011 - Building A Business By Accident with Janneke den Draak

The Turning Lemons Into Lemonade Podcast

In this episode of Turning Lemons Into Lemonade, you'll hear from Janneke den Draak. Janneke is from the Netherlands and is blazing a trail of coaching and online courses in a country where that isn't the norm! Janneke started her business through two key circumstances that forced her into a life of entrepreneurship. First, she had been an IT engineer who at the age of 28 was diagnosed with repetitive motion syndrome - meaning that she could no longer use her arms and hands at a computer any more - leaving her with an inability to do a LOT of different types of jobs - not just the one for which she had been trained! In the days prior to Google - Janneke did an internet search and found Dragon Dictation software and started learning how to run her computer with dictation. Shortly thereafter, she got a job as a consultant on speech recognition and Dragon Dictation. A few years later, her entire department was let go - and she was out of a job! Fortunately, because they were eliminating her department, she was able to contact the clients and take them with her. One of the big struggles she described as a first time entrepreneur was the inexperience of negotiating her own contracts - and how that was a brand new skill that she wasn't prepared for!