Building her own path: Jennifer Olsen’s entrepreneurial journey

Jennifer Olsen’s career is a story of recognizing opportunity and building something without an obvious blueprint. After working in biotech and earning her MBA from UW Bothell in 2005, Olsen briefly pursued consulting. Realizing the traditional consulting path was not right for her led to the entrepreneurial decision that shaped the next chapter of her career.

While earning her MBA, Olsen thought consulting was her next step. She accepted what she called her “dream job” with a Big Four global HR consulting firm and was celebrated as the first person in her class to land that kind of position. But the experience quickly clarified what Olsen wanted from her career.

“I just missed working with the smaller organizations like I had come out of,” she said. “And I just knew that this was not my career path.”

She called a former boss and friend who had started a business. “If you will hire me for six months as a consultant, I will quit my job today,” Olsen told her. She agreed and Olsen took the leap.

Olsen began providing fractional HR services to biotech companies, offering smaller organizations experienced HR support without the cost of a full-time department.

“I realized that there was something here,” she said. “Fractional services was pretty new. There weren’t a lot of companies that were doing that. There was one other competitor in the space.”

She founded Resourceful HR in 2008 and grew it into a successful HR consulting firm.

Being able to have access to professors that were really, really good at their subject matter expertise and had experience applying it within industry gave me the confidence, I think, to be able to know that I could do that.

Olsen launched the company as the financial crisis began. Her UW Bothell education became a practical resource as she navigated the uncertainty of starting and growing a business.

The MBA program connected Olsen with professors who brought both academic expertise and industry experience. That combination connected classroom learning with the realities of running an organization and gave her confidence to build a company of her own.

“Being able to have access to professors that were really, really good at their subject matter expertise and had experience applying it within industry gave me the confidence, I think, to be able to know that I could do that,” she said. “I could go out and start something.”

When challenges arose, Olsen returned to her coursework and reached out to professors for perspective and support. “It gave me a good foundation to then be able to go back to my textbooks … and to have access to my professors … to feel like I had a team of support behind me, rather than feeling like I was just out on my own.”

Olsen also valued the support of her MBA cohort. Thirty-six students began the program, and most moved through it together. Several classmates were already director-level in their companies, and their professional experience enriched the learning environment.

“I learned just as much from them as I did from the professors,” Olsen said. “We had each other’s backs.”

Students pushed one another to improve, she said, while maintaining a collaborative culture. That environment gave Olsen a professional community that continued to support her as she became a business owner.

Olsen grew Resourceful for more than a decade. In January 2020, an Atlanta-based corporation, OneDigital, approached her about acquiring the company. OneDigital wanted to enter the HR consulting market and saw Resourceful as a way to establish a presence in the Pacific Northwest.

At the end, I’m more of an entrepreneur at heart. I like to grow things from scratch.

Olsen agreed to sell. The transaction closed in September 2020, and she stayed for three and a half years to help build OneDigital’s Northwest HR Consulting division. Although the acquisition was positive, moving from owner to employee was an emotional adjustment.

“At the end, I’m more of an entrepreneur at heart. I like to grow things from scratch,” she said.

Olsen now provides executive leadership development and exit readiness coaching for business owners. Some clients are building companies they may eventually choose to sell; others are preparing for a sale within three years. Drawing on her own experience, she helps them navigate both the practical and emotional dimensions of ownership transitions.

She is currently writing a book about the emotional challenges entrepreneurs face when exiting a business.

Her advice to current UW Bothell students is to use the resources around them and ask experienced peers for help.

“There are no dumb questions,” she said. “Nobody knows everything that they’re doing.”