Jane Peh is the Co-Founder & CEO at Pawjourr, an online jobs marketplace for for pet owners and vets to work with their favourite brands.
1) To kick things off, could you tell us a little about your career background and current role?
Hi all, great to be here! My name is Jane and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Pawjourr, an online jobs marketplace for pet owners and vets to work with their favorite brands.
Before starting this company, I was in the advertising industry as an account executive (also known as a suit); basically the liaison between creatives and clients in firms like Ogilvy and Dentsu.
Fast-forward, I burnt out and started freelancing as a project/account manager for a consultancy firm for their clients (e.g. PayPal and adidas APAC).
2) What does a day in your life look like for you? Can you take us through a recent workday?
I work off hours because I am currently based in Singapore but work with US clients as well.
- 11am – wake up, coffee, and greet my furkid a good morning
- 12pm – check/reply to emails.
- 12 – 3pm – meetings / sync-up with team members or clients
- 4 – 5pm – walk my dog/thinking time
- 5pm – Daily WIP
- 5 – 6pm – Team WIPs
- 6 – 7pm – Founders sync-up
- 7 – 9pm – Dinner / Break / Walk my dog
- 9pm – 3am – usa clients / sales meetings / emails
My typical work hours range from 11am – 3am with breaks in-between.
3) Does your current role allow for flexible or remote working? If so, how does that fit into your life and routine?
Yes, our nature of the business allows for flexible/remote working. Within the company, we embrace flexi-work arrangements so some of our colleagues do e.g. start work earlier so that they can be home in time for dinner with their family members. I think the beauty of a tech company is that you just need an internet connection + laptop to get to work.
There are a lot of calls for WFH / remote working, especially for parents and I think this is also true for pet owners. Having flexibility around my working hours is something I enjoy a lot. I also work a lot better at night so having the flexibility helps me become a lot more productive.
For now, we do a hybrid model (3D in office + 2D WFH) – there are still lots of benefits for F2F interaction and many of our employees do enjoy the physical interaction.
4) What does work-life balance mean to you and how do you work to achieve that goal?
To me, work-life balance means producing quality and timeline work at a schedule that works for me.
I’m not a morning person so being able to start work at noon helps a lot. To ensure that my team members can still sync/catch up with me (despite my odd hours), we come up with processes to automate and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
5) In the past 12 months, have you started or stopped any routines or habits to change your life?
I have started reading again, in a bid to learn from other founders and/or experts in their field. As a first-time founder, reading up on other people’s experiences is one of the best ways to avoid similar mistakes and/or learn frameworks that help to scale my company.
I’ve also started listening to podcasts e.g. masters of scale, YCombinator, Justin Kan, etc to learn about the POV of USA investors and how things work there.
6) Do you have any favorite books, podcasts, or newsletters that you’d like to recommend?
- Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin
- Hacking Growth by Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis
- Blitzscaling by Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman
- Lenny’s newsletter
- Failory
7) Are there any products, gadgets or apps that you can’t live without?
- Products – Is coffee counted?
- Gadgets – for sure my phone and laptop
- App – Instagram, food delivery, transport.
8) If you could read an interview about work-life balance by anyone, who would that be?
Tim Cook. I’ve read his biography (The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level) and I can’t imagine how he juggles work-life balance given the timezone he has to work with and the kind of schedule the CEO of Apple would be on!
9) Do you have any last thoughts on work, life, or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?
I think a lot of people define work-life balance as a clear cut (no work on weekends and after 6pm), but I don’t think it’s about a deliberate fit into a specific morph/definition but rather, making work part of your lifestyle.
Would equate this to how some people force themselves to exercise 3-4x a week and make it a “goal”; it should be natural and forms part of your everyday life.
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