In her conversation with Venture Café Presents host Christine Dunn at Venture Café’s Female Founders Night, Allexe Law, Founder of ArtScience Group, discussed ways she helps business executives and entrepreneurs develop deliberate leadership strategies and skills to foster growth.

The ArtScience Group provides strategic leadership and growth training to leaders of early stage companies to help navigate the growth process. “Think of it like a living, growing organism,” said Allexe. “Just like a living growing organism, companies grow and they have growing pains. I work with them to reduce the pain. I work with them on the challenges and the obstacles, and I do that through strategic priority setting and planning.”

ArtScience offers three main areas of coaching: growth planning and team building sessions, coaching and, CEO forums. In the early stages of development, new CEOs are often very focused on proving their product and sales, often at the expense of long-term and mission-driven planning. “Leadership on the fly can now have deliberate leadership for growth,” continued Allexe.

She has found that, once funding is in place, things often move very quickly, and teams are challenged in many areas including hiring. “When you are bringing on board people, you want to bring on the best people. The best people are going to be people that relate to your mission and also that relate to your values. That’s what strategic growth means.”

As she coaches CEOs, Allexe encourages leaders to get outside perspective, especially at the beginning when things are coming “fast and furious.” CEO forums can be a very useful piece of this process, where peers going through similar situations can offer helpful insight.

Allexe came from a background in the clean tech industry, where particular challenges in organization and funding have offered her a helpful perspective as she reaches out into other sectors. “To be around driven, smart, motivated people trying to solve challenges – I was hooked!” said Allexe of her move into consulting and coaching.

“I want to take all of my expertise in strategy planning and execution and I want to bring it to this market, early stage companies that are at that point where they are going for growth and they don’t necessarily have all the information to make that transition go as smoothly possible,” she continued. “Smart, driven, really creative people coming up with innovative solutions to global challenges, local solutions, etc. I wanted to be part of elevating them to the next level.”

As a panelist at Venture Café’s Female Founders Night, Allexe noted that many conversations gravitated to the question of why there aren’t more female founders out there. “Women are taught to be perfect,” she observed. “Don’t feel like you need to be perfect.”

She encourages women to get out there, meet people, network and go through a discovery process to generate a new idea. “Talk as much as possible about your idea. There are many ideas out there, but the number of ideas that come to execution are small,” she said.

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For more information on Allexe and her work, visit www.artsciencegroup.com.

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