Show notes
Where should you be devoting your energies as a professional? Part of answering that question involves getting clear on which endeavors you feel naturally drawn toward. Former journalist Victoria Crandall shares her unique journey of leaving the US to become a managing director of a cocoa exporter in the Ivory Coast. We’ll talk about the power of curiosity and using your natural interests as a way of guiding your career choices. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll also explain the importance of identifying your professional “center of gravity.” Key Career Insights We all have things we’re naturally drawn toward in life. The key is to pay attention to what you keep returning to again and again as a clue to where you could take your career. We live in an age where incredible amounts of information are available at our fingertips. This information can be such a powerful enabler for the change you desire for your career. “Learning on the job is riddled with uncertainty and is therefore uncomfortable, even painful. But, if you’re willing to embrace the discomfort of making mistakes and adopt a growth mindset, you will benefit immensely.” -Victoria Crandall, guest on Episode 41 Tweetables to Share If you’re curious and you’re hungry for information, you can become an expert relatively quickly. Victoria Crandall Tweet This Your professional 'center of gravity' is where you can do your most rewarding, gratifying work. Joseph Liu Tweet This Resources Mentioned I referenced a quote from Stephen Speilberg about listening to the whispers in your life. Here’s the full video. https://youtu.be/l2Im25BdQ8M I also referenced this episode of Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman featuring Ev Williams. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about what’s been whispering in your ears. What’s something that seems to keep popping up that could signal where your center of gravity is in your career. It could be something people keep telling you about one of your strengths, or a talent that keeps showing up, or just an idea you can’t stop toying with. Try to capture what your center of gravity is, then take one action this week that COULD move you closer to that place. About Victoria Crandall, Commercial Director Victoria Crandall is a Sub-Saharan African specialist who is passionate about entrepreneurship, disruptive technologies, and agricultural commodities. She has had several career transitions, segueing from business journalism to soft commodity research to commodity trading. Victoria is currently the commercial director of an Ivorian cocoa and raw cashew nut exporter. She is also the creator and host of the Young African Entrepreneur Podcast. Follow Victoria on Twitter and Instagram. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Victoria know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to Grammarly for Supporting Career Relaunch Built by linguists and language lovers, Grammarly’s writing app finds and corrects hundreds of complex writing errors — so you don’t have to. Career Relaunch listeners can download Grammarly for free by going to GetGrammarly.com/relaunch. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I think I’m inherently drawn to things that are new and challenging. I think it’s my inner pioneer spirit. Once I started becoming interested in Sub-Saharan African markets, I became more and more drawn to being an Africa specialist. Joseph: Hello, Victoria. Welcome to Career Relaunch. I’m so happy to have you on the show today. Victoria: Thrilled to be here, Joseph. Joseph: You are our very first guest on this show based in West Africa. I want to talk about your experiences there in Sub-Saharan Africa, the challenges you tackled reinventing yourself and your perspectives as someone who’s a minority in many ways there in the Ivory Coast. Before we get to all that, can you just kick us off by telling us what you’re up to right now in your career and your life? Victoria: I work as a Commercial Director at an Ivorian cocoa and cashew nut exporter. What I’m busy doing right now is pretty much booking contracts, making sure that all of our cocoa exports are going out on time. The company has also launched a small cocoa processing factory, so I’m actually getting my first exposure to manufacturing and managing a local factory, which has been pretty interesting. Joseph: Can you just paint a little bit of a picture for me just because I’ve never been to the Ivory Coast? Can you just describe a little bit about where you live there, where you work? What’s the overall environment there and the setup there for you? Victoria: First of all, Ivory Coast is a tropical country. There are pretty much two seasons here. It’s either raining or it’s not, so we’re just about to go into the rainy season. Abidjan is more developed as compared to other large cities in West Africa. As compared to Accra and Ghana or Lagos in Nigeria, Abidjan has much better infrastructure. There’s power 24/7, clean drinking water. If you go to any shop, you can find loads of imported goods. There’s a nice movie theater in town. An hour’s drive away, there’s a beautiful beach. It’s a very comfy lifestyle. I think it’s kind of the best secret that maybe a lot of expats in Ivory Coast maybe don’t want to tell everybody, but it’s a very pleasant life. Joseph: I know you’re American, and you’re there in the Ivory Coast, so I want to talk about how you ultimately landed there. Before we do that and before we get into more of your role there as a Commercial Director, I’d like to go back in time and talk through the two major chapters in your career prior to this period in your life, and then we can dive into more detail and the dynamics of your current situation. I was wondering, Victoria, if you could just tell us a little bit about your time going way back as a business journalist. Victoria: My first full-time job was working as a freelance business journalist, but it was a rather atypical job. I was hired for a business intelligence company based out of London, also offices in New York and Hong Kong. They cover mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, joint ventures, and they hired me to read the newspapers in Arabic, because after I finished my studies in the US, I went to Syria, and I studied Arabic for two and a half years. I was very fortunate that I lived there right before the Civil War broke out. I became proficient in Arabic and moved to Dubai. Luckily, I knew a lot of contacts in the journalism community and was able to reach out to someone at the Financial Times who put me in touch with someone at Mergermarket. Working as a freelancer, I could live anywhere in the world. I was pretty much a digital nomad before that was a trendy term. That allowed me to live in Dubai. I also lived in Cairo, Egypt. I also traveled to Lagos for six weeks, and then kind of my last stop when I was still working with this company as a business journalist was in Casa Blanca, Morocco. Joseph: Had you always planned on living the US and living this sort of international lifestyle? If so, what was the draw for you? Victoria: I didn’t, but in hindsight, it’s not surprising that I was led to make a career abroad. I have an older sister who has been very influential to me. When she was only 24, she got a job in Germany working for Adidas. She being eight years older than me and having such an influence, I kind of looked to her as a mentor or saw that, ‘Wow, you can do that.’ Also, we had traveled a lot together. When I was in high school, I would go and visit her in Europe, and we’d travel somewhere for two weeks, and having studied also languages in high school and in college. I just love travel. I love learning about new places and cultures, learning new languages. Once I fell down the Middle East rabbit hole so to speak when I was in college, I kind of just fell in love with Arabic. To me, it seemed very logical. I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ll go and live in an Arabic speaking country for a year, two years, and that will open plenty of doors.’ That’s kind of how it happened. Joseph: You’re traveling around, you’re doing this journalistic work, what happened next for you? Victoria: The big game changer was that I became enthralled with Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically with business in Sub-Saharan Africa, because when I was working at this business intelligence company, they gave me the Sub-Saharan African press to cover because no one was really interested in it. That was because Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, it’s still pretty much still a frontier market. You don’t have a lot of large-size M&A deals, so they were like, ‘You take Kenya and Nigeria and Ghana,’ and I just thought it was fascinating because I think I’m inherently drawn to things that are new and challenging. I think it’s my inner pioneer spirit. Particularly reading about Nigeria, I just felt like, ‘Wow, this seems like such a crazy, complicated place but so fascinating.’ You look at its population size and its natural resources, and it’s just like, ‘Wow, this place is going to take off at some point.’ Once I started becoming interested in Sub-Saharan African markets—and this was also concurrent with all of the political problems in the Middle East because this was after the Arab Spring—I became more and more drawn to being an Africa specialist. Joseph: How did you go about become an ‘expert’ in that? What was that journey like for you? Victoria: I think it’s amazing that, if you’re curious and you’re hungry for information, you can become an expert relatively quickly. I tend to be very self-deprecating, so I really hesitate to call myself an expert. Given that there’s so much information out there, you can learn a lot very quickly. I didn’t have any business background. I had studied international relations. I was really drawn to politics and kind of always thought I would stay a journalist. Just reading business papers, I was actually able to teach myself a lot, so when I worked as a business journalist, it was kind of an education as well about markets, how they worked, financing. Again, I’m nowhere near an expert, but at least it made me comfortable with the jargon, and I was able to build a network and I think established credibility pretty quickly. Joseph: How did you make the transition in to working in soft commodity research for a bank? For those listeners who aren’t familiar with the term soft commodities, can you just very quickly explain the difference between soft and hard commodities? Victoria: Soft commodities are agricultural commodities – coffee, cocoa, cotton, grains, whether that be corn, sorghum, rice, oil seeds, etc. If you’re going to think of other commodities, they tend to be extractives. It’s diamond, gold, oil, any type of platinum, etc. I got interested in commodities in a very roundabout way. As I mentioned earlier, I was living in Morocco, and at that point in my life, I felt very adrift. I had taken this promotion to be North Africa Correspondent and moved to Casa Blanca, Morocco. I don’t really like North Africa as a region. I don’t find it as interesting as let’s say Sub-Saharan Africa. For me, it was a pit stop. It was pretty much that, I’m transitioning away from the Middle East, and I want to get to Sub-Saharan Africa, but I haven’t found that opportunity to kind of take me there yet. I had the good fortune when I was in Morocco, working freelance. I could of course take other projects, and I was able to take a month-long project that took me to Abidjan. That was in March 2013, two years after a period of conflict. When I came here, things were calm, and investors were starting to come back. It just felt very dynamic, and something was happening here. On a personal level, I just really liked it. I found people were very friendly. The people are very welcoming, and I felt like, Côte d’Ivoire economy is very dynamic. It has agriculture. It has an energy sector. It has an oil refinery. It’s the largest economy in Francophone West Africa. I’m working on this economic research project, and one of my interviews was with the head of soft commodities research at a pan-African bank, Ecobank. I had a very good interview with the head of research. A couple of days later, when I submitted the quotes from our interview, I had also found out just kind of randomly through LinkedIn that they were actually looking to recruit a soft commodities analyst to be based somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. When I submitted the quotes to him, I said, ‘Hey, I saw this JD for the Soft Commodities Analyst position, and I’d really like to apply.’ I ended up getting the job, and five to six months later, I moved to Abidjan, and I’ve been here ever since. Joseph: I guess what’s in my mind, Victoria, as I’m thinking about this, is if I were to make that kind of a move both geographically and also in terms of I guess the function of my job, I would personally be dealing a lot with what I would call impostor syndrome. Did you feel any of that, or was that not so much an issue for you? Victoria: It was a huge issue for me. I kind of always felt like I was a fraud or at least a misfit working in a bank, because I always felt like I am a liberal arts social sciences type of person and an ex-journalist, and I don’t have that credibility. I never did a CFA. I didn’t do an MBA. I didn’t study finance. Sometimes, that would get to me, but most of the time, I would just talk myself out of it and be like, ‘You’re the one who’s here doing the work.’ It was a position that they really struggled to fill, because unfortunately, a lot of Africans aren’t that interested in agriculture, and they don’t see it as something where they want to be an agricultural commodities analyst. Because I just naturally gravitated toward that position and particularly wanting to study cocoa because Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) is the world’s largest cocoa producer, I was able to learn very quickly and to really cut my T’s and to establish credibility. The only way I handled it is that, sometimes, you have bad days or you have maybe bad experiences that will trigger or at least make you doubt yourself. If you look at your body of work and what you’re accomplishing on the day-to-day, it’s like, ‘No, the work speaks for itself.’ Joseph: That’s really interesting. I guess you’re right. Sometimes, you just have to dive in and just give it your best shot. I know that you’ve got a reason for being there, and there’s a reason why they hired you, and you deserve to be there. You’re working at Ecobank, and then you eventually make a shift into working in the cocoa and raw cashew nut export business and industry. How did that transition come about for you? Victoria: That was an interesting one and one I never would have anticipated, because again, I always told myself I could never be a commercial trade person, because I always look at traders, and they tend to be men, they’re very aggressive, it’s a very testosterone kind of… Joseph: That’s what I have in my mind too. Victoria: Exactly. I had reached a glass ceiling at Ecobank, and I was kind of becoming frustrated with my work…
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