We were lucky to catch up with Alex Reynolds recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alex, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
I think it’s crucial to be generous as a response to the people who have poured into me. I had several people take the time to help me get started in business things in my early twenties. Specifically, I think of a family who taught me how to work through business finance and bookkeeping. I could never repay what they did for me, but I can pass it along and be generous to others.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I’ve worked with innovative companies and organizations and started my own ventures for nearly a decade. I started in the “church world,” working as a media producer for a mid-sized Baptist Church in Greenville, SC. From the outside, most people don’t know what to make of someone who works for a church, but the time I spent working in that organization shaped much of my life that came later. Working in that environment taught me how to be very agile and inventive with the provided resources, although I wouldn’t have articulated it like that while there.
While professionally working in media, I also worked to begin a community development organization focused on creating environments where our local community could connect, and I still run that organization today. Professionally, I transitioned out of the media producer role into a few different jobs at marketing startups and video production companies, and today, the bulk of my time is taken by my work for a software startup called ScopeStack, which I joined about a year after its founding. Today, my “next big thing” is working to influence the local political landscape here in Greenville, SC.
A defining throughline in my ventures has been my belief in the power of connections and relationships to propel efforts forward. Being the most intelligent person in the room doesn’t help if you can’t communicate and form meaningful connections. I think a throughline in all my efforts has been the connections I’ve developed.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Important qualities:
– Ability to make meaningful connections with people
– Ability to stay focused on the things that are right in front of you to be responsible for and to set aside everything else
– Necessity of random connections, especially early on
There is some tension between these points, especially the second and third. In my early career, I always felt wrong about being too much of a generalist, but today, I recognize that it’s because I did a little bit of everything that I had so many platforms to understand how the world works. I’ve also realized there is no linear progression between being a generalist and a specialist. It’s a pendulum I feel I swing back and forth on as the needs of my career and side interests dictate.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
100% to be well-rounded. There are many things I’m not great at, but I can do them, and I think my tolerance of being able to do things that I don’t love for periods has given me the platform to do the things I love eventually. I don’t believe in the follow your dreams mentality; I think most of us don’t know what we want until we get there.
Any journey we take changes us. What I dream about at the start of the journey will, by definition, change along the way. So, in my thinking, I very rarely have set out knowing what I fully want; I’ve operated in a very pragmatic way and taken the next step on opportunities in front of me, and the taking of so many different next steps has required me to be a very well rounded person. The latitude that has afforded allowed me to get a little further down specific paths. As I’ve gone down paths, I’ve figured out which ones are fruitful and which are likely not leading anywhere I want to go. Again, this isn’t a linear process, so maintaining the ability to do different things has been essential in my journey as I’ve needed to pivot as circumstances change.
Contact Info:
- Website: alexreynolds.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexsreynolds/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asreynolds/
Image Credits
Sophia Hopkins, Emily Barbee, Michael Gibbons, Wellington Payne
