The power of the pivot: How to rewrite your professional story

It can be tricky finding your professional feet after becoming a parent. As Esther Vallejo describes it in her LinkedIn profile, she was her family’s “chief home officer” for more than five years, focused primarily on raising two young children. She tried to launch a few businesses, but they failed to fire. 

“I come from a long line of entrepreneurs, and have successfully started and run small businesses both in Spain and Australia” says Barcelona-born Esther, “but after taking time off to raise my children and trying to start again, I kind of lost direction and thought I can’t keep going on this way because I’m always going with gut feeling – you need a system and a strategy. I was a mum wanting to reinvent myself.”

For Esther, the University of Melbourne’s Master of Entrepreneurship, co-delivered with Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship, has been transformative. Wanting to build a business from nothing, she rejected an MBA in favour of the Master of Entrepreneurship. “When I came here, it just felt right,” says Esther, who studied part-time and graduated in 2022. “I was able to be at home with my kids, and also start the process of becoming my own person once again, and go back into the workforce and see where the journey takes me”…

Now a Business Manager at Holmesglen Self-Employment Assistance, Esther is a mentor for start-up founders – a conduit for the knowledge she gained in the Master of Entrepreneurship program. As a consultant, she has prompted many an epiphany among the people she coaches. “They have so many ‘aha moments’ when I’m sharing what I’ve learned,” says Esther. “They say, ‘Why haven’t I been taught this before?’ It’s like a breath of fresh air for people who don’t know what they’re doing in their business. I give them a step-by-step strategy they can follow.”

The Master of Entrepreneurship program redefined entrepreneurship for Esther, shifting her focus from selling to problem-solving. She always thought entrepreneurship involved acting out of intuition but realised it’s more a process, perhaps even a science: “It’s a way of analysing the market and putting a strategy around it.”

Esther also learned to emotionally detach from business. She began her career in her family’s fashion-retail in Barcelona, and witnessed first-hand her father’s attachment to let go of and adapt the company he had built from scratch and successfully ran for decades, when the industry inevitably changed. Learning from the experience, Esther has adopted a different, maybe healthier, approach.

“One thing I’ve learned here is that your business is not your baby,” she says. “It’s just a business. It’s not your life and it doesn’t need to be. You can set it up to sell and let it go – there’s a strategy behind every business.”

At Wade Institute, Esther found a quiet space away from the little-kid chaos of home, as well as short courses on personal branding and public speaking to support her professional rebirth. For inspiration, she had to look no further than her teachers and classmates. “I’ve met beautiful people,” she says. “I look at them now on LinkedIn and think, wow, you’re writing books and creating amazing things. I feel very privileged to be part of this community.”  

The Master of Entrepreneurship program challenged her “wanting everything to be perfect” and gave her a “playground” where she could follow her curiosity and “fail safely”. Realising her thoughts and insecurities, Esther sought counselling at Wade Institute, which supported her through the program. “One of the personal challenges I faced was the little voice in my head saying, ‘No, you can’t do this,’ says Esther.

“For me, the highlight is that I can look back and say, yes, I can! And… I’ve done it.’ The program gave me the opportunity to do things differently, challenged me in unimaginable ways and it’s changed my life completely.’”

This article first appeared on the University of Melbourne.