The SuccessLab Podcast: Where Entrepreneurs Collaborate for Success Beth Cochran: Entrepreneur, PR and Content Marketing Strategist, Collaborat

When something is broken, oftentimes, the natural instinct is to turn a blind eye and hope someone else will fix it — but this wasn’t the case for Paul Roetzer. While working at a public relations agency early in his career, Paul was having a hard time reconciling the services he was providing for clients with the cost of their retainers. So, he set to work on a solution that would standardize PR services and prices. And in 2005, Paul launched PR 20/20, a marketing consulting and services firm that became the first firm in HubSpot's certified partner program which now includes thousands of agencies from around the world.
According to Paul, success isn’t solely financial — it’s about bringing true value to others and aligning yourself with people who have a similar take on life. He truly believes his career successes — from growing PR 20/20 to authoring two books (The Marketing Performance Blueprint and The Marketing Agency Blueprint) to launching the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute — is a direct indication of this.
In this episode, Paul discusses why getting uncomfortable and making small bets on yourself is one of the best ways to fuel your career and achieve the goals you set for yourself. This mindset has helped him successfully manage the rapid growth of PR 20/20 while dealing with the tragic passing of his best friend — an event that forever changed his perspective on life and business. 
Read on for a selection of questions, and listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above. 
What led you to create PR 20/20? In the early 2000s, I was working at a PR agency and I didn't really understand the business model. Everything was billable hours and in my young mind, it didn’t make sense. I would send invoices to clients every month and it'd be a block of text of all the things we did. The client would call me and say, “this looks great, but what did we get for $12,000 last month?”. I wanted this process to be more tangible for myself and for clients, so I started working on this idea of standardized services and set pricing.
“PR 20/20” was originally a paper I wrote about how the industry needed a new vision for how it did everything. A year and a half after writing it, I went home and told my wife that I'm going to start a business. She said, “okay, what does that mean?”. I said, “I don't know, but I'll make sure we have health insurance and a paycheck when I do.” That was a Wednesday and on that Sunday, I got a $25,000 loan from a family member and I started the business two weeks later.
What was one of your darkest moments, and how did you emerge from it? I was 27 when I started the agency. I didn't have any kids and my wife and I had been married for four or five years at that point. Life was pretty good and then my father-in-law passed away suddenly of cancer. We tried to figure out how to move on with life after that and then the following year, my best friend died in a tragic accident. Here I was in the midst of 100% growth, and from the outside, it seemed as though I had everything figured out. On the inside, I was a wreck and was trying to figure out how to piece together the next day. I threw myself into business even harder because it became my escape and the growth distracted me from dealing with the reality of life. 
It was the reality that took me a long time to kind of come to grips with. No one wants to live through that stuff, but I have a totally different perspective on life and business once I eventually made it through.
What has been one of the best things you’ve done for the business to grow it? I made a bet on HubSpot in the very early days. I think what I've done well in my career is finding people I wanted to surround myself with — people who had really interesting visions and who I thought had the will to see them through. HubSpot was very much a bet on its people, not on its technology. I truly believed Brian Halligan and Dharm

When a routine –– and very common –– medical procedure went awry, it prompted a major career and life shift for Stephanie Schull. Stephanie’s mother underwent a procedure that hundreds of thousands of women have undergone, and like many that have –– which they would soon come to learn –– her outcome was unsuccessful, leaving her in pain for the rest of her life.
Refusing to accept this fate, Stephanie left her career as a philosophy professor in pursuit of a better solution for the many women who—like her mother—experience pelvic floor issues.
Today, Stephanie is the founder and inventor of Kegelbell, the only FDA-registered external vaginal weight that provides a natural way to get stronger pelvic floor muscles. Through Kegelbell, she is aiming to remove stigmas around women’s health and bring a voice to pelvic floor issues that have been kept quiet far too long.
In this episode, we learn about Stephanie’s sweeping move from academia to the business world, the challenges she faced in producing solutions for what is still mostly a taboo subject, and the creative ways she’s been able to run her company with a lean team. 
 
Read on for a selection of questions, and listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above. 
What led you to create what is today known as Kegelbell? My mother got a pelvic mesh surgery that didn't work well for her and she will be in pain for the rest of her life. When I learned about this, I was shocked to know that she had problems with her pelvic floor for all these decades. And I was shocked that there was a surgery with such a questionable success. My response to the problem was to research it. That's when I realized that most women have problems with their pelvic floor and as of five or so years ago, people weren't talking about it. The solutions, as a result, were flawed because there wasn't enough conversation. As I dug, I saw that there was a good option, it was just not being utilized. When I talked to people about it and discovered they weren't going to make it right, that's where I decided I had to get involved, so I quit academia and started Kegelbell.
What's been one of the biggest challenges you've had to overcome in building Kegelbell? The first challenge was that the subject of pelvic floor issues was taboo. My mother had the problem for decades and didn't tell us about it. When I started wanting to fundraise, I heard a lot of “no, that's not really a problem” and “it's too expensive to educate people about it.” Something else that I got pushed back on was the solution I was proposing to fix, treat and prevent weakened pelvic muscles. A lot of investors were saying, “you need to provide an ongoing band-aid solution that keeps the customer on the hook.” I ran into some pretty systemic problems right out the gate.
What was one of your darkest moments, and how did you emerge from it? The darkest moment is an ongoing, everyday concern. With a physical product, I'm looking down the barrel of bank account and cash flow issues every day. Looking at cash flow problems is uncomfortable and it's like I'm flying too close to the sun all the time. As I get bigger, it's the same problem, just with larger numbers. This isn't going to go away. I have to adjust to this reality, which is a bit different than the things I've been used to up until this point.
What keeps you going? Listening to podcasts like these so you don't feel alone. It’s important to hear from other people with multi-billion dollar companies and hearing them say it's never comfortable and that they're always close to the edge. I recently heard the founders of Lyft talk about how some of the scary moments just don't go away, and I’ve been telling myself that. Finding comfort in hearing from others is why I wanted to share my experience in hopes it helps someone else.
What has been one of the best things you’ve done for the business to grow it? Not giving up. If you

Seven continents, 70 countries, countless books, studies in psychology, philosophy and physiology at Oxford with a specialization in brain chemistry were all part of a quest to figure out how to live a good life and what a good life even means. 
 
And that search eventually led Arthur Worsley to create The Art of Living. Prior to, however, he had been working 80+ hour weeks at McKinsey for three years. Burnout and several other life events prompted him to leave and finally start to uncover what it means to live a good life. Today, after immersing himself in studying this, he is helping others get more out of life and achieve self mastery through his TRACKTION Masterclass and The Art of Living.
 
The following is the transcript from the show. But first, a few helpful links:
More about the TRACTION Masterclass (tip: use code “wiredpr75” to get 75% off the class! Only the first 50 people)  GTD (Getting Things Done)  book summary Productivity & Performance: Do More, Better How to accelerate learning


What led you to create The Art of Living? 
I left McKinsey and I'd been doing a whole load of things. I'd been studying, I learned five languages, I did an ultra marathon through the Sahara desert, I'd been traveling and reading books, and I wanted a way to capture all of that. I stumbled on the Fineman method of learning –– learning by teaching it to someone else. I started putting this stuff down and people started reading it. 
 
I've always been fascinated with being good at life. I had a father who was an alcoholic and despite having all of the advantages that he could have possibly had, he sort of threw his life away. If I look back at my decision on why I wanted to study psychology, why I've always been so interested in reading and why I went traveling, a lot of them link back to trying to get to the bottom of these questions, which is how can we live a good life? How can we not throw away everything that we're given? What does a good life even mean? That's where The Art of Living really came from.
 
What was the turning point when you realized you had stumbled onto something viable with The Art of Living?
When I started out and people started resonating with the stuff I was writing, that was the first moment where I thought, maybe this is possible. The moment that I realized that this was really going to be something cool was when I was with one of my partner's friends who’s a retired CEO. I was chatting to him and his wife about the life philosophy that I'd put together, the way I organize my weeks and my days and how I avoid burnout and they said, “Hey, would you give us some coaching?” I'd never really thought about coaching people on that, and that is when I realized that the business was probably going to be viable.
 
What were the early days like? Once you knew you wanted to build this, how long did it take you?
I started out reading a lot of books and it was a huge learning curve for me. Some people start a business and they come from a strong marketing background and then they find a product that they can sell. Some people have a product or a cause that they believe in, and then they're trying to work out the marketing aspect of it. 
 
For me, even though the product had been evolving, I knew what it was I wanted to help people with from a very early stage and I focused on one channel. I’m a big search engine optimization guy. I love the idea of just optimizing something and then leaving it out there and having it slowly accrue more people. That was my top-of-funnel and then I had to work out how to turn those readers into subscribers and those subscribers into buyers? That was a long process of trial and error and learning from people who'd been there before me.
 
It’s quite a different path than McKinsey, was there anything you had to overcome mentally to let go of that chapter and pursue this as a new path?
I think it's surprisingly similar to McKinsey in t

To leave the corporate world at the beginning of a financial recession to start a company requires big thinking and even bigger action—and Rebecca Clyde has both in spades. Add that to her ability to outhustle and outwork her competitors and it’s no wonder Rebecca was able to quickly find innovative paths to revenue and growth for her clients despite all odds.
Today, Rebecca has built one of the most highly sought after marketing communications agencies in Phoenix, Ideas Collide, in addition to co-founding her newest venture Botco.ai, a platform that offers chat-nurturing solutions for businesses. How does she do it? By leading with value and operating under the mentality that if you pay it forward, the rest will follow.
In this episode, we talk with Rebecca about the forces that drive her enterprising spirit, the hard lessons she’s learned along the way, and how she creates channels for paying it forward.
 
Read on for a selection of questions, and listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above.
What led you to leave the corporate confines to build your own company, Ideas Collide?
At the time, I worked at a good company and really enjoyed everything I did while I was there. But I wanted to take more control of my destiny and my income and I realized the corporate world had a lot of limitations. I realized I had outgrown my ability to work for somebody else and was ready to spread my own wings. 
In those early days, what were some of the challenges you had to overcome to achieve growth?
We started the company in the middle of the recession in 2008. The very beginning years were scrappy. Our goal was to help our clients find a path to revenue and growth despite all of those downward forces. We were also lucky that we were a startup. We didn't have the overhead of a big agency so we could charge less, be nimble, try different things and experiment without a lot of risks. Our clients really appreciated that and as a result, some of our fastest growth years were during that period where most other companies in our industry were contracting.
What was the turning point when you realized you had stumbled onto something viable with Botco.ai?
My co-founders and I had a hypothesis that the world has shifted to become on-demand. Everyone was struggling to keep up with that on-demand world because the marketing technologies, processes and frameworks that have been built were not designed for it. If we could shift that, and make businesses really responsive, then they would be able to attract more customers and retain them for longer.

Last year, one of my customers at Botco.ai A/B tested a campaign where half of their customers were driven to a ‘chat with us’ experience in which they got to interact with the Botco.ai chat. The other half went to their typical landing page to book an appointment. What we learned was when people have a chance to ask questions and get an instant answer, they're twice as likely to convert and become customers. As soon as I saw the results from that effort, I knew we were onto something.
Was it tough to make the decision to leave Ideas Collide and go full time with Botco.ai?
It was a transition I had to plan over a good amount of time. I couldn't just walk away from it without being very thoughtful. One of the things I did was make a list of all of my duties and responsibilities and slowly began training people to take on each one of those tasks. It was a way to be able to step away from that business so I could start a new company, but it was also a really great way to develop my team. It created that growth trajectory for many of the team members to step up, take on ownership, and truly have an opportunity to run the business, not just be an employee. It was also a growth opportunity for me because it was time for me to build a new company. There was a lot I needed to learn. I needed to have that space to be able to fully give Botco.ai the attention it deserved. 
Wh

When MeiMei Fox submitted her first book proposal, never in her wildest dreams did she think it would lead to a life-long writing career. But, a fateful connection to the right person (combined with her innate writing talent) soon catapulted MeiMei into the ranks of the New York Times bestselling authors. 
 
Today, she is also a contributor to Forbes, The Huffington Post, and Self Magazine, among other publications, and has co-authored several other notable titles. On top of all that, she manages to find the time to serve as a life coach and mother to twin boys. What’s her secret sauce? Fear less, love more. 
 
In this episode, we talk to MeiMei about how she fearlessly pursues audacious goals, how she overcomes challenges and her approach for getting big things done: worst first.
 
Read on for a selection of questions, and listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above.

Your background is in psychology, so what led you to writing?
I studied psychology then I went to work at McKinsey as a management consultant and I intended to go down that path, but I was really unhappy. It was fascinating and I was surrounded by brilliant people, but I didn't feel that my work was meaningful and helping the world be a better place. After I finished my two-year program with McKinsey, I was lost and I didn't know what to do next. I was talking with a friend who was a doctor, and he wanted to write a book about supplements and I said, “I can help you write that.” I bought a book called “How to Write a Book Proposal” and I wrote up a proposal for this book that we would co-author. One of my friends knew someone at Penguin Putnam so I sent her the proposal and she wrote back about a week later and said, “I never do this, but we're going to buy your book.” That's how my career in writing got started. 
 
What’s been one of your favorite subjects or pieces to write?
I've been blessed to have been taken down this path through my mentor in the publishing world. She got me into writing books on spirituality. When I began to work on a book with Robert Thurman, who's a professor of Buddhism at Columbia University (one of the Dalai Lama's oldest friends and also Uma Thurman's dad), I was taken with Buddhism. It's been fascinating to work on several books about Buddhism, learn more about it and find that it really resonated with everything that I believed about the world. I feel like I was almost called down that path during my career in writing. From there, I went to work on The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World with Howard Cutler, which was co-authored with the Dalai Lama.
 
How have you accomplished so much over the course of your career? 
I expected, and wanted, to have children at a younger age, but I ended up getting divorced and spent most of my 30s being single and not getting remarried until I was almost 40 and starting to have a family then. Even though that wasn't what I wanted, I ended up with all this time. So, I just kept pursuing my interests. Everything I've done has been driven by my passion and my purpose. I don't seek out to win awards or be the wealthiest or most successful. I just go after what excites me and gets me up in the morning with a smile on my face.
 
What, if any, was a significant challenge you’ve had to overcome in your career? 
Choosing this path is the biggest challenge. There's a great deal of instability and in the world of book editing and ghostwriting—it can be feast or famine. I get a really huge project and get a big chunk of payment upfront and then another chunk when the book is finished. Other times, it's like I'm scrambling to pay the monthly bills. You have to be really comfortable with uncertainty. The trade off has been the excitement and the freedom. I've literally spent most of my career working whenever and wherever in the world that I wanted to. 
 
As a life coach, are there any common threads you see in what tends to limit individua

When was the last time you paused, reflected on what was going on in your life, and took a hard look at how it was affecting your happiness, health and overall success? Has it been awhile? More than likely, the answer is “yes.”
Often we rush from one task, milestone or accomplishment to the next, in constant pursuit of what we think we need to make us happy, successful and fulfilled. In other words, we’re always looking for more and it’s exhausting.
For Karen Mangia, VP of Customer & Market Insights at Salesforce, this was her reality until a health issue forced her to press pause. But as they say, it’s often life’s most challenging situations that present the best gifts. Through this journey, Karen learned that success, happiness and fulfillment wasn’t about more. In fact, it was just the opposite –– a topic she explores in her book, “Success With Less”.
In this episode, we talk to Karen about how the idea of “pause, ponder, prioritize” came about, how to peacefully coexist with old habits, and how to identify when you’re at a crossroads and what to do about it.
What led you to write “Success With Less”? I think back to those early days when my mom would do this chore chart. It would be a list every day of the things that you were supposed to do and the behaviors you were supposed to display. If I did it, I would get one of those gold stars. I loved being able to see the stars across the board, like these little moments of achievement. I took that gold star mentality forward in life. Keep saying yes, keep performing, and keep amassing those gold stars. It was a formula that worked incredibly well early in my career. I earned several promotions and got some recognition and rewards that created more opportunities.
The challenge was that the further you go in your career and life, you have to be more thoughtful about what you're saying yes to and whether it’s serving you and moving closer to your goals. All those gold stars eventually added up to a really major setback in my life and I started discovering that “Success With Less” formula. How I defined success changed radically. Success was getting healthy enough again to be able to enjoy my life and that was a very different definition than getting gold stars, and that was okay.
Being a type-A personality, how did you teach yourself to pause more frequently? In some ways, the pause was forced on me because I was conscious that I really did have limited time and energy. What I found during that time was that having a success mindset and an outcome in mind helped me start saying “no” to things that might drain my energy and not get me closer to my goal. What I started to discover when I was saying “no” on my own terms or pausing from endless activity was the pauses that we choose feel really different than the ones that are forced on us. What I started finding was when I could choose these moments to pause because they would help me refresh or reset, it felt a little more empowering.
How do keep from returning to old habits and thought patterns that set you back? It is really difficult to change our routines and boundaries and then stick with them because that takes energy. We don't always have all the energy that we need to endlessly keep everything in perfect balance. What's important is how do you reset when you find that happening? I'll never forget what my friend once said—that it is okay to look behind you and acknowledge that that person with those habits is still there and it's always going to be there. The difference is you can see that person from a distance and peacefully coexist which means you now have permission to make a different choice. Having a little bit of saving grace that you're still human and you're gonna make mistakes will go a long way.
Are there one or two people along your journey who have really transformed the trajectory of your career? There are a couple who come to mind. I had hit a point w