HAVING achieved the societal definition of success, by graduating with honours and excelling in her promising career overseas, Founder and CEO of Soul Career, Lisandra Rickards soon found herself feeling “empty” after coming to the realisation that she did not know her definition of success.

Rickards admits that she also found herself burning out which made her realise that managing her time and becoming more discerning about the jobs she engaged in was key to managing her stress levels to ultimately perform at her best.

With this new outlook, Rickards decided to move back to Jamaica, where she felt “at home” and connected to who she was. This allowed Rickards to begin her quest to find the path that would reward her with true happiness. After moving back to Jamaica, she recounts her tenure at the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship which saw her quickly evolving from being an entrepreneur development trainer to becoming the chief executive officer. She led incubator and accelerator programs for many early stage organizations for different sectors including agriculture, hospitality, marketing and technology. This not only challenged her as a leader but also gave her a wealth of knowledge about entrepreneurship and managing key aspects of a business.

Interestingly, travelling to Spain for a business trip reminded Rickards of what made her feel more connected to her true self – wanting to be location-independent and experiencing work-life balance. This desire was also the driving force behind her exploring e-Commerce as a key component of her business model and eventually taking the leap into becoming a full-time entrepreneur. She wanted to create an organization that was fully technology-enabled to provide greater access to global clients, while still being able to create her newly sought-after lifestyle.

Soul Career operates is a workforce transformation company that is entirely online. They use a community and content management platform to deliver their training and coaching programs to clients. They run digital ads, convert online, and accept payments using ecommerce systems. The company’s team members are based in Jamaica, Florida, Germany, and Southeast Asia with clients based in the Caribbean, the UK, the US, Canada, and as far away as Japan. Her my goal is to run a fully automated ecosystem so that she can minimize the manual labor needed to administer their programs, and focus on the quality of their content and programs – so that they exceed their customers expectations.

Rickards and her global team help companies to manage the end to end people operations including recruiting, talent development, performance management, and coaching programs, primarily using psychometrics. They also provide programs that help individuals to pursue their ideal careers. For Rickards, Soul Career is about putting people first to ultimately drive organisational success.

Rickards highlights that entrepreneurship is about managing your emotions through uncertainty, building resilience through disappointment and having certainty and stability within oneself. She also admitted that learning how to sell was a skill set that she needed to have and one that she developed through coaching. Being able to tolerate risk, especially financial risk is also key as an entrepreneur.

Ultimately, Rickards wants to make people happy at work again. She believes that with the evolution of technology, the need for organisations to depend entirely on employees to deliver results has shifted. Therefore, creating more capacity for people to “be human” at work, and deliver better outcomes for the organisation.