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Ellen Britt On Using All Your Talents & Riding On Pink Coattails

Ellen BrittIn this episode, the founder of Pink Coattails talks about using every experience in her background as a physician assistant and more to transition and prosper as an entrepreneur. Ellen Britt is an award-winning online marketing strategist, amazing speaker, Amazon best-selling author and a fellow podcaster.

Ellen

Ellen is a master interviewer because she’s interviewed probably almost a hundred or more people on her podcast at this point.  Her podcast is called PinkCoatTails.com.

Twitter: @ellenbritt

Facebook: Facebook.com/ellenbrittbiz

Share your story of how you became an entrepreneur.

I grew up in an entrepreneurial family.  My parents started a home greenhouse when I was small and they grew that into a pretty good sized commercial enterprise, so I really learned through them what true customer service meant and also about the pride and the quality of what you’re providing to customers.  Now after college I didn’t go into entrepreneurship myself, I went into medicine and I was a physician assistant, a PA in the emergency room for a couple of decades and along the way I collected several other degrees including a couple of master’s degrees and a doctorate and an Ed. D. in biology.  But I always wanted freedom to set my own hours but more than that, to use my intellect that was to grow something that was my own thing.

And one day I saw someone doing TeleScience online.  It actually was Harry Spellman if you remember him way back and I thought to myself, I can do that.  So I started out in health and wellness because I thought that that’s where my greatest area of credibility was.  We grew our list to nearly 18,000 names in less than a year with that, made some money, interviewed some of the biggest names in self-development and marketing, Dr. Joe Vitale, Tellman Knudson, Mark Joyner, Jean Houston and on and on and on.  But I had to learn marketing along the way and I absolutely fell in love with it.

And so I finally moved completely away from the health and wellness industry into marketing and our first company was after our everyday chi experiment, was Marketing Chi and then we rebranded about a year and a half ago to Pink Coattails and now I have launched myself deep into the podcasting space, so that’s where we are and that’s kind of my story.

What is the story behind Pink Coattails?

That’s interesting because if you look at the old political metaphor of men, usually men riding in on the political coattails of someone, usually in a presidential election, congressmen, senators, they all get brought in on the coattails of a successful presidential candidate.  Well, I wanted to use that same metaphor, of course I painted the tails pink and it’s women entrepreneurs riding in on the coattails of other successful women entrepreneurs.  So that’s the story behind the brand.  It’s kind of a fun brand and it really seems to resonate.  It’s got a great curiosity factor too.  People, “Pink Coattails, what’s that?”

And not to disparage what the guys are doing, I think it’s wonderful how they bond together.  They look at each other as brothers, but women for the most part, we didn’t grow up in that kind of culture, especially when I grew up, team sports for girls were nearly nonexistent but still even today the women’s culture is different.  So I thought there was a space for this in women’s entrepreneurial world to provide those coattails for other women to ride in on.

What was the biggest surprise that you’ve had, maybe something that was totally unexpected about becoming an entrepreneur, about marketing your products and services online?

I thought when I first became an entrepreneur that I had to learn a whole new skill set.  What could be further removed in online marketing than stitching up a guy’s chainsaw laceration or doing chest compressions on somebody’s grandmother after she collapsed in the kitchen with a heart attack.  But rapidly I realized that my medical training had given me something that most marketers take years to learn and I think some never learn it and that’s the ability to take in information and make quick decisions.  I also learned how to take decisive action without overly worrying about the outcome because in the E.R. you had to act, and more importantly, how to approach problems in a really precise systematic manner.

We were taught a system that I use in practice for over 20 years called the SOAP system and I still use that as I approach business problems and I use it with my clients.  The biggest gift that gave me and one that I’ve used and I’m still using is the ability to interview people.  One day I sat down with a calculator and really conservatively and honestly tried to estimate how many patients I had seen over the couple of decades I had practiced because all of those start with an interview and I was astonished.  I had interviewed enough people to fill the Houston Astrodome not once but twice, over 60,000 people.

Now this experience really honed my ability to interview people and to solve problems really like no other business training I could have ever gotten, and that was my biggest surprise.

What an amazing way to build on the experience you already had in a totally different niche category profession and I never would have thought of something like that but it’s true, you have to interview them, you have to get deep into the heart of the problem, the matter to find a solution.

You do and a lot of folks — and as women, we have our certain insecurities and stuff about coming into business anyway and you think, well I was in corporate for so long or I did this or that for so long, but really I encourage all of your listeners to take a hard look at the skills that you’ve developed in other areas, whether that’s raising children or gardening, there are things there that you have developed that you can turn and apply to your own business now.

So many entrepreneurs and particularly women have fears about going to the next level or doing something a little bit different in our business.  What would be one fear that you have tackled and you’ve gotten over it and what advice would you give somebody who was trying to do the same?

I’m a naturally introverted person, a very introverted person, I’ll put it that way.  And I had to learn to overcome my ability to put myself out there.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with Sally Hogshead’s new work, Fascination Advantage Assessment.  My whole thing is mystique and if you do too much mystique, it’s called the deadbolt.  You put a deadbolt and you don’t even let people see your stuff.  But again I went back to my medical training and I thought about that first day when we were headed down to the autopsy room for the first time, I was scared out of my living mind.  What was going to happen was I’m going to like fall over in a dead faint when we saw all those bodies in there, what was going to happen?  But I knew that this was crucial to my success in PA school.

And I was able to just gird myself up and think that I had to trust the process, that they had a process for teaching me this and that if I could trust that — and lots of students have gone through this before, and if I could trust that and step into it, I would be fine.  And yes it was difficult but I got through it.  And so that’s what I’ve drawn on now when I have to do something that doesn’t come naturally to me.  I enjoy speaking but for a long time it was very difficult and I always fall back to that time, it was like, all right Ellen, trust the process.  There were other woman entrepreneurs who have gone ahead of you that have done this successfully and besides, doing this is a piece of cake when it comes to walking into that cadaver room, that’s all I think.

And then I think of the things that I have overcome in the past and think, “Well this is a piece of cake compared to that.”  And then I just moved into it and I find that when I start to take action, those fears dissolve and I get through it.

Trust the process. Build on your past successes. Then take action.

What would be one of the top 1 or 2 tip that you have for keeping your mindset on track for success?

Mindset is very, very important.

In fact I’ve made mindset really the focus of my own Pink Coattails podcast.  The two things that are really important for me, is start each day the night before.  Now we’ve all heard that of course I thought it determine our actions and our actions determine our results and so on.  So your thoughts and your mood and your state of mind first thing in the morning are going to very likely affect your entire day, and the state of mind you wake up in is so important, so you want to tap into the power of your subconscious mind and have it work for you while you’re sleeping.  So when you wake up, you won’t automatically start dredging up negative stuff or panic yourself with all that you’ve got to get done that day before you feed them and hit the floor.

There are so many things that can personally or professionally kind of shake us to our core.  How do you deal with things like that to keep your mindset on track for reaching the goals you want to achieve?

Related Link:

The Transformational Power of Your Personal Rituals

So my practice and yours and your listeners might be different, is to end the day right before I go to sleep, in gratitude, three things that I’m grateful for that day.  These don’t have to be big.  They could be as simple as the way the light falls on a tree outside your window.  But the important thing is to program your mind with that feeling, that emotion right before you go to sleep and you’ll be surprised if you haven’t tried this before, what a better mood you’re in when you wake up.  So start your day the night before.  The second tip is food is a drug.  Start treating your brain like the fine-tune machine it is.  If you’re eating tons of junk food — and hey, I’ve been just as guilty of this as everybody else, especially being a Southerner with a sweet tooth, or just not eating the nutritious means you know you should and not exercising, your brain is going to tell you, you’re going to get foggy, you’re going to have down moods, you are going to have the inability to be optimistic and positive and your mindset is going to be directly affected.

Now the wonderful thing about this is that you can change this situation no matter how badly you have been eating with your very next meal or snack.

 

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