1261 – Helping Your Team Thrive with Sidekick’s Bonny Van Rest

In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge speaks with the co-founder of Sidekick, Bonny Van Rest.

Sidekick is a group of strategy consultants that offer an entrepreneurial approach to solving business problems, maximizing impact, creating business integrators with action oriented purpose drive and first hand experience of growing, leading, and owning businesses. Bonny shares with Josh what she’s seen in the market and how a lot of great business ideas go to waste. Oftentimes the visionary entrepreneur minds that come up with ideas often do not  have the profile, personality, capacity, or time to scale the idea.

Sidekick offers a good but simple strategy including purpose, passion, people, and profit to make an idea a reality and a thriving business. Bonny shares how often when we think of entrepreneurial minds we associate them with business founders, however a lot of these entrepreneurial minds also live within larger organizations too. She calls them “intrepreneruials,” innovators from within the system. These personalities are often the first to spot an opportunity but they have a department to run and an entire organization to convince of an idea so they often struggle to bring these ideas to fruition.  Bonny shares that’s where Sidekick can offer the hands on approach or bench strength to help translate the entrepreneurial passion into actions. This is done through the facilitation of strategic and annual planning, developing a go to market strategy, or helping tackle a current business challenge.

Josh asks Bonny what Sidekick provides that leaders or organizations are not able to do by themselves. Bonny shares how Sidekick works alongside you to help set up simple and straightforward tools and processes. She explains the different profiles of people and the gap between the visionaries and executer level thinkers. Josh asks about the Sidekick team and what does that engagement look like, how does that process work. Bonny discusses her 4P assessment which is part of Sidekick’s framework. It includes a true discovery phase where the different backgrounds and expertise can collaborate together. She discusses the facilitation of workshops and how that facilitation process is what she considers one of Sidekick’s superpowers. She also emphasizes Sidekick’s objective of making sure that the solutions that they provide are sustainable. Bonny shares that the goal is to work with you not necessarily for you and the philosophy of teaching a man to fish and how that ideology has impacted Sidekick’s practices.

Want to learn more? Check out Sidekick’s website at https://www.sidekickconsulting.ca/

Check out Sidekick on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/sidekick-consulting-ca/

Check out Bonny Van Rest on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bonnyvr/