Hey, I’m
Dom
Farnan
GET TO KNOW ME
Featured clients:
Here’s my “bio”
(For a quick copy and paste if you’re featuring me in your podcast, show, summit, mastermind, etc.)
For over twenty years, Dom Farnan has been a fearless leader in high-growth settings, blending entrepreneurship and advocacy in each of her roles. Whether she’s recruiting talent for titans like Snapchat and Instacart or injecting joy into virtual team meetings through sound and dance, the first thing people notice about Dom is the profound intentionality behind her actions. Always one to see the unlimited potential in another human being, Dom brings radical change to the talent industry through the application of mindfulness, generosity of spirit, and a sense of compassion that values relationship building. Currently, she channels her expertise into DotConnect, the thriving conscious connection agency she founded in 2011.
As a conscious leader, Dom refuses to think in the limiting terms that have been so pervasive in the corporate world. She pulls from her journey of a merely surviving workaholic culture to thriving — shattering the belief that high performance has to cost inner peace. Where others see talent as an end to the means of filling vacancies for clients, Dom sees a holistic picture — bringing talented individuals and dynamic companies together to create inspired, empowering matches.
Just as Dom finds harmony for her clients and their hires, she cultivates it within her own team. She leads with an awakened heart and matches it with unparalleled business savvy. In DotConnect’s first year of business, Dom scaled the company to $3M. From there, Dom’s growth mentality has never once subsided. In 2022, DotConnect was honored by being included on the Inc5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the country. For Dom, the honor is a testament to the resilience and acumen of her team: as the global pandemic ravaged so many industries and slowed hiring, DotConnect grew by 222% during that time.
The secret to Dom’s success is hidden in DotConnect’s very name. Dom named the company after her grandmother. While her grandmother didn’t have the tools and resources to create something for herself, what she did have was an uplifting spirit. She saw the light in others and was a steadfast cheerleader to those around her. Through Dom’s professional — and personal — experiences, she carries on her grandmother’s legacy on a global scale.
Dom is equally proud of how DotConnect’s successes are born from an environment completely cleansed of corporate toxicity — something she and her executive teamwork to elevate and evolve daily. At home in Laguna Beach, California, Dom cherishes creating memories with those she loves and is eager to offer a resounding “yes” to new experiences and opportunities. When she’s not spending time with her family, Dom can be found collecting stories, writing, and cultivating her soul-affirming spiritual practice. Dom’s first book about inner work and blossoming after burnout will be released in Fall of 2022.
Now, here’s the real story behind my bio…
I graduated high school early when I was 17 years old and started interning at a company in HR. One day, they asked me if I wanted to be a recruiter and I replied, “I don’t know what that is but okay, let’s do it!”
Little did I know, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I was blessed to have the most amazing senior mentors who believed in me, coached me, and helped me in the beginning stages of my career to really make me the best at what I do. I continued to work in corporate for five years before moving into consulting — where I worked with 400+ companies in 20 years.
From the outside perspective, everything looked great… but underneath it all, I was completely burnt out. I had nine clients with only two part-time people helping me. I hadn’t taken a vacation in my entire career. I didn’t know how to take time off and I had no boundaries — and as a result, I ended up having a major breakdown. One of my friends grew concerned about me and made a suggestion: “Why don’t you tell your clients you have a team, and you bring a team in and train them up? Because you can’t do this anymore.”
The idea of taking a step back and trusting a team with my work terrified me. I was making a lot of money, and I didn’t know if my clients wanted to work with anyone else but me. But I could not carry on the way I was, so I built a team and trained them up.
I had never managed a team before and I didn’t know how to lead people. I was also not very conscious at the time, so I would project my toxic corporate programming onto my company and things became dysfunctional. I took a good look at myself and realized that I had been a perfectionist, a hardass, and extremely judgemental and critical of my employees. I thought it was everyone else messing up when in reality, I was the problem.
Then 2020 happened and the pandemic hit.
My company lost almost all of its work except for one client. This client helped my team and I pay the bills for the rest of the year, but unfortunately they treated me like I was an internal employee. I was attending 80 hours of meetings a week on top of running my own team and business. I was also stuck quarantined at home and had to constantly face myself and my struggling marriage. There I was yet again — burnt out and in a breakdown.
I decided to get a coach. During our first session, I told her that my marriage and life were a mess but that I didn’t want to talk about any of that. I just wanted to focus on work. She laughed and said, “Okay, we can try that. But you know it’s all connected, right? You can’t have a fucked up marriage and still have an amazing company. You know that, right?”
That was when I first started to learn about consciousness and self-growth. But my real spiritual journey began in 2021 when I met Gerard Adams and joined his Conscious Leaders Mastermind.
This spiritual awakening
completely changed my life
… along with my company.
I began softening, trusting my intuition and reprogramming all of the toxic corporate bullsh*t I dealt with for so long.
Before, I couldn’t find it in me to trust my team or set boundaries. Once I started to do the inner work, my company began to thrive, quadrupled its headcount, and grew 222% in revenue in just three years! I even took a trip to Antarctica where I was off the grid for two whole weeks — something I would have never even thought of doing before. What’s even more amazing is while I was away, my team was inspired to step fully into their power and they crushed it. I realized that when a team AND the founder are operating at their highest level, so is the company.
That’s why my mission is to bring forth a movement of conscious company culture so that businesses and their teams are truly thriving from the inside-out.