GCUC Podcast Recap: Claire Carpenter

Explore the highs and lows of Claire Carpenter’s entrepreneurial adventure as she reaches her next summit – 18 years in the making. The Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot takes us on a journey through business development, big social impact, the importance of passion, the productive art of doing nothing, and more in this episode of the GCUC Podcast.

Reach your own summit with these juicy sound bites:

There’s no easy way to get experience. You just have to go out and live, learn, love. Battle your way through the things that matter to you. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

Leadership is just like climbing. Leading an organization, being an entrepreneur, you just gotta hang in there long enough and you’re gonna get pumped out. It’s going to feel strenuous and stressful. You gotta hang on in and shake it out, get a breather every now and then. Come down for a rest and then get back on it. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

What climbing and other adventurous activities teach you is that it is ok to not know where you’re going entirely, have a destination in mind, be problem solving and on your feet, and working things out as you go along. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

The clouds come in and they obscure your view. You lose your map. You lost your waterproof. Shit happens. How are you going to deal with it? That’s what matters. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

Adventurous people and risk taking people. Calculated risks. Climbing is a calculated risk sport and that’s what you learn. That’s the balance between being an entrepreneur and adventurer. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

With climbing theres always a summit. With entrepreneurship, I don’t know if I’ve reached the summit. There’s always another goal, always more I can do. I think that’s whats so hard about it. It never turns off. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

How do you stay grounded when the summit is ever changing? -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

Its about the journey. There are many summits to go and explore on your entrepreneurial journey. And it is important to block time out on the calendar, do the things that bring you peace and calm. Keep exploring and remember it’s ok sometimes to not want to leave the tent. You have to be in it for the long run as an entrepreneur. It is not an easy thing being a successful business person. You can’t be in it for the short term, it has to be the long haul. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

If work is our passion, and as an entrepreneur there has to be passion for work, otherwise go get a job. If you’re not passionate about your enterprise then you’re in the wrong business. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

We talk so much about mental health and a part of it is just stepping away, making sure you do take a vacation. Decompression time is important and you don’t have to go fight the fight every single day. Sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

Doing nothing isn’t doing nothing. It’s recovering, it’s processing, it’s thinking, it’s breathing, it’s eating, it’s sleeping. It’s not doing nothing. We are only doing nothing when we’re dead. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

I started coaching one on one. I enjoy that kind of in depth support and that relationship you can build with another individual. Helping people along their way in life. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

I am delighted that I get to stay part of The Melting Pot business family with my team. I get to be the granny and not the mother, as it were, in this next phase. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

I get to be three things for The Melting Pot. I get to be ambassador, business development, mentor and guide to my colleagues and to members of our community, and a consultant. We got a lot of experience and opportunities to share with other people who are interested in place making and making social impact. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

What else could we do as Scotland’s Center for Social Innovation to make social impact? How do we use our coworking hub; our incubation program to help people with good ideas to help them make those ideas happen? How do we help place makers make their places happen? -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

Because I am an entrepreneur and I can’t help myself, I bought a camper van a couple years ago in lockdown as a type of prototype in living remote in a van. As an adventurer, you’re always away from home so why not take home with you? -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

There are so many places in Europe to go and see and do so that’s why I got the camper van. Why not do work remote, if you can? Go and visit all the coworking friends that I’ve made over Europe. Go see some of those on the trail. Go see some beautiful places. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

That’s always been one of my favorite things about coworking. I can land in any city in the world and go find my people at a coworking space. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

Find your entrepreneurial community, professional network, friendly people, climbing is just another form of community. We all belong to lots of types of community. It’s an international network, just like coworking hub. So I can travel to different places and meet others where we have something in common and I find a connection and go and have fun with them. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

What is really doing well right now is people’s awareness about the fact that this thing called coworking and even the option of flexspace exists. The conversations around the future of work, where people work, how they work, when they work. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

That flexible model is a really important leverage point. We now got enough examples of coworking infrastructure, the business model of coworking hubs has progressed, its advanced. The tools coworking hubs can use to run their businesses and support their customers has advanced. The technology is there; the customer pipeline is strong; people’s awareness is strong. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

The challenges that I see is there is going to be a lot of space available in the world and a lot of people saying come fill this space. It doesn’t matter if that’s office space, hotel lobby, the bank. People want foot traffic because they own premises. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

Space is space. But community is a different thing. How you create community, who you invest time and energy in. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

We are going to be competing with a whole change in the marketspace and use of space over the next 10 years. As people experience coming back out into the world enjoying face to face events and trying to navigate with themselves, families, people they live with, and their employer…where, when, and how they work is going to take time to play out. -Claire Carpenter, Founder & Executive Director of Social Innovation at The Melting Pot

Things have irrevocably changed. We now have choice and one of our choices is, we don’t want to go back to your soulless, stale office. Flexibility is coming up really high in results as to what people want. They don’t want to be told where to go, they want to go wherever it works for them. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

Click HERE to listen to the full podcast with Liz Elam and Claire Carpenter. It’s juicy!