Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:00) – Hey, everyone. Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Allison Whalen. Allison, welcome on the show.

Allison Whalen: (0:00:09) – Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:11) – So am I. Let’s start with who is Allison?

Allison Whalen: (0:00:16) – Sure. So I grew up in Minnesota and moved to New York after college and started off my career in finance. I did invest in banking and private equity, and then I kind of pivoted all over the place. And so I did a little bit of nonprofit work. I worked at some investor type activities and then ultimately got my MBA and pivoted into tech startups. And my job before I started parentally was I joined an early stage tech startup called managed by Q and stayed with them through their ultimate acquisition by WeWork. And that was unbelievable to me. It was sort of like the experimental ground where I could pretend I was an entrepreneur but with no actual risk. And so that was really life changing for me. And at the same time, I became a mother. And so I know we’re going to talk a lot about my business today and the entrepreneurial experience, but that was really transformative, I think, into making me who I am today of having a child in the midst of this really fast paced, high stakes environment. And that impacted everything I think about me, my work style, and ultimately drove me to launch my business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:01:27) – That’s an amazing experience to have had and having been through, not just from what you realized and how this business came along, but also this trajectory of having been through different industries at different points in time, just so much that it helps you one understand yourself, but also helps you grow. So we’ll talk a little more about all of these things, but now that we know a little about you, let’s play a game. We call this the underrated overrated. And I’ll just throw a few themes at you and see how you react to them.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:05) – Okay. I’m a little nervous, but let’s do it.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:08) – It’s a game.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:10) – Okay.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:11) – All right, let’s start with nfTs.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:16) – Oh, my goodness. I have absolutely no right to have an opinion on that.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:24) – Game, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:24) – You can. I know. I feel like what I’m really good at is knowing when I should have an opinion. So I would just say overrated because I have no idea.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:35) – That’s a good answer. Okay, what about crypto?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:41) – So I believe in it, but I think to me, my sense, and maybe this is because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, it feels like it’s overrated just because of how much is talked about it. But that’s not to say that it’s not good. I just think there’s probably a lot more focus on that, a lot more investment on that than probably is deserved. But we’ll see.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:04) – All right, so let’s round that off with the metaverse or the omniverse, as some people call it.

Allison Whalen: (0:03:12) – I’m going to say underrated because I feel like I don’t hear as much about that. So this is all kind of me coming back to how much do I actually hear about this? I don’t hear as much about it in my world, and maybe this is a personal perspective of, like, I should probably learn more about this, whereas I feel like I hear a lot about everything else that you’ve mentioned.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:33) – That makes sense. Let’s move into the more real world. What about real estate prices?

Allison Whalen: (0:03:43) – I’m trying to figure out in my mind what does overrated and underrated mean. I mean, I think they’re overvalued and we’re in trouble, but I don’t know if that’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:56) – Makes sense. What about stock market valuations?

Allison Whalen: (0:04:05) – I feel like I’m trying to cop out of all of this, but I guess my perspective on the stock market is I don’t care. And I try to live my life not caring about it because I’m young enough that it doesn’t matter. And over time it’ll be fine. And I think that the most important thing is diversification. And so hopefully everyone is diversified and they don’t have to care if it’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:04:27) – That’s a really smart answer. What about two other things that are related? Cash and then inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:04:36) – Yeah, cash, I think, is underrated. But I’m a very conservative person, both personally, we tend to over index on cash, which we’ve been mocked for in our personal life. And when I run my own business, I’m very conservative. And I think that’s partially having come from the tech world that was highly funded, where you see just spending, spending, spending, where cash doesn’t matter. And so I also bootstrapped my business for two years where cash was the most important thing. I literally could not exist if I didn’t have cash. And so I think it’s incredibly important and underrated. What was the second piece to it?

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:15) – Inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:17) – Inflation. I listened to an interesting podcast recently where I think it’s underrated or overrated, depending on who you are. So if you’re young in the job market, it’s blown out of proportion. Because, yes, everything is more expensive, but you’ll make more. But that’s very different than retired. My parents who are retired and how that impacts them. So I think it really depends on your stage of life.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:45) – Makes sense. And then the last one is the great resignation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:54) – This is hard for me because I live in that world. I hear about it all the time, and I think the attention to it is real. So it’s not over underrated. I think it’s exactly right. It is happening, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. And so I think it’s spot on, basically.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:17) – All right, well, thanks for playing along. That was fun. Looked like I put you in a spot, which not really, but let’s come to some questions that are closer to you and you don’t feel like you have to cop out on them.

Allison Whalen: (0:06:30) – Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:32) – Let’s talk about what is parentally and what is the mission, the vision, and also, most importantly for me, why do this?

Allison Whalen: (0:06:41) – Yeah. So parentally offers a benefit that employers provide to their expecting employees. And so we come in and we provide a career coaching based program that starts about three months before parental leave starts. And through our coaching and curriculum, like checklists, content, best practices, templates, we help employees prepare really strong coverage plans and then support them with their re onboarding the first three months after a parental leave to get them back to work. And so you can think of us as really squarely in a career bucket. So there are tons of resources to support health and well being and parenting. But when I had my first child, when I was working at managed by Q, there was absolutely nothing to help me with my career. And so I was a manager and I had a really important sales role where it was black and white, whether I was successful or my team was successful, and it was really difficult. And when I returned to work, I realized, this is crazy, because my company wanted to retain me, I wanted to stay. So you had two parties that really wanted the same result. And yet, because nobody knew how to support the process, we didn’t know how to put together a strong coverage plan. They didn’t know how to support me upon my return, and I didn’t even know what I needed. I was trying to leave. And so what I realized is this is a massive problem. And so to the answer of, like, why focus on this? This is the moment, especially for women, when they begin to fall off their preferred career track. It’s when they have a child and it’s when they have their second child and again their third. It continues to hurt them. And I guess the epiphany I had was so much of that is unnecessary. This isn’t a situation where it’s like, oh, it is what it is. And when you become a parent, your ambitions change and everything changes. And this is how it always has to be. I identified well, actually, there are many different things that companies, managers, teammates, and the expecting employee can do to set everyone up for success so that parental leave is not this major disruption in your career, but it’s actually a forcing function to give you the opportunity to take a step back, figure out what’s not working well, and then come back better than ever.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:08:56) – Makes sense. And I personally believe that this is massive. Right. And we see this in the numbers, how women tend to drop off. You pointed out specifically when they know they’re expecting, whether it’s the first, 2nd or third child. And we have seen as an industry, across these different industries, there is a major impact of not having as many women in the workforce or not having as many women in leadership positions or executive positions. So I think what you’re doing is extremely important. Tell us a little more about the size and scale of your operations, where all are you doing this? Are you working with certain specific industries and would love to learn a little more about that.

Allison Whalen: (0:09:40) – Yeah, well, the problem, like you mentioned, is huge. Companies now, I think, because of employee demand, are realizing they have to give more paid leave. They have to give it to men. They have to encourage the men to actually take it. So get rid of the stigma associated with, oh, I don’t want to take my leave or I’ll look like I don’t care about work. And people are having children later in life now, typically in their 30s, when they have roles with more responsibilities. And so their absence can be more painful in their career and for the company. So the problem is getting bigger and bigger. So where we step in is we’re kind of riding on the coattails of companies already realizing we’ve got to extend our parental leave. And then they realize, uhoh, this may have some negative impacts as it relates to retaining women or working parents in general, or business disruption. And so we come in at that point to help them solve that and hopefully convince them to continue to extend their leave because of that, because we tend to work with more progressive employers, we are over indexing on tech companies who are really the first movers here. They are going after the most senior, most expensive talent, and so they’re really following what employees want. But I would say over the past, we launched in 2019 and I’ve noticed a massive difference post Covid so we were live six months pre Covid, and at that point, it was like the most progressive tech companies wanted to work with us, and they totally got it. And this differentiated them once Covid hit. And all of a sudden we became very aware of the challenges of working parents and parental leave became more top of. I mean, we’re working across finance, we’re working with CPG companies, so it’s not just tech anymore. And we do span really small startups all the way through Fortune 100 employers. So we’ve worked with over 800 employees to date, and that’s growing every single month. We have 25 corporate clients at this point. And so we’ve grown a lot faster than I expected, and I think largely because of a lot of the industry and societal trends that I mentioned before.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:11:52) – And that’s really heartening to hear, right. That we are moving in the right direction. So as you look at the business and the opportunities and the challenges, if we can talk a little first about what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing as a business?

Allison Whalen: (0:12:11) – Yeah, the biggest challenge. I should caveat this by saying I come from sales, so I’m always thinking with my sales hat on. And the biggest challenge I see today in our business is we are creating a new category. So I have never once won business from another vendor. It’s not like I’m going in and competing on, oh, you already have this budget and we’re better, so you should just move that budget. To me, that’s what I used to do at manage by Q. It was commercial cleaning, and so everybody knows they need to clean their office, they have budget for it. So it was a pretty easy sale of, well, just give it to us. This is totally different. It’s much harder. You have to oftentimes convince companies that they have a problem that they’re not aware of, which is really difficult, and then convince them to find new budget. And people don’t really like change. And so even companies that know, yes, this is a big problem, they’re scared to try something new. And so I would say that’s the biggest challenge for us. But it’s what I really like of, I don’t mind being at the forefront of this. I think that it’s where I’m best anyway. But it is a huge challenge. I mean, it would be much easier if everyone had a budget for parental leave support and I just had to go in and say, look at how great we are. But that’s not really what it’s like.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:13:23) – I think the good thing working in your favor is that the value proposition is so clear.

Allison Whalen: (0:13:29) – Yeah, that’s what I think. We get a lot of pressure, though, to prove our ROI, and it’s very difficult because I think that the number one problem that we’re solving is actually poor productivity. So when people return from parental leave, I think companies and managers don’t fully recognize how difficult that is and the incredible opportunity cost of people showing up. There’s no re onboarding in place. Takes them forever to figure out what they missed to get back into work. That is incredibly expensive, and it’s very difficult to prove, so to speak, to leadership, how expensive that is. And that for a fraction of that price, we can help with that. So to me, this is so obvious that, of course, for the amount that you’re paying us, we’re going to make a massive difference. But I think it becomes more difficult to put dollars and cents to it. When you’re talking about opportunity, cost makes sense.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:14:26) – And hopefully, as this evolves, as more companies sign up, those metrics will come to the fore. And then from there on, it just becomes a matter of validation that all of these companies, they’ve seen the value and it just scales from there.

Allison Whalen: (0:14:42) – Yeah, and to that point, we love that. People love what we do. Like, our NPS score is very high, but we’re so focused on that should be baseline. Like, any benefit that a company offers should make people happy. We need to prove we’re actually adding value to the company. And so we have a number of things that we’re tracking to show productivity increase, retention increase, things like that that are actually showing what are they doing differently because of us? As opposed to. I loved having a career coach. I mean, everybody loves working with a career coach, so that’s just sort of a given.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:15:15) – Makes sense. Now, on the flip side, what’s the biggest opportunity you’re most excited about?

Allison Whalen: (0:15:23) – So I get really excited by, I always expected to have a lot of smaller tech company clients, and I think I was most surprised by how quickly I was able to partner with really large companies. And the reason that’s so exciting, of course, there’s like a huge revenue opportunity there. But really where I get really excited is when you partner with large companies, you just have such an incredible platform for impact. So whatever we do with them, we’re impacting thousands of people. And that’s just really motivating to somebody who starts a business like this that is focused on more of like a social mission. And we’re seeing a lot of our large employer clients come to us and really push us to do more and to say we want to bring you in and focus on the employee experience, expand your services. I’ve actually been saying no nonstop because I think that that’s helpful to scale at this stage. But that’s the exciting next step of we don’t have to sit on the sidelines and pilot for free and beg people for feedback. We actually have these partners that will partner with us and they know we’re experimenting, but we get to do it with real people and in an environment that the feedback loop is just so strong. So I think that’s what I’m most excited about going into next year.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:16:38) – That’s amazing. That’s a great place to be in. Now, as we look forward, let’s look back, and I like to call it looking in the rear view mirror, not just in your entrepreneurial journey, but also back in your career. What are two things that stand out? One, that you kind of blew it out of the park, even exceeded your own expectations, and then on the other end, something that did not work out as you had expected and in turn became a lesson learned.

Allison Whalen: (0:17:10) – Yeah. Do you want me to answer that from a career perspective? Yeah, I think from a career perspective for me. So I come from a background of more corporate America and finance, and I had never worked in a startup until I went to manage MyQ. And I was amazed how much I loved it and how good I was at it. And I think about that a lot because I think I grew up not around entrepreneurs. I grew up in an environment where you should go to school, you should get the right major, you should get a nice paying job that’s very secure. And so it never occurred to me to try something riskier. And so I also thought, well, I must not be good at it. And so when I went there and I was able to join really early, stay through the acquisition, and even after we were acquired by WeWork, I realized, like, wow, I did way better at this than I ever thought I would, and that there are a lot of things that I can do that are helpful here and in an entrepreneurial environment, failure, I think. Well, so there are a few things. I made one decision earlier in my career to get into education because I cared a lot, and I really believed in the power of education to help improve a lot of the major issues we have with poverty, both internationally and in the United States. I think the mistake I made there is confusing what you believe in and what you’re good at. And so I really believed in it. And literally within a few weeks of joining, I worked for a charter school network for a year. Within a few weeks realized, wow, this does not align with my skill set at all. And so that was not good, which seems like a very basic lesson, but it took actually doing that to realize. But I’m basically saying I did the same thing in both cases and got different results. In one case realized I was terrible at it, the other case did something brand new and realized I was great at it. So the outcomes are different. But I think no matter what, that learning, if you can derisk it, is really helpful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:19:21) – Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s not easy to kind of reflect and accept that this is what I did and I made a mistake. As long as you can do that and learn from it, it makes you a better person. And from what I’ve learned is the sooner you make these mistakes, the better you become as yeah, I think the.

Allison Whalen: (0:19:44) – Parallel to that with parentally is my co founder and I piloted the business while we were still working full time. So I was at management Q she was at target and we piloted because we were like, we have no idea how this is going to work. And there were a lot of failures in the pilot and it’s like, thank goodness because it completely changed the direction that we went with the business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:20:05) – That’s really smart. I’m going to use that as a pivot to come to my favorite part of the show. We call it the one line life lessons. Would love to hear your one line life lessons and some context around either how you came to adopt them or how you came up with them.

Allison Whalen: (0:20:23) – Yeah. So I think number one is always have a bias to action. Obviously that’s more important in the startup environment, but I have such a strong bias to action. I believe in it so deeply of breaking things down into really small steps and just doing them. And the faster you get feedback, faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn, the better you will be. The other thing that I really do live by is like anytime I’m about to do anything risky, I always run through a mental exercise of what is the worst case scenario? So I always ask myself that, because the answer is almost always, it’s not that bad. And I think not thinking through that can oftentimes make people stop or be scared of the unknown. But the second you say, what is the absolute worst thing that could happen? And then you’re like, well, that’s not that bad. And if it did happen, this is what I would do. Let’s go. And so I find that to be really helpful and not as negative as it sounds. I think the third is, if you’re focused on a real problem, your business will succeed. And so one thing I’ve been hyper aware of is, how do I stay married to this problem and not get distracted by revenue goals and not get distracted by other people’s opinions of what we should be doing? Not get distracted by the customer saying, we love what you’re doing. Can you now help working parents who have teenagers? No, because that’s not the problem that we’re focused on. And so I really strongly believe in focusing on that problem, and you will be successful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:21:59) – I just want to, not to interrupt you, but I want to talk about the importance of recognizing that, but also having the courage to focus and remain on that objective, because I can imagine all of these different influences that can be extremely hard.

Allison Whalen: (0:22:17) – Yeah, it’s hard, and it’s especially hard when you have really large clients who have a lot of money. And again, I think that this is the benefit of having worked in a startup before and seeing what happens when you chase that. It does not pay off in the long run. And also, the other thing I’ve learned is the customer will stick around. So if you say no this year and say, just wait three years, they’ll be there if they really like you. So, yeah, I believe very deeply in really defining the problem and sticking with that. The fourth would be smart work is better than hard work. I think any parent feels this way, that we’re just not willing to work around the clock anymore. And that’s also not the best answer. And so I really put a lot of pressure on me, my team, everyone, to think what is the best way to do this, and to avoid, if you put the constraint of, I have to do this between nine and five, you will, and you will probably do it better, and you’ll say no to the things that are silly. So I’m a big believer in that. And then the last is done is better than perfect. I think for many people, especially ambitious professionals, they really struggle with that. But it’s just if you go after perfect, that makes everything else I’ve described break. You can’t work smart then if you want to be perfect. And I think the reality is, for almost everything we do in life, 80% is good enough and gets you closer to the goal. And so maybe that changes as we scale the business and get really mature. But I really believe that we should always be aiming for 80%, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be so much better. And maybe that’s also because we’re in a space where there’s literally nothing. So we have to constantly be increasing what we want to get to. But if we wait too long to get there, it’s going to be bad for everyone. And so we need to just move bias to action done is better than perfect.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:19) – And I agree with that. And just to add to that, it also forces you to think about the resources that you do have and prioritize them, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:24:30) – Yeah. I’m just a huge believer that we just have to put things out in the world and see what happens. And then over time, you can bring in people who make incremental improvements, but especially in early stages of the business, you just need to start solving problems faster.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:48) – True. Allison, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your oneline life lessons for our audience. We have an entire collection@onelinelifelessons.com. And wherever you socialize digitally. Allison, thanks again. We really appreciate you coming on, and good luck with the journey and your continued growth.

Allison Whalen: (0:25:09) – Great. Thank you so much.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:00) – Hey, everyone. Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Allison Whalen. Allison, welcome on the show.

Allison Whalen: (0:00:09) – Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:11) – So am I. Let’s start with who is Allison?

Allison Whalen: (0:00:16) – Sure. So I grew up in Minnesota and moved to New York after college and started off my career in finance. I did invest in banking and private equity, and then I kind of pivoted all over the place. And so I did a little bit of nonprofit work. I worked at some investor type activities and then ultimately got my MBA and pivoted into tech startups. And my job before I started parentally was I joined an early stage tech startup called managed by Q and stayed with them through their ultimate acquisition by WeWork. And that was unbelievable to me. It was sort of like the experimental ground where I could pretend I was an entrepreneur but with no actual risk. And so that was really life changing for me. And at the same time, I became a mother. And so I know we’re going to talk a lot about my business today and the entrepreneurial experience, but that was really transformative, I think, into making me who I am today of having a child in the midst of this really fast paced, high stakes environment. And that impacted everything I think about me, my work style, and ultimately drove me to launch my business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:01:27) – That’s an amazing experience to have had and having been through, not just from what you realized and how this business came along, but also this trajectory of having been through different industries at different points in time, just so much that it helps you one understand yourself, but also helps you grow. So we’ll talk a little more about all of these things, but now that we know a little about you, let’s play a game. We call this the underrated overrated. And I’ll just throw a few themes at you and see how you react to them.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:05) – Okay. I’m a little nervous, but let’s do it.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:08) – It’s a game.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:10) – Okay.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:11) – All right, let’s start with nfTs.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:16) – Oh, my goodness. I have absolutely no right to have an opinion on that.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:24) – Game, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:24) – You can. I know. I feel like what I’m really good at is knowing when I should have an opinion. So I would just say overrated because I have no idea.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:35) – That’s a good answer. Okay, what about crypto?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:41) – So I believe in it, but I think to me, my sense, and maybe this is because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, it feels like it’s overrated just because of how much is talked about it. But that’s not to say that it’s not good. I just think there’s probably a lot more focus on that, a lot more investment on that than probably is deserved. But we’ll see.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:04) – All right, so let’s round that off with the metaverse or the omniverse, as some people call it.

Allison Whalen: (0:03:12) – I’m going to say underrated because I feel like I don’t hear as much about that. So this is all kind of me coming back to how much do I actually hear about this? I don’t hear as much about it in my world, and maybe this is a personal perspective of, like, I should probably learn more about this, whereas I feel like I hear a lot about everything else that you’ve mentioned.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:33) – That makes sense. Let’s move into the more real world. What about real estate prices?

Allison Whalen: (0:03:43) – I’m trying to figure out in my mind what does overrated and underrated mean. I mean, I think they’re overvalued and we’re in trouble, but I don’t know if that’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:56) – Makes sense. What about stock market valuations?

Allison Whalen: (0:04:05) – I feel like I’m trying to cop out of all of this, but I guess my perspective on the stock market is I don’t care. And I try to live my life not caring about it because I’m young enough that it doesn’t matter. And over time it’ll be fine. And I think that the most important thing is diversification. And so hopefully everyone is diversified and they don’t have to care if it’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:04:27) – That’s a really smart answer. What about two other things that are related? Cash and then inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:04:36) – Yeah, cash, I think, is underrated. But I’m a very conservative person, both personally, we tend to over index on cash, which we’ve been mocked for in our personal life. And when I run my own business, I’m very conservative. And I think that’s partially having come from the tech world that was highly funded, where you see just spending, spending, spending, where cash doesn’t matter. And so I also bootstrapped my business for two years where cash was the most important thing. I literally could not exist if I didn’t have cash. And so I think it’s incredibly important and underrated. What was the second piece to it?

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:15) – Inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:17) – Inflation. I listened to an interesting podcast recently where I think it’s underrated or overrated, depending on who you are. So if you’re young in the job market, it’s blown out of proportion. Because, yes, everything is more expensive, but you’ll make more. But that’s very different than retired. My parents who are retired and how that impacts them. So I think it really depends on your stage of life.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:45) – Makes sense. And then the last one is the great resignation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:54) – This is hard for me because I live in that world. I hear about it all the time, and I think the attention to it is real. So it’s not over underrated. I think it’s exactly right. It is happening, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. And so I think it’s spot on, basically.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:17) – All right, well, thanks for playing along. That was fun. Looked like I put you in a spot, which not really, but let’s come to some questions that are closer to you and you don’t feel like you have to cop out on them.

Allison Whalen: (0:06:30) – Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:32) – Let’s talk about what is parentally and what is the mission, the vision, and also, most importantly for me, why do this?

Allison Whalen: (0:06:41) – Yeah. So parentally offers a benefit that employers provide to their expecting employees. And so we come in and we provide a career coaching based program that starts about three months before parental leave starts. And through our coaching and curriculum, like checklists, content, best practices, templates, we help employees prepare really strong coverage plans and then support them with their re onboarding the first three months after a parental leave to get them back to work. And so you can think of us as really squarely in a career bucket. So there are tons of resources to support health and well being and parenting. But when I had my first child, when I was working at managed by Q, there was absolutely nothing to help me with my career. And so I was a manager and I had a really important sales role where it was black and white, whether I was successful or my team was successful, and it was really difficult. And when I returned to work, I realized, this is crazy, because my company wanted to retain me, I wanted to stay. So you had two parties that really wanted the same result. And yet, because nobody knew how to support the process, we didn’t know how to put together a strong coverage plan. They didn’t know how to support me upon my return, and I didn’t even know what I needed. I was trying to leave. And so what I realized is this is a massive problem. And so to the answer of, like, why focus on this? This is the moment, especially for women, when they begin to fall off their preferred career track. It’s when they have a child and it’s when they have their second child and again their third. It continues to hurt them. And I guess the epiphany I had was so much of that is unnecessary. This isn’t a situation where it’s like, oh, it is what it is. And when you become a parent, your ambitions change and everything changes. And this is how it always has to be. I identified well, actually, there are many different things that companies, managers, teammates, and the expecting employee can do to set everyone up for success so that parental leave is not this major disruption in your career, but it’s actually a forcing function to give you the opportunity to take a step back, figure out what’s not working well, and then come back better than ever.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:08:56) – Makes sense. And I personally believe that this is massive. Right. And we see this in the numbers, how women tend to drop off. You pointed out specifically when they know they’re expecting, whether it’s the first, 2nd or third child. And we have seen as an industry, across these different industries, there is a major impact of not having as many women in the workforce or not having as many women in leadership positions or executive positions. So I think what you’re doing is extremely important. Tell us a little more about the size and scale of your operations, where all are you doing this? Are you working with certain specific industries and would love to learn a little more about that.

Allison Whalen: (0:09:40) – Yeah, well, the problem, like you mentioned, is huge. Companies now, I think, because of employee demand, are realizing they have to give more paid leave. They have to give it to men. They have to encourage the men to actually take it. So get rid of the stigma associated with, oh, I don’t want to take my leave or I’ll look like I don’t care about work. And people are having children later in life now, typically in their 30s, when they have roles with more responsibilities. And so their absence can be more painful in their career and for the company. So the problem is getting bigger and bigger. So where we step in is we’re kind of riding on the coattails of companies already realizing we’ve got to extend our parental leave. And then they realize, uhoh, this may have some negative impacts as it relates to retaining women or working parents in general, or business disruption. And so we come in at that point to help them solve that and hopefully convince them to continue to extend their leave because of that, because we tend to work with more progressive employers, we are over indexing on tech companies who are really the first movers here. They are going after the most senior, most expensive talent, and so they’re really following what employees want. But I would say over the past, we launched in 2019 and I’ve noticed a massive difference post Covid so we were live six months pre Covid, and at that point, it was like the most progressive tech companies wanted to work with us, and they totally got it. And this differentiated them once Covid hit. And all of a sudden we became very aware of the challenges of working parents and parental leave became more top of. I mean, we’re working across finance, we’re working with CPG companies, so it’s not just tech anymore. And we do span really small startups all the way through Fortune 100 employers. So we’ve worked with over 800 employees to date, and that’s growing every single month. We have 25 corporate clients at this point. And so we’ve grown a lot faster than I expected, and I think largely because of a lot of the industry and societal trends that I mentioned before.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:11:52) – And that’s really heartening to hear, right. That we are moving in the right direction. So as you look at the business and the opportunities and the challenges, if we can talk a little first about what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing as a business?

Allison Whalen: (0:12:11) – Yeah, the biggest challenge. I should caveat this by saying I come from sales, so I’m always thinking with my sales hat on. And the biggest challenge I see today in our business is we are creating a new category. So I have never once won business from another vendor. It’s not like I’m going in and competing on, oh, you already have this budget and we’re better, so you should just move that budget. To me, that’s what I used to do at manage by Q. It was commercial cleaning, and so everybody knows they need to clean their office, they have budget for it. So it was a pretty easy sale of, well, just give it to us. This is totally different. It’s much harder. You have to oftentimes convince companies that they have a problem that they’re not aware of, which is really difficult, and then convince them to find new budget. And people don’t really like change. And so even companies that know, yes, this is a big problem, they’re scared to try something new. And so I would say that’s the biggest challenge for us. But it’s what I really like of, I don’t mind being at the forefront of this. I think that it’s where I’m best anyway. But it is a huge challenge. I mean, it would be much easier if everyone had a budget for parental leave support and I just had to go in and say, look at how great we are. But that’s not really what it’s like.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:13:23) – I think the good thing working in your favor is that the value proposition is so clear.

Allison Whalen: (0:13:29) – Yeah, that’s what I think. We get a lot of pressure, though, to prove our ROI, and it’s very difficult because I think that the number one problem that we’re solving is actually poor productivity. So when people return from parental leave, I think companies and managers don’t fully recognize how difficult that is and the incredible opportunity cost of people showing up. There’s no re onboarding in place. Takes them forever to figure out what they missed to get back into work. That is incredibly expensive, and it’s very difficult to prove, so to speak, to leadership, how expensive that is. And that for a fraction of that price, we can help with that. So to me, this is so obvious that, of course, for the amount that you’re paying us, we’re going to make a massive difference. But I think it becomes more difficult to put dollars and cents to it. When you’re talking about opportunity, cost makes sense.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:14:26) – And hopefully, as this evolves, as more companies sign up, those metrics will come to the fore. And then from there on, it just becomes a matter of validation that all of these companies, they’ve seen the value and it just scales from there.

Allison Whalen: (0:14:42) – Yeah, and to that point, we love that. People love what we do. Like, our NPS score is very high, but we’re so focused on that should be baseline. Like, any benefit that a company offers should make people happy. We need to prove we’re actually adding value to the company. And so we have a number of things that we’re tracking to show productivity increase, retention increase, things like that that are actually showing what are they doing differently because of us? As opposed to. I loved having a career coach. I mean, everybody loves working with a career coach, so that’s just sort of a given.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:15:15) – Makes sense. Now, on the flip side, what’s the biggest opportunity you’re most excited about?

Allison Whalen: (0:15:23) – So I get really excited by, I always expected to have a lot of smaller tech company clients, and I think I was most surprised by how quickly I was able to partner with really large companies. And the reason that’s so exciting, of course, there’s like a huge revenue opportunity there. But really where I get really excited is when you partner with large companies, you just have such an incredible platform for impact. So whatever we do with them, we’re impacting thousands of people. And that’s just really motivating to somebody who starts a business like this that is focused on more of like a social mission. And we’re seeing a lot of our large employer clients come to us and really push us to do more and to say we want to bring you in and focus on the employee experience, expand your services. I’ve actually been saying no nonstop because I think that that’s helpful to scale at this stage. But that’s the exciting next step of we don’t have to sit on the sidelines and pilot for free and beg people for feedback. We actually have these partners that will partner with us and they know we’re experimenting, but we get to do it with real people and in an environment that the feedback loop is just so strong. So I think that’s what I’m most excited about going into next year.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:16:38) – That’s amazing. That’s a great place to be in. Now, as we look forward, let’s look back, and I like to call it looking in the rear view mirror, not just in your entrepreneurial journey, but also back in your career. What are two things that stand out? One, that you kind of blew it out of the park, even exceeded your own expectations, and then on the other end, something that did not work out as you had expected and in turn became a lesson learned.

Allison Whalen: (0:17:10) – Yeah. Do you want me to answer that from a career perspective? Yeah, I think from a career perspective for me. So I come from a background of more corporate America and finance, and I had never worked in a startup until I went to manage MyQ. And I was amazed how much I loved it and how good I was at it. And I think about that a lot because I think I grew up not around entrepreneurs. I grew up in an environment where you should go to school, you should get the right major, you should get a nice paying job that’s very secure. And so it never occurred to me to try something riskier. And so I also thought, well, I must not be good at it. And so when I went there and I was able to join really early, stay through the acquisition, and even after we were acquired by WeWork, I realized, like, wow, I did way better at this than I ever thought I would, and that there are a lot of things that I can do that are helpful here and in an entrepreneurial environment, failure, I think. Well, so there are a few things. I made one decision earlier in my career to get into education because I cared a lot, and I really believed in the power of education to help improve a lot of the major issues we have with poverty, both internationally and in the United States. I think the mistake I made there is confusing what you believe in and what you’re good at. And so I really believed in it. And literally within a few weeks of joining, I worked for a charter school network for a year. Within a few weeks realized, wow, this does not align with my skill set at all. And so that was not good, which seems like a very basic lesson, but it took actually doing that to realize. But I’m basically saying I did the same thing in both cases and got different results. In one case realized I was terrible at it, the other case did something brand new and realized I was great at it. So the outcomes are different. But I think no matter what, that learning, if you can derisk it, is really helpful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:19:21) – Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s not easy to kind of reflect and accept that this is what I did and I made a mistake. As long as you can do that and learn from it, it makes you a better person. And from what I’ve learned is the sooner you make these mistakes, the better you become as yeah, I think the.

Allison Whalen: (0:19:44) – Parallel to that with parentally is my co founder and I piloted the business while we were still working full time. So I was at management Q she was at target and we piloted because we were like, we have no idea how this is going to work. And there were a lot of failures in the pilot and it’s like, thank goodness because it completely changed the direction that we went with the business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:20:05) – That’s really smart. I’m going to use that as a pivot to come to my favorite part of the show. We call it the one line life lessons. Would love to hear your one line life lessons and some context around either how you came to adopt them or how you came up with them.

Allison Whalen: (0:20:23) – Yeah. So I think number one is always have a bias to action. Obviously that’s more important in the startup environment, but I have such a strong bias to action. I believe in it so deeply of breaking things down into really small steps and just doing them. And the faster you get feedback, faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn, the better you will be. The other thing that I really do live by is like anytime I’m about to do anything risky, I always run through a mental exercise of what is the worst case scenario? So I always ask myself that, because the answer is almost always, it’s not that bad. And I think not thinking through that can oftentimes make people stop or be scared of the unknown. But the second you say, what is the absolute worst thing that could happen? And then you’re like, well, that’s not that bad. And if it did happen, this is what I would do. Let’s go. And so I find that to be really helpful and not as negative as it sounds. I think the third is, if you’re focused on a real problem, your business will succeed. And so one thing I’ve been hyper aware of is, how do I stay married to this problem and not get distracted by revenue goals and not get distracted by other people’s opinions of what we should be doing? Not get distracted by the customer saying, we love what you’re doing. Can you now help working parents who have teenagers? No, because that’s not the problem that we’re focused on. And so I really strongly believe in focusing on that problem, and you will be successful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:21:59) – I just want to, not to interrupt you, but I want to talk about the importance of recognizing that, but also having the courage to focus and remain on that objective, because I can imagine all of these different influences that can be extremely hard.

Allison Whalen: (0:22:17) – Yeah, it’s hard, and it’s especially hard when you have really large clients who have a lot of money. And again, I think that this is the benefit of having worked in a startup before and seeing what happens when you chase that. It does not pay off in the long run. And also, the other thing I’ve learned is the customer will stick around. So if you say no this year and say, just wait three years, they’ll be there if they really like you. So, yeah, I believe very deeply in really defining the problem and sticking with that. The fourth would be smart work is better than hard work. I think any parent feels this way, that we’re just not willing to work around the clock anymore. And that’s also not the best answer. And so I really put a lot of pressure on me, my team, everyone, to think what is the best way to do this, and to avoid, if you put the constraint of, I have to do this between nine and five, you will, and you will probably do it better, and you’ll say no to the things that are silly. So I’m a big believer in that. And then the last is done is better than perfect. I think for many people, especially ambitious professionals, they really struggle with that. But it’s just if you go after perfect, that makes everything else I’ve described break. You can’t work smart then if you want to be perfect. And I think the reality is, for almost everything we do in life, 80% is good enough and gets you closer to the goal. And so maybe that changes as we scale the business and get really mature. But I really believe that we should always be aiming for 80%, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be so much better. And maybe that’s also because we’re in a space where there’s literally nothing. So we have to constantly be increasing what we want to get to. But if we wait too long to get there, it’s going to be bad for everyone. And so we need to just move bias to action done is better than perfect.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:19) – And I agree with that. And just to add to that, it also forces you to think about the resources that you do have and prioritize them, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:24:30) – Yeah. I’m just a huge believer that we just have to put things out in the world and see what happens. And then over time, you can bring in people who make incremental improvements, but especially in early stages of the business, you just need to start solving problems faster.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:48) – True. Allison, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your oneline life lessons for our audience. We have an entire collection@onelinelifelessons.com. And wherever you socialize digitally. Allison, thanks again. We really appreciate you coming on, and good luck with the journey and your continued growth.

Allison Whalen: (0:25:09) – Great. Thank you so much.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:00) – Hey, everyone. Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Allison Whalen. Allison, welcome on the show.

Allison Whalen: (0:00:09) – Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:11) – So am I. Let’s start with who is Allison?

Allison Whalen: (0:00:16) – Sure. So I grew up in Minnesota and moved to New York after college and started off my career in finance. I did invest in banking and private equity, and then I kind of pivoted all over the place. And so I did a little bit of nonprofit work. I worked at some investor type activities and then ultimately got my MBA and pivoted into tech startups. And my job before I started parentally was I joined an early stage tech startup called managed by Q and stayed with them through their ultimate acquisition by WeWork. And that was unbelievable to me. It was sort of like the experimental ground where I could pretend I was an entrepreneur but with no actual risk. And so that was really life changing for me. And at the same time, I became a mother. And so I know we’re going to talk a lot about my business today and the entrepreneurial experience, but that was really transformative, I think, into making me who I am today of having a child in the midst of this really fast paced, high stakes environment. And that impacted everything I think about me, my work style, and ultimately drove me to launch my business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:01:27) – That’s an amazing experience to have had and having been through, not just from what you realized and how this business came along, but also this trajectory of having been through different industries at different points in time, just so much that it helps you one understand yourself, but also helps you grow. So we’ll talk a little more about all of these things, but now that we know a little about you, let’s play a game. We call this the underrated overrated. And I’ll just throw a few themes at you and see how you react to them.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:05) – Okay. I’m a little nervous, but let’s do it.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:08) – It’s a game.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:10) – Okay.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:11) – All right, let’s start with nfTs.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:16) – Oh, my goodness. I have absolutely no right to have an opinion on that.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:24) – Game, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:24) – You can. I know. I feel like what I’m really good at is knowing when I should have an opinion. So I would just say overrated because I have no idea.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:35) – That’s a good answer. Okay, what about crypto?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:41) – So I believe in it, but I think to me, my sense, and maybe this is because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, it feels like it’s overrated just because of how much is talked about it. But that’s not to say that it’s not good. I just think there’s probably a lot more focus on that, a lot more investment on that than probably is deserved. But we’ll see.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:04) – All right, so let’s round that off with the metaverse or the omniverse, as some people call it.

Allison Whalen: (0:03:12) – I’m going to say underrated because I feel like I don’t hear as much about that. So this is all kind of me coming back to how much do I actually hear about this? I don’t hear as much about it in my world, and maybe this is a personal perspective of, like, I should probably learn more about this, whereas I feel like I hear a lot about everything else that you’ve mentioned.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:33) – That makes sense. Let’s move into the more real world. What about real estate prices?

Allison Whalen: (0:03:43) – I’m trying to figure out in my mind what does overrated and underrated mean. I mean, I think they’re overvalued and we’re in trouble, but I don’t know if that’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:56) – Makes sense. What about stock market valuations?

Allison Whalen: (0:04:05) – I feel like I’m trying to cop out of all of this, but I guess my perspective on the stock market is I don’t care. And I try to live my life not caring about it because I’m young enough that it doesn’t matter. And over time it’ll be fine. And I think that the most important thing is diversification. And so hopefully everyone is diversified and they don’t have to care if it’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:04:27) – That’s a really smart answer. What about two other things that are related? Cash and then inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:04:36) – Yeah, cash, I think, is underrated. But I’m a very conservative person, both personally, we tend to over index on cash, which we’ve been mocked for in our personal life. And when I run my own business, I’m very conservative. And I think that’s partially having come from the tech world that was highly funded, where you see just spending, spending, spending, where cash doesn’t matter. And so I also bootstrapped my business for two years where cash was the most important thing. I literally could not exist if I didn’t have cash. And so I think it’s incredibly important and underrated. What was the second piece to it?

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:15) – Inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:17) – Inflation. I listened to an interesting podcast recently where I think it’s underrated or overrated, depending on who you are. So if you’re young in the job market, it’s blown out of proportion. Because, yes, everything is more expensive, but you’ll make more. But that’s very different than retired. My parents who are retired and how that impacts them. So I think it really depends on your stage of life.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:45) – Makes sense. And then the last one is the great resignation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:54) – This is hard for me because I live in that world. I hear about it all the time, and I think the attention to it is real. So it’s not over underrated. I think it’s exactly right. It is happening, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. And so I think it’s spot on, basically.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:17) – All right, well, thanks for playing along. That was fun. Looked like I put you in a spot, which not really, but let’s come to some questions that are closer to you and you don’t feel like you have to cop out on them.

Allison Whalen: (0:06:30) – Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:32) – Let’s talk about what is parentally and what is the mission, the vision, and also, most importantly for me, why do this?

Allison Whalen: (0:06:41) – Yeah. So parentally offers a benefit that employers provide to their expecting employees. And so we come in and we provide a career coaching based program that starts about three months before parental leave starts. And through our coaching and curriculum, like checklists, content, best practices, templates, we help employees prepare really strong coverage plans and then support them with their re onboarding the first three months after a parental leave to get them back to work. And so you can think of us as really squarely in a career bucket. So there are tons of resources to support health and well being and parenting. But when I had my first child, when I was working at managed by Q, there was absolutely nothing to help me with my career. And so I was a manager and I had a really important sales role where it was black and white, whether I was successful or my team was successful, and it was really difficult. And when I returned to work, I realized, this is crazy, because my company wanted to retain me, I wanted to stay. So you had two parties that really wanted the same result. And yet, because nobody knew how to support the process, we didn’t know how to put together a strong coverage plan. They didn’t know how to support me upon my return, and I didn’t even know what I needed. I was trying to leave. And so what I realized is this is a massive problem. And so to the answer of, like, why focus on this? This is the moment, especially for women, when they begin to fall off their preferred career track. It’s when they have a child and it’s when they have their second child and again their third. It continues to hurt them. And I guess the epiphany I had was so much of that is unnecessary. This isn’t a situation where it’s like, oh, it is what it is. And when you become a parent, your ambitions change and everything changes. And this is how it always has to be. I identified well, actually, there are many different things that companies, managers, teammates, and the expecting employee can do to set everyone up for success so that parental leave is not this major disruption in your career, but it’s actually a forcing function to give you the opportunity to take a step back, figure out what’s not working well, and then come back better than ever.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:08:56) – Makes sense. And I personally believe that this is massive. Right. And we see this in the numbers, how women tend to drop off. You pointed out specifically when they know they’re expecting, whether it’s the first, 2nd or third child. And we have seen as an industry, across these different industries, there is a major impact of not having as many women in the workforce or not having as many women in leadership positions or executive positions. So I think what you’re doing is extremely important. Tell us a little more about the size and scale of your operations, where all are you doing this? Are you working with certain specific industries and would love to learn a little more about that.

Allison Whalen: (0:09:40) – Yeah, well, the problem, like you mentioned, is huge. Companies now, I think, because of employee demand, are realizing they have to give more paid leave. They have to give it to men. They have to encourage the men to actually take it. So get rid of the stigma associated with, oh, I don’t want to take my leave or I’ll look like I don’t care about work. And people are having children later in life now, typically in their 30s, when they have roles with more responsibilities. And so their absence can be more painful in their career and for the company. So the problem is getting bigger and bigger. So where we step in is we’re kind of riding on the coattails of companies already realizing we’ve got to extend our parental leave. And then they realize, uhoh, this may have some negative impacts as it relates to retaining women or working parents in general, or business disruption. And so we come in at that point to help them solve that and hopefully convince them to continue to extend their leave because of that, because we tend to work with more progressive employers, we are over indexing on tech companies who are really the first movers here. They are going after the most senior, most expensive talent, and so they’re really following what employees want. But I would say over the past, we launched in 2019 and I’ve noticed a massive difference post Covid so we were live six months pre Covid, and at that point, it was like the most progressive tech companies wanted to work with us, and they totally got it. And this differentiated them once Covid hit. And all of a sudden we became very aware of the challenges of working parents and parental leave became more top of. I mean, we’re working across finance, we’re working with CPG companies, so it’s not just tech anymore. And we do span really small startups all the way through Fortune 100 employers. So we’ve worked with over 800 employees to date, and that’s growing every single month. We have 25 corporate clients at this point. And so we’ve grown a lot faster than I expected, and I think largely because of a lot of the industry and societal trends that I mentioned before.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:11:52) – And that’s really heartening to hear, right. That we are moving in the right direction. So as you look at the business and the opportunities and the challenges, if we can talk a little first about what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing as a business?

Allison Whalen: (0:12:11) – Yeah, the biggest challenge. I should caveat this by saying I come from sales, so I’m always thinking with my sales hat on. And the biggest challenge I see today in our business is we are creating a new category. So I have never once won business from another vendor. It’s not like I’m going in and competing on, oh, you already have this budget and we’re better, so you should just move that budget. To me, that’s what I used to do at manage by Q. It was commercial cleaning, and so everybody knows they need to clean their office, they have budget for it. So it was a pretty easy sale of, well, just give it to us. This is totally different. It’s much harder. You have to oftentimes convince companies that they have a problem that they’re not aware of, which is really difficult, and then convince them to find new budget. And people don’t really like change. And so even companies that know, yes, this is a big problem, they’re scared to try something new. And so I would say that’s the biggest challenge for us. But it’s what I really like of, I don’t mind being at the forefront of this. I think that it’s where I’m best anyway. But it is a huge challenge. I mean, it would be much easier if everyone had a budget for parental leave support and I just had to go in and say, look at how great we are. But that’s not really what it’s like.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:13:23) – I think the good thing working in your favor is that the value proposition is so clear.

Allison Whalen: (0:13:29) – Yeah, that’s what I think. We get a lot of pressure, though, to prove our ROI, and it’s very difficult because I think that the number one problem that we’re solving is actually poor productivity. So when people return from parental leave, I think companies and managers don’t fully recognize how difficult that is and the incredible opportunity cost of people showing up. There’s no re onboarding in place. Takes them forever to figure out what they missed to get back into work. That is incredibly expensive, and it’s very difficult to prove, so to speak, to leadership, how expensive that is. And that for a fraction of that price, we can help with that. So to me, this is so obvious that, of course, for the amount that you’re paying us, we’re going to make a massive difference. But I think it becomes more difficult to put dollars and cents to it. When you’re talking about opportunity, cost makes sense.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:14:26) – And hopefully, as this evolves, as more companies sign up, those metrics will come to the fore. And then from there on, it just becomes a matter of validation that all of these companies, they’ve seen the value and it just scales from there.

Allison Whalen: (0:14:42) – Yeah, and to that point, we love that. People love what we do. Like, our NPS score is very high, but we’re so focused on that should be baseline. Like, any benefit that a company offers should make people happy. We need to prove we’re actually adding value to the company. And so we have a number of things that we’re tracking to show productivity increase, retention increase, things like that that are actually showing what are they doing differently because of us? As opposed to. I loved having a career coach. I mean, everybody loves working with a career coach, so that’s just sort of a given.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:15:15) – Makes sense. Now, on the flip side, what’s the biggest opportunity you’re most excited about?

Allison Whalen: (0:15:23) – So I get really excited by, I always expected to have a lot of smaller tech company clients, and I think I was most surprised by how quickly I was able to partner with really large companies. And the reason that’s so exciting, of course, there’s like a huge revenue opportunity there. But really where I get really excited is when you partner with large companies, you just have such an incredible platform for impact. So whatever we do with them, we’re impacting thousands of people. And that’s just really motivating to somebody who starts a business like this that is focused on more of like a social mission. And we’re seeing a lot of our large employer clients come to us and really push us to do more and to say we want to bring you in and focus on the employee experience, expand your services. I’ve actually been saying no nonstop because I think that that’s helpful to scale at this stage. But that’s the exciting next step of we don’t have to sit on the sidelines and pilot for free and beg people for feedback. We actually have these partners that will partner with us and they know we’re experimenting, but we get to do it with real people and in an environment that the feedback loop is just so strong. So I think that’s what I’m most excited about going into next year.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:16:38) – That’s amazing. That’s a great place to be in. Now, as we look forward, let’s look back, and I like to call it looking in the rear view mirror, not just in your entrepreneurial journey, but also back in your career. What are two things that stand out? One, that you kind of blew it out of the park, even exceeded your own expectations, and then on the other end, something that did not work out as you had expected and in turn became a lesson learned.

Allison Whalen: (0:17:10) – Yeah. Do you want me to answer that from a career perspective? Yeah, I think from a career perspective for me. So I come from a background of more corporate America and finance, and I had never worked in a startup until I went to manage MyQ. And I was amazed how much I loved it and how good I was at it. And I think about that a lot because I think I grew up not around entrepreneurs. I grew up in an environment where you should go to school, you should get the right major, you should get a nice paying job that’s very secure. And so it never occurred to me to try something riskier. And so I also thought, well, I must not be good at it. And so when I went there and I was able to join really early, stay through the acquisition, and even after we were acquired by WeWork, I realized, like, wow, I did way better at this than I ever thought I would, and that there are a lot of things that I can do that are helpful here and in an entrepreneurial environment, failure, I think. Well, so there are a few things. I made one decision earlier in my career to get into education because I cared a lot, and I really believed in the power of education to help improve a lot of the major issues we have with poverty, both internationally and in the United States. I think the mistake I made there is confusing what you believe in and what you’re good at. And so I really believed in it. And literally within a few weeks of joining, I worked for a charter school network for a year. Within a few weeks realized, wow, this does not align with my skill set at all. And so that was not good, which seems like a very basic lesson, but it took actually doing that to realize. But I’m basically saying I did the same thing in both cases and got different results. In one case realized I was terrible at it, the other case did something brand new and realized I was great at it. So the outcomes are different. But I think no matter what, that learning, if you can derisk it, is really helpful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:19:21) – Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s not easy to kind of reflect and accept that this is what I did and I made a mistake. As long as you can do that and learn from it, it makes you a better person. And from what I’ve learned is the sooner you make these mistakes, the better you become as yeah, I think the.

Allison Whalen: (0:19:44) – Parallel to that with parentally is my co founder and I piloted the business while we were still working full time. So I was at management Q she was at target and we piloted because we were like, we have no idea how this is going to work. And there were a lot of failures in the pilot and it’s like, thank goodness because it completely changed the direction that we went with the business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:20:05) – That’s really smart. I’m going to use that as a pivot to come to my favorite part of the show. We call it the one line life lessons. Would love to hear your one line life lessons and some context around either how you came to adopt them or how you came up with them.

Allison Whalen: (0:20:23) – Yeah. So I think number one is always have a bias to action. Obviously that’s more important in the startup environment, but I have such a strong bias to action. I believe in it so deeply of breaking things down into really small steps and just doing them. And the faster you get feedback, faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn, the better you will be. The other thing that I really do live by is like anytime I’m about to do anything risky, I always run through a mental exercise of what is the worst case scenario? So I always ask myself that, because the answer is almost always, it’s not that bad. And I think not thinking through that can oftentimes make people stop or be scared of the unknown. But the second you say, what is the absolute worst thing that could happen? And then you’re like, well, that’s not that bad. And if it did happen, this is what I would do. Let’s go. And so I find that to be really helpful and not as negative as it sounds. I think the third is, if you’re focused on a real problem, your business will succeed. And so one thing I’ve been hyper aware of is, how do I stay married to this problem and not get distracted by revenue goals and not get distracted by other people’s opinions of what we should be doing? Not get distracted by the customer saying, we love what you’re doing. Can you now help working parents who have teenagers? No, because that’s not the problem that we’re focused on. And so I really strongly believe in focusing on that problem, and you will be successful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:21:59) – I just want to, not to interrupt you, but I want to talk about the importance of recognizing that, but also having the courage to focus and remain on that objective, because I can imagine all of these different influences that can be extremely hard.

Allison Whalen: (0:22:17) – Yeah, it’s hard, and it’s especially hard when you have really large clients who have a lot of money. And again, I think that this is the benefit of having worked in a startup before and seeing what happens when you chase that. It does not pay off in the long run. And also, the other thing I’ve learned is the customer will stick around. So if you say no this year and say, just wait three years, they’ll be there if they really like you. So, yeah, I believe very deeply in really defining the problem and sticking with that. The fourth would be smart work is better than hard work. I think any parent feels this way, that we’re just not willing to work around the clock anymore. And that’s also not the best answer. And so I really put a lot of pressure on me, my team, everyone, to think what is the best way to do this, and to avoid, if you put the constraint of, I have to do this between nine and five, you will, and you will probably do it better, and you’ll say no to the things that are silly. So I’m a big believer in that. And then the last is done is better than perfect. I think for many people, especially ambitious professionals, they really struggle with that. But it’s just if you go after perfect, that makes everything else I’ve described break. You can’t work smart then if you want to be perfect. And I think the reality is, for almost everything we do in life, 80% is good enough and gets you closer to the goal. And so maybe that changes as we scale the business and get really mature. But I really believe that we should always be aiming for 80%, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be so much better. And maybe that’s also because we’re in a space where there’s literally nothing. So we have to constantly be increasing what we want to get to. But if we wait too long to get there, it’s going to be bad for everyone. And so we need to just move bias to action done is better than perfect.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:19) – And I agree with that. And just to add to that, it also forces you to think about the resources that you do have and prioritize them, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:24:30) – Yeah. I’m just a huge believer that we just have to put things out in the world and see what happens. And then over time, you can bring in people who make incremental improvements, but especially in early stages of the business, you just need to start solving problems faster.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:48) – True. Allison, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your oneline life lessons for our audience. We have an entire collection@onelinelifelessons.com. And wherever you socialize digitally. Allison, thanks again. We really appreciate you coming on, and good luck with the journey and your continued growth.

Allison Whalen: (0:25:09) – Great. Thank you so much.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:00) – Hey, everyone. Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Allison Whalen. Allison, welcome on the show.

Allison Whalen: (0:00:09) – Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:11) – So am I. Let’s start with who is Allison?

Allison Whalen: (0:00:16) – Sure. So I grew up in Minnesota and moved to New York after college and started off my career in finance. I did invest in banking and private equity, and then I kind of pivoted all over the place. And so I did a little bit of nonprofit work. I worked at some investor type activities and then ultimately got my MBA and pivoted into tech startups. And my job before I started parentally was I joined an early stage tech startup called managed by Q and stayed with them through their ultimate acquisition by WeWork. And that was unbelievable to me. It was sort of like the experimental ground where I could pretend I was an entrepreneur but with no actual risk. And so that was really life changing for me. And at the same time, I became a mother. And so I know we’re going to talk a lot about my business today and the entrepreneurial experience, but that was really transformative, I think, into making me who I am today of having a child in the midst of this really fast paced, high stakes environment. And that impacted everything I think about me, my work style, and ultimately drove me to launch my business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:01:27) – That’s an amazing experience to have had and having been through, not just from what you realized and how this business came along, but also this trajectory of having been through different industries at different points in time, just so much that it helps you one understand yourself, but also helps you grow. So we’ll talk a little more about all of these things, but now that we know a little about you, let’s play a game. We call this the underrated overrated. And I’ll just throw a few themes at you and see how you react to them.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:05) – Okay. I’m a little nervous, but let’s do it.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:08) – It’s a game.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:10) – Okay.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:11) – All right, let’s start with nfTs.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:16) – Oh, my goodness. I have absolutely no right to have an opinion on that.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:24) – Game, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:24) – You can. I know. I feel like what I’m really good at is knowing when I should have an opinion. So I would just say overrated because I have no idea.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:35) – That’s a good answer. Okay, what about crypto?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:41) – So I believe in it, but I think to me, my sense, and maybe this is because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, it feels like it’s overrated just because of how much is talked about it. But that’s not to say that it’s not good. I just think there’s probably a lot more focus on that, a lot more investment on that than probably is deserved. But we’ll see.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:04) – All right, so let’s round that off with the metaverse or the omniverse, as some people call it.

Allison Whalen: (0:03:12) – I’m going to say underrated because I feel like I don’t hear as much about that. So this is all kind of me coming back to how much do I actually hear about this? I don’t hear as much about it in my world, and maybe this is a personal perspective of, like, I should probably learn more about this, whereas I feel like I hear a lot about everything else that you’ve mentioned.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:33) – That makes sense. Let’s move into the more real world. What about real estate prices?

Allison Whalen: (0:03:43) – I’m trying to figure out in my mind what does overrated and underrated mean. I mean, I think they’re overvalued and we’re in trouble, but I don’t know if that’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:56) – Makes sense. What about stock market valuations?

Allison Whalen: (0:04:05) – I feel like I’m trying to cop out of all of this, but I guess my perspective on the stock market is I don’t care. And I try to live my life not caring about it because I’m young enough that it doesn’t matter. And over time it’ll be fine. And I think that the most important thing is diversification. And so hopefully everyone is diversified and they don’t have to care if it’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:04:27) – That’s a really smart answer. What about two other things that are related? Cash and then inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:04:36) – Yeah, cash, I think, is underrated. But I’m a very conservative person, both personally, we tend to over index on cash, which we’ve been mocked for in our personal life. And when I run my own business, I’m very conservative. And I think that’s partially having come from the tech world that was highly funded, where you see just spending, spending, spending, where cash doesn’t matter. And so I also bootstrapped my business for two years where cash was the most important thing. I literally could not exist if I didn’t have cash. And so I think it’s incredibly important and underrated. What was the second piece to it?

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:15) – Inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:17) – Inflation. I listened to an interesting podcast recently where I think it’s underrated or overrated, depending on who you are. So if you’re young in the job market, it’s blown out of proportion. Because, yes, everything is more expensive, but you’ll make more. But that’s very different than retired. My parents who are retired and how that impacts them. So I think it really depends on your stage of life.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:45) – Makes sense. And then the last one is the great resignation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:54) – This is hard for me because I live in that world. I hear about it all the time, and I think the attention to it is real. So it’s not over underrated. I think it’s exactly right. It is happening, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. And so I think it’s spot on, basically.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:17) – All right, well, thanks for playing along. That was fun. Looked like I put you in a spot, which not really, but let’s come to some questions that are closer to you and you don’t feel like you have to cop out on them.

Allison Whalen: (0:06:30) – Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:32) – Let’s talk about what is parentally and what is the mission, the vision, and also, most importantly for me, why do this?

Allison Whalen: (0:06:41) – Yeah. So parentally offers a benefit that employers provide to their expecting employees. And so we come in and we provide a career coaching based program that starts about three months before parental leave starts. And through our coaching and curriculum, like checklists, content, best practices, templates, we help employees prepare really strong coverage plans and then support them with their re onboarding the first three months after a parental leave to get them back to work. And so you can think of us as really squarely in a career bucket. So there are tons of resources to support health and well being and parenting. But when I had my first child, when I was working at managed by Q, there was absolutely nothing to help me with my career. And so I was a manager and I had a really important sales role where it was black and white, whether I was successful or my team was successful, and it was really difficult. And when I returned to work, I realized, this is crazy, because my company wanted to retain me, I wanted to stay. So you had two parties that really wanted the same result. And yet, because nobody knew how to support the process, we didn’t know how to put together a strong coverage plan. They didn’t know how to support me upon my return, and I didn’t even know what I needed. I was trying to leave. And so what I realized is this is a massive problem. And so to the answer of, like, why focus on this? This is the moment, especially for women, when they begin to fall off their preferred career track. It’s when they have a child and it’s when they have their second child and again their third. It continues to hurt them. And I guess the epiphany I had was so much of that is unnecessary. This isn’t a situation where it’s like, oh, it is what it is. And when you become a parent, your ambitions change and everything changes. And this is how it always has to be. I identified well, actually, there are many different things that companies, managers, teammates, and the expecting employee can do to set everyone up for success so that parental leave is not this major disruption in your career, but it’s actually a forcing function to give you the opportunity to take a step back, figure out what’s not working well, and then come back better than ever.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:08:56) – Makes sense. And I personally believe that this is massive. Right. And we see this in the numbers, how women tend to drop off. You pointed out specifically when they know they’re expecting, whether it’s the first, 2nd or third child. And we have seen as an industry, across these different industries, there is a major impact of not having as many women in the workforce or not having as many women in leadership positions or executive positions. So I think what you’re doing is extremely important. Tell us a little more about the size and scale of your operations, where all are you doing this? Are you working with certain specific industries and would love to learn a little more about that.

Allison Whalen: (0:09:40) – Yeah, well, the problem, like you mentioned, is huge. Companies now, I think, because of employee demand, are realizing they have to give more paid leave. They have to give it to men. They have to encourage the men to actually take it. So get rid of the stigma associated with, oh, I don’t want to take my leave or I’ll look like I don’t care about work. And people are having children later in life now, typically in their 30s, when they have roles with more responsibilities. And so their absence can be more painful in their career and for the company. So the problem is getting bigger and bigger. So where we step in is we’re kind of riding on the coattails of companies already realizing we’ve got to extend our parental leave. And then they realize, uhoh, this may have some negative impacts as it relates to retaining women or working parents in general, or business disruption. And so we come in at that point to help them solve that and hopefully convince them to continue to extend their leave because of that, because we tend to work with more progressive employers, we are over indexing on tech companies who are really the first movers here. They are going after the most senior, most expensive talent, and so they’re really following what employees want. But I would say over the past, we launched in 2019 and I’ve noticed a massive difference post Covid so we were live six months pre Covid, and at that point, it was like the most progressive tech companies wanted to work with us, and they totally got it. And this differentiated them once Covid hit. And all of a sudden we became very aware of the challenges of working parents and parental leave became more top of. I mean, we’re working across finance, we’re working with CPG companies, so it’s not just tech anymore. And we do span really small startups all the way through Fortune 100 employers. So we’ve worked with over 800 employees to date, and that’s growing every single month. We have 25 corporate clients at this point. And so we’ve grown a lot faster than I expected, and I think largely because of a lot of the industry and societal trends that I mentioned before.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:11:52) – And that’s really heartening to hear, right. That we are moving in the right direction. So as you look at the business and the opportunities and the challenges, if we can talk a little first about what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing as a business?

Allison Whalen: (0:12:11) – Yeah, the biggest challenge. I should caveat this by saying I come from sales, so I’m always thinking with my sales hat on. And the biggest challenge I see today in our business is we are creating a new category. So I have never once won business from another vendor. It’s not like I’m going in and competing on, oh, you already have this budget and we’re better, so you should just move that budget. To me, that’s what I used to do at manage by Q. It was commercial cleaning, and so everybody knows they need to clean their office, they have budget for it. So it was a pretty easy sale of, well, just give it to us. This is totally different. It’s much harder. You have to oftentimes convince companies that they have a problem that they’re not aware of, which is really difficult, and then convince them to find new budget. And people don’t really like change. And so even companies that know, yes, this is a big problem, they’re scared to try something new. And so I would say that’s the biggest challenge for us. But it’s what I really like of, I don’t mind being at the forefront of this. I think that it’s where I’m best anyway. But it is a huge challenge. I mean, it would be much easier if everyone had a budget for parental leave support and I just had to go in and say, look at how great we are. But that’s not really what it’s like.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:13:23) – I think the good thing working in your favor is that the value proposition is so clear.

Allison Whalen: (0:13:29) – Yeah, that’s what I think. We get a lot of pressure, though, to prove our ROI, and it’s very difficult because I think that the number one problem that we’re solving is actually poor productivity. So when people return from parental leave, I think companies and managers don’t fully recognize how difficult that is and the incredible opportunity cost of people showing up. There’s no re onboarding in place. Takes them forever to figure out what they missed to get back into work. That is incredibly expensive, and it’s very difficult to prove, so to speak, to leadership, how expensive that is. And that for a fraction of that price, we can help with that. So to me, this is so obvious that, of course, for the amount that you’re paying us, we’re going to make a massive difference. But I think it becomes more difficult to put dollars and cents to it. When you’re talking about opportunity, cost makes sense.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:14:26) – And hopefully, as this evolves, as more companies sign up, those metrics will come to the fore. And then from there on, it just becomes a matter of validation that all of these companies, they’ve seen the value and it just scales from there.

Allison Whalen: (0:14:42) – Yeah, and to that point, we love that. People love what we do. Like, our NPS score is very high, but we’re so focused on that should be baseline. Like, any benefit that a company offers should make people happy. We need to prove we’re actually adding value to the company. And so we have a number of things that we’re tracking to show productivity increase, retention increase, things like that that are actually showing what are they doing differently because of us? As opposed to. I loved having a career coach. I mean, everybody loves working with a career coach, so that’s just sort of a given.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:15:15) – Makes sense. Now, on the flip side, what’s the biggest opportunity you’re most excited about?

Allison Whalen: (0:15:23) – So I get really excited by, I always expected to have a lot of smaller tech company clients, and I think I was most surprised by how quickly I was able to partner with really large companies. And the reason that’s so exciting, of course, there’s like a huge revenue opportunity there. But really where I get really excited is when you partner with large companies, you just have such an incredible platform for impact. So whatever we do with them, we’re impacting thousands of people. And that’s just really motivating to somebody who starts a business like this that is focused on more of like a social mission. And we’re seeing a lot of our large employer clients come to us and really push us to do more and to say we want to bring you in and focus on the employee experience, expand your services. I’ve actually been saying no nonstop because I think that that’s helpful to scale at this stage. But that’s the exciting next step of we don’t have to sit on the sidelines and pilot for free and beg people for feedback. We actually have these partners that will partner with us and they know we’re experimenting, but we get to do it with real people and in an environment that the feedback loop is just so strong. So I think that’s what I’m most excited about going into next year.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:16:38) – That’s amazing. That’s a great place to be in. Now, as we look forward, let’s look back, and I like to call it looking in the rear view mirror, not just in your entrepreneurial journey, but also back in your career. What are two things that stand out? One, that you kind of blew it out of the park, even exceeded your own expectations, and then on the other end, something that did not work out as you had expected and in turn became a lesson learned.

Allison Whalen: (0:17:10) – Yeah. Do you want me to answer that from a career perspective? Yeah, I think from a career perspective for me. So I come from a background of more corporate America and finance, and I had never worked in a startup until I went to manage MyQ. And I was amazed how much I loved it and how good I was at it. And I think about that a lot because I think I grew up not around entrepreneurs. I grew up in an environment where you should go to school, you should get the right major, you should get a nice paying job that’s very secure. And so it never occurred to me to try something riskier. And so I also thought, well, I must not be good at it. And so when I went there and I was able to join really early, stay through the acquisition, and even after we were acquired by WeWork, I realized, like, wow, I did way better at this than I ever thought I would, and that there are a lot of things that I can do that are helpful here and in an entrepreneurial environment, failure, I think. Well, so there are a few things. I made one decision earlier in my career to get into education because I cared a lot, and I really believed in the power of education to help improve a lot of the major issues we have with poverty, both internationally and in the United States. I think the mistake I made there is confusing what you believe in and what you’re good at. And so I really believed in it. And literally within a few weeks of joining, I worked for a charter school network for a year. Within a few weeks realized, wow, this does not align with my skill set at all. And so that was not good, which seems like a very basic lesson, but it took actually doing that to realize. But I’m basically saying I did the same thing in both cases and got different results. In one case realized I was terrible at it, the other case did something brand new and realized I was great at it. So the outcomes are different. But I think no matter what, that learning, if you can derisk it, is really helpful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:19:21) – Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s not easy to kind of reflect and accept that this is what I did and I made a mistake. As long as you can do that and learn from it, it makes you a better person. And from what I’ve learned is the sooner you make these mistakes, the better you become as yeah, I think the.

Allison Whalen: (0:19:44) – Parallel to that with parentally is my co founder and I piloted the business while we were still working full time. So I was at management Q she was at target and we piloted because we were like, we have no idea how this is going to work. And there were a lot of failures in the pilot and it’s like, thank goodness because it completely changed the direction that we went with the business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:20:05) – That’s really smart. I’m going to use that as a pivot to come to my favorite part of the show. We call it the one line life lessons. Would love to hear your one line life lessons and some context around either how you came to adopt them or how you came up with them.

Allison Whalen: (0:20:23) – Yeah. So I think number one is always have a bias to action. Obviously that’s more important in the startup environment, but I have such a strong bias to action. I believe in it so deeply of breaking things down into really small steps and just doing them. And the faster you get feedback, faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn, the better you will be. The other thing that I really do live by is like anytime I’m about to do anything risky, I always run through a mental exercise of what is the worst case scenario? So I always ask myself that, because the answer is almost always, it’s not that bad. And I think not thinking through that can oftentimes make people stop or be scared of the unknown. But the second you say, what is the absolute worst thing that could happen? And then you’re like, well, that’s not that bad. And if it did happen, this is what I would do. Let’s go. And so I find that to be really helpful and not as negative as it sounds. I think the third is, if you’re focused on a real problem, your business will succeed. And so one thing I’ve been hyper aware of is, how do I stay married to this problem and not get distracted by revenue goals and not get distracted by other people’s opinions of what we should be doing? Not get distracted by the customer saying, we love what you’re doing. Can you now help working parents who have teenagers? No, because that’s not the problem that we’re focused on. And so I really strongly believe in focusing on that problem, and you will be successful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:21:59) – I just want to, not to interrupt you, but I want to talk about the importance of recognizing that, but also having the courage to focus and remain on that objective, because I can imagine all of these different influences that can be extremely hard.

Allison Whalen: (0:22:17) – Yeah, it’s hard, and it’s especially hard when you have really large clients who have a lot of money. And again, I think that this is the benefit of having worked in a startup before and seeing what happens when you chase that. It does not pay off in the long run. And also, the other thing I’ve learned is the customer will stick around. So if you say no this year and say, just wait three years, they’ll be there if they really like you. So, yeah, I believe very deeply in really defining the problem and sticking with that. The fourth would be smart work is better than hard work. I think any parent feels this way, that we’re just not willing to work around the clock anymore. And that’s also not the best answer. And so I really put a lot of pressure on me, my team, everyone, to think what is the best way to do this, and to avoid, if you put the constraint of, I have to do this between nine and five, you will, and you will probably do it better, and you’ll say no to the things that are silly. So I’m a big believer in that. And then the last is done is better than perfect. I think for many people, especially ambitious professionals, they really struggle with that. But it’s just if you go after perfect, that makes everything else I’ve described break. You can’t work smart then if you want to be perfect. And I think the reality is, for almost everything we do in life, 80% is good enough and gets you closer to the goal. And so maybe that changes as we scale the business and get really mature. But I really believe that we should always be aiming for 80%, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be so much better. And maybe that’s also because we’re in a space where there’s literally nothing. So we have to constantly be increasing what we want to get to. But if we wait too long to get there, it’s going to be bad for everyone. And so we need to just move bias to action done is better than perfect.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:19) – And I agree with that. And just to add to that, it also forces you to think about the resources that you do have and prioritize them, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:24:30) – Yeah. I’m just a huge believer that we just have to put things out in the world and see what happens. And then over time, you can bring in people who make incremental improvements, but especially in early stages of the business, you just need to start solving problems faster.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:48) – True. Allison, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your oneline life lessons for our audience. We have an entire collection@onelinelifelessons.com. And wherever you socialize digitally. Allison, thanks again. We really appreciate you coming on, and good luck with the journey and your continued growth.

Allison Whalen: (0:25:09) – Great. Thank you so much.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:00) – Hey, everyone. Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Allison Whalen. Allison, welcome on the show.

Allison Whalen: (0:00:09) – Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:11) – So am I. Let’s start with who is Allison?

Allison Whalen: (0:00:16) – Sure. So I grew up in Minnesota and moved to New York after college and started off my career in finance. I did invest in banking and private equity, and then I kind of pivoted all over the place. And so I did a little bit of nonprofit work. I worked at some investor type activities and then ultimately got my MBA and pivoted into tech startups. And my job before I started parentally was I joined an early stage tech startup called managed by Q and stayed with them through their ultimate acquisition by WeWork. And that was unbelievable to me. It was sort of like the experimental ground where I could pretend I was an entrepreneur but with no actual risk. And so that was really life changing for me. And at the same time, I became a mother. And so I know we’re going to talk a lot about my business today and the entrepreneurial experience, but that was really transformative, I think, into making me who I am today of having a child in the midst of this really fast paced, high stakes environment. And that impacted everything I think about me, my work style, and ultimately drove me to launch my business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:01:27) – That’s an amazing experience to have had and having been through, not just from what you realized and how this business came along, but also this trajectory of having been through different industries at different points in time, just so much that it helps you one understand yourself, but also helps you grow. So we’ll talk a little more about all of these things, but now that we know a little about you, let’s play a game. We call this the underrated overrated. And I’ll just throw a few themes at you and see how you react to them.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:05) – Okay. I’m a little nervous, but let’s do it.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:08) – It’s a game.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:10) – Okay.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:11) – All right, let’s start with nfTs.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:16) – Oh, my goodness. I have absolutely no right to have an opinion on that.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:24) – Game, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:24) – You can. I know. I feel like what I’m really good at is knowing when I should have an opinion. So I would just say overrated because I have no idea.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:35) – That’s a good answer. Okay, what about crypto?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:41) – So I believe in it, but I think to me, my sense, and maybe this is because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, it feels like it’s overrated just because of how much is talked about it. But that’s not to say that it’s not good. I just think there’s probably a lot more focus on that, a lot more investment on that than probably is deserved. But we’ll see.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:04) – All right, so let’s round that off with the metaverse or the omniverse, as some people call it.

Allison Whalen: (0:03:12) – I’m going to say underrated because I feel like I don’t hear as much about that. So this is all kind of me coming back to how much do I actually hear about this? I don’t hear as much about it in my world, and maybe this is a personal perspective of, like, I should probably learn more about this, whereas I feel like I hear a lot about everything else that you’ve mentioned.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:33) – That makes sense. Let’s move into the more real world. What about real estate prices?

Allison Whalen: (0:03:43) – I’m trying to figure out in my mind what does overrated and underrated mean. I mean, I think they’re overvalued and we’re in trouble, but I don’t know if that’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:56) – Makes sense. What about stock market valuations?

Allison Whalen: (0:04:05) – I feel like I’m trying to cop out of all of this, but I guess my perspective on the stock market is I don’t care. And I try to live my life not caring about it because I’m young enough that it doesn’t matter. And over time it’ll be fine. And I think that the most important thing is diversification. And so hopefully everyone is diversified and they don’t have to care if it’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:04:27) – That’s a really smart answer. What about two other things that are related? Cash and then inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:04:36) – Yeah, cash, I think, is underrated. But I’m a very conservative person, both personally, we tend to over index on cash, which we’ve been mocked for in our personal life. And when I run my own business, I’m very conservative. And I think that’s partially having come from the tech world that was highly funded, where you see just spending, spending, spending, where cash doesn’t matter. And so I also bootstrapped my business for two years where cash was the most important thing. I literally could not exist if I didn’t have cash. And so I think it’s incredibly important and underrated. What was the second piece to it?

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:15) – Inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:17) – Inflation. I listened to an interesting podcast recently where I think it’s underrated or overrated, depending on who you are. So if you’re young in the job market, it’s blown out of proportion. Because, yes, everything is more expensive, but you’ll make more. But that’s very different than retired. My parents who are retired and how that impacts them. So I think it really depends on your stage of life.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:45) – Makes sense. And then the last one is the great resignation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:54) – This is hard for me because I live in that world. I hear about it all the time, and I think the attention to it is real. So it’s not over underrated. I think it’s exactly right. It is happening, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. And so I think it’s spot on, basically.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:17) – All right, well, thanks for playing along. That was fun. Looked like I put you in a spot, which not really, but let’s come to some questions that are closer to you and you don’t feel like you have to cop out on them.

Allison Whalen: (0:06:30) – Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:32) – Let’s talk about what is parentally and what is the mission, the vision, and also, most importantly for me, why do this?

Allison Whalen: (0:06:41) – Yeah. So parentally offers a benefit that employers provide to their expecting employees. And so we come in and we provide a career coaching based program that starts about three months before parental leave starts. And through our coaching and curriculum, like checklists, content, best practices, templates, we help employees prepare really strong coverage plans and then support them with their re onboarding the first three months after a parental leave to get them back to work. And so you can think of us as really squarely in a career bucket. So there are tons of resources to support health and well being and parenting. But when I had my first child, when I was working at managed by Q, there was absolutely nothing to help me with my career. And so I was a manager and I had a really important sales role where it was black and white, whether I was successful or my team was successful, and it was really difficult. And when I returned to work, I realized, this is crazy, because my company wanted to retain me, I wanted to stay. So you had two parties that really wanted the same result. And yet, because nobody knew how to support the process, we didn’t know how to put together a strong coverage plan. They didn’t know how to support me upon my return, and I didn’t even know what I needed. I was trying to leave. And so what I realized is this is a massive problem. And so to the answer of, like, why focus on this? This is the moment, especially for women, when they begin to fall off their preferred career track. It’s when they have a child and it’s when they have their second child and again their third. It continues to hurt them. And I guess the epiphany I had was so much of that is unnecessary. This isn’t a situation where it’s like, oh, it is what it is. And when you become a parent, your ambitions change and everything changes. And this is how it always has to be. I identified well, actually, there are many different things that companies, managers, teammates, and the expecting employee can do to set everyone up for success so that parental leave is not this major disruption in your career, but it’s actually a forcing function to give you the opportunity to take a step back, figure out what’s not working well, and then come back better than ever.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:08:56) – Makes sense. And I personally believe that this is massive. Right. And we see this in the numbers, how women tend to drop off. You pointed out specifically when they know they’re expecting, whether it’s the first, 2nd or third child. And we have seen as an industry, across these different industries, there is a major impact of not having as many women in the workforce or not having as many women in leadership positions or executive positions. So I think what you’re doing is extremely important. Tell us a little more about the size and scale of your operations, where all are you doing this? Are you working with certain specific industries and would love to learn a little more about that.

Allison Whalen: (0:09:40) – Yeah, well, the problem, like you mentioned, is huge. Companies now, I think, because of employee demand, are realizing they have to give more paid leave. They have to give it to men. They have to encourage the men to actually take it. So get rid of the stigma associated with, oh, I don’t want to take my leave or I’ll look like I don’t care about work. And people are having children later in life now, typically in their 30s, when they have roles with more responsibilities. And so their absence can be more painful in their career and for the company. So the problem is getting bigger and bigger. So where we step in is we’re kind of riding on the coattails of companies already realizing we’ve got to extend our parental leave. And then they realize, uhoh, this may have some negative impacts as it relates to retaining women or working parents in general, or business disruption. And so we come in at that point to help them solve that and hopefully convince them to continue to extend their leave because of that, because we tend to work with more progressive employers, we are over indexing on tech companies who are really the first movers here. They are going after the most senior, most expensive talent, and so they’re really following what employees want. But I would say over the past, we launched in 2019 and I’ve noticed a massive difference post Covid so we were live six months pre Covid, and at that point, it was like the most progressive tech companies wanted to work with us, and they totally got it. And this differentiated them once Covid hit. And all of a sudden we became very aware of the challenges of working parents and parental leave became more top of. I mean, we’re working across finance, we’re working with CPG companies, so it’s not just tech anymore. And we do span really small startups all the way through Fortune 100 employers. So we’ve worked with over 800 employees to date, and that’s growing every single month. We have 25 corporate clients at this point. And so we’ve grown a lot faster than I expected, and I think largely because of a lot of the industry and societal trends that I mentioned before.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:11:52) – And that’s really heartening to hear, right. That we are moving in the right direction. So as you look at the business and the opportunities and the challenges, if we can talk a little first about what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing as a business?

Allison Whalen: (0:12:11) – Yeah, the biggest challenge. I should caveat this by saying I come from sales, so I’m always thinking with my sales hat on. And the biggest challenge I see today in our business is we are creating a new category. So I have never once won business from another vendor. It’s not like I’m going in and competing on, oh, you already have this budget and we’re better, so you should just move that budget. To me, that’s what I used to do at manage by Q. It was commercial cleaning, and so everybody knows they need to clean their office, they have budget for it. So it was a pretty easy sale of, well, just give it to us. This is totally different. It’s much harder. You have to oftentimes convince companies that they have a problem that they’re not aware of, which is really difficult, and then convince them to find new budget. And people don’t really like change. And so even companies that know, yes, this is a big problem, they’re scared to try something new. And so I would say that’s the biggest challenge for us. But it’s what I really like of, I don’t mind being at the forefront of this. I think that it’s where I’m best anyway. But it is a huge challenge. I mean, it would be much easier if everyone had a budget for parental leave support and I just had to go in and say, look at how great we are. But that’s not really what it’s like.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:13:23) – I think the good thing working in your favor is that the value proposition is so clear.

Allison Whalen: (0:13:29) – Yeah, that’s what I think. We get a lot of pressure, though, to prove our ROI, and it’s very difficult because I think that the number one problem that we’re solving is actually poor productivity. So when people return from parental leave, I think companies and managers don’t fully recognize how difficult that is and the incredible opportunity cost of people showing up. There’s no re onboarding in place. Takes them forever to figure out what they missed to get back into work. That is incredibly expensive, and it’s very difficult to prove, so to speak, to leadership, how expensive that is. And that for a fraction of that price, we can help with that. So to me, this is so obvious that, of course, for the amount that you’re paying us, we’re going to make a massive difference. But I think it becomes more difficult to put dollars and cents to it. When you’re talking about opportunity, cost makes sense.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:14:26) – And hopefully, as this evolves, as more companies sign up, those metrics will come to the fore. And then from there on, it just becomes a matter of validation that all of these companies, they’ve seen the value and it just scales from there.

Allison Whalen: (0:14:42) – Yeah, and to that point, we love that. People love what we do. Like, our NPS score is very high, but we’re so focused on that should be baseline. Like, any benefit that a company offers should make people happy. We need to prove we’re actually adding value to the company. And so we have a number of things that we’re tracking to show productivity increase, retention increase, things like that that are actually showing what are they doing differently because of us? As opposed to. I loved having a career coach. I mean, everybody loves working with a career coach, so that’s just sort of a given.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:15:15) – Makes sense. Now, on the flip side, what’s the biggest opportunity you’re most excited about?

Allison Whalen: (0:15:23) – So I get really excited by, I always expected to have a lot of smaller tech company clients, and I think I was most surprised by how quickly I was able to partner with really large companies. And the reason that’s so exciting, of course, there’s like a huge revenue opportunity there. But really where I get really excited is when you partner with large companies, you just have such an incredible platform for impact. So whatever we do with them, we’re impacting thousands of people. And that’s just really motivating to somebody who starts a business like this that is focused on more of like a social mission. And we’re seeing a lot of our large employer clients come to us and really push us to do more and to say we want to bring you in and focus on the employee experience, expand your services. I’ve actually been saying no nonstop because I think that that’s helpful to scale at this stage. But that’s the exciting next step of we don’t have to sit on the sidelines and pilot for free and beg people for feedback. We actually have these partners that will partner with us and they know we’re experimenting, but we get to do it with real people and in an environment that the feedback loop is just so strong. So I think that’s what I’m most excited about going into next year.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:16:38) – That’s amazing. That’s a great place to be in. Now, as we look forward, let’s look back, and I like to call it looking in the rear view mirror, not just in your entrepreneurial journey, but also back in your career. What are two things that stand out? One, that you kind of blew it out of the park, even exceeded your own expectations, and then on the other end, something that did not work out as you had expected and in turn became a lesson learned.

Allison Whalen: (0:17:10) – Yeah. Do you want me to answer that from a career perspective? Yeah, I think from a career perspective for me. So I come from a background of more corporate America and finance, and I had never worked in a startup until I went to manage MyQ. And I was amazed how much I loved it and how good I was at it. And I think about that a lot because I think I grew up not around entrepreneurs. I grew up in an environment where you should go to school, you should get the right major, you should get a nice paying job that’s very secure. And so it never occurred to me to try something riskier. And so I also thought, well, I must not be good at it. And so when I went there and I was able to join really early, stay through the acquisition, and even after we were acquired by WeWork, I realized, like, wow, I did way better at this than I ever thought I would, and that there are a lot of things that I can do that are helpful here and in an entrepreneurial environment, failure, I think. Well, so there are a few things. I made one decision earlier in my career to get into education because I cared a lot, and I really believed in the power of education to help improve a lot of the major issues we have with poverty, both internationally and in the United States. I think the mistake I made there is confusing what you believe in and what you’re good at. And so I really believed in it. And literally within a few weeks of joining, I worked for a charter school network for a year. Within a few weeks realized, wow, this does not align with my skill set at all. And so that was not good, which seems like a very basic lesson, but it took actually doing that to realize. But I’m basically saying I did the same thing in both cases and got different results. In one case realized I was terrible at it, the other case did something brand new and realized I was great at it. So the outcomes are different. But I think no matter what, that learning, if you can derisk it, is really helpful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:19:21) – Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s not easy to kind of reflect and accept that this is what I did and I made a mistake. As long as you can do that and learn from it, it makes you a better person. And from what I’ve learned is the sooner you make these mistakes, the better you become as yeah, I think the.

Allison Whalen: (0:19:44) – Parallel to that with parentally is my co founder and I piloted the business while we were still working full time. So I was at management Q she was at target and we piloted because we were like, we have no idea how this is going to work. And there were a lot of failures in the pilot and it’s like, thank goodness because it completely changed the direction that we went with the business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:20:05) – That’s really smart. I’m going to use that as a pivot to come to my favorite part of the show. We call it the one line life lessons. Would love to hear your one line life lessons and some context around either how you came to adopt them or how you came up with them.

Allison Whalen: (0:20:23) – Yeah. So I think number one is always have a bias to action. Obviously that’s more important in the startup environment, but I have such a strong bias to action. I believe in it so deeply of breaking things down into really small steps and just doing them. And the faster you get feedback, faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn, the better you will be. The other thing that I really do live by is like anytime I’m about to do anything risky, I always run through a mental exercise of what is the worst case scenario? So I always ask myself that, because the answer is almost always, it’s not that bad. And I think not thinking through that can oftentimes make people stop or be scared of the unknown. But the second you say, what is the absolute worst thing that could happen? And then you’re like, well, that’s not that bad. And if it did happen, this is what I would do. Let’s go. And so I find that to be really helpful and not as negative as it sounds. I think the third is, if you’re focused on a real problem, your business will succeed. And so one thing I’ve been hyper aware of is, how do I stay married to this problem and not get distracted by revenue goals and not get distracted by other people’s opinions of what we should be doing? Not get distracted by the customer saying, we love what you’re doing. Can you now help working parents who have teenagers? No, because that’s not the problem that we’re focused on. And so I really strongly believe in focusing on that problem, and you will be successful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:21:59) – I just want to, not to interrupt you, but I want to talk about the importance of recognizing that, but also having the courage to focus and remain on that objective, because I can imagine all of these different influences that can be extremely hard.

Allison Whalen: (0:22:17) – Yeah, it’s hard, and it’s especially hard when you have really large clients who have a lot of money. And again, I think that this is the benefit of having worked in a startup before and seeing what happens when you chase that. It does not pay off in the long run. And also, the other thing I’ve learned is the customer will stick around. So if you say no this year and say, just wait three years, they’ll be there if they really like you. So, yeah, I believe very deeply in really defining the problem and sticking with that. The fourth would be smart work is better than hard work. I think any parent feels this way, that we’re just not willing to work around the clock anymore. And that’s also not the best answer. And so I really put a lot of pressure on me, my team, everyone, to think what is the best way to do this, and to avoid, if you put the constraint of, I have to do this between nine and five, you will, and you will probably do it better, and you’ll say no to the things that are silly. So I’m a big believer in that. And then the last is done is better than perfect. I think for many people, especially ambitious professionals, they really struggle with that. But it’s just if you go after perfect, that makes everything else I’ve described break. You can’t work smart then if you want to be perfect. And I think the reality is, for almost everything we do in life, 80% is good enough and gets you closer to the goal. And so maybe that changes as we scale the business and get really mature. But I really believe that we should always be aiming for 80%, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be so much better. And maybe that’s also because we’re in a space where there’s literally nothing. So we have to constantly be increasing what we want to get to. But if we wait too long to get there, it’s going to be bad for everyone. And so we need to just move bias to action done is better than perfect.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:19) – And I agree with that. And just to add to that, it also forces you to think about the resources that you do have and prioritize them, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:24:30) – Yeah. I’m just a huge believer that we just have to put things out in the world and see what happens. And then over time, you can bring in people who make incremental improvements, but especially in early stages of the business, you just need to start solving problems faster.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:48) – True. Allison, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your oneline life lessons for our audience. We have an entire collection@onelinelifelessons.com. And wherever you socialize digitally. Allison, thanks again. We really appreciate you coming on, and good luck with the journey and your continued growth.

Allison Whalen: (0:25:09) – Great. Thank you so much.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:00) – Hey, everyone. Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Allison Whalen. Allison, welcome on the show.

Allison Whalen: (0:00:09) – Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:00:11) – So am I. Let’s start with who is Allison?

Allison Whalen: (0:00:16) – Sure. So I grew up in Minnesota and moved to New York after college and started off my career in finance. I did invest in banking and private equity, and then I kind of pivoted all over the place. And so I did a little bit of nonprofit work. I worked at some investor type activities and then ultimately got my MBA and pivoted into tech startups. And my job before I started parentally was I joined an early stage tech startup called managed by Q and stayed with them through their ultimate acquisition by WeWork. And that was unbelievable to me. It was sort of like the experimental ground where I could pretend I was an entrepreneur but with no actual risk. And so that was really life changing for me. And at the same time, I became a mother. And so I know we’re going to talk a lot about my business today and the entrepreneurial experience, but that was really transformative, I think, into making me who I am today of having a child in the midst of this really fast paced, high stakes environment. And that impacted everything I think about me, my work style, and ultimately drove me to launch my business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:01:27) – That’s an amazing experience to have had and having been through, not just from what you realized and how this business came along, but also this trajectory of having been through different industries at different points in time, just so much that it helps you one understand yourself, but also helps you grow. So we’ll talk a little more about all of these things, but now that we know a little about you, let’s play a game. We call this the underrated overrated. And I’ll just throw a few themes at you and see how you react to them.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:05) – Okay. I’m a little nervous, but let’s do it.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:08) – It’s a game.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:10) – Okay.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:11) – All right, let’s start with nfTs.

Allison Whalen: (0:02:16) – Oh, my goodness. I have absolutely no right to have an opinion on that.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:24) – Game, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:24) – You can. I know. I feel like what I’m really good at is knowing when I should have an opinion. So I would just say overrated because I have no idea.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:02:35) – That’s a good answer. Okay, what about crypto?

Allison Whalen: (0:02:41) – So I believe in it, but I think to me, my sense, and maybe this is because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, it feels like it’s overrated just because of how much is talked about it. But that’s not to say that it’s not good. I just think there’s probably a lot more focus on that, a lot more investment on that than probably is deserved. But we’ll see.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:04) – All right, so let’s round that off with the metaverse or the omniverse, as some people call it.

Allison Whalen: (0:03:12) – I’m going to say underrated because I feel like I don’t hear as much about that. So this is all kind of me coming back to how much do I actually hear about this? I don’t hear as much about it in my world, and maybe this is a personal perspective of, like, I should probably learn more about this, whereas I feel like I hear a lot about everything else that you’ve mentioned.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:33) – That makes sense. Let’s move into the more real world. What about real estate prices?

Allison Whalen: (0:03:43) – I’m trying to figure out in my mind what does overrated and underrated mean. I mean, I think they’re overvalued and we’re in trouble, but I don’t know if that’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:03:56) – Makes sense. What about stock market valuations?

Allison Whalen: (0:04:05) – I feel like I’m trying to cop out of all of this, but I guess my perspective on the stock market is I don’t care. And I try to live my life not caring about it because I’m young enough that it doesn’t matter. And over time it’ll be fine. And I think that the most important thing is diversification. And so hopefully everyone is diversified and they don’t have to care if it’s underrated or overrated.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:04:27) – That’s a really smart answer. What about two other things that are related? Cash and then inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:04:36) – Yeah, cash, I think, is underrated. But I’m a very conservative person, both personally, we tend to over index on cash, which we’ve been mocked for in our personal life. And when I run my own business, I’m very conservative. And I think that’s partially having come from the tech world that was highly funded, where you see just spending, spending, spending, where cash doesn’t matter. And so I also bootstrapped my business for two years where cash was the most important thing. I literally could not exist if I didn’t have cash. And so I think it’s incredibly important and underrated. What was the second piece to it?

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:15) – Inflation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:17) – Inflation. I listened to an interesting podcast recently where I think it’s underrated or overrated, depending on who you are. So if you’re young in the job market, it’s blown out of proportion. Because, yes, everything is more expensive, but you’ll make more. But that’s very different than retired. My parents who are retired and how that impacts them. So I think it really depends on your stage of life.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:05:45) – Makes sense. And then the last one is the great resignation.

Allison Whalen: (0:05:54) – This is hard for me because I live in that world. I hear about it all the time, and I think the attention to it is real. So it’s not over underrated. I think it’s exactly right. It is happening, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. And so I think it’s spot on, basically.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:17) – All right, well, thanks for playing along. That was fun. Looked like I put you in a spot, which not really, but let’s come to some questions that are closer to you and you don’t feel like you have to cop out on them.

Allison Whalen: (0:06:30) – Yeah.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:06:32) – Let’s talk about what is parentally and what is the mission, the vision, and also, most importantly for me, why do this?

Allison Whalen: (0:06:41) – Yeah. So parentally offers a benefit that employers provide to their expecting employees. And so we come in and we provide a career coaching based program that starts about three months before parental leave starts. And through our coaching and curriculum, like checklists, content, best practices, templates, we help employees prepare really strong coverage plans and then support them with their re onboarding the first three months after a parental leave to get them back to work. And so you can think of us as really squarely in a career bucket. So there are tons of resources to support health and well being and parenting. But when I had my first child, when I was working at managed by Q, there was absolutely nothing to help me with my career. And so I was a manager and I had a really important sales role where it was black and white, whether I was successful or my team was successful, and it was really difficult. And when I returned to work, I realized, this is crazy, because my company wanted to retain me, I wanted to stay. So you had two parties that really wanted the same result. And yet, because nobody knew how to support the process, we didn’t know how to put together a strong coverage plan. They didn’t know how to support me upon my return, and I didn’t even know what I needed. I was trying to leave. And so what I realized is this is a massive problem. And so to the answer of, like, why focus on this? This is the moment, especially for women, when they begin to fall off their preferred career track. It’s when they have a child and it’s when they have their second child and again their third. It continues to hurt them. And I guess the epiphany I had was so much of that is unnecessary. This isn’t a situation where it’s like, oh, it is what it is. And when you become a parent, your ambitions change and everything changes. And this is how it always has to be. I identified well, actually, there are many different things that companies, managers, teammates, and the expecting employee can do to set everyone up for success so that parental leave is not this major disruption in your career, but it’s actually a forcing function to give you the opportunity to take a step back, figure out what’s not working well, and then come back better than ever.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:08:56) – Makes sense. And I personally believe that this is massive. Right. And we see this in the numbers, how women tend to drop off. You pointed out specifically when they know they’re expecting, whether it’s the first, 2nd or third child. And we have seen as an industry, across these different industries, there is a major impact of not having as many women in the workforce or not having as many women in leadership positions or executive positions. So I think what you’re doing is extremely important. Tell us a little more about the size and scale of your operations, where all are you doing this? Are you working with certain specific industries and would love to learn a little more about that.

Allison Whalen: (0:09:40) – Yeah, well, the problem, like you mentioned, is huge. Companies now, I think, because of employee demand, are realizing they have to give more paid leave. They have to give it to men. They have to encourage the men to actually take it. So get rid of the stigma associated with, oh, I don’t want to take my leave or I’ll look like I don’t care about work. And people are having children later in life now, typically in their 30s, when they have roles with more responsibilities. And so their absence can be more painful in their career and for the company. So the problem is getting bigger and bigger. So where we step in is we’re kind of riding on the coattails of companies already realizing we’ve got to extend our parental leave. And then they realize, uhoh, this may have some negative impacts as it relates to retaining women or working parents in general, or business disruption. And so we come in at that point to help them solve that and hopefully convince them to continue to extend their leave because of that, because we tend to work with more progressive employers, we are over indexing on tech companies who are really the first movers here. They are going after the most senior, most expensive talent, and so they’re really following what employees want. But I would say over the past, we launched in 2019 and I’ve noticed a massive difference post Covid so we were live six months pre Covid, and at that point, it was like the most progressive tech companies wanted to work with us, and they totally got it. And this differentiated them once Covid hit. And all of a sudden we became very aware of the challenges of working parents and parental leave became more top of. I mean, we’re working across finance, we’re working with CPG companies, so it’s not just tech anymore. And we do span really small startups all the way through Fortune 100 employers. So we’ve worked with over 800 employees to date, and that’s growing every single month. We have 25 corporate clients at this point. And so we’ve grown a lot faster than I expected, and I think largely because of a lot of the industry and societal trends that I mentioned before.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:11:52) – And that’s really heartening to hear, right. That we are moving in the right direction. So as you look at the business and the opportunities and the challenges, if we can talk a little first about what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing as a business?

Allison Whalen: (0:12:11) – Yeah, the biggest challenge. I should caveat this by saying I come from sales, so I’m always thinking with my sales hat on. And the biggest challenge I see today in our business is we are creating a new category. So I have never once won business from another vendor. It’s not like I’m going in and competing on, oh, you already have this budget and we’re better, so you should just move that budget. To me, that’s what I used to do at manage by Q. It was commercial cleaning, and so everybody knows they need to clean their office, they have budget for it. So it was a pretty easy sale of, well, just give it to us. This is totally different. It’s much harder. You have to oftentimes convince companies that they have a problem that they’re not aware of, which is really difficult, and then convince them to find new budget. And people don’t really like change. And so even companies that know, yes, this is a big problem, they’re scared to try something new. And so I would say that’s the biggest challenge for us. But it’s what I really like of, I don’t mind being at the forefront of this. I think that it’s where I’m best anyway. But it is a huge challenge. I mean, it would be much easier if everyone had a budget for parental leave support and I just had to go in and say, look at how great we are. But that’s not really what it’s like.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:13:23) – I think the good thing working in your favor is that the value proposition is so clear.

Allison Whalen: (0:13:29) – Yeah, that’s what I think. We get a lot of pressure, though, to prove our ROI, and it’s very difficult because I think that the number one problem that we’re solving is actually poor productivity. So when people return from parental leave, I think companies and managers don’t fully recognize how difficult that is and the incredible opportunity cost of people showing up. There’s no re onboarding in place. Takes them forever to figure out what they missed to get back into work. That is incredibly expensive, and it’s very difficult to prove, so to speak, to leadership, how expensive that is. And that for a fraction of that price, we can help with that. So to me, this is so obvious that, of course, for the amount that you’re paying us, we’re going to make a massive difference. But I think it becomes more difficult to put dollars and cents to it. When you’re talking about opportunity, cost makes sense.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:14:26) – And hopefully, as this evolves, as more companies sign up, those metrics will come to the fore. And then from there on, it just becomes a matter of validation that all of these companies, they’ve seen the value and it just scales from there.

Allison Whalen: (0:14:42) – Yeah, and to that point, we love that. People love what we do. Like, our NPS score is very high, but we’re so focused on that should be baseline. Like, any benefit that a company offers should make people happy. We need to prove we’re actually adding value to the company. And so we have a number of things that we’re tracking to show productivity increase, retention increase, things like that that are actually showing what are they doing differently because of us? As opposed to. I loved having a career coach. I mean, everybody loves working with a career coach, so that’s just sort of a given.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:15:15) – Makes sense. Now, on the flip side, what’s the biggest opportunity you’re most excited about?

Allison Whalen: (0:15:23) – So I get really excited by, I always expected to have a lot of smaller tech company clients, and I think I was most surprised by how quickly I was able to partner with really large companies. And the reason that’s so exciting, of course, there’s like a huge revenue opportunity there. But really where I get really excited is when you partner with large companies, you just have such an incredible platform for impact. So whatever we do with them, we’re impacting thousands of people. And that’s just really motivating to somebody who starts a business like this that is focused on more of like a social mission. And we’re seeing a lot of our large employer clients come to us and really push us to do more and to say we want to bring you in and focus on the employee experience, expand your services. I’ve actually been saying no nonstop because I think that that’s helpful to scale at this stage. But that’s the exciting next step of we don’t have to sit on the sidelines and pilot for free and beg people for feedback. We actually have these partners that will partner with us and they know we’re experimenting, but we get to do it with real people and in an environment that the feedback loop is just so strong. So I think that’s what I’m most excited about going into next year.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:16:38) – That’s amazing. That’s a great place to be in. Now, as we look forward, let’s look back, and I like to call it looking in the rear view mirror, not just in your entrepreneurial journey, but also back in your career. What are two things that stand out? One, that you kind of blew it out of the park, even exceeded your own expectations, and then on the other end, something that did not work out as you had expected and in turn became a lesson learned.

Allison Whalen: (0:17:10) – Yeah. Do you want me to answer that from a career perspective? Yeah, I think from a career perspective for me. So I come from a background of more corporate America and finance, and I had never worked in a startup until I went to manage MyQ. And I was amazed how much I loved it and how good I was at it. And I think about that a lot because I think I grew up not around entrepreneurs. I grew up in an environment where you should go to school, you should get the right major, you should get a nice paying job that’s very secure. And so it never occurred to me to try something riskier. And so I also thought, well, I must not be good at it. And so when I went there and I was able to join really early, stay through the acquisition, and even after we were acquired by WeWork, I realized, like, wow, I did way better at this than I ever thought I would, and that there are a lot of things that I can do that are helpful here and in an entrepreneurial environment, failure, I think. Well, so there are a few things. I made one decision earlier in my career to get into education because I cared a lot, and I really believed in the power of education to help improve a lot of the major issues we have with poverty, both internationally and in the United States. I think the mistake I made there is confusing what you believe in and what you’re good at. And so I really believed in it. And literally within a few weeks of joining, I worked for a charter school network for a year. Within a few weeks realized, wow, this does not align with my skill set at all. And so that was not good, which seems like a very basic lesson, but it took actually doing that to realize. But I’m basically saying I did the same thing in both cases and got different results. In one case realized I was terrible at it, the other case did something brand new and realized I was great at it. So the outcomes are different. But I think no matter what, that learning, if you can derisk it, is really helpful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:19:21) – Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s not easy to kind of reflect and accept that this is what I did and I made a mistake. As long as you can do that and learn from it, it makes you a better person. And from what I’ve learned is the sooner you make these mistakes, the better you become as yeah, I think the.

Allison Whalen: (0:19:44) – Parallel to that with parentally is my co founder and I piloted the business while we were still working full time. So I was at management Q she was at target and we piloted because we were like, we have no idea how this is going to work. And there were a lot of failures in the pilot and it’s like, thank goodness because it completely changed the direction that we went with the business.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:20:05) – That’s really smart. I’m going to use that as a pivot to come to my favorite part of the show. We call it the one line life lessons. Would love to hear your one line life lessons and some context around either how you came to adopt them or how you came up with them.

Allison Whalen: (0:20:23) – Yeah. So I think number one is always have a bias to action. Obviously that’s more important in the startup environment, but I have such a strong bias to action. I believe in it so deeply of breaking things down into really small steps and just doing them. And the faster you get feedback, faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn, the better you will be. The other thing that I really do live by is like anytime I’m about to do anything risky, I always run through a mental exercise of what is the worst case scenario? So I always ask myself that, because the answer is almost always, it’s not that bad. And I think not thinking through that can oftentimes make people stop or be scared of the unknown. But the second you say, what is the absolute worst thing that could happen? And then you’re like, well, that’s not that bad. And if it did happen, this is what I would do. Let’s go. And so I find that to be really helpful and not as negative as it sounds. I think the third is, if you’re focused on a real problem, your business will succeed. And so one thing I’ve been hyper aware of is, how do I stay married to this problem and not get distracted by revenue goals and not get distracted by other people’s opinions of what we should be doing? Not get distracted by the customer saying, we love what you’re doing. Can you now help working parents who have teenagers? No, because that’s not the problem that we’re focused on. And so I really strongly believe in focusing on that problem, and you will be successful.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:21:59) – I just want to, not to interrupt you, but I want to talk about the importance of recognizing that, but also having the courage to focus and remain on that objective, because I can imagine all of these different influences that can be extremely hard.

Allison Whalen: (0:22:17) – Yeah, it’s hard, and it’s especially hard when you have really large clients who have a lot of money. And again, I think that this is the benefit of having worked in a startup before and seeing what happens when you chase that. It does not pay off in the long run. And also, the other thing I’ve learned is the customer will stick around. So if you say no this year and say, just wait three years, they’ll be there if they really like you. So, yeah, I believe very deeply in really defining the problem and sticking with that. The fourth would be smart work is better than hard work. I think any parent feels this way, that we’re just not willing to work around the clock anymore. And that’s also not the best answer. And so I really put a lot of pressure on me, my team, everyone, to think what is the best way to do this, and to avoid, if you put the constraint of, I have to do this between nine and five, you will, and you will probably do it better, and you’ll say no to the things that are silly. So I’m a big believer in that. And then the last is done is better than perfect. I think for many people, especially ambitious professionals, they really struggle with that. But it’s just if you go after perfect, that makes everything else I’ve described break. You can’t work smart then if you want to be perfect. And I think the reality is, for almost everything we do in life, 80% is good enough and gets you closer to the goal. And so maybe that changes as we scale the business and get really mature. But I really believe that we should always be aiming for 80%, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be so much better. And maybe that’s also because we’re in a space where there’s literally nothing. So we have to constantly be increasing what we want to get to. But if we wait too long to get there, it’s going to be bad for everyone. And so we need to just move bias to action done is better than perfect.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:19) – And I agree with that. And just to add to that, it also forces you to think about the resources that you do have and prioritize them, right?

Allison Whalen: (0:24:30) – Yeah. I’m just a huge believer that we just have to put things out in the world and see what happens. And then over time, you can bring in people who make incremental improvements, but especially in early stages of the business, you just need to start solving problems faster.

Nitin Bajaj: (0:24:48) – True. Allison, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your oneline life lessons for our audience. We have an entire collection@onelinelifelessons.com. And wherever you socialize digitally. Allison, thanks again. We really appreciate you coming on, and good luck with the journey and your continued growth.

Allison Whalen: (0:25:09) – Great. Thank you so much.