Meet Jennifer Ong.

Former VP at Blackrock turned fashion startup General Manager turned Founder of Ctrl Alt Career.

Today in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• 🛍️ Jen’s Two Career Pivots & How It All Began During Covid

• 🚀 Choosing Between VC-Backed Founder and Bootstrapping

• 🤝 How She Grew to High 5-Figure Sales in 1 Month

• 💪 Jen’s Honest Reflections and Her Competitive Moat

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Starting a Coaching Business in APAC | Jennifer Ong

Jennifer Ong is the founder of Ctrl Alt Career, a career coaching business designed to help unhappy professionals stuck in “perfect on paper” jobs identify and pivot into a “perfect for you” career.

Before this, Jen graduated from Columbia University and started her career at BlackRock working up to a VP before pivoting to her dream job working at fashion startup Style Theory, where she was their General Manager in charge of setting up and growing their HK business.

Because of her own career struggles, she felt compelled to start a podcast Ctrl Alt Career to help others in their careers which eventually grew to her career coaching business today.

🛣️ Tell us about your career journey from working in finance to starting Ctrl Alt Career.

I started off in finance because I majored in economics in school. When I was graduating from school, I didn't really give it much thought. I just went into roles that were recruiting actively on campus without really thinking oh, is this really the right job for me? It was the path of least resistance.

Within six months of being on the job, I realized it wasn't right for me. It was a data analytics role and I’m much more of a people’s person. I knew I wanted to leave pretty early on but I had no idea what else I wanted to do. I was held back by my preconceived notions of success and stayed at Blackrock for 7 years!

At that point, I didn't know myself at all. My entire life I've just been really good at achieving goals and delayed gratification to the point where I lost sight of who I am and what makes me tick. It took me six years to unpack my beliefs on what a successful career looks like and define success in my own terms. Externally, I also got a lot of validation by working in a big company, my colleagues were nice, and the pay was excellent, which made it even harder to leave.

The good news is I did manage to get myself out and successfully pivoted into my dream job working at fashion startup Style Theory. And that truly was the dream — I woke up excited to go to work, and never experienced the Sunday blues. And I thought — wow I can’t believe I wasted 7 years of my life working in a “perfect on paper” job when I could have had a career that was “perfect for me”.

And so during Covid, I started my podcast Ctrl Alt Career. Circuit breaker was really hard for me and I wanted an excuse to talk to people. I was surprised by the reception to the podcast — I guess it was a topic that really resonated with a lot of people. Before long, I had strangers writing to me, thanking me for creating the podcast and started to ask me for help with their careers.

At that point in time, I was also looking for ways to monetize the podcast. Podcasting was taking up a substantial amount of my time (entire weekends!), and I recognized that I wasn’t someone who could keep doing the podcast for free.

But I realized if you want advertisers, you need hundreds of thousands of people listening to make even just a small amount of money. That was too difficult at that point in time. And people were already asking me career questions, so I thought why not start a career coaching business and leverage the podcast to bring people in? That’s how it evolved.

🛍️ You were working at Style Theory full-time while working on your business on the side. How did you decide when to go full-time on the business?