0:03

What becomes possible when you stop trying to prove yourself and start building something that reflects who you really are?

Caroline: 0:15

This is the Your Next Success podcast, and I'm your host, Dr. Caroline Sangal. I'm a life first career coach and strategist on a mission to normalize questioning your career because I believe each of us is made on purpose for a purpose only we can fulfill. The longer we live out of alignment with who we are, what we do best, and why we're here, the more we miss out. And the more the world misses out on what only we can give. The Your Next Success Podcast is where we explore how to build a career that truly fuels your life. We talk about self-discovery, smart job search strategies, professional growth, and you'll hear stories from people who've navigated big career transitions themselves so you can see what it's really like to make bold changes and feel inspired to create your own version of authentic success, one that is aligned, meaningful, and truly yours.

1:19

Today's guest is Dr. Jeffrey Kiplinger, a scientist turned entrepreneur whose journey includes corporate highs, identity shifts, and a deep commitment to reinvention. Jeff began his career in drug development at Pfizer, where he and his team work to make analytical technologies more accessible to R&D teams. After a decade, he was let go, a pivotal moment that pushed him to redefine success and rebuild on his own terms. Since then, Jeff has demonstrated what's possible with clarity, resilience, and a willingness to keep trying. He founded and sold Averica Discovery, authored the Amazon best selling book, Expert to Entrepreneur, and co-founded Selling Science, a firm helping science-based businesses grow through smart sales strategy and communication. In this conversation, Jeff and I talk about what it's like to go from directionless high schooler to PhD chemist, the emotional weight of being let go, and how it affected his identity and relationships, how he kept moving forward, even through economic downturns and uncertainty. Why building a business takes more than expertise and what scientists often overlook the surprising lessons he learned about communication, sales, and redefining success. This episode is for anyone who's navigating career disruption, rebuilding after a setback, or feeling called to use their expertise in a new way.

Caroline: 3:04

Jeff, welcome to Your Next Success I'm super excited to have you on the podcast today. How everything going for you?

Jeff Kiplinger: 3:11

Oh, it's great up here. We have 95 degrees and 110 degree heat index and we're just enjoying the heck out of it.

Caroline: 3:19

where are you located these days?

Jeff Kiplinger: 3:21

Hudson River Valley

Caroline: 3:22

I'm glad that we got to meet several months ago. What I'm trying to do on our podcast is to try to help people understand different career transitions, folks can look at someone in the position that they have and they don't understand the rollercoaster and sometimes it's tricky to understand how people can make big changes and do things like that. So if you wouldn't mind, I would love to try to understand your career story. If we dialed it way back to way back, back in the day when you were trying to decide what you wanted to go to college for, how did you make that decision? How did that happen for you?

Jeff Kiplinger: 4:02

Well Iove this subject because I think life is full of so many different career transitions in a way. I don't know that my journey is any different than anybody else's. When I graduated high school, you know, I was looking at myself as kind of I had no direction, I didn't know what I was gonna do next and as a matter of fact, I applied to one college because my parents told me that if I didn't apply to a college, they were gonna throw me out of the house. So applied to one. I applied in July and went in September. I don't know that anybody could get away

Caroline: 4:36

Wow.

Jeff Kiplinger: 4:37

with that nowadays, but I applied to Butler University and my parents were both alums and maybe they pulled some strings to get my application considered late. But you know, I was a very rebellious kid at that age. When I hit college, I caught fire. So that was a whole new experience for me. I had just been slogging through high school. It was dull. It was, it was difficult. It was very routine. But when I got to college, everything became possible and I, I ate it up. I ended up with a triple major when I graduated.

Caroline: 5:10

And what were your majors? When you went, when you had your triple major, what were those subject fields and then what were you looking at for grad school?

Jeff Kiplinger: 5:19

Chemistry, physics, and zoology

Caroline: 5:21

Oh,

Jeff Kiplinger: 5:22

But it was all sciences. Right. And you know, I really loved college, but I, when to graduate school, I had no self-discipline for basically being responsible for my own education. And it took me, I would say, a year and a half to develop even a, you know, a good idea that I could succeed in graduate school. And during that period of time, I didn't really know that I was gonna make it. Graduate school in chemistry, which was the major that I eventually chose organic chemistry. If you were unsuccessful, you were awarded a master's degree if you'd made it so far during the program. And a master's degree was considered you know, by PhD candidates to be a second best.

Caroline: 6:05

Consolation prize. basically asking you to leave Although there were a couple people that chose that upfront, but then I always thought, do, they know that there's this perception that we're all looking at them like they, they didn't choose the hard thing, but then they just chose what was best for them, I guess.

Jeff Kiplinger: 6:24

Hit the nail on the head there when you used perception, right? Because, what we are taught in educational institutions is what the faculty wants you to believe about yourself and about the educational process. So I was taught a lot of things in graduate school. I was taught that going to work in industry was a lower status position than going to work in academia. And that if you weren't any good

Caroline: 6:47

Yeah.

Jeff Kiplinger: 6:48

ended up in industry instead of in another university someplace. And I've learned that's complete garbage. And although I'm sure there are still people in academia that believe that you know, and, and more power to them if they're successful. But but it is very difficult to get an academic position

Caroline: 7:04

Yeah.

Jeff Kiplinger: 7:05

and it is relatively straightforward to get an industry position, and it ought to be about whether you're happy and whether you achieve what you wanted to do with that position than somebody's external rating of whether you're successful or not. So I had all of that head trash, you know, am I gonna be able to develop the self-discipline necessary? Am gonna, am I gonna make it past that cutoff where you're told to leave with a master's? Am I gonna make it into the glorified academic world? Or am I gonna end up, a low status person in industry? And eventually I started to realize I needed to make my own choices. And so as I did develop the self-discipline necessary to succeed, as I realized I was gonna be able to get a PhD, that I was gonna be able to write up a good solid dissertation and that I did all of that on my own. I began to feel that I could be more self-directing in my career. And I went for a couple of postdocs, muddled through those, found a nice position with Pfizer, started my career there, and then ultimately same head trash. You know, Are you going management? Management is where the success track is. Are you gonna become a top scientist with a lot publications under your belt? Are you going to succeed in the corporate world, which is very political and, very much dominated by, you know, one upmanship and and some environments? You know, all of those things kind of set me back a little bit at times too. Ultimately, when I left Pfizer and I was fired from Pfizer.

Caroline: 8:37

Oh wow.

Jeff Kiplinger: 8:38

I came into conflict after 10 years with my management and and they told me that, wasn't welcome anymore and I little settlement package and I went off and moped for a couple of years and tried to get new things going and then we hit recessions. You know, my efforts to start my own businesses were you know, coming up against headwinds that I had no control over. And again, during this whole process, you just learn that, you know, you have to set your sail in some direction and try and identify the headwinds and see if there's a way past them, and if there's not, step back. Try again.

Caroline: 9:20

For someone that had, you know, kind of risen and overcome and the triple major, and then getting the PhD and even landing the job at Pfizer and then after 10 years to get that"no, we don't want you."

Jeff Kiplinger: 9:36

Yeah, it hurts

Caroline: 9:38

Like, were you pissed? Was it a hit to your ego? Was it an identity crash? You know, did you think trying your own business was a consolation prize? Like what, what? Walk me through that headspace and then how you you got out of it.

Jeff Kiplinger: 9:54

I did try to start businesses. My first one was a single member consultancy, like a lot of people who leave an industrial position do. My second one was a partnership with a gentleman where we were building research parks, across the US. We did two or three of those. And then, then he actually, found a much better career path for himself. He managed, to win the Powerball as a matter of fact. So, you know, he, he started at very different type of business and moved to Hawaii and we disbanded that. I started a laboratory for a Midwestern company that was a technology collaboration between them and another group and we rode that for a while until we hit the 2001 recession. So, you know, some that you could look at as false starts, but they were all learning experiences. And when I started a contract research laboratory in the Boston area, I had to figure out how to make that successful. So we, we went operational with that on January 1st, 2008. you'll probably remember that Lehman Brothers went under in October of 2008, and that was the you know, a long period of recession. I remember meeting with a bunch of executives in Boston as part of a peer networking group that I was involved in, and they all thought the world was gonna collapse and it was never gonna come back. That was early 2009. It was a scary time, but every year was an up year for us because we figured out how to manage for cash flow instead of try and manage the P&L and so there was a lot of learning to do for me and for my upper level employees who became executives in the company, and then we eventually rode that track record to a pretty good level of success and sold the company in 2016.

Caroline: 11:46

So you started that company just like yourself or you and a friend, and then grew it to how many people and then sold it?

Jeff Kiplinger: 11:54

Well, I started it myself, and at the end I was, I had awarded some amount of stock to a few key employees, but I was the, know, the the majority owner. So it was really my baby. But we were, at the time that we sold about 20 employees a low single million dollar figures, in, not into the tens of millions yet. I sold the company primarily because the, the buyer which was a Canadian based company, had a US expansion plan that revolved around acquiring other assets in the United States, and I very much wanted to learn how to evaluate the value of other businesses and so I worked with that team for about eight or nine months, and then their private equity owners made a change in the management structure and I was sort of pushed to the side and the rest of the team was let go and they went a new direction. So when my

Caroline: 12:54

Wow.

Jeff Kiplinger: 12:54

contract was up, I left. left. Now that's not an unusual

Caroline: 12:58

Yeah.

Jeff Kiplinger: 12:59

not anything that I tried to control or, or felt bad about not being able to control. That's just the vicissitudes of of life, right. things go and things come and change and you ride it out. I think the the earlier transitions that we were talking about through college and graduate school and, and first job and so forth are, were much more things that I let emotionally impact me.

Caroline: 13:26

Tell me about that and describe that a little bit more.'Cause there could be some people at that. So what do you mean by let that you let them emotionally impact you?

Jeff Kiplinger: 13:37

Well, I would say the, the worst one was leaving Pfizer. Right? Because, you know, everybody knew that I'd left under conflict. You know, people didn't know the details of the, the arrangement that I had with the company when I left and the and the settlement package and so forth. But what they did know was that, I was I was pushed out and most of my friends, I was living in Southeastern Connecticut. Right. Suburban or exurban or almost rural in a way and so everybody's spread out you know, across that area. Everybody that I knew was a Pfizer person. And so, my ex-wife and I would go to dinner with these people and, you know, there'd be some amount of uncomfortableness of talking about Pfizer around me so forth. Eventually it did affect my marriage, and, I think that that might have been to a large degree in my head that I felt inadequate in providing my share of the marriage, and so I was driven to start the company in Boston because of that. But it took several years, as I said, of false starts, some of which were, because I didn't know enough, and some of which were, because you know, things happen.

Caroline: 14:54

Nobody

Jeff Kiplinger: 14:54

predicts that their business partner is gonna win the Powerball.

Caroline: 14:57

Right. Although, can you predict that I would win it? Can, can we, can we win it together? I think we should buy a ticket and see. Um,

Jeff Kiplinger: 15:07

You can't win if you don't play Caroline.

Caroline: 15:08

I know that is the thing. That is the thing that, that's always the, you know, yeah. You didn't get the winning lottery ticket because you didn't, you didn't buy it at all. So. Again

Jeff Kiplinger: 15:18

all that head came around being let go from Pfizer having to be around Pfizer, people not being able to get back into that world. You know wondering at the end of every discussion what my wife was thinking of me and so forth. You know, eventually kind of put me in a pretty bad place. And I see people leaving Pfizer today because they're still doing rounds of layoffs, like every major pharmaceutical company, and they're bitter. And what I wish for them is that they don't remain bitter for very long. You know, you, you put your life into a company like Pfizer, you, you think that they love you back and they don't necessarily. Everything's a business decision. So, you know, to, trying to personalize it and and think that it's about you was really my mistake.

Caroline: 16:07

I did the same, honestly, because it felt like I was, I was laid off in that 2009 kind of upheaval. And It was a hit to the ego, hit to the identity. And I was, you know, originally thinking like, seriously, like I'm on the list. Like, don't you know who I am? Don't you know what I've done? How in the world did you put me on the list? And, and I felt like. Naively before it happened to me, I admit, I thought anyone who had ever been laid off or let go did something wrong, and they must be a horrible person. And then, you know, I was thinking, well, wait, am I the loser? I must be the loser. Because, because that person stayed and that person stayed and I didn't think highly of them and they still had jobs, but I didn't. So it was a huge, huge thing. Now in hind sight, I can look back, and I say, thank God that happened to me. Seriously. I'm so glad that happened to me, because what I've been able to do since that time is leaps and bounds better and more suited to who I actually am, that if I had stayed there, but I naively thought. Oh, I'm gonna join this company. I'm gonna stay for 40 years and this, this, this. And that's just how it's gonna go down. So had you thought that originally as well, when you kind of joined Pfizer thinking, I'm gonna stay there forever?

Jeff Kiplinger: 17:38

I not only thought that I was told that when I interviewed for the position at Pfizer. I remember going out for a walk at lunch on the campus with my soon to be boss who told me that basically Pfizer had a policy that if you made it through your first six months, you were an employee for life. So he said, understand that when you join this company, you are joining for your entire career. Now believing that was my mistake. I remember when Pfizer did its first layoff, and this was prior to the mergers with Warner Lambert and then later Park Davis. So they weren't expanding at that point into, into, the behemoth that they later became but I remember the first layoff that came down just shocked everyone in the company, they eliminated an entire research area and nobody was familiar with that ever happening. So, yeah, and there are still people, as I say, that are going through layoffs now that are shocked and, you know, and clearly emotionally coping with something that they never expected to happen. Because the attitude is, I've put all of my energy into this, right? And you know, we can say pharmaceutical companies are evil all we want, right? But the reality is that every single person that goes to work in those companies every day wants to do something good. And they believe that by the slow, incremental process of science, that they will make a contribution to human health. Sometimes they, you know, it'll be a very visible contribution. Like they'll, they'll have their name on a patent for a brand new drug that's a big impact on humanity. But more often it's just that you're supporting teams that are doing that type of work. And you feel like I've put all my energy into this. I've been at work, you know, 50 hours or more a week for years and years and years dedicated to this company. And they just basically say, well, you know, you're a line item and you're gone.

Caroline: 19:35

So then you decided you wanted to be in control of your own destiny. Had your own companies and then after you sold that then what did you do

Jeff Kiplinger: 19:46

Well, yeah, that's an, that's an interesting question. So I did have to ride out the last of my contract I did some, griping to people around me about that, but I didn't personalize it the way that I did with the Pfizer thing, or, you know, with with my struggles to develop the discipline necessary to get through graduate school. I didn't feel like, oh, Jeff, you are inadequate, you know. Oh, Jeff, you know, you failed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was just, I wish it had turned out differently and rah, gripe about it. So, but ultimately I didn't linger on the fact out it didn't work out I had made some money from selling the company. I felt that I could retire if I really wanted to. I told my wife that I would take a year off after I left at the end of my contract. and I did so. So I left at the end of 2018. Taking a year off brought me to the end of 2019. We all know what happened at the beginning of 2020, so, you know, I have perfect timing with respect to these kind of things. But what I found during that year that I took off was that every single thing looked like a business to me. I mean, there was a clam shack that went out of business near us, and I was like, I could buy that and I could turn it into a place that made high end donuts. And, you know, they would sell like, uh, by nine 30 in the morning and then I could take the rest of the day off

Caroline: 21:12

Yeah.

Jeff Kiplinger: 21:13

you know, could create a plant nursery. There's a real need for that out here. You know, I could start a business in photography. I could you know, I don't know.

Caroline: 21:21

So this entrepreneurial spirit was a huge driver and it didn't necessarily matter what form.

Jeff Kiplinger: 21:28

It, it didn't, no, I really enjoyed after the cycle of, of starting my last company and selling it successfully, I enjoyed that, in hindsight, it was a struggle at times. I mean, we had to get through that 2008 to 2010

Caroline: 21:45

recession

Jeff Kiplinger: 21:45

period. The really worst of it, not knowing whether we were gonna survive or not, and that that weighs on you psychologically and keeps you up at night and it's a tough time. A lot of entrepreneurs that have been through that and some of them I wrote about in the book I got quotes from people who talked about how it affected their physical health to make it through that period of time.

Caroline: 22:48

And let's talk about that book because you have become a bestselling author to add to your accolades and your book is Expert to Entrepreneur.

Jeff Kiplinger: 22:58

Well, initially that was a COVID project. You know, here I was after taking a year off and then deciding to start a company that, with my business partner that was going to help CROs and contract development firms sell better to their scientist customers. Right? So we were just launching that when COVID hit. And then I had nothing to do for a while. I thought, well, you know, before I forget, this whole process of founding, growing and selling a contract research firm, why don't I write it all down? And then float it around to a few people and see whether it reads well? So I did just that. I'd never published a book before. I wrote something that ultimately was a fairly personal account and looked to me like it could be valuable to other scientists who were in a similar position of trying to test their entrepreneurial skills, trying to learn through that process, and so I wrote Expert to Entrepreneur, and I found a publisher and the book came out 2021 I guess so about two years after I started writing it and became an Amazon bestseller and that's been a nice little bonus to see that something you've written is useful to people and gets good feedback from people.

Caroline: 24:17

So did you write what you wish somebody had told you?

Jeff Kiplinger: 24:20

Not so much, I wrote what I experienced and how I learned how to do it better. I don't know that there's another book out there that deals specifically with the struggles that scientists have with, you know, part of it is our own head trash. I remember learning in seventh grade in earth science class that you had to write down everything as though it was completely impartial. And so, in seventh grade, I learned to write in passive voice instead of an active voice. So instead of I did this, the stuff was added to the stuff and this was observed, you know, and so you become so hyper objective that fail to develop the skills to say what you believe. And this was the biggest struggle that myself and, and my team members faced in selling what we knew we were good at to a customer.

Caroline: 25:15

So then how did you develop those skills?

Jeff Kiplinger: 25:18

I, took a sales training class with, you know, a team of sales experts in the Metro West Boston area and initially I struggled, I pushed back against everything they said. No, I can't do it that way because my customers are scientists, they're different. They don't expect to hear things that way. They expect me to stand there and say totally objectively this is what we do, you should evaluate it and decide whether you wanna buy from me and it doesn't work very well. I'm basically forcing my client to make a decision that they don't have sufficient information to evaluate.

Caroline: 25:55

And then how did it evolve then?

Jeff Kiplinger: 25:57

Well, eventually I learned that, you know, if we believe that what we were doing brought something to the table, we should talk about that. This is why we do what we do. This is what we believe it brings to you, and then immediately drop all of that stuff about us and start asking questions to see whether we can determine if we are a good fit for the customer's problem. It's a different approach from standing up at a scientific conference and presenting a paper where you objectively display all of the data and you say, these are our conclusions, but your conclusions may be different. Please take this work and bridge forward from there. That objective way of presenting is what we're all taught, but it doesn't work when you're talking to a customer where you have to evaluate. What are they thinking about the impact of the problem that they're having? Does it impact the organization enough for them to spend money on fixing it? What are their other solutions that they've looked at in the past? What are those? And those could include another contract firm. It could include another research path that we don't have any impact on. It could include buying a piece of equipment that we don't have in our laboratory. In those cases, I have to be willing to say, you know, that might be a better solution for you, but

Caroline: 27:20

I see. Because as scientists we're objective and we're just skeptical. So it's always like, let me find the hole in this thing. That can't be true. That can't be right. I think it's better. And then to flip to the sales. It's here's how we solve your problem. Here's how we can work together. Being the bridge from your past to their future.

Jeff Kiplinger: 27:41

And that's exactly what you face when you go into a room full of scientists. If you present, they will find holes. That is their job. That is what they've been trained to do. As you've said, it's that that is their skill and we all recognize that in each other. I'm presenting, if i'm just talking about myself, all I'm doing is presenting an argument for them to post poke holes in, and at the end of the day, you know, they'll come out of that seminar or whatever I've given, and they'll feel good about themselves because they did their job as scientists. They poked holes in it, but we won't have a business relationship. So it doesn't do either of us any good. I can't solve their problem and they can't pay me for doing so.

Caroline: 28:24

So interesting. How has your definition of success changed over time?

Jeff Kiplinger: 28:31

Well, my definition of success at a personal level, I think everybody's a little different in this, right? So, when people talk about successful entrepreneurs, a lot of times in the books that you read, in the seminars that you can subscribe to online of business experts telling you how to do this correctly you'll hear people basically saying, if you're not motivated by money, you will not make money. And so I find that for myself, I'm not motivated by money so much as I am a highly competitive person and I like to win. If my measure of winning is money, that brings me to one point. If my measure of winning is at the end of the day, I'm really, really happy. That's another thing. So I was very, very happy about the path that we took with Averica. If I'd been money motivated, I should, in hindsight, I should be beating myself up because I should have ridden it for longer to make us more profitable, and then sold it for a higher sum then I'd be you know, sitting at least on a small yacht someplace in the Mediterranean but that wasn't the path I took. I took the path towards something that was exciting to me

Caroline: 29:42

Yeah.

Jeff Kiplinger: 29:42

working with that company in Canada that was our was exciting to me at the time. And I'm still good friends with the team that I sold the company to. I don't have a business relationship with what that company became when their private equity changed the direction. But that's okay.

Caroline: 30:01

How about outside of work? What have been the things that were always your go-tos of trying to have a sense of fulfillment or utilizing all of you, because sometimes as scientists, if you're good in music, you could be good in math and science and all of these things. But like, what have been your other well-rounded hobbies to use all of your skills besides just the science ones that were your career?

Jeff Kiplinger: 30:29

Yeah, it's interesting. So, you know, in terms of hobbies, I do a lot of cycling and hiking. I find that physically challenging and it, it's about self-discipline, like I learned in graduate school that, you know, what, what can I make myself into if I put my mind to it? So that's got that aspect of it. I play guitar badly and my focus has been on bluegrass music, where I'm trying to get to the point where I can start a small bluegrass band and begin to get gigs. I sing pretty well, so that's my forte in bluegrass and I have a nice high tenor voice and everybody seems to enjoy that. So that's been a skill that I've been working to develop. Really the big passion project that my wife and I have is we own 10 acres of land up here in the Hudson River Valley. When we bought it, it was a depleted dairy farm very bad soil structure and tons of invasive plants. The only wildlife that seemed to thrive were deer who used it for shelter. So we have a tremendous deer overpopulation problem up here. And so, we've been working for, about eight years now to restore it with the idea being with, with the marker of successful restoration being biodiversity. And so I look at insect and bird species counts as a way of so I can't the ones that you only hear the bird song and then some expert says, oh, that's a blackburnian warbler or something like that. I can't do that. So, I have to see them. So I've seen 85 just from my back porch and we've got about 30 nesting species now. So this is pretty exciting. It's a passion project and it's one that we've started do more. We've started to go the route of trying to expose it to more people up here.

Caroline: 32:27

Yeah.

Jeff Kiplinger: 32:27

There's of interest in doing this type of of rewilding work, if you will.

Caroline: 32:35

Maybe that's another book.

Jeff Kiplinger: 32:37

It might be, there's a lot of people writing about this and I don't feel competent, but I do have in mind to produce maybe a 15 minute little video about the project and see if we can use that to get even more people interested.

Caroline: 32:51

Absolutely. That is so amazing. So if somebody feels stuck or stagnant in their career, in their life, what's your go-to advice for them?

Jeff Kiplinger: 33:05

The first thing I would say is if your emotional response is to beat yourself up, please take a step back. Because every time that I've done that, I've ultimately, as time has gone on, and as I've aged and as I've learned more and as I've been successful at other things, I've learned to look back on those periods of time and say, really the beating myself up part was holding me back. What I needed to do was to say, okay, here was something I failed at. Here was something that I didn't control for. Here was something that I didn't learn. And I have the opportunity to do that now, or I have the opportunity to do something different. So, you know, I can't say that I would take the Pfizer experience and learn to become more successful at corporate politics. Not my thing, not my interest, also not my fault that I wasn't.

Caroline: 34:03

Right.

Jeff Kiplinger: 34:04

In other things, they just didn't fit with that part of the Pfizer organization at that time.

Caroline: 34:10

That's a good point so how can people find you what capacities do you work with people? How can they find you these days?

Jeff Kiplinger: 34:19

I consult with, a few companies that are trying to get a, a business forward look at how they might bring their science to other people. So part of that is helping them understand that they can build a sales organization that they can bridge forward from their marketing team to better exposure and then sell based on what they're good at. and part of it is just the satisfaction of working with the executive leadership of a, a company that hasn't got it all in place yet. There's a certain coaching aspect to that, but it's, you know, I really try and get in and get my hands dirty and build people's organizations to a better level of success. I like it to be metrics based. I am after all a scientist and you know, I'm, I like to have goals that we're working towards. In terms of exposure to the basic ideas the book is a good place to start, it is widely available on Amazon. it's called Expert to Entrepreneur: How to Turn Your Hard Won Expertise into a Thriving Business but if they search expert to entrepreneur and Kiplinger and Amazon, they'll find me. The company Selling Science that I founded with my business partner Dave Kwajewski we still work with companies on their business process so people can find me at jeff@selling-science.com.

Caroline: 35:42

Awesome. And I am big on trying to help people be authentically successful. So how would you define authentic success for you in this chapter

Jeff Kiplinger: 35:55

Again, I think for me, the big struggle personally has always been getting out of my own head and being able to look at how I've affected other people along the way. Some of that's been good, some of that's bad. The, what I'm looking for now in the rest of my life is that the sum of things ends up being, you know, net positive. So, everything that I do with my, with my family, I have a daughter who is getting married soon. she and her fiance. They're just starting out. I put a lot of energy into that. we put a lot of energy into the future of the, the land up here and the people that that touches. so we're trying to percolate that outward. I love to sing and I find that's a way of building community with other people as well. Well, thank you so very much

Caroline: 36:43

for giving us a little bit of insight into your career journey, into your past, into your amazing book and how you help others and certainly wish you all the best with the wedding, the future, the rewilding project, and, and all of the things. I appreciate you for being part of Your Next Success.

Jeff Kiplinger: 37:03

Thank you so much for inviting me. It's always wonderful to talk to you, Caroline and, and I think your business is fantastic. Having gone through these kind of struggles, I think they're ubiquitous, right? We, we are all gonna go through things like this and having some help in that the way to reset my own head would have been invaluable. I would've, I would've lost less time, had fewer periods of being unhappy and you know, and ultimately I hope would've ended up where I am now much more quickly. Well, thank you so very much Jeff's story is a reminder that success isn't about sticking to the original plan. It's about staying curious, learning through each challenge, and moving forward with intention. He didn't set out to become an entrepreneur. He was fired from a job he thought would last a lifetime. And yet what he built after speaks volumes, not just about business, but about courage and clarity.

Caroline: 38:09

Thanks for listening to Your Next Success with Dr. Caroline Sangal. Remember, authentic success is yours to define and includes aligning your career to support the life you want.