Meet Dora Rankin

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dora Rankin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dora below.

Dora, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
Pain and hardship have been the pathway to my purpose. I never did anything the “traditional” way. I grew up with a powerhouse single parent mother who taught me to be self sufficient from an early age. I watched her struggle not only with being a woman in the healthcare industry, an extremely male dominated field but I also watched her fight for respect from inside and out of the workplace. Women’s rights were not on my radar at 12 years old but I knew from that age women could pursue anything.

When I was 25 I found myself divorced, with two kids, a heavy drinking problem and a big girl job at the bank. By the age of 30 I was an executive leader, climbing the corporate ladder with intensity, raising my daughters, full time caregiver of my powerhouse mom who had been diagnosed with MS and I had finally sobered up,

It wasn’t until many years later I realized my purpose. My years of trials and tribulations were instrumental to discovering what I’m here to do. I spent a few years building a start up, taking up women’s studies at Cornell and on my 43rd birthday my sister was the one who said- “will you please go and share your brilliance with the world.”

And so I did. My purpose is truly to pioneer economic power for women. There’s only 2% of women entrepreneurs that make over a million dollars a year and my purpose is to change that.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I led teams in corporate finance for 20+ years. I coached top performing sales leaders to acquire relationships with startup business owners to fortune 500 CEO’s. I then worked with these CEO’s to build out their growth plans.

When I moved into the start-up fintech world I spent three years figuring out how to get people to buy a really complex product that no one has ever heard of. Sounds fun huh. Well I did it. So when I work with women founders now in any industry, whether it’s opening up a new brick & mortar, selling a business to start a new one, creating a business online or moving from corporate to consulting one thing always remains the same, there’s a huge AHA moment that happens when they see what is necessary to implement every single week to grow their business. Sales and marketing is not just about posting and sending out newsletters. The online marketing trend is false advertisement for what it really takes to grow your business.

Here’s the simplest way for me to break it down:
Sales= how you find your people
Marketing=how your people find you.

Action, more action and more action using a qualitative and quantitative formula for every sales and marketing activity. You see you can’t build a business with just inbound marketing and you can’t build a business with just outbound sales activities. You HAVE to have both, and when done over and over to your TARGET AUDIENCE enough you will create a flywheel of sales.

The ultimate challenge.

What I’ve found over the last few years is the biggest disconnect we flounder around like a fish out of water or jello on the counter is how to consistently get sales. How to build business revenue, how to be profitable, how to grow. That sounds like an overarching theme of somewhat cluelessness around what to DO once you have an amazing product or offer to sell.

The major bottleneck is sales and marketing.

1. Being educated around the difference between the two
2. How to experiment both strategically without tossing spaghetti at the wall.
3. Priorities & Consistency
I could talk all day long about priorities and managing consistency in your business while managing the responsibilities that come up in your life, like kids and husbands and school and health and family….

So when you find yourself not being consistent in sales and marketing- due to frustration- stop and ask yourself, are you frustrated because you think it’s not working or do you not know what you really should be doing.

As a business coach my role is to create the roadmap so you can reach your northstar goals. Whether it’s a million in sales or 20 million in sales. Some clients call me their second hand CEO. I tend to like fractional CEO. Either way, we roll up our sleeves and conquer your growth arm and arm

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Be sincere. Always think of others first. 2. Overdeliver with no expectations
3. Lead with your heart in all things

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
Three years ago I stumbled across the book We Should All Be Millionaires, by Rachel Rodgers. I had no idea she would end up being my mentor and I’d be a founding Hello7 coach in her coaching certification program in 2023. But here we are!!

We’re going to change the world by trailblazing economic power for women entrepreneurs.

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