The First Time Outside Your Comfort Zone Is Challenging, the Second Time Less So
Learn to travel light, because ideas and answers to questions, both professional and personal, do not come by staying locked in your room. Moving geographically, traveling abroad, periodically moving from one company to another or just changing roles within the same organization cost efforts and some sacrifices: there is the effort of leaving your comfort zone, there is the fear of wasting time and making mistakes, but “sacrifices can be made, because they are choices in exchange for something that will end up enriching us. The first time you leave your comfort zone is hard work, true, but the second time it already requires less effort. The important thing is to remain interested in what’s happening in the world, in its dynamics, intersecting your interests with the attention to the evolution of the market." Francesca Rizzi, an economics graduate from Bocconi University and now CEO and cofounder of Jointly, explains and contextualizes all the steps and knots one encounters at the beginning of a career path of personal satisfaction. But she does not do it only because her company – launched in 2014 together with Anna Zattoni, now president – deals precisely with technologies, services and personalized consultancies to companies seeking to improve the welfare of their employees (otherwise known as corporate wellbeing). She does it above all because she herself has experienced moments of hesitation in her professional life.
And yet, she turned out to “love” many of those choices: "I was undecided between sociology and engineering, I ended up preferring economics which seemed like a middle ground and actually gave me a view from above of the systems, the market and society, which was what I was looking for," recalls Ms Rizzi. After moving from Verona to Milan to pursue her university studies, she lived in a university residence: “Apart from having found my future husband there and friends whom I still hang out with, it was and is a large community of people having the same imprint. Important for social relationships and, in particular, for helping each other in life.”
So she married her college mate and had two daughters, but first Rizzi packed her bags and did an international university exchange program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (one of the Ivy League business schools), and an internship at the newly founded ECB. Then she worked in the McKinsey Research Office, starting as a strategic consultant in the banking and insurance industry, and ending up in a coordinating role in the Asset Management & Insurance practice. All this while traveling often and living for months abroad, in Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
“I approached each experience as a new gym apparatus, trying to acquire new techniques and learn new tools. I learned by myself that this approach helped me later become an entrepreneur. I also recommend it to those who don’t want to found a company or don’t know yet if they will,” Rizzi adds. “The idea to create Jointly came after attending the sessions of work-life balance working group of Valore D, an Italian women’s empowerment program.” On that occasion, the entrepreneur understood that there was an unexpressed need in the market. Companies, starting with the largest ones, wanted to improve the work-life balance of their employees but did not always have the skills and resources to do so. “When I came into contact with these companies, I discovered a world I knew very little about. That experience encouraged me to leave a job I liked and dive into a sector that, a decade ago, wasn’t structured like it is today. Why? Because I needed to contribute to changing the world of work. That was my desire and, as I said before, I tried to combine satisfying my own inclinations with the evolving needs of the market,” concludes Rizzi.