The Bossy Nurse Podcast
The Bossy Nurse Podcast is a show about nurse creators, innovators, risk-takers, and the ideas that shape their success. Hosted by Marsha Battee, Founder of TheBossyNurse.com.
The Bossy Nurse Podcast
3. How Sarah Michelle Boes Built a $1 Million Nurse Business in 7 Months
In this episode of The Bossy Nurse Podcast, host Marsha Battee sits down with Sarah Michelle Boes, MSN, APRN, FNP-BC to unpack how she transformed NP board exam panic into a focused, three-hour crash course, a thriving community, and ultimately a multi-million-dollar sale of Sarah Michelle NP Reviews.
Find the all the resources mentioned in the show and full details about this episode at this link.
Don't forget to subscribe to The Bossy Nurse Podcast on your favorite app, and please leave a quick rating and review. It helps more nurses find the show!
Want early episode drops, behind-the-scenes action, special invites to virtual and in-person events, and chances to be featured on the podcast or The Bossy Nurse blog?
Signup for our newsletter at thebossynurse.com/join.
I literally was just like, okay, I'll give you this three-hour course, I guess for$15. And the first day I made a thousand dollars in a day. Wow. And I was like, oh my God, I don't make a thousand dollars like sometimes as a nurse in a week, like sometimes two weeks, like depending upon like what's going on. Like, this is so cool, this is incredible. Like, how do I just make a thousand dollars every day?
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to the Bossy Nurse Podcast, a show about nurse creators, innovators, risk takers, and the ideas that shape their success. I'm Mark Shabaty, and on the show today, how Sarah Michelle Bowes turned anxiety-written, one-size-fits-all nurse practitioner board exam prep into an engaging three-hour crash course, a growing community, and then a multi-million dollar exit. For decades, NP board prep has promised certainty through multi-day long lectures. Yet, so many nurses still show up to task carrying more anxiety and strategy. Then COVID shoved everything onto Zoom, revealing that the familiar, gruesome stretches of in-person lectures didn't always cut it or exactly translate into an online forum. Times had changed, and nurses needed targeted, digestible practice and tools to regulate nerves in the moment. So our guest Sarah tried a different approach. A three-hour crash course that blended essential content with anxiety reduction tools. She seeded it by giving it free to classmates and building a Facebook group where nurses shared their own successes with passing their boards. Within four months, and now selling it as an offer, Sarah's revenue crossed$100,000, then$1 million around the seven-month mark. And within two years of launching the business, she sold it for millions. Sarah's story doesn't begin with a spreadsheet. She grew up in rural eastern Kentucky with two teacher parents who often juggled two or three jobs to make ends meet. Surprisingly, a house fire when she was a teenager forced to move and became a hard reset for the family's finances. And then later in nursing school, a public school day over an IV push spiraled into her first public panic attack, and the judgment that she wasn't cut out for nursing. But she pushed through, and then grad school, later titling her anxiety into what Sarah discovered as her love for teaching, and an innovative way of reframing how nurses prepare for their next step and how she could build something meaningful. But again, it all started where her resilience was forgot, the mountains of eastern Kentucky, miles from the nearest grocery store, and a childhood that taught her to make do. When I asked Sarah what that feeling was like growing up, she didn't hesitate.
SPEAKER_02:Um chaotic might be a good word for it. You know, when you grow up in a really rural area like Pipool, for those who know Piepool, it is a bit isolating because even though it has this very small town feel, everything is so spread out. And I'm literally living like in the middle of the mountains. And so when I try to give people perspective on what it's like to grow up as rural as I did, I tell them that we grew up 45 minutes from the closest grocery store. And I think then people are like, oh, I like I didn't understand before, but now I kind of get it. And it was super commonplace. I went to multiple different schools, I ended up moving schools quite a few times, um, just related to different things going on. And it was commonplace for school to also be 45 minutes to an hour away, and that's just like commute is part of a life out there. And also tell people that I feel like I grew up two decades behind. Like even the music that I enjoy listening to, like it's a little bit older than what I am. Um, not that that's a bad thing, of course. But I think overall growing up extremely rural um was a lot of focus on kind of our inner family unit. And you know, friends weren't as much of friends and connections and networking weren't as much of a focus. And I'm glad now as an adult to kind of expand that focus and get to expand my network and it all not all just be like the one family unit, but it is very like hunkered down about you and your family when you grow up in a place like that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, very interesting. I grew up in a small town as well, and I was an hour and a half to school on the school bus, an hour, hour 15 minutes to an hour and a half on the school bus, but we were a lot closer to the city. It only took us 20 minutes to get to a grocery store, probably, but it's just the route of the school bus and how long it would take. Um, just hearing that story, I'm curious because we're gonna talk a lot about success and money in this episode, but I'm kind of curious at what your what your home life was like growing up in a rural area. And was money a part of the story back then? And did you have big dreams, big goals in terms of finding wealth? Or was that just something that was always a struggle or something that you never talked about when you were younger?
SPEAKER_02:I think for me, money was always part of the story, but not in the sense of like searching for wealth. Like I never assumed once in my life that I would have any kind of like sustainable wealth, or especially like generational wealth, like all of that is still almost like new and uncomfortable to me even today. But I grew up with two parents who were both school teachers, and I think a lot of my first introductions to money were we don't have enough. And so, even though they were college educated, which was a really big deal back home, and they have what looks like on paper, good stable jobs, that doesn't necessarily you're making the money that you need or also the money that you want. And so we kind of got into this scenario where my parents essentially built a house that they couldn't afford and they kind of lived above their means because there's not a lot of financial literacy in eastern Kentucky either. And so they kind of got themselves into a bad spot. And I tell you this, because a lot of my childhood they worked two or three jobs. So they would go and they would be school teachers during the day, and then they would drop me off at home with my siblings, and now I'm the babysitter while they go work at Lowe's and Kmart and these other side jobs and try to do these other side hustles to kind of make all the ends meet together. And then fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, our house ended up burning down when I was a teenager. And even though like that sounds really terrible from the outside, it did kind of give us the financial reset that we all needed to be able to actually get out of eastern Kentucky. So when I was a junior in high school, we did end up moving out of eastern Kentucky and they were able to kind of like reset some of their financial troubles, financial woes, all the things, which is really incredible for my family. And I think the other thing to note just about money and being school teachers, it was like super jarring for me as a teenager to begin to wrap my head around the fact that when my parents were teachers in eastern Kentucky, they made, I think it was 60% of what they made when we moved. And so even just having a four or five hour gap, but being in the same state gave them access to crazy. It's just like crazy to me that all it takes is just like a little bit of movement to the left almost. And you're like, oh, like we make so much more money and we're so much more stable here, and all these things. But I also think like that speaks to kind of the culture of Eastern Kentucky, too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I'm sure, well, I would imagine maybe your parents didn't even realize that just a move to another city within the same state would have drastically changed your lives like that. And so when you were growing up in those circumstances, knowing that, like you said, your parents lived above their means. What was your feeling about money at the time?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, money was very scary to me. I was like, there's never gonna be enough. There's never gonna be enough, like I can't work enough jobs for there to be enough. And it kind of became this like ingrained thing that I was even as soon as I became a teenager who could work, like I immediately had three jobs. But I didn't need three jobs. Like I was I was paying for my car insurance payment. Um, and I was like paying for you know different things that pop up, like your prom dress or whatever else. But like, did I really need three jobs? No, but like the hustle was already ingrained in me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that's what you saw at your parents, I'm sure. Three jobs, a couple of jobs.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yes, a little side hustle here, do this over here. And I was like, okay, like this is the system and this is how we figure out money. Um, and hopefully one day, you know, my parents were very insistent about me getting a college degree. Like that was their big thing that they harked on. It was like, hopefully, one day I'll get a college degree and just have one job.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Relief, yeah. And so um thinking about were you a good student growing up, middle school?
SPEAKER_02:I was a phenomenal student. Okay. Um, I always like when I decided to go to nursing school, a lot of what hinged on that decision for me actually was I had a high enough ACT score and a high enough GPA that I was gonna get automatic admission into UK's nursing school as long as I maintain my grades like during the pre-nursing period. But I got a little bit more lengthy and buffer, which is really cool. But yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, awesome. So um, how was the decision for you to really choose nursing? I know I I've read some of your story and listened to some of your story about the decision, like nursing wasn't far off from school teaching in in terms of income. What was the decision for you to decide to go into nursing?
SPEAKER_02:I grew up always wanting to be a teacher. And when I wavered, it actually wasn't to nursing. It was I wanted to be an author or I wanted to be a journalist, like I wanted to write. Like that was really exciting and enticing to me. And my parents were like, absolutely not in any way can you do either of those things? Like, if you want to write, write on the side. If you want to be a teacher, that's a hard pass. Like you've got to pick something in the medical field. And when you think about coming out of rural Kentucky, like what they're thinking is this job is so stable. Like this job, like, we know Sarah will be good for the rest of her life. And they actually really pushed me to become an MD instead. But I couldn't really afford to do that. Like, I was paying for all of my bachelor's degree on my own, which was its own hefty bill. And I knew like after that bachelor's degree just came more debt if I went to medical school. But I think like the other piece that I didn't really understand then, that I understand about myself now, was I had so much anxiety about the uncertainty of whether I would get to medical school. So in my brain, I'm like, I can't run the risk of doing four years of school to get a degree I really don't want just to go to medical school and then not get into medical school. Like, I just can't run that risk. Um and for me, I'd had this really incredible experience with my grandmother because, you know, growing up, as I've said multiple times now, really rural. We had to travel for her care when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. And so the closest place for her to get her initial care was actually two and a half hours from home for us. And it was during the summertime, and me and my grandmother were incredibly close. And so I actually traveled with her and I stayed with her in the hospital. But it was kind of like my first and really like only introduction to nursing and what I thought nurses were, um, especially this being an oncology unit. I thought they were people that brought ice cream, which I thought was really cool. I thought they were people that play board games. That was really fun because they did that with me, which is incredible that they paused to do that, like knowing what I know about nursing now. Yes. Um, but I had this really phenomenal experience of like, these are just really compassionate, caring humans. And obviously, like they cared about my grandmother and her care, but they really cared about me. And so I was like, well, I have this automatic admission if I want to go the nursing route. And I know I'm gonna get into nursing school, and I know that I can get this degree in four years, but also like in the back of my mind, like if I really like let's say I get through my nursing degree and I'm like, I really do want to be an advanced provider. Like, I know that doors open down the road for me, and I can probably do it cheaper. So even then it was kind of all about the money all the time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Yeah, it's it. I remember those type of stories and feelings about everything was always about money. And um, growing up in a, you know, as a poor family, you know, it was no, you have to do something in the medical field or be a lawyer, you know. That's your safety net. Yeah, that's your safety net. You have to go into medicine, you have to go into legal studies or something like that. Um, one thing you did mention that I want to go back to is I know you've talked a lot about your mental health story and your anxiety that you had throughout your career. And we can talk a little bit more about that. I know you had some intense things going on after learning about your daughter and the heart defect and things like that. Curious at where your anxiety started. I know you publicly have stated about your first public episode of your anxiety and extreme anxiety. When did that start? Do you remember it starting as a young girl, or did it come when you were in nursing school or older?
SPEAKER_02:Um, I've actually been exploring this quite a bit in my memoir because I'm like, what is like the first seed of anxiety? Like, where did this come from? And I can very clearly tell you like anxiety has just been a part of me for my entire existence. Like when I think back on my childhood, like I a lot of like my earliest memories are like me standing behind my mom's leg, like almost like peering out. And I had a lot of uh issues initially, like going to school and kind of like that detachment process. And I know a lot of children do, like, that's a normal, but for me, it was definitely prolonged. But where where I see it starting to like blur a little bit because we haven't talked about it yet, but I do have diagnosed OCD, and I can definitely see the OCD in my childhood in the sense of you know, when me and my middle sibling were we're three years apart, and for a while, like we slept in the same bed and like we like did the whole sister thing, you know. But I can remember like getting up and looking out the window after 9-11 and like watching to see if like planes were flying over a house. Now, why would planes be flying over the mountain? Like, there's there's no logic to that. Like, we didn't live close to an airport, but that was the kind of anxiety that I was living on loop, and I like started developing even then, like this kind of like hyper-vigilant, hyper-responsible state. Cause it's like, if I don't look out the window and I don't make sure there's a plane coming, then something bad's going to happen. And what I love to tell people about OCD just because it gets so stereotyped by the media, is like at its core. What it actually is is not the hand washing or the germs or anything like that. Like this one flavor, it's really this intolerance of uncertainty. And so when people are washing their hands of 100 times, what they're actually trying to do is get the certainty of I'm not going to get this sickness or I don't have these germs on my hand. And so when I'm checking for the plane over and over and over, like I'm trying to make sure we are safe. And so for me, a lot of kind of my anxiety behaviors were really around safety.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for revealing that to the audience. I'm sure that's very helpful to understand, even though we're mostly nurses probably listening to this podcast. I know that some of that anxiety actually may have almost hindered you from completing nursing school and actually had an instructor who may have said, you know, this may not be the your your you know place. How did you tell us that story and how did you handle that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I very much like for a long time, I was kind of able to try, try being the keyword, harness my anxiety into a box that I felt like gave me a lot of momentum in things like school because I would be so anxious about getting the grade, doing the thing, looking a certain way, that it was this fuel for me. Um, but what ended up happening was I was halfway through nursing school at the time, and you know, it's a dreaded med surge semester that everybody always haunts about. And there's so much anticipatory anxiety, and like yeah, I can like very also vividly remember the first day of that class when she's like, you know, like that stereotypical movie scene where like look left, look right, like that person's not gonna be here with you. She basically was like, 30% of you are gonna fail this class. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Um, you know, that's a lot that like the material itself is just harder, and that's really where you kind of have to like step up your game and your critical thinking ability and how you're gonna show up as a nurse. And you're not really like being babied anymore, not that any of nursing school is babying, but like it's been our first semester in an elementary school, like being in medsearch is different, yeah. And I felt even more like pressure and high stakes because I had very purposely chosen to do my med search clinicals where my mama had received her cancer care because I knew I wanted to work there one day, and so like for me, every shift felt kind of like a mini job interview. Like, I wanted to show up and I wanted to do really well. And we were halfway through the semester. I had just had a midterm evaluation, everything was looking good. I got in all-satz factories, like moving right along. And my instructor asked to pass medications with me that morning, and I was like, oh, no big deal. And because we were halfway through at that point, basically we had kind of been given like free reign with the nurses, and so like our instructor just like rotated people every week of who she's gonna pass meds with or do a skill. And it hadn't been my turn in a long time. And we went to pull out the meds, we're pulling them out of the Pixis, and we pull out some Ivy Zofran, and that's gonna be administered Ivy push, and then turned to her and I was like, Hey, you know, I've never done an IV push before, like, I'm gonna need you to walk me through this. Like, what is this like? And you know, it's it's really hard for me to understand even today how the situation devolves so quickly, you know. Now having like my experience as an educator and my experience with students, and like a student who like paused and stopped and was like, Hey, I don't know how to do this, instead of a student who just pushed forward anyways. Like, that's much more scary and dangerous to me. Like, I would much rather the student just stop. But that was the wrong response, and she was very upset that I did not know how to do it. She was like, you know, you're halfway through the semester, you're halfway through this program, like I don't understand how you don't know how to do I be pushed, and you have about two minutes to figure it out. Okay. Wow. Uh so my anxiety is like level 1000 at this point. Like, I'm like, I'm starting to sweat, even like remembering this memory. And so I go out to the nurse's station. There's this nurse who I've been put with several times who I really liked. And I was like, hey, Corey, like, can you do this with me? Can we kind of like walk through the process together? I've got to figure this out fast, but I need to go do this with my instructor. And as we're in the process, and what I was so hung up on actually was not even the process of like how do I pull it out of the vibe? Like, I knew I knew the basics, right? But my brain was stuck on, and it's such a good reflection of my OCD, actually, was is this compatible? Will this be compatible with normal saline? And I know that sounds so silly and so minuscule, but I wanted to be absolutely not as a nursing student. I wanted to be absolutely serious. So my instructor came into a nursing station, saw me doing this with this other nurse. Um, and that was not the way that she wanted me to figure that out. I guess she wanted me to figure that out on my own. So she ended up yelling at me in the nurses station. And as a result of that, I actually had my first public panic attack ever. Like I was very much like I could contain myself and my anxiety enough that I could always like make it to a bathroom. Or I was very much an anxious person that had panic attacks in the middle of the night. Like I would wake up and I would be anxious and I would have panic attacks. So it was very different for me to like have my classmates looking at me and some patients walking by and the other nurses in a nursing station. And I literally I just like don't have any air left in my body. So go to the bathroom, I get myself sorted out, I come back out, and the nurse that I had been figuring it out with was like, told my instructor, like, hey, like I can do it with her. Like, if you guys want to take like some pause or some time for each other, but that wasn't also what my instructor wanted to do. So we went in the room and we pushed through, and I cried most of the time that I pushed the medication into a line. It was this whole ordeal. And so at the end of that clinical day, she was like, you know, I just don't think you're cut out for this. Like, I think you're too anxious to be a safe nurse, and I don't really know how we move forward from here. And the other layer was, you know, we talked about how hard this med search class was. At that point, even though we're halfway through the semester, we're just about to take another exam. I had failed the first exam by one question. And everyone knows in nursing school, like the skills are all weird. So, like the passing was 76. I got a 74. So it wasn't like I got a 50. Yeah. But I had had a lot of anxiety during that exam. And I hadn't really figured out the course yet. So in their minds, they're like, okay, you failed an exam and now you're having panic attacks in clinical. Like, we don't, this isn't the right fit. But what I wish like could have happened even for a moment, just like, what's going on here? What do you need? Where are you not resourced at? Like, how do we help you move forward instead of just being like, oh, like it's time for you to go? Because I know I fully understand and I can appreciate as an educator, like, accreditation is based on your first-time pass, right? But also, like, here I am halfway through my program. I've never had a single issue before this semester, and now they're like, oh no, you gotta go. Like, they don't even like pause to ask.
SPEAKER_00:It makes me think, I wonder, was that part of that motivation of wanting to have you consider something else? Um, was it was it the pass rate? I never would have thought about that, but I wonder if that had something to do with it, especially if you have a small class, a pass rate, one student could make it, yeah, derail your pass rate. So I'm so sorry that happened. And um, you know, I I all the time when I talk to nurses or even, you know, the nurses I've had the opportunity to talk to on the show about, you know, bullying or or anything where we're not supported. I just always wonder, like, have we learned yet?
SPEAKER_02:Like, why are we reliving the same loop?
SPEAKER_00:Right, right. The same story, the same nurse's story from nurse to nurse. It's the same, you know, story. Any nurse you've had, you know, challenges on whether it's a unit. And you were a nursing student too. It wasn't like you were baby. Yeah, it wasn't like 19.
SPEAKER_02:That was oh my goodness. Like it's just a baby. Because I graduated nursing school when I was 21. And I just yeah, yeah. I tried to think about that perspective sometimes too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So you push through it, right? You decide to. I don't know if that was a driver for you hearing that from your instructor, or what was your decision-making process after that? Do I quit? Do I keep going? How did that happen?
SPEAKER_02:Uh it started with collapse. I was like, oh my God, like I've always been a successful student. I've never had a problem. Like, I always put the work in, get the result. And like, I wasn't like inherently smart in the sense of like, I don't need to study. Like, I had to put the work in to get the grade, but I had always done that and it always worked. And so I really kind of had to just take a couple of days and figure out, okay, like, do I want to be a nurse? What does that look like? And actually, what I ultimately decided in that time was I didn't really want to be a nurse. However, I couldn't afford to start over. Like I couldn't, like, none of these classes transferred, like, that wasn't gonna work out. And the thought of spending more money and more years in school to get a degree felt more impossible than anything else. And so even though like I knew, like, hey, I don't really like love nursing, and I do have a lot of anxiety, there's like almost there's no reason not to try to go back and just see if I can pass it and make it through. Because I think the other thought I had to myself that even though I don't enjoy this now, I've only been in the hospital two semesters. Yeah. So my my previous semester was just like a general med surge unit. I'm on this oncology unit now, and like it's okay, but it wasn't like what I dreamed and envisioned, you know. Yeah, and so maybe like when I get the PEDs or when I get the OB or when I get the ACU, like I might find something that clicks for me. Um, what I didn't know then, I know now, is like I very much just wanted to teach. And that was way more, like, as soon as I had kind of my first teaching moment, which we can talk about too. I was like, oh, like this is what I I just didn't know yet, right? But I decided to stick through anyways, and it was a very, very, very terrible semester for me because ultimately the action plan that they put together was I would do every assessment, every med pass, every last little thing. Like I could not walk in a patient room without my instructor anymore. And that is so high pressure with someone that you feel like is already like against you. Yeah. So I would, you know, clinical would start at like 6, 6:30, whatever it was. I would get up at 4 a.m. and I would be like going through my assessment guide, and I would be going through all the things, and I would be looking up meds, and like I would just be trying to like prepare, prepare, prepare in whatever way I could. And in the process of doing that, I started to figure out the actual class portion. And so even though I had failed the first exam, I did good on the second exam. So that was like a ball in my cord, like, hey, like, let me figure this out, let me stay. And what was actually so cool for me was at the end of the semester, and I really feel like it was a testament to like me as a student, too. They offered this thing where basically, um, you know, like the Hessies and the ATIs and all that, all these predictor exams, they had their own version of that. And they were like, any exam that you have passed this semester that um if you score higher on the predictor, it will replace that grade. And so I was like, okay, this is a cool opportunity. Yeah, uh and so I ended up, I got like an astronomical score on that predictor. Like it was like a 94 or 95% chance that I was gonna pass the NCLEX someday. And so it took me from like barely skating by in the class to getting a B in the class too, which was awesome. Yeah, yeah. Um, and about a year after that experience, you know, I moved into my next clinical and I very much like tried to like stay under the radar. I was like, nobody look at me. Like I like the instructors, everybody's scary to me now, like everything feels high risk all the time. And actually, what a gift it was to go into Pete's and OB where they kind of want you to be hands off, anyways. Like your words are not really there. It was good timing. Yeah. But um, in my senior year of college, they put out an ad essentially for tutors. And somebody asked me, like, hey, you know, you kind of figured out the med surge thing. Like, do you think you could help this girl figure out the med surge thing? And I was like, I mean, I can try. Yeah. And I started working with just one student. And by the end of that semester, like I was tutoring privately 40 hours a week. And it was all on my own time. And it was all on my own. Like I made up the pay rates and all these things. I was like, this is so cool. And I love this so much. And I just want to do this forever. Like I'd rather just tutor and teach. Like, nursing is fine, but I don't think like it's my final destination. And now I know that for sure. Was that through a company where you have that opportunity, or is that something you started? Um, initially it was through a tutoring service on campus that was specifically tutoring athletes. But as you can imagine, there are not a lot of nursing major athletes. There were actually two in the entire like athlete pool. But one of the athletes that I was tutoring told her friend, who then told their friend who didn't tell their friend. So then it really was all just like word of mouth.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, all through me. So when you found that new love of nursing education, you graduated from college, you got your first nursing job. When you got your first nursing job, and I think that was bone marrow transplant, you were saying earlier before the school.
SPEAKER_02:Actually, I started very briefly in peez oncology. Okay. Um, but I only spent a few months there and then immediately went to bone marrow transplant adults.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So when you got that job in bone marrow transplant, were you already thinking about grad school to become a nurse educator? Or how did that sort of happen?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I graduated nursing school in May of 2016. I had my master's in nursing education by February of 2018. Okay. So I was ready.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you were ready. Move right along. Yeah. Did you happen to work in the same hospital as an educator? Or did you sort of move along?
SPEAKER_02:I what I ended up doing was the hospital system that I was working in, which was attached to the nursing school actually that I went to. So I worked in UK healthcare, they had this really incredible opportunity that if you went to an in-state school or it took less than a certain amount of time, they would just pay for it outright. And then you would owe them time on the back end. And so I ended up working within UK healthcare for five or six years. It was like two of a day of however long I needed to stay for them to pay for all of my degrees. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, awesome. Awesome. So you're educating nurses a lot better, probably opportunity for you, probably feeling a lot better, I'm sure, with the choice that you made in terms of your career path. Um, so but then you decided I want to be a nurse practitioner. And how was that decision? And I know you had to study for it, and I know this is where the business part came in. So let's hear a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_02:So I finished my master's in nursing education. At this point, I'm 23. And I'm like, nobody's gonna hire 23 year old. Like it doesn't matter the degrees I have, it just doesn't. Um and at the time, what my employer announced actually was that they were gonna stop paying for school. And I was like, okay, like I just like I thought I was kind of done with school for a bit, and I don't really know if I want to be a nurse practitioner. And this will sound crazy, but what I told my husband was it's free, so how can I pass it up? But also, like, even if I never use a degree, like it's gonna get me to teaching jobs faster, it's gonna make me a better teacher. So I should just go ahead and do it. Like, we're in the right season of life, like we're not married yet. We were like, we were engaged at this point. We're not married, we don't have kids. Like, if I'm gonna go hard, like this is the time to do it. And going to school full time and working full time is definitely uh going hard. Yeah, definitely. So I was able to do a little bit of an expedited nurse practitioner program because I already had the master's nurse in education, which was incredible. And as I was actually finishing up my nurse practitioner degree, I got my first teaching job. And that was at a local nursing school, and I loved it immediately. I was like, oh, I'm like in my element. I'm so excited. I was very like over-eager, very over-ambitious for it to be amazing, incredible, and awesome. But it truly was. And this leads us right up to when COVID started. So in March of 2020, with the most incredible of incredible, of incredible timing for me, I had put in my notice to leave my bone marrow transplant job. So I left bedside nursing the week the world shut down. And I still don't know how I had like that kind of insane luck. Yeah. And there was so much uncertainty with my teaching job of like, are we still doing this? Like, we can't get in the clinical sites now. What is this gonna look like? Which was another really fortunate and incredible opportunity because what they did was they just pivoted everything online, which is fine. But we did, especially in the beginning and it evolved, but in the very beginning, there was no like, here's your lesson plan or here's what you do. They were just like, get on Zoom and figure it out. And I was like, all right, I'm just gonna get on Zoom and figure this out. Like, how do I teach something that should be in person online? Because it's clinical, like it's yeah, it's not even the course portion. And I was teaching students how to put catheters in the water bottles and tissue boxes and all this like fun, creative, innovative stuff, and it really just like lit up my brain of like, how do I make this meaningful and purposeful? And how do I keep these students engaged, even though they're at home and they have all these new distractions, um, and just all this anxiety too, because the world is just chaos and nobody knew when we were going back, if we were going back, and it took us a long time to go back, actually. But I left my nursing job, I was teaching online, I'm finishing up nurse practitioner school, and because during COVID, all the review courses pivoted online. So, what used to be this like two-day in-person conference experience, they now just like plugged on Zoom and thought that would work. And doing two 10-hour just like straight lecture. Getting on a computer, yeah, on Zoom, like it would have been horrible in person, but like Zoom was next level horrible, right? So bad. Um, and actually, my very sweet husband, he found me asleep on the second day. Like, I was just like, you know, I kind of like sat in the floor for a moment and I just kind of like leaned over and I just fell right asleep, and I missed like a whole two hours of the lecture, but I was just so worn out. And the other kind of compounding factor here was my exam kept getting delayed because of COVID. Like, I showed to the testing center and it would be closed, but you don't know until you get there. Get there, yeah. All that anticipation of like, I'm gonna take the thing and I'm gonna do the thing, and then you get there and they're like, oh no, not today. And uh my favorite time that I got rescheduled, which is like next, just like next level of extreme anxiety. They canceled my exam, which was fine, and they rescheduled it for me, which was something they hadn't done any other times. And they rescheduled me. This is no joke, they rescheduled me to a testing center in Dubai, and there was no phone, there's nobody you can call. Their their service online keeps shutting down. So for like a week, I couldn't even get it rescheduled out of Dubai. Like, I couldn't even cancel the appointment. And I'm like, the last thing I want is to like them think I'm supposed to show up, and then like I miss my appointment, and then I get I have to pay again, all this stuff. I mean, it was just oh wow, true unending chaos trying to take this exam. So my anxiety was level 10 million. Um and actually, I was so anxious. I ended up like breaking a tooth in the process, I had to get a tenile implant, like all this crazy stuff. But when I finally got to take the exam on my fifth try to take the exam, it was one of the easiest exams I'd ever taken. And I was oh my god, I did every review out there because I was so anxious, and like what I actually needed was not to spend thousands of dollars on a credit card and reviews. I really just like needed the confidence in myself that I could do the thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And and I was accidentally you started a business.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was sitting in the parking lot and I was waiting for my friend to come out, and I was like, oh my God. I was like, what if I just do like what I've been doing on Zoom with my clinical students? And I just like put this into a little course, like talks about anxiety, but also like talks about the content a little bit. Like, how do we merge those? Because I had seen it be so successful with my clinical students. So like I kind of already had like a format and a vision in my mind that I'd been working on for months. I just didn't know that's what I was working towards. Yeah. And that weekend, it was Memorial Day weekend. Our air conditioning unit went out and we were too broke to get it fixed. I'll never forget that detail. I'm like sitting upstairs, sweating, trying to put this together, this course. And my husband is outside literally with cinder blocks. I'm like watching him through the window, putting together his own homemade smoker because we couldn't afford a smoker, and he really, really wanted a smoker for the summer. And I ended up, I gave the little three-hour course that I made to all of my classmates for free. And I was just like, invite somebody in this Facebook group with me and like see what you think. Tell me what you think, tell me what you don't like.
SPEAKER_00:All the curious, what was that course focused on? I know you talked about um some test taking strategies and reducing anxiety. Within a three-hour course, what did you focus on with that?
SPEAKER_02:So, what I did was I called it a crash course. And I really just tried to condense down of what's the need to know information? Like, what are the need to know blood pressure guidelines, for example? And then what I did was kind of create this like calm response, even though it was recorded of like, okay, we have Sally come in today and her blood pressure is this. What do you think? What guidelines should we use? And I would pause and I'd be like, and then you can answer at home. So if you knew it, great. If you didn't, great. And so we could talk through it. And then I would be like, okay, but if this popped up on the exam and you felt really anxious, here is a tool that you could have used to get through this question faster. Okay, I see. Even just simple test taking strategies, like if two answers are opposites, this problem with those answers and kind of like walking through the basics too. Um, but even seeing that live is like so helpful for people to then be able to use it later.
SPEAKER_00:And then you started sharing it with your classmates, and that's how it's worse though.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. They're like, what do you mean? This three-hour course for free, and like I have a media rapport with you, because A, I kind of already know you, um, even though it was an online program. But B, like people started passing. And what kind of happened was people would pass and then would come into my Facebook group and they would post about passing and how impactful it was, and other people would get excited and they want to try it. And at the time, because I didn't know anything about business and I didn't know anything about really anything, all I had was Zoom recordings and a Vemo. I literally was just like, okay, I'll give you this three-hour course, I guess for$15. And the first day I made a thousand dollars in a day. Wow. And I was like, oh my God, I don't make a thousand dollars like sometimes as a nurse in a week, like sometimes two weeks, like depending upon like what's going on. Like, this is so cool, this is incredible. Like, how do I just make a thousand dollars every day? That was my first goal. I was like, how could I just like replicate this process, make a thousand dollars every day? And like we would be set for life if I could figure out how to do that.
SPEAKER_00:Can we back up a little bit? Um, because you started with your classmates. How did that end up into a Facebook group and then people starting to know about your Facebook group? And was your Facebook group only for your classmates at first? And then you would have them invite people in, or how did you go about doing that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So what I did was I said, I went to our like schools Facebook group that we had, because it was an online program. And I said, if you will come over here and join this group and invite one person that you know, and sometimes people would like invite their husband, like they wouldn't even invite the nurse practitioner student. But I was like, But if you will join the group and invite one person, I will give it to you for free. Oh, wow. Okay, and so I gave it to the first 100 people for free. If they would just invite somebody else in. And then when I hit the 100 people mark was when I started to sell it. Yeah. So I mean I hit 100 people in like three days, like quickly, very quickly.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And so when you were starting off with the Facebook group and you were bringing people over into your group, were you also teaching in that group, or was the first thing you were just focused on is like getting people into this course so you can, you know, get some successes behind your belt, or were you actually teaching and posting in the group as well?
SPEAKER_02:I so what I tried to make that group into and was really successful was if you had a question about anything, post it here and I will answer. And I'll make sure you'll get a reputable answer with a source. Because a lot of the online Facebook groups at the time, and probably still today, like students would just be feeding off of each other and their anxiety and asking all these questions, but like nobody was actually like, hey, this is the answer. So I definitely did that, and like manically into the middle of the night, like people would be asking questions all the time, and I would be like pulling sources and looking things up and all this. Because that's the other thing, too. Like, I love to tell people about starting a business, is you don't have to be an expert to do it. And even if I studied all day, every day, all the medical knowledge, I would never know every answer, I would still be looking things up, anyways, which is why the sources are important, right? Um, but beyond that, I also did learning posts every day. I had a lot of fear and anxiety when I started the business of if people saw my 25-year-old face, which looked 12 then, um, has aged me a little bit, I look a little bit more tired. Um, that they would immediately lose all rapport with me and they would not want to interact with so I changed my Facebook picture, I hid my profile, did all these things, so you couldn't even see my face. Um, and so I never did like videos or things then that had my face, it was all voiceover, and so I was just like sitting behind a computer screen all the time, like putting up daily learning posts of like, what do you think about this patient? Somebody asked a question, I would come in, answer the question, and give a source. But just even being the one reputable source, because it was me for a long time. Um, and we made a substantial amount of money before I ever hired anyone. Um, people were obsessed. They were like, Oh my god, what do you mean I can just get like free answers to any of my questions?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, of course I'll be in this group. And there's the odds behind the curtain, just doing that. Yeah, it's like a word. Yeah, yeah. So this is fascinating. And um, I want you to share too about how you started off with the business because I think a lot of us think, oh, we have to get a logo, we have to get a website, we have to get, you know, an LLC started up and running. And you started off with like Facebook Messenger and Venmo or something like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, literally for months.
SPEAKER_00:Um how crazy was that, first of all, because I'm sure I mean if you're making a thousand dollars a day over a$15,$25 course, that's a lot of orders.
SPEAKER_02:A lot of people, and it's a lot of people DMing me questions too, like not even just in the group itself. I was incredibly overwhelmed from the jump because I didn't anticipate people being as excited. I didn't anticipate like when I started it, I was like, if I could just pay for my dental implant, like that would be cool. Like I wasn't I couldn't see the vision. My husband immediately after the first day, he saw the vision. I was like, nope, can't see that. Um but for the first three months, which is such a short span of time, but felt like forever at the time. I did not have a website of any kind, actually, almost four months. Wow. And in that time I made a hundred thousand dollars.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, four months, no website, a hundred thousand dollars and Venmo and Facebook Messenger and Cash App in Cash App.
SPEAKER_02:Like I started maxing out Venmo. And you know, people always want to overcomplicate or really just like over-perfect, like they think it has to be this way to put it out there. And I love sharing my story because there is nothing perfect about it. Like, if you had asked me then, I'd be like, oh, like the PowerPoints are really good. Um, literally the PowerPoints I made on like Microsoft PowerPoints. So you know, like the style, like it was not a great PowerPoint, but the content was really good and I was engaging with my people and that kind of overrode. But I didn't even have an LLC until we hit 100 grand because I just didn't know. And when we hit 100 grand, I was like, I guess we should probably pay taxes. Like you think we're supposed to be paying taxes? And my husband's like, I don't know, like we could call up an accountant. So we live, we went to this like 95-year-old accountant in the middle of the city, and he was like, Oh, yes, you need to be paying quarterly taxes. And I was like, Okay, you just like you tell me what to do. And it was like so old school, like he made us do like handwritten checks, like he didn't even explain the online system because he just didn't know himself. Yeah, that's like how like out of a loop that we were. Yeah, I would say the first like big business thing I did actually wasn't even LLC. I started to be afraid that people were gonna steal my content and just resell it as their own. Because I'd seen that happen to a couple of different just creators in general, and so I went and copyrighted my courses. I don't know why that was like the first move, but I was like, I feel like this is this makes it official. Like if I have copyright protection, but I literally I got copyright protection and then two weeks later we had an LLC. Like that's how like out of order we were.
SPEAKER_00:Or well, the order worked just right for you. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Curious. So with the with the fast moving growth that that you had, um do you still I'm curious, do you still have that course, that three-hour course? Is it somewhere in just tucked away? Are you are you still selling it or is that just something? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay. It's like uh memorabilia at this point, it's like nostalgia of the opening days because the other thing is like the courses have to update all the time because things on the exam are changing all the time. But if you go to the website today, we sell a rendition of the crash course, but it's way nicer and way more polished than it was back then. Yeah. And by the time I ended up selling my company, we had probably about 22 to 25 hours of recorded content that you could purchase. And then we also had a six-week live program and like a 2000 question, question bank. Okay. So we were we were full steam by the yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So I know, so I know the ending of of that is selling your company. But before we get there, how did you handle that growth? Okay, you figured out, okay, I need to talk to an accountant because we're supposed to be paying taxes and doing something with it. And so to go from$100,000 selling courses in four months just by introducing it to your classmates to now multiple millions of dollars selling those courses and then selling your business, how was that trajectory for you from that first$100,000 to, okay, this is something huge? And were you always thinking about selling or acquisition, or was this something that just happened? Like, how did that come about? How did that conversation about acquisition and business and how great we've done come about?
SPEAKER_02:It was so fast. Everything happened just so insanely fast that I feel like even today, you know, it's been three years since we sold. I feel like I'm like still wrapping my head around the whiplash of the two years that I own the business because I started it in May of 2020 and I sold it in June of 2022 for people's brains to kind of wrap their heads around. So we had made our first hundred thousand dollars in those first few months. I was like, okay, I guess we need a website, I guess we need an accountant. Like, let's do the thing. And in November of that year, that first website really like kind of went down in flames. It was a shamble, and the website itself ate up a lot of my time. So, what I love to do is be creative and create content and teach and talk to students. And what the has started to pivot into is now I'm fixing a website every day, and also I don't know how to fix a website. So I'm like trying to overcome that learning curve all the time. And the way that the website you made a bad hire, is that what happened? I made a terrible hire for a website twice. I finally got it right on the third try. Okay. But the first guy couldn't even get the website open. The second guy got a website open that I could do subscriptions on because that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to go from lifetime access to a subscription model because that made so much more sense for me than people just sharing this course for a lifetime with all their friends and family and anyone else who becomes a nurse practitioner. But the subscriptions were messed up in the sense that if you canceled, it didn't give you access to the end of your paid month. And so I would have to go in every morning and manually fix accounts as they canceled. Oh my goodness. And that became very overwhelming very fast because I'm like trying to do all this forward-facing stuff, and now I'm trying to fix the back end all the time. And it's just like there's not enough of me as a human. Oh, and I'm still teaching full-time, by the way. I still have my full-time job. So I'm like, I'm trying to do all the things. And so I give you that backstory because I ended up right before Thanksgiving hiring a business coach. And I literally I had a friend one time who wanted to start a taco truck, and she called up a business coach. And the business coach said, That's a terrible idea. Don't do that. Um, which for her, that was the right call. Okay. Okay. I was gonna be like a taco truck. That's a great idea. No, no, no, no. For for this specific human, it was a terrible idea. But I was like, um, I guess I'll just call up that lady who told Katie that the taco truck was a bad idea, and maybe she can help me figure this out because I was at a point where I was so overstimulated and overwhelmed that I was just gonna kind of let it die.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And I was like, and I've got something here because between August and November, when I called her, I mean, it was almost Thanksgiving, we jumped from 100,000 to 250. So I was like between what dates again? August and August to Thanksgiving. Wow. Yeah. I was like, so I can't just let it die. Like this is like this is our golden egg.
SPEAKER_00:Um this is a$25 course by this point, just$25 at that point.
unknown:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:So you're that's a lot of sales then. That's so many sales, so many sales. Wow.
SPEAKER_02:$50. Yeah. So I call her up and she's like, oh my god, what has happened? She's like, what do you mean? You just made$250,000. I'm like, I don't know, I just did. So can you help me figure it out? And she's like, well, I've never told anyone this ever on a first call. She's like, by the time you talk to me next week, like, I need you to hire somebody. I don't care who it is, I don't care if it's another instructor, I don't care if it's a VA, like you've got to hire a human. So I ended up hiring my first virtual assistant who mostly spent her time in the back end of the website resetting those subscriptions for me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, but it gave me just enough space in my crazy schedule to envision everything up to this point was recorded courses. And I really wanted to do something live because everybody was asking for it. But I didn't want to do a live program unless it could be different. Like I wasn't, if I just was gonna teach you for two, 10-hour days, like I wasn't gonna do it. Like that wasn't meaningful to me. And so I started envisioning, like, oh, like what does this live program look like? And I started um putting together the initial infrastructure of what we end up calling the live study group program. And the live study groups were a six-week program for at the time, I think it was$500. And the way that it was set up was I give you a calendar and I tell you exactly what days to watch the courses and what how many practice questions to do. And I literally just every day, this is what you do, and then we meet up every other week for four hours, and we actually go through case studies and questions together live. And that also people like I already had a prompt audience. Obviously, I made 250 grand at this point. Yeah, and so my first life study group cohort was just 30 people, but it was still 30 people we paid$500, like that was a really big deal, and it was also super successful, super fast. Everybody wanted in for the next one, and the life study groups really kind of like catapulted us to the next level. And as we've got these love study groups that we're figuring out, we bring in a real website team and a real marketing team, and we move to a real course software. So at that point, we went from our little rinky dink website to being on Kajabi, if people are familiar with Kajabi.
SPEAKER_00:Uh so were you on WordPress and doing something like member press in the back end or something? Okay, because I yeah, I was wondering how you were doing that. Very painful, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Very, very painful in every way.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and Kajabi is an all-in-one um platform for course creators, coaches, that kind of thing, where you can get payments and host your course at the same time. So, just for those who are interested in knowing, all the pieces, yeah, all in one, all in one nice.
SPEAKER_02:That's what I need in that moment. But yeah, so Christmas that year, we launched a lot of study groups. It's a me as successful. I go ahead and I hired my first nurse practitioner. It was somebody I used to go to nursing school with, and I was like, all right, we've got it. I've got a VA, I've got a nurse practitioner, I've got an instructor with me. Like, we are ready to propel forward full speed. And by gosh, I think it was March, we had made a million dollars. And I was like, what is happening? Like, I still like couldn't even wrap my head around it then.
SPEAKER_00:And that wasn't even a year, correct?
SPEAKER_02:No, it wasn't even a full year, it was like seven, eight months in. We made a million dollars. And so that's when I first started having the inklings of like, we are on a rocket ship right now. Yeah, this rocket ship is incredible, and like we're gonna have to really like start to rethink like, okay, like we need a question bank. Like, we don't have a question bank yet, and we're gonna need an app and we're gonna need all of this like specific software to us, and like you start like putting all those pieces together, and also we made a million dollars without ever writing a single ad, like it was all word of mouth, which was so cool and so incredible. So I'm like, okay, we probably need to hire an ad team, like, we probably need to like start figuring out all these other pieces. But what my fear became is just like their partition market's only so big, like it's kind of a niche thing. Yeah, so how long do we roll ride this rocket ship before it plateaus? Because if you're gonna sell a business, you want to sell it on the high, you don't want to sell it on the plateau or of a dip. And at that point, we're like, we're growing month over month over month over month. So now, is that what you were thinking? So when does that end? Like, how does that, you know? And so finally, by December of the following year, so a year and a half ish into the business, uh met for the first time with a growth strategist because I had found a business mentor at the time, and I don't think we've said a name in my business up to this point. It's called Sarah Michelle Reviews. Like it's it's my name, it's my face, it's me. It's kind of a personal brand, right? But I had met another business mentor at that time who said that I wouldn't be able to sell, where I would be really devalued by having my name in my face because it would have Kiwan syndrome. And so I initially met with the grocer TJ of like, okay, if I want to sell eventually, do I have to remove myself to do that? And if so, let's go ahead and start that process. Okay. And he was like, Well, um, selling a business is like selling a house in the sense that it's worth whatever someone's willing to pay for it. And so the only way to know what someone's gonna value it with your name and your face on it is to like go to market and do like a teaser.
SPEAKER_00:And and what does that exactly mean when you go to market with a teaser?
SPEAKER_02:So you you put together a little PowerPoint, a little I did a little canvas slide deck about kind of it gives information, but not in so much away that it would be like um you don't want to give like trade secrets away, or you don't want to give away proprietary information because these are if they're gonna buy you, they're probably also one of your competitors. So you gotta think about it in that sense, you gotta be delicate, um, but. You put together a PowerPoint, it's vague enough about your success and where you're going and your vision. And then you just start sending that out to companies that you would like to purchase you or private equity firms that might want to invest in you. Um, but private equity was never really super my interest because, like, we didn't need the cash flow. A lot of businesses need the cash flow, they need the injection at some point. We didn't need that. So I really like I wanted to find a strategic partner that could really like take us to the next level because I had tried to build an app. I had started the process of trying to build our own software, and I knew immediately that I was 1000% out of my league. I was like, I just don't know enough and I can't learn fast enough to figure out this tech space. So, like the ideal vision for me is to be purchased by an ed tech company that already has this stuff figured out.
SPEAKER_00:Can you explain a little bit? I know because we're talking to nurses on this podcast. So we may have never heard of this world of private equity, mergers, acquisitions, purchasing, you know, selling. I neither. So yeah, and teasing. So a lot of us as nurses, we don't know this world. Could you just before you tell us about the whole selling process and putting out those teasers and um sort of, you know, hoping no one takes your idea or, you know, takes too much information or proprietary information? What is that process of private equity deciding between that and and what is private equity? What was it to you back then? And how did you learn it quickly, I'm sure? And how did you make the decision to just go with partners who are going to help you grow versus the private equity equity route? Because with private equity, you take some funding, they own a portion of your business, and then you can probably eventually sell it to them, I guess, afterwards. But how did that work for you?
SPEAKER_02:So I didn't know enough then to really understand the difference. And so I kind of started to articulate that difference through the teaser process. So we sent out the teasers to all these different people just to get a kind of a vibe check. And at that point, we actually we truly were not intending to sell the business then because our intent was just see what it's worth today, and then we can figure out in the future like what does that look like? Do we want to sell? And the way that I would uh describe private equity is um I'm trying to figure out how to say this nicely old men in suits sitting somewhere in a suite in Manhattan, and they're a little bit condescending again. What private equity wanted for me was for me to be the next captain. So, like, you got the nursing stuff figured out, cool. Like, let's do NCLEX now, let's do medical stuff now, let's do MCAT, let's do ACT, let's do SAT. And I was like, I don't really want to be like full service brand. Like, I like my nurses, I understand my nurses and my nurse practitioners. Like, yes, NCLEX makes a lot of sense, but like ACT I really don't care about. And if I don't care about it, I don't want to do it, right? Yeah, at least not for me. So that was kind of my experience with private equity and what they envisioned, and what they would have done is they would have injected a lot of cash into my business for a large portion of my business in return. Most of the time, they'll take the majority stake, and so you kind of lose your power over the business. Yeah, your power, yes, your ownership. Yes, you definitely do. And that was really intimidating, really scary for me. And then you're kind of trapped there in a way, and they have really high expectations and really high standards, and you don't really get to make the choices anymore. So it's like, mm-hmm, that gives me anxiety. So I don't think I don't think that's for me. Yeah. The other route you can go is finding a strategic partner that you could fit in with. So the company that ended up purchasing mine, they had everything but nursing. They couldn't figure out the nursing world for whatever reason. And so they had MCAT and they had LSAT, and those were super successful, and they already had a tech platform and they had systems and infrastructure in place. Like this was a pretty decent sized company. Um but what spoke to me the most when I met with Blueprint initially was number one, they showed up full force to the mean. Like they had the whole executive team squad there, and they had their, they actually have their own private equity partners. So they had the permanent equity partners there, etc. But like half the people that showed up were women. And everyone that worked in my business, with the exception of my husband, obviously was a woman. And that that culture was really important to me to be valued in the same way. But I will tell you, you know, when I initially got my offer from Blueprint, you know, we weren't intending to sell, and it was not the offer I wanted. And so I said, peace out, talk to you later.
SPEAKER_00:And at that time, did you already have other offers to compare it with? And you were saying, Oh, I think we're worth more than this, or what do you think?
SPEAKER_02:So, what me and my husband did, and if you ever want to sell a business or really sell anything, to be honest, I think everyone should do this exercise of what is your number before you ever talk to anybody else. So before you ever get an offer, before you ever like get emotionally excited, like, oh, like half their exec team is women and like all this stuff. What is your number? And so when the offer started rolling in, it wasn't our number. It wasn't our number, it wasn't our number. And so it was easy to say no. And we didn't get hung up otherwise because of that.
SPEAKER_00:How did you choose your number though? Did you have did you do research on other companies that were similar and you were able to sort of see what was the average, I guess, of those type of companies? Or how did you choose your number?
SPEAKER_02:Me and my husband, well, mostly my husband, did a lot of really complicated math of what it would, what number would be worth it to us to sell the upside? Like what number sets us up for success in a way that like we can have generational wealth and we can impact our families and we can do philanthropy work. Like it was all personal to us. And so, like what my number is might not be your number or like even close to your number, but it like it fit our vision, but it also fit of like, you know, if we just kept the business, how much will we make in five years? How much will we make in 10 years? And should we just keep it for that reason alone? And so it was kind of this like internal debate, but it was still like very subjective and personalized to us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Now, when you finally made the decision, or you didn't like the number at first and then they came back and countered, or uh, was that a long process where you just said no and then they came back months later, or was it all one like fail swoop where they came back and forth with you with the with a negotiation?
SPEAKER_02:The missing detail of this story is in December when we first met with the growth strategist, on the morning we were going to meet with him for the first time. I woke up and took a pregnancy test and found out that I was pregnant. And we got the official offer, I believe it was in February. And so, like, I'm just like I'm moving along, I'm like cooking this baby at this point. And when I told them no, they said, Well, we'll come back in July after we have like our next board meeting and the next quarter, and we see how you're doing. Um, because they were like, our offer is low because like it's a gamble for us, like you're such a new business. Like, are you really gonna do in the next quarter what you say you're gonna do? And I was like, I know, like I know that I'm gonna do what I'm gonna say I'm gonna do, but I appreciate the sentiment. And but if you think about July, I was supposed to have a baby in August, so that was like really like I knew there was not gonna be a sale in July, regardless, because it's such a complicated process to sell a business. And in February, I said bye. And I went on and I was like, okay, if we're not selling, because basically Blueprint was who I wanted to buy me of the people that we had met with. And if it wasn't gonna work out with them, I was just gonna stop the process and continue on with my business and growing my business. And so we had actually started working with a software developer out of Singapore to build our own IncLEX software because they're planning on launching IncLEX products and building out a better infrastructure for us because Kajabi is great, but we needed specific to us. Like we couldn't host a question bank on Kajabi, like it was kind of becoming a nightmare. So the week that Blueprint came back in late March, which was a very quick turnaround. Um, our question bank, which we were hosting on WordPress at the time, went kipputs. I mean, it just absolutely died. And we have thousands of subscribers to this question bank.
SPEAKER_01:Oh wow.
SPEAKER_02:And we're trying to put everything on Kajabi overnight, even though Kajabi is not made to do a question bank. We're just trying to give them something because people were panicking. And so when they called me that week, I was like, oh man, I would love to sell. I am so in over my head. I mean, I didn't tell them this, yeah. Of course, but they ended up ironically coming back with our number.
SPEAKER_00:And yeah, was it a big jump from where they started to what your number was? It was double.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, it was double.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Now, did they see a difference in the did they see that it was growing? Did you have another teaser or another deck that you sent them?
SPEAKER_02:They had such a successful quarter at that point that they were like, we feel comfortable taking the risk as long as you're still doing what you said you were doing and we weren't. Um, and I was like, okay, I guess we're gonna do the sell thing. Like it wasn't what I anticipated, but so we spent all of April, all of May, a lot of June negotiating back and forth, but really like even the two and a half month sale process is pretty fast. However, we were such a simple business at the end of the day. Like we had only a handful really of employees, and we didn't have like years and years of records to go through. And like, so we really were able, like, it was painful talking to lawyers every day. Um, but outside of that, like we were able to get it done and we all knew we had a deadline because I was pregnant and I was gonna be on leave and kind of all the pieces too of just like selling a business and then immediately leaving that business and all the preparation that has to go in to do that because that's hard. That's really just that's a really hard situation to be in. Um but we sold in June of 2022, and I'm like always a little disappointed, and that's a weird thing to say because we didn't really get time to celebrate it. Like we didn't, we never got like a real pause because it was three weeks later that we found out my daughter was gonna be sick, and so we thought that we had like this normal, healthy baby and this normal, healthy pregnancy, and like I'm envisioning my maternity leave, like holding a baby over here and my laptop over here, and like yeah, I'm still like in the business. And to go from that vision to like finding out that our daughter has four heart defects and she's gonna have heart surgery in her first week of life, and like everything just completely upended. And so if I could go back in that time, I would have spent that two weeks, I don't know, like raging, partying, I guess. Like I would have like, we would have taken a trip or we would have done something fun, or like, but instead we were starting to like nestle in and cozy in with the thought of having a baby, and it just kind of really pivoted. But yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And I would love to, I know we're running out of time, and I would love to share that story. Maybe in another podcast episode, we can go into the work that you're doing now with being a heart mom and working with many different organizations. Um yeah, with dealing with heart defects and things like that. So I would love to share that story and maybe have you come back on another episode and share. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like it's like I when we started this, I said, Oh, we're gonna get through four topics. And we barely, you know, got through the third topic. And I and I welcome to my memoirs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're writing a book too, as well. And um, there's only so much you can do in like an hour's time. But I want to ask one thing, and I don't know how much you can share about um the whole sell and the process. You are already making, from what I understand, millions of dollars in the business. So when someone is making millions of dollars in their business, because there are nurses out there who are doing it now, um, should they expect multiple millions in an offer? Because I'm not sure, you know, what that sell was, but you said it doubled what your first offer was at first. So, what do you think a nurse should expect? And I know it's different for every business about what your number is and how you want to set up yourself for wealth in the future. Um, what would you say to that?
SPEAKER_02:Uh, they call that a multiple. And so there are whatever your style of business is, there's traditionally a multiple assigned to that. And so, like, if you are an ed tech business, so if you're an education business that has their own technology, for example, like that's a bigger multiple than just an education business. Like I had, um, you should absolutely expect a multiple. Like, you're not you're not gonna sell your business making millions of dollars just to get like a couple of millions of dollars back. Like you would have, like you would have made that if you had just kept it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, right. Because you can make that over the next couple of years. So it doesn't make sense to sell it for what you're doing.
SPEAKER_02:So you gotta find what makes sense for you in the multiple ranges a little bit, but that's kind of the beauty of working with a broker, working with a grocery strategist, working with someone who's done the process before, that they can kind of help you navigate what that should look like. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so get a broker, get a growth strategy, get a great broker.
SPEAKER_02:Mine was not great. Um, but yes, get a great broker. Yeah. Uh the other detail, which is just fun for me to say, so I'll throw it in at the end was when we initially turned down the deal from Blueprint, the first one, my broker kind of lost his mind. Oh. Um, and he was like, What do you mean you would turn this down? Like, this is life-changing money, all this stuff. And I'm like, Yeah, but it's not our number, and that's okay. Um, was he working on a commission? Yes, brokers are incentivized because they get their cut, right? And so we actually ended things with the broker all together and because, like, we're moving forward the business, and now we've had this really uncomfortable experience with you because we don't want to be like pushed into a sale. Yeah. Um, so we ended up negotiating the entire deal by ourselves. Wow, which was also a crazy intense wild experience. Um, but my husband's incredible, and I like to think I'm incredible. So yeah, we figured it out.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I I think you've figured it out greatly, and I want to thank you for sharing all the story. And again, we have to bring you back to hear the the part two um of your story. Yeah. What's a memorable nursing story that you may have that comes to mind that still comes to mind, still tugs at your heart, still makes you go back to nursing.
SPEAKER_02:I think about this incredible woman. Um, when I was working in bone marrow transplants, where I spent most of my time, who she came in to get a bone marrow transplant. There's so much anticipation involved with that as well, and there's so much prep involved. And they place your central line a few days before you come in to actually do a transplant. And in the few days she had been home, she ended up getting an infection in that central line. So it had to be pooled, they had to put a new one in, they had to delay her bone marrow transplant. Like it was, it felt like the worst of the worst of the worst. Like it was, it was not great. Um, and so when she finds out, and I'm staying in the room with her, that she has a central line infection, and like we're about to pivot the whole process of what we thought we were gonna be doing. She ends up, I don't know how she ended up standing on her bed, but she ended up standing on her bed, like welling, having a panic attack, just having just like a full body, full mental breakdown. And so I ended up because you know, I've had a lot of panic attacks in my life. I literally I just went and sat down on her bed, even though she's like standing and towering over top of me. And I was like, I'm just gonna sit here with you through this. So it's like, however, you want to feel is how you feel. Um, and when you are in a position where you feel ready to talk and we can kind of figure things out together, like that's cool. But until then, like I'm just gonna sit here through this with you, and I know this really sucks. Um, and her daughter was so touched by that, and she was so touched by that. Like, even years later, like um, she came back and she thanked me for like having that moment with her and like seeing her in that moment and just validating, like, hey, you can be anxious, and hey, this really sucks, and I'm just gonna like be your person through it.
SPEAKER_00:That was Sarah Bowes, founder of Sarah Michelle in P Reviews. And one quick story that we didn't get to include in the podcast episode.
SPEAKER_02:Um, I have a very fun side project right now, which fills so the realm of nursing and everything else I've done. But I do have an astrology podcast. Um, and I do astrology readings on the side. And I actually I think sometimes like and I'm I feel like I get more rapport because I'm like, I have two college degrees, I'm a successful entrepreneur. Like, I think this astrology thing is actually a thing. But I remember how cool it was for me. I met this incredibly successful mergers and acquisitions lawyer. She like led a firm, all this stuff, and she told me she's like, I'm kind of like into astrology. And I was like, Are you? And this was way before I ever got into it. But it like really opened the door for me for like someone who was successful to be like, this isn't like a croc. Um, so that's so much fun for me.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to rate and review this episode in your favorite podcast app. And don't forget to click the follow button so you won't miss an episode. This episode was produced and edited by yours truly with administrative and research support from Liz Alexandri and Renan Silva. I'm Marcia Batti, and you've been listening to the Bossy Nurses podcast.
