Irene Molodtsov’s start to life has given her a unique work ethic. “What it's taught me is sometimes luck plays a big part in your life”, she says of her family’s escape from then-USSR when she was eight years old.

“We went through refugee camps in Austria and then into Italy, and it's only because my mum was pregnant with my sister that we got sped through the system a little bit quicker and onto Australia.”

Having that early insight into the magic of timing, combined with a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, left Irene with quite a high risk profile. “Sometimes you just have to go for it”, she says, an approach which has served her well in her own career. The former KPMG management consultant left to cofound her own firm, Molten, which she went on to sell to Sia Partners, of which she is now CEO. But while timing and gumption have helped her on her way, it’s that early blueprint of sheer hard work that has really cemented her success.

“If I think about the kind of the immigration wave that came with us, they were educated, professional, intelligent, highly qualified, and it wasn't because they didn't work hard”, she muses. Her doctor mother and engineer father both arrived in Australia with qualifications that weren’t recognised here. “So my parents, who are highly educated people, started to clean floors. They became cleaners, and then they did that at night, and during the day they learned English. What it's taught me is that no money is dirty and no work is dirty. If you're desperate and you've got children, ego just doesn't come into it. All work is good and honorable.”

Irene is a mother of two herself, now, but she describes having her own business as “like having a child”. And she’s learned lessons along the way, about how to create a thriving workplace culture (she says diversity is key), how to foster loyalty (she gave employees equity in the business), and why agility is more important than flexibility.

And despite her brilliant success, it’s comforting to know that the formidable Irene finds networking events just as intimidating as the rest of us. “I've cried in more toilets around the world than you would know, because I think those environments are terrifying…I'm not sure who does enjoy those things, but there must be people, right!”

Here, Irene takes us behind the scenes of the management consultancy industry, and shares some valuable insights about leadership, gender equity, and empathy along the way.

Your mum is a doctor and your dad is an engineer. But when you arrived in Australia, their qualifications were void. How did that affect the family, and what kind of work ethic did you learn from them?

It's the story of most refugees. They're there to have a fresh start. They're there for freedom. They're there for safety primarily, and ego goes out the door. I've been in enough yellow cabs in New York to hear stories of refugee dads who were there, and proudly showing me pictures of their daughters who are now lawyers, and so we're not unique. It's a story of many, many refugees.

You spent a number of years working at KPMG, one of the big four, before you left to found your own company Molten. What was the driving force behind your decision to leave?

The driving force was that it was as simple as I saw a niche in the market. I specialised in change management in KPMG, and I thought, "Okay, there's actually a place in the market to do strategic transformation and change management without having to sell systems”, which is what the big four were pushing for. And we saw a gap in the market. So it was as simple as ‘okay, what's the worst thing that can happen? If it doesn't work out, I can always walk into one of the big four.’ And sometimes, being a bit naive about the future and not overthinking it is absolutely the best thing you can do.

You said that leaving and starting the firm was quite easy, because you’ve got quite a high risk profile. Why do you think it’s sometimes better to just go for it instead of weighing up all the risks?

Absolutely. I think actually the worst thing you can do if you're thinking, ‘look, should I do something by myself, be an entrepreneur, launch something’, is overthink it, and actually sit down and go through all the risks. If I were to do that back then and go through all the bad things that are going to happen, all the mistakes that you're going to potentially make, all the difficult places, I mean, you just don't do it. Sometimes you just have to go for it.

And you just deal with it step by step. Don't think about ‘in three years, this might happen, in two years…’ I never liked those questions, especially in interviews. Where do you think you're going to be in two or three years time? I don't know, but I can talk to you about the next six months because these are the steps that I'm taking. So, I think not overthinking things too much and not going through all the risks is the advice that I would give people who are thinking of being entrepreneurs.

It’s often said that you have to learn the rules before you can break them. Do you think it was important for you to have that strong foundation at KPMG before you broke out on your own?

I think so. Starting in a bigger firm gives you the language, gives you the skill set, and gives you the opportunities to get some solid training. Now, not to say if you're coming out of smaller firms that it's less professional, but you just don't get the same opportunities sometimes for the training, for the conferences, for the skill set acquisitions. I just think it's a really, really solid start.

What’s your advice to someone with an idea for a business?

The biggest thing I would say is be prepared to sacrifice, and I'm not sure if this whole theme of super hard work and sacrifice is very popular anymore because right now, there's a big wave towards a more holistic approach - which by the way, I very much believe in, aware of mental health and physical health and the whole kind of the equilibrium of work-life balance.

But the reality of the situation is when you are starting a business, which is like having a child, you become the parent which means you're responsible for the finance, and the marketing, the procurement, the delivery, the sales, the entire gamut. And there will be times if you're intending for that to succeed that you may not be going out with your friends as often, or going on holidays, because all your effort's going into that business. To be honest, I don't know any other way that you can have a success.

I love what I do. I love my work and I was so engrossed in the business because I knew that it was a very special time and experience. You're getting people into the business who are just as excited as you about it. You're growing something. They're very agile. If you want to change something, you change something quickly. And it's an exciting time. I don't feel like I was missing out either, because to me, it was worth it.

You started Molten with your co-founder Rory Colfer. Can you tell me about some of the mistakes you made in the early days?

I think primarily we made three fundamental mistakes. One of them was just bad luck and the other two was us. One of the bad decisions was opening an office in Hong Kong in 2008. No one knew that the crash would come, and obviously, that cost us money.

But the other two, we certainly learnt from the mistakes and we put those learnings to good use, but they were mistakes. Number one is when we started Molten, we didn't have as much respect for the consulting skill set. So, we would get, for example, highly qualified bankers to come in, HR people, all good people, but they weren't management consultants. And because they weren't management consultants, they didn't know how to do a proposal. They didn't know how to manage stakeholders, and there's a whole craft to what we do. So, that cost us, because recruiting people is very expensive. It's a lot better to recruit, to retain, to grow your talent. So, now, I now put a big emphasis on getting people from management consulting industry.

And the second big one, and I think this is one that most entrepreneurs are tempted to do, is overstretch yourself, grow too quickly, open offices around the world too quickly before you have the management bandwidth. I think there's something about being ambitious, but being cautious about your own personal bandwidth, because at the end of the day, as founders, as leaders, you need to be across a lot of things. And I think that was probably a mistake is grow too quickly without having the bandwidth.

What have you learned from this?

If you look at the change management theory, where change fails, where mistakes get made, it's got nothing to do with technology or putting in the wrong system. It's got to do with people, either getting the wrong people or not motivating, not incentivising the right people. I think trying to understand what hard and soft skills you require and to as much as possible make sure that there's a cultural alignment is very, very key. I think the other key is getting diversity into the workplace. Getting people from different backgrounds, different languages, but who are still quite homogenous in terms of their value set is a very, very good thing because then you get the difference, you get the diversity of views, but there's still some commonality that keeps you together within the one organisational culture.

You sold Molten to Sia Partners where you are now CEO. What have the challenges and benefits of that change been like?

It's been both liberating and a little bit strange. It's liberating because you've got a bigger balance sheet. You can do bigger things. You're not living hand to mouth with your cash, in cash out, like a smaller company. And there's freedom because it's so highly entrepreneurial. It's not 100,000 people. It's 2,000. On the other hand, there are procedures and there are rules and there are some centralised systems, and that sometimes feels odd, but you can see why it's needed, right? So, it's both freeing and slightly odd, but overall, I'm so glad we sold to Sia Partners.

You delayed having children because you felt that starting your own business was all-consuming. So how has motherhood changed your working life?

I think the question is multifaceted because there's the pre-COVID motherhood and the COVID motherhood. The last 18 months has been very tricky, because all the parents have had to homeschool and work at the same time, look after the children, look after the team, keep morale up, make sure that the children have an as normalised last 18 months as possible. When I was younger, we didn't talk about our children at work. As women, it's just like, ‘I'm here, I'm a professional woman and that's it.’ And now, I talk about my children at work. I'll say, ‘I could not do any calls between 4:00 and 6:00, for example, because I have to feed my children.’ And it's so freeing to say that. And I had someone say to me the other day, ‘I'm so glad you said that on the call because it gives me the license to do the same.’

I think now being a mother, I don't know if it's just because of the state of my career, but also there's a big movement pro-women. We want to keep women who are mothers in the workforce and get them back into the workforce. It's about going back to bringing your authentic self. I'm a mother. This is who I am. It makes me the person that I am, makes me actually a much richer person, and that is always part of the conversation for me at work and out of work. So, it's nothing that I hide. It's actually something that I'm very proud of, and I hope that we have more and more women with children in the consulting industry. Certainly, for Sia Partners, that's what we're trying to encourage. Get the talent back in.

I think the answer is to make sure that we're having individual conversations with people rather than making blanket assumptions. We've just hired a new HR manager. She has two children. We had a conversation. She said, ‘What is your expectation about me being in the office?’ And I said, ‘You tell me what you need to do to be in the office.’ I think the conversation has to be agile. There's someone else who actually feels the reverse, she needs to have time away from the family and make sure that she's got peace and quiet. So, she wants to be in the office. That works for her. So, it is about having those individual conversations and not saying, ‘Everyone does this.’ I think that is the future.

On that note, we know that women over the age of 35 tend to drop out of the consulting industry. How can businesses better support women so that we hold on to our talent?

Yes, I think even just having a specific finish now feels very old school because why? What's the rationale? If you don't have a meeting between 3:00 and 4:00, why do you have to leave at 4:00? Do your work. I think even just the concept of flexibility feels old-fashioned. It is about agility. That's the future.

You once said “If you want to keep senior people, you need to give them skin in the game”. Talk to me about how you do that as a leader, and why it’s so important?

In my own business we shared some equity. Also making sure that people are accountable and bonused on their performance, because at the end of the day, what everyone wants is to have an impact on the market and to feel that if they've got influence. If they've got influence on their clients, on their people, on growing a company, they're rewarded for that, and that goes as a vertical slice to the most junior people. I don't believe that bonusing people should only be at the senior level. I think it's about making sure that if you have made an impact, you're rewarded for it. I think that's how you build that kind of retention and loyalty to the brand.

You recently led a team of data scientists who found that language used in job ads affect whether men or women apply, and the more senior the role, the more ‘masculine’ the language. What prompted you to look into this, and can you give some examples of the type of language you researched?

The future is data. It's about not making decisions due to gut feel, but making it based on fact that the data is kicking out. From a D&I perspective, we know that women tend to apply for jobs that they feel that they're a hundred percent qualified for. They want to tick off every single box. And men don't, right, which means that a lot of qualified women either don't end up going for jobs, or just miss out on opportunities.

So, we started looking at the language in job ads. And there are words that have been researched and they're coded. I'll give you an example of what a couple of male-coded words are. Self-sufficient, championing, lead, confident, - very male-oriented words that will probably speak to a man more than a woman. Female-coded words include facilitate, empathy, coordination. And so, that in itself, depending on the words that are used, can skew the kind of result that you get. And what we want to do is we want to make sure that there's neutral language, that it's attracting all people, that it's not just speaking to men, because we still have a long, long way to go to balance out the gender in the workplace. And if anything COVID has done, it's actually made things worse.

At AllBright we really champion the power of networking. Tell me how you approach networking?

It's very tricky because the professional workplace is still very male-dominated. And I'm quite small, I'm 5'2", and I sometimes feel quite petite going into a room, and honestly, I just go, "Oh my god." Networking is so important, right? But there's different ways of doing networking. So, I've just worked out what works for me, and what works for me is to have smaller amounts, but to go very deep into those relationships. Rather than be superficial and be a butterfly, the relationships that I have, I'm very loyal to. I've had the same people who have bought from me at work, there's been years and years and years because I get to know them. I know who their children are. I know who their pets are. I know their likes and their dislikes. So, I rather go deep and fewer than networking with a lot of people. But confidence is a very tricky thing. Sometimes you just have to fake it and get through it.

I've cried in more toilets around the world than you would know, because I think those environments are terrifying. I think that the online channel has democratized and taken away some of that, because I find that doing it online I've actually been able to do lots more wider networking. I think the future maybe is to do deep physically in-person and to do wider online because honestly... I'm not sure who does enjoy those things, but there must be people, right, because they're good at it!

Sia Partners employs over 1,600 consultants in 16 countries, but you’re also the mother of two young boys. So how do you separate work and life, and how do you switch off?

The work-life balance is a bit enigmatic, isn't it? I'm not sure if it's something you can have on an ongoing basis. I think there's peaks and there's troughs. I think when work is very busy, then you may not be able to hit that Pilates class twice a week. And when it's a downturn, then you may be able to go three times a week, right? So, I think it's about just accepting that it's not going to be all lovely and all beautiful and all balanced because it can't be because things happen.

That's the question I get asked the most by graduates. How do you do work-life balance? I say ‘No one's got it. There's no such thing.’