"Tuck & Roll" - Be Prepared to Pivot with Bonnie-Lyn de Bartok

In the podcast "Time To Press Pause," hosted by Ellen Williams, CEO of The Salient Strategist, she interviews Bonnie-Lyn de Bartok, founder and CEO of The Social Factor Data Company. Bonnie-Lyn, an expert in social risk and performance measurement with 25 years of experience, shares her journey and the significant "pauses" she experienced in her business. 

She describes how relentless work led to physical and organizational breakdowns, forcing her to step back and reassess her approach. These pauses, though challenging, led to major pivots in her business, transitioning from a consultancy to a data technology company. Despite setbacks like the COVID-19 pandemic and shifting market sentiments, Bonnie-Lyn continuously adapted, leading to innovations and a shift towards establishing a hedge fund.

Throughout the discussion, she emphasizes the importance of recognizing the need for a pause, recalibrating, and innovating based on insights gained during these breaks. She advises CEOs to identify early warning signs of burnout and to create dashboards to maintain a clear view of their business goals. The conversation highlights resilience, adaptability, and the critical role of pausing to achieve long-term success.

Transcript

Welcome to Time To Press Pause: A Podcast for CEOs by CEOs. I'm your host, Ellen Williams, CEO of The Salient Strategist, and today I'm speaking with Bonnie-Lyn de Bartok. Bonnie-Lyn is founder and CEO of The Social Factor Data Company. She is a highly accomplished expert in social risk, performance, and impact measurement and management with 25 years of experience across 60 countries. She has advised governments, investors, corporations, and non-governmental organizations, resulting in numerous awards for her entrepreneurial and technological contributions to the Social Risk and Quantitative fields. Bonnie-Lyn's work has been featured in prominent international publications and she has been a speaker at prestigious events including the G20 Summit. Welcome, Bonnie Lynn. It's a pleasure to meet you and it's great to have you here on Time To Press Pause. 

Bonnie-Lyn: Thank you very much for having me and reaching out. It's a great platform to actually stop and think about when you do pause. It was a good exercise. So, thank you. 

Ellen: Oh that's awesome. Let's just dive right in then. I'm excited to hear about your “press pause” story? 

Bonnie-Lyn: Thank you. I you know what it's I hadn't thought about this at all until you reached out with the concept, which I think is really good because I know that I press pause regularly. And I know that I've had three big ones for our business over the years, 14 years. But I don't think I've ever stopped to put it to words before. Pressing pause - over the weekend as busy as my schedule was I had to stop for a few minutes and think about what I might talk about. That's a small pause. We've been in business 15 years and we've done two major pivots. If I have to think about what pause means, it's a step back and a recalibration. Like a rethink and maybe even a total redo. Since 2009, when we established the company, we've had three major pauses. Two forced ones, where we weren't listening and life just forced us to pause. And one preemptive one. So, I think that I'm actually learning something from that before we get to the forth pause. So, from 2009 to 2014, I was really at my peak, in a new business. And when I think about the level that I was operating at, I was hosting about 8 to 16 meetings a day. I attended several events per week. I was likely in a new city most weeks. Over the 25 years leading to this, I was working in 60 different countries in this capacity, so I was on, all the time. All the time. I'm Canadian- based and I had clients in Australia and I would answer the phone at 3:00 AM. And to keep going. So, I had a 24-hour workday and I never stopped. I was also a lot younger. [laughs] At one time I had 35 projects running in eight different countries and I had a go-bag of supplies and I literally would run in the door, dump one bag, grab another bag, repack and I'd be gone a few hours later. I had a room just for supplies. Just for doing that. 

Ellen: So, you had a system to be 24-hour go-getter. 

Bonnie-Lyn: Yes. Non-stop and it was crazy. And then things started to manifest within my body. The adrenal crashes. Eventually my back went out, my kidneys crapped out. I was on the floor in my office, and I had an assistant then, which is also crazy thought these days, but my assistant had to go and get a chiropractor and bring him to the office to release my back so I could get up and walk out to go home. And one of my employees had to drive me home. I was on the floor trying to meet a deadline for 5:00 PM. 

Ellen: Oh my goodness. 

Bonnie-Lyn: I, my assistant, put my laptop on the floor so I could finish the report and hit send. 

Ellen: And that felt perfectly normal and the right thing to do. 

Bonnie-Lyn: Everybody thought it was funny. They were like, “You're crazy. You're a machine. You're...” You know, and the client was like, “Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?” It was a report that would approve both financing and permit for the operation to move. It was a 3 1/2 year undertaking and this was the final deadline and everything was crashing so. 

Ellen: Including you. 

Bonnie-Lyn: Including me. And it was funny because the reaction from family, friends and employees was all over the map. “You need to get up.” “You need to go to work.” To, “You need to take a break.” “Don't worry about it.” To employees leaving. 

Ellen: Wow. 

Bonnie-Lyn: Like this is too much. They were also burning out. I also I had one or two employees just leave because they were also burning out. They were not willing to work that hard and I couldn't understand because the deadline was on Friday. Nobody leaves before a deadline. “What do you mean?” Right? That used to be my work ethic. That used to be my whole adult life to that point. So that was the first big one. That was a forced pause. From there, we lost clients. We lost employees. We had clients not paying us. We had employees going to clients. The whole thing exploded from there. So when I did pause, it fell apart. And the mental process of having to accept that was crazy. And it was huge. We were globally recognized. We had won dozens of awards. We had huge contracts. We were winning business from the big guys. We were at our peak. And it just imploded. So that was my first big one. When I when you said pause, I was like, oh, that was a big pause because I had to accept it. And I had to take a break. And I had to just let it be what it was. And we had to take the foot off the gas pedal and literally just stop and unplug no matter what. It just was what it was. And it was just going to happen. So, in hindsight, what a crazy ride and I never would have stopped if my body didn't stop me. But it forced me to take. I took several months off. I think it was four or five months and I went into my, I call it my “rabbit hole.” I isolate, I go, I go internal. I went to 30,000 feet and reviewed everything we had done, which I had not stopped to do at that point. To realize that we were kind of in an echo chamber, same pitch, same client, same process, same da, da, da. It became a repeatable process that others were just starting to emulate because it was successful. They were stealing our stuff, our content, our people, our because it was successful and they wanted to take it. And there was nothing I could do about it, really. Which was also an, “OK. How do I keep my IP from walking out the door?” I need to automate what I'm doing so that my IP is in the system and not walking out the front door. A and with that... So at the time that was 2014, 2015 really by the time I came out of that little that little chamber. And what I had done is I reinvented the whole business with the exact same subject expertise. Big data was new, new technologies were emerging. Can I automate what we are actually doing? We were building social management systems, auditing social management systems. Is there enough data in the world whereby I could automate you know, 80 - 90% of what we're doing to create and what ultimately became a data product? And then a rating system and the rating system became indexes and the indexes started improving performance, yeah. So this whole second business, it really was a new business registered on the new was we now became a data tech technology company. So that entire innovation was reborn. New people. New brand. New business. We literally rolled all of that experience into a new project and it wouldn't have been if not for that pause. So then came four years building the data product and all of all of the tools and solutions. And we won again dozens of globally recognized awards. I won first place in UBS's future Finance award out of 400 Fintechs, which just blew my mind, right? Like I had to learn the coding language, had to learn the Fintech language, the technology, the quantitative language, so on. And we won a huge award in private asset management on Park Ave in New York. Ball gowns, the whole bit. I had like my whole world exploded. This is going to be so big. This is huge. And that was in February of 2020. And I came back to Toronto. To a mining big mining conference and COVID hit. COVID I had 42 betas with the largest asset managers in the world. 

Ellen: Yeah. 

Bonnie-Lyn: COVID I had 42 betas with the largest asset managers in the world signed up to test this product, this highly anticipated product and I lost all of it. From March of 2020 through to September of 2020 it all disappeared. We did not have clients or burn or investment to survive that. This was four years of investment. You know, micro investments, a couple of angels invested in this technology with us. And we had to drag out that for three more years before it came back. Then it was inflation. Then it was war. Then it was anti-ESG sentiment and we kept having to tuck and roll tuck and roll tuck and roll, reinvent pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, restructuring the same content and the same information 10 different ways. Nobody wants your data. Nobody knows what to do with it. It's too much. It's too early. Nobody's into social. Nobody you know. So we were an echo chamber with this pitch. It was just falling on deaf ears. So then we had to pivot again and we came up with COVID data and a bunch of investors just stole the information to traded on it as their own, without any recognition. So we were back on this treadmill and this cycle that I was in with the previous business. Even my investors were saying, “You gotta shut this down. You're not closing anywhere. It's just chaos.” Spraying and praying on the treadmill with no runway. We had to accept that as a as a next major pause like what we're doing is not working. The timing is off. Prioritizations and chaos in the markets globally are all over the map. We had a couple of companies try to buy us and for whatever reason got shifted in a different direction and none of the deals closed. ESG's cool. ESG's not cool. ESG's cool. ESG’s not cool. 

Ellen: I rode. I rode that that roller coaster for a while, too. Yeah. 

Bonnie-Lyn: You're in. You're out. You're in. You're out. You're cool. You're not cool. You're cool. You're not. We had to survive all of that, which was just constant innovation. “OK, guys, Monday morning. We gotta rethink this. OK, we gotta reposition this. OK. All right. Nobody knows what to do with the data. What can we synthesize where it's more digestible? Can we create some indexes? Can they just buy the indexes?” So, none of it worked out. It was basically an 8-year burn. I don't know how we actually did it. It was kind of a forced pause and kind of an acceptance and a realization that, “OK, we need to stop the bleeding because we're just burning money.” We have so much interest and we've spent months and even years with some of the same clients working towards building products together and I kept, just disappeared. I stepped back voluntarily this time. And accept turn the feeds off to let people go. But what was so interesting is when I reviewed that period of time from the rebuild. We had created so much value. Like the the data, the technology, the tools, the systems, the algorithms, the quant, the... “Well, maybe we can sell this, there's value in it. Somebody will buy this.” Nope. So, I've had to reinvent it again. I can't let that die, it's 15 years' worth of work. We're trying to teach investors how to use the data and the tools so that they can build them into their portfolios and make money and hedge their books and rebalance things. And you know, inclusive of of the social factors in ESG and so on. And they're like, “Do you have anything for climate?” So yes, social's a hot topic, but we, the world really doesn't know what that means yet. You know, we talk about diversity and equity as though it were equal to social and we're starting the process of collecting information. We've got 10 years' worth of data and performance on a whole plethora of social risk issues across the spectrum of human rights and ethics and supply chains and health and safety and employment and, you know, and so on. It's way bigger than DEI and we are 20 years ahead of the game here. So, then I kept. Trying to prove this performance to investors and like an echo chain and they're like, “This is really cool. But like, we don't really do. Why don't you just run your own fund?” And I heard it so many times. And then there was all kinds of objections to that, investors saying,  “Well you can't just be a PM.” Well, I couldn't just be a global consultant either, but I did it. I couldn't just quant, but I did. It couldn't just code, and I did it so. So why not? My fund is outperforming the market. We are tracking 8 to 9% of the market with an 8-year history. Hedge funds aren't doing that. Why am I not my own hedge fund? So, in the last well, I guess year at least six months for sure, we have been building a hedge fund. And we have pivoted again, but this was a voluntary pivot, a voluntary pause, a voluntary rethink. I was a rower back in the day in my “uni days”. Through rowing, you learn when to push, and when to pace. So, I think I've learned a lot from that. I think that attitude is everything. 

Ellen: Fascinating. I mean I have to pause. I have to pause you because I'm trying to take this all in. I have to pause and think. Your story is fascinating. Your experience and what you've been able to do with all the various pauses, some thrust upon you. And I love that you said earlier, “We weren't listening.” So, you were in your own can't see the forest through the trees, sort of thing. And now it feels like, not only are you listening, but you're listening to your intuition, your gut to yourself. What brought you here. It sounds like the extreme highs and lows. Sounds like it did really well, and then it all came crashing down and certainly having that happen more than once is not easy to recover from. So, bravo and congratulations and perseverance and fortitude and just knowledge. Hopefully this time you are, you're in the right place at the right time. 

Bonnie-Lyn: The market will meet us at some point. We hear this relentlessly from successful entrepreneurs. Consistency is key. Never quitting his key, you know. Get up, dress up, show up. Attitude is everything. Delusional optimism helps. Learn to rest, not to quit. Its continuous improvement. 

Ellen: Very inspiring that you did, you just kept getting up. You kept the ball rolling, even though it was in a slightly different direction, and now you've culminated everything over the years to be in this amazing position. 

Bonnie-Lyn: It's not for the faint of heart. Most could not stomach this most wouldn't put themselves in certain. Risk personal risk, financial risk to keep going when everybody else thinks you should stop. 

Ellen: What advice do you have to CEO's as far as when they can identify when to press pause? 

Bonnie-Lyn: Most CEO's have some KPIs, some key performance indicators that are business-related. It becomes a recipe for success. How much return did you get for your effort? Personally, as a CEO, my early warning signs, which I learned from my big pause in 214 where my body quit. When I go through a period of when I start, when it starts getting difficult to get up in the morning. When you're, you know, your eyes are poofy and your hair doesn't go and you forget to put the coffee mug under the under the coffee maker in the morning and you're struggling to get out the door and like a whole bunch of things aren't working out, you're you sound like an echo chamber with the same pitch and there's no clothes. When you’re confuffled and it's not working. That for me is my early warning sign to stop. Take a break. Even if it's like a couple days. Unplug. Fresh air. Exercise. Rehydrate. Go for a massage. Get a facial. Do whatever you need to do to recalibrate. Go to 30,000 feet. Review how many people you've talked to in the last four months. Like if I had 165 pitches and like with no closes then what we're doing is not working.  Do a quick evaluation of why. I just make a list of all the things that you know that I thought I needed to follow up on. Then I let it go. Literally let it. Go. And if I come back, you know, four days later or a week later, maybe it's two weeks later in some cases. And I look at the list like nothing was important. Huge for me before I left. And none of that matters. Like we gotta reprioritize. New list. New list. Reprioritize. OK, no, we had a little bit of traction over there and none over there. Let's just pivot. Like this way. And reengage them and say, “Why did you think this about the product? Can you can you open that up for me a little bit? Let me understand this a little bit. Like. What is the problem that's on your desk?” In every instance, I build myself a dashboard. If I can't fit my whole story into one page that I'm looking at from 30,000 feet, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where I am. I don't know where I've been. I don't know where I'm going. So, I don't have a plan, but I have. A goal post right? Like. 

Ellen: That's, that's great advice. Build a dashboard if you can't explain what's going on in one screen, then it's time to reevaluate. Bonnie this has been terrific. I really appreciate how much you've shared. I know I've learned. I'm sure people listening have learned. And I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being on Time To Press Pause. 

Bonnie-Lyn: Thank you for taking the time to listen. It's great. It's been a great exercise. You made me stop to think about this and actually it's a really good exercise. We should do it more, I think. 

Ellen: Thank you for listening to this episode of Time to Press Pause. To learn more about Bonnie-Lyn Bartok, go to thesfactor.co. To learn more about me, go to thesalientstrategist.com. And be sure to join us again wherever you listen to your podcast.