On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maria Flynn, author of the new book, Make Opportunity Happen. Maria and I talk about the entrepreneurial journey and some of the hands-on things you can do as an entrepreneur to make the journey more effective and rewarding. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses.Interview Transcript with Maria Flynn, Author of Make Opportunity Happen and Co-founder of the Digital Health KC InitiativeBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maria Flynn. She's an entrepreneur, co-founder of the Digital Health KC Initiative, and author of the new book Make Opportunity Happen: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Align Your Own Stars. Welcome, Maria. Maria Flynn: Thank you for having me. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Our good friend Melissa Vincent, who runs the Pipeline organization down in, in Kansas City, connected us and said, hey, you need to talk to Maria and get her opinions and insights on what's going on in the entrepreneurship space.And with your new book coming out, we figured it'd be perfect time to have you on the show. Let's give a little background of how you became an entrepreneur and, and maybe a little bit about your journey. Maria Flynn: So, I grew up with entrepreneurial parents, so it was kind of in me from a early age. I went on into engineering and that was a great foundation to launch as an entrepreneur.And then I found myself as an intrepreneur inside a larger company, Cerner Corporation, so healthcare IT. And that was a great training ground to go on in my own entrepreneurial endeavor later, but I had that real urge to go find what that was. When I left Cerner, I went looking for what it was. Kind of just out there, leap of faith, not knowing what I was going to find. And I found my co-founders in Orbis Biosciences. It's a pharmaceutical manufacturing technology company. We started in 2008. And we sold it in 2020. And since then, I've been working with entrepreneurs, which is how the book came about, is I was repeating the same stories in a book as a way to scale yourself so that I could help more people. So, I'm excited that it's out in the world now. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, let's dive right into it. It's called Make Opportunity Happen. And so, I would imagine that through your journeys, it wasn't just you figuring out how to do all this kind of stuff. What were some of the biggest inflection points in your career that you write about in the book or otherwise that helped you figure out the entrepreneur journey?Maria Flynn: Yeah, so after you sell a company, you go into a period of reflection. And when I really thought, you know what is my value and what do I do uniquely well. It was around, you know, getting things done and ironically when I started to jot a few notes down, there was a book that came out that was about getting it done. I was like, oh no, somebody came out in the world with the book. And then when I looked at it, I was like, no, my book is very different. You need to know many things as an entrepreneur, and you don't have enough time. To read all these books. So, this book is kind of a guide to get fast track on certain things from hiring to firing, to building your board, to raising funding to strategy.And it's kind of a compilation of all the things I learned from getting things done as a kid, working in my parents' business, to tools that I learned when I was at Cerner, to what made Orbis successful. And it goes through different pillars. It's about execution, perseverance, adapting. And your support system and then your mindset is entwined in all that.Brian Ardinger: What I liked about the book, and I, and I got an advanced copy of it, it's almost like a textbook or a guidebook that you can kind of pick up at different times during your entrepreneurial journey. You really do a good job of providing kind of templated pieces. Let's say I'm trying to hire, or I'm trying to, you know, understand how to figure out the mentors that I should be working with, and you have little guidebooks or little templates that the entrepreneur can follow to help if nothing else just put some structure around what is oftentimes an unstructured practice of entrepreneurship. Maria Flynn: Yes. And so, you can think of it as a series of frameworks that, as you've been through the journey, a lot of this stuff seems like common sense. But when you're starting, like how do you start to think about some of these things?So that's what these ...
