A Conversation with: Sonya Sigler
This episode features a conversation with Sonya Sigler, founder of PractiGal. Known as a high-energy and inspiring speaker and workshop facilitator for corporate teams and women’s networks, Sonya inspires her audiences to take action to reach their goals and make their dreams come true. In her private coaching and consulting work, Sonya works with corporate teams, founders, executives, entrepreneurs, and legal professionals to provide them with the tools and connections they need to succeed.
Sonya is the best-selling author of WELCOME to the Next Level: 3 Secrets to Become Unstuck, Take Action, and Rise Higher in Your Career, and What’s Next for My Career? Your Guide to Deciding to Leave Your Stable Job to Follow Your Passion, both of which have accompanying workbooks and online courses available on demand. Her latest book is 30 Days to Better Self-Care. She is a certified Vistage speaker and her most popular workshops are Authentic Personal Branding, Networking with a Purpose, Self-Care Made Easy, and Getting Noticed on LinkedIn. She and her husband live in Vancouver, WA, where she is writing her next book, Set Yourself Up for Success - Master the 5 Essential Skills to Succeed in Any Job.
Sonya’s Contact Information: sonya@sonyasigler.com | 650-281-8325 | https://iampractigal.com/
“So, if I could give any advice, it would be to stay true to yourself and the goals that you have for yourself. Because it’s so easy to do everything for everybody else, but it’s really hard to do that one thing for you. What trickles down from that is the boundary setting and keeping to take care of yourself because I see a lot of entrepreneurs run themselves into the ground trying to do everything. And so, being the one in charge, being the one who starts the business, doesn’t mean you have to do everything. Doesn’t mean you have to everything yourself”
Transcript:
Suzanne Hanifin: Hello, I am Suzanne Hanifin with Acumen Executive Search, and I am so excited to have the lovely Sonya Sigler with us today. Sonya is an incredible consultant. She has this wide breadth of experience, including 30 years as an attorney, as a general counsel. Then, Sonya, you moved into consulting and helping primarily women, and now, in the last few years, you have been the most prolific author and amazing and so. It will be really wonderful to hear your story, hear your learnings because, again, this podcast is all about best practices in leadership. When we do our profiles of leadership, it’s really about highlighting you and what you can bring to the table. So, welcome, Sonya.
Sonya Sigler: Thank you, Suzanne. I appreciate you having me on.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah, and I’m sure your background, again, is much more than attorney, consultant, author. So, walk us through where you got to where you are today.
Sonya Sigler: Well, I'll give you a little overview because we could spend hours talking about that. I wanted to become an attorney since I was 14, and so that’s what I did. Everything I did had that in mind, and I wanted to be a professional musician. So, I had these dual goals. I was going to be the President of the United States and a U.S. Senator, and I was going to be the first female principal trombone player in the Berlin Philharmonic because it was all male at the time, and the first female president. So, I had really great aspirations, and then I got into politics early on, and I was like, "Ooo, if this is what it means to be a senator and a president, this is not for me." I don’t play games. I’m very straightforward. I tell it like it is, as some people say, in a nice way like your best friend, but also like a drill sergeant to kick you in the butt when you need it. So, that’s kind of how…I grew up on a farm. You really have to be no-nonsense. And then also have a mom who’s an entrepreneur and run her own businesses, as her parents did too. And my dad’s parents did too. So, I’ve had the entrepreneurial gene as well, which I didn’t really factor all that into being a lawyer.
I had the singular goal of becoming a lawyer there, and I went to Berkeley and was doing computer science and music and failed miserably in the computer science and did, let’s just say, average in the music. So, I had to find a different major to stay in school, and you just have to become creative to get your goal. I was going to law school, so I literally just had to get through four years of college with a degree. I ended up changing to philosophy and getting a music minor, and those two things served me really well in the trajectory of my career. I didn’t know how well it was going to be, but I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. But I did become a lawyer at 25, and I got a job at Sega, the video game company.
Suzanne Hanifin: I remember Sega. Yeah.
Sonya Sigler: I was very popular with all my cousins. I was hired by a really amazing man who was so kind and he hired smart people and just was unruffleable. He was just, he was very calm, and so I learned a lot from him and I’ll tell you more about his story in a second. I was a lawyer for about a year before I was like, "Oh my God, is this all there is?" I was bored, and I was…I don’t want to say disenfranchised. I was more bored and like really..am I going to negotiate the same kind of licensing agreement over and over for 40 years? So, I started looking around, and I really gravitated to all the new things. I gravitated to the new business development group that was doing virtual reality. I gravitated to the guys in product development who were looking at new properties. We licensed things like Joe Montana, Tommy Lasorta, and Disney properties—all kinds of interesting stuff. Plus, we had our own great characters like Sonic the Hedgehog. So, licensing in and out, and I just gravitated to all that new stuff. And then, I was there for about three years, and then I went to Intuit for five years. I got laid off at Sega probably in about the fifth round of layoffs. When Riley hired me, he was like, "Okay, don’t get used to the video game industry; it’s a boom-and-bust industry. It could be really great today, and then tomorrow you could get laid off." Well, it took like three years for layoffs to get to the legal department. So, I had my second interview the day I got laid off, and so I started at Intuit two weeks later. I spent five years there, and those two experiences had laid the foundation for my philosophy on leadership.
Scott Cook and Bill Campbell were amazing, and they were amazing role models. What we did at Intuit. We went from…we used to laugh that it was a $500 million startup because they had an entrepreneurial mindset. They explored all kinds of different things, and they went from being a desktop software company to a really online services powerhouse for online financial services. I was there during that whole transition, and I was the lawyer who negotiated all the agreements with online, with the banks to get your data online. I saw a lot of different stuff, and there I gravitated to the new things. This should have been my clue that I needed to be at startups and earlier in the process and with the new, exciting technologies. I did get there after five years at Intuit, but that’s really what I discovered along the way was, yeah I wanted to be a lawyer, and I like being a lawyer, and I like certain things about it, but I don’t like being on someone else’s cry-wolf schedule. I like being more in control of my schedule and the direction of the company. That’s one thing I discovered along the way. But those two experiences were really formative in terms of how I approach leadership and how I view leadership teams. So, yeah, it’s been a wild ride, and I was a lawyer at startups for 20 years. So, I’ve got a lot of business experience as well as the legal side.
Suzanne Hanifin: Absolutely, and how did you transition then from being a day-to-day attorney to consultant? And tell us a little bit about your practice and how you're bringing all that in.
Sonya Sigler: When I was at Intuit and I gravitated to all the new online banking, all of the real estate—which became Quicken Mortgage—all of that was new and exciting to me, and I really liked figuring it out. I have that figure-it-out gene, and that is one of the things I look for in other people now and I look for in the clients that I work with. I left Intuit going to startups because I realized I needed to be earlier in the process. So, not just negotiating, but from the business plan forward. I really liked growing companies. So, when I got laid off from a job in 2014, and I was getting divorced at the time, I kind of sat down and I’m like, "What do I want to do with my life when I grow up?" I realized I was the team photographer for my kids' football teams, so I needed to be on the field Fridays at 4:00 to take pictures. And I was like, "Gosh, I have to be there at 4:00. I really don’t want to take another job commuting to San Francisco, commuting an hour each way." I was like, "I should just keep consulting. I should just keep doing that and find more clients." So, that’s what I ended up doing. For the last 10 years, I’ve not worked on Fridays, and I do consulting. I brought all of that experience to bear. So, operations, legal, finance. I was CFO at one startup for nine years. Let’s see. Operations, business development, a little bit of marketing, and finance, plus the legal. All of that leads me to help companies grow now. I work with companies who have taken, like usually founders who have taken the company so far and are running up against a wall in terms of how do I grow to that next level. That’s the kind of person I help now. It happens to be lawyers, it happens to be entrepreneurs, and it happens to be people who are like, "This 9-to-5 job is not working for me. I need to do something else. Help me figure out what that is and make that leap." So, those are the people I work with now, using every bit of experience I’ve gained along the way.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah, and it’s so interesting to me, Sonya, for all these conversations we’ve had with CEOs and with consultants, nobody had a straight path. Their road was winding and meandering at some times. It’s really about who you are as a person and how do you show up. You mentioned that you look for this gene of "figure-it-out", yeah, but let’s talk about some of those core values that you bring to the table. And how do you then operationalize this? You talked about your first boss being so kind. How did he operationalize that throughout the organization?
Sonya Sigler: When I was hired at Sega, Riley Russell, who went on to be general counsel at Sony for another 25 years, he hired me and he hired another man, Jack, when we were in law school. So our last semester in law school. He couldn’t decide between the two of us, so I was like, "Well, let’s just share the job. We both want to work, and we both can’t do it full-time, so let’s just share the job." Riley did. He hired both of us, so we both worked part-time. Then, the company was growing like gangbusters, so we ended up hiring both of us after we took the bar. We both came on as new lawyers, having worked there for a semester in school. And he was the kind of person who would hire someone smart, give them the rope to hang themselves, you know, he said, "Come back to me if you have questions on anything." He kind of had an open-door policy: "Come on in, sit down, ask your questions, get your answers, and then go on your way. I’m going to leave you to do your job." I really learned the autonomy and the importance of autonomy and trusting the people that you hire. You know, you’re hiring smart people; let them be smart. So that was really amazing.
And then, while I was out taking the bar, someone was hired over his head by the chairman of the board, and that man was the complete opposite. He was a micromanager; he didn’t trust anyone. He had no business being in-house as a lawyer. He was very ivory tower. He spent money like nobody’s business. I’m going to tell you this career-limiting move I did while I was at Sega. You talk about me being an author and writing books. I’ve shared all these stories in my books, and I’m going to share one story that’s going to come out in the book I’m writing now, called Set Yourself Up for Success. I could not believe the behavior of this man that was hired over Riley’s head. I made an appointment with the CEO, and I sat down in his office and said, "Look, we are spending over a million dollars a month on outside legal fees because he wants three opinions so he can’t possibly be wrong about things." The CEO listened. It was Tom Kalinske, who’s really fabulous. Talked about role models as well. He said, "I would like to help you, but I can't do anything about it; my hands are tied." Years later, I ran into him at a party at Riley's house. And this is, we’ve all stayed in touch. This is what's really great about this is that we've all stayed in touch and really respect each other and have fun together. Years later, Tom was like, "I really respected you for coming to me and having the courage to come to me. It showed me that you really cared and that you deeply cared about the success of the company and the department." I didn’t see it that way; I thought it was the right thing to do, like, "Why are we spending money?" That really showed me that spending other people’s money the right way—not willy-nilly—was really important to me. And Tom saw that and told me that later. He’s one of the people I interviewed for the book, and he shared some of those stories. It was just flooring to hear that, you know, come back around. So that kindness and that sense of ownership—those are two values that I hold dear and that I help my own clients hire for as well. We get really clear on what's important to them and what is going to be successful in that environment.
Sega was very entrepreneurial, Intuit was very entrepreneurial, and I gravitated to startups, which obviously have that same innovation gene—same, you know, "let's just all get together and figure it out." I mentioned the "figure it out" gene. I think growing up on a farm, you have to do that as well. You have only so many resources, and if you want groceries, you’ve got to drive 25 minutes into town. So, make do with what you've got. That kind of attitude is really important at a startup, and so looking for that kind of mindset of taking ownership of something as opposed to waiting to be told what to do—that’s really important.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah, absolutely. And so, you have an array of different clients right now that you help operationalize. I know this is hard, but I'm still going to ask this: If there is a piece of advice you see most often needed to entrepreneurs, what is that advice?
Sonya Sigler: Oh gosh, there are so many things. I think the most important thing they can do is be themselves—know what's important to them. I see a lot of people working to make more money, more money, more money, but why? Why do you want to do this? I’m working with one because special needs daughter, so she’s like I need to sock money away to be able to take care of her for when she’s not here. So, she has a very clear purpose. Another woman I’m working with, you know, has built a million-dollar law firm in three years. She has very clear goals in terms of “I have things I need to pay off and I also have special needs son that I need to plan for that I don’t know if he’ll ever be independent. Those, those two goals are very clear for her. So, in being able to be true to themselves and what's important to them, they can be clear with others why they’re building the business and why they’re doing what they’re doing.
I think that, out of all the things that I see entrepreneurs doing, they get pulled here and there to help customers, and "Oh, I need to be this to this customer," or, "Oh, I need to be this to that customer," and they get pulled off their game. They get pulled off that purpose and they get pulled off their goal. So, if I could give any advice, it would be to stay true to yourself and the goals that you have for yourself. Because it’s so easy to do everything for everybody else, but it’s really hard to do that one thing for you. What trickles down from that is the boundary setting and keeping to take care of yourself because I see a lot of entrepreneurs run themselves into the ground trying to do everything. And so, being the one in charge, being the one who starts the business, doesn’t mean you have to do everything. Doesn’t mean you have to everything yourself. I mean, you, as a business owner, Suzanne, have learned this in spades. The minute you hire for someone to take over something that is not your zone of genius or something that you want to be doing, it’s such a relief to have someone else take care of it. So, I think if entrepreneurs and business owners can take that one piece of advice—stay true to you, what you do best and let other people do the rest.
Suzanne Hanifin: On that note, I have to say, "Amen!" That’s awesome. So, let’s make it personal. I love asking this question, especially to people who’ve taken that winding road: If there was one piece of advice you would have given your 20-year-old self, what advice would you have said?
Sonya Sigler: Okay, at 20. I would want myself to know then, don’t be caught up in one way of doing things. There's more than one path. Like I said, I was headed down the path of being a lawyer. I was just trying to finish my degree at Cal and get to law school and become a lawyer. I was so single-minded that I missed out on other things. I was in seven different performing groups at Cal, so I literally was doing the music and the lawyer path, and I didn’t look left or right from that. If I had to give myself advice, it would be to take it all in and do the fun stuff. Don’t forget about the fun stuff just because you’re curious about something. Like half my sorority did ballroom dancing when one of our sisters was getting married, and she wanted everyone to know how to dance. That was great, so that was something I wouldn’t have done had Virginia not said, "Everybody's doing this." So, I wish I would have taken time to do things that were off the path I had set for myself because I might have discovered I should have gotten a JD/MBA or I should have done an operations research degree instead of the philosophy with all the logic. I probably would have made other discoveries, so that’s the piece of advice I would have given myself: Don’t be so wedded to one path that you don’t see other opportunities.
Suzanne Hanifin: No, I appreciate that because, again, when we’re driven, we tend to be very single-minded and not looking around. And as we age, with wisdom, it is the smelling of the roses that makes life worth it. It’s that pause. So, Sonya, we’re going to finish up. Just tell us kind of who your ideal client is. And I need to let everybody know that all of your contact information will be at the end, and to reach out. So, tell us who your ideal client is.
Sonya Sigler: My ideal client falls into one of three categories: a lawyer, or an entrepreneur, or someone who aspires to be an entrepreneur who’s not quite made the decision to leave a full-time job to start their own thing. And it’s someone who is ready to take action. I really concentrate on people who just need a little nudge. They have good ideas, they have good actions, they are smart—they just need a little assistance along the way because they’re so interesting, interested in what they’re doing, and they get overwhelmed and need a little bit of direction. It’s someone who likes to be successful, is used to being successful, and they’ve gotten a little stuck. They think they should be able to work their way out of it, but they’ve discovered they can’t, and they need a little help. So those are the people that I really like to just give that nudge, give that assistance, and watch them thrive.
Suzanne Hanifin: That’s perfect. So again, Sonya, thank you so much for your insights. What a great learning to have these iconic leaders at such a young age and to see that growth and success. Thank you again, Sonya Sigler. Again, go, go gal—help me with your consulting. I can’t believe I all of a sudden blanked on it
Sonya Sigler: Oh, practical coaching and consulting.
Suzanne Hanifin: PractiGal! Awesome. Thank you so much, Sonya.
Sonya Sigler: Thank you!