited about the company and our project and what we could offer this great startup. We did some debriefing among the team on our game plan for the project and then it was off to lunch. After lunch, we got right to work! We spent the afternoon delegating tasks and specific items for research and were able to come up with some great work to present. Doing this project has been a great experience with a huge increase in knowledge of international business.

Tomorrow we get the opportunity to sit down with the CEO Siobhan and interview her about leadership. I'm excited to hear her responses to our questions around her values as a leader, how she motivates her team to keep them driving towards their goals, and what some of her leadership challenges are. I'm also excited to talk about how she has used and uses her network and communicates, since that's a recurring topic among the other entrepreneurs.