0037: EntrepreNursing: How to be an innovative, disruptive, changemaker, regardless of your industry with Nurse Practitioner, Founder of HireNurses.com, Director Nurse Innovation & Entrepreneurship Northeastern,TedX Speaker, & Author Rebecca Love

Ea interviews, episode 37, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Welcome Expert Authority World. I'm excited to be here with you. And I have a question for you. Have you ever wanted to start a company? Have you ever wanted to make a difference? Have you ever wanted to change lives, maybe even speak, make an impact on the world? Well, I have none other than Rebecca Love, founder of Hired Nurses.com, speaker, author and TEDx speaker. I'm gonna bring her up right after we thank our sponsor. How would you like to grow your wealth? Easier than you think. With the change, you probably don't notice anyhow automatically. That's why I started the compounding interest snowball investing with acorns and advise you do too. Get started simply and easily today@eainterviews.com for acorns. Here she is, everyone, the lovely Rebecca Love. Rebecca, it's great to have you here.

Oh, so nice to be here, Maya. Thanks so much for having me.

So I want to ask, what inspired you to start your first company? I mean, why even bother? I mean, entrepreneurial isn't the easiest road in life. Why'd you want to do it?

Well, you know, it wasn't necessarily I was a dream of mine. I had a situation where I was a hospice nurse practitioner and at that morning I went out and I saw the patient who was going to be put into a nursing home and he wanted to die at home. And this had happened to numerous ones of my patients where they had wanted to stay at home, but the families could not find affordable care to keep them at home. And at the same time, I was teaching nursing at a community college. So this was March 2013, and I went back to my school where I was teaching and I had a group of seven students that had graduated with me in December, it was now March, and they couldn't find a job. And the desperation was in the air because they were told if you became a nurse, you could find a job. And I remembered turning to the computer and saying there has to be a place that connects people with those who want to hire nurses. And I'm remembering as I got more frustrated searching websites, there was nothing specific to nursing for jobs at least, and feeling my own frustration of when I was a new grad and putting my resume out there and feeling everything was going into black holes. So I left feeling very frustrated, both because my patient was going into a nursing home, they wanted to die at home. My Students couldn't find jobs. And I literally woke up in the middle of the night and I knew what we had to do. And I told my husband, and my husband said, great, and rolled back over and I got out of bed and I called my favorite nurse, who was my mother, and it was the middle of the night. I said, mom, I know what we have to do. We have to create a place that people can find nurses and nurses can be found for new opportunities. And she said, hey, great idea. Why don't you call me back in the morning? And I'm sure she thought it was some harebrained idea and if I slept on it, it would go away. But it didn't. And that's where the story began. It was all with the idea that if we just created a place that people wanted to connect with nurses and those who wanted to hire nurses, then we were going to do something good for the world. And it was much harder than I ever, ever imagined.

Well, I'm glad you started it because there's definitely a need in society there for it.

Well, thanks, Mario. You know, it was a long road, and I would have to say we had some success along the way and we had some wonderful things that happened. And the truth is that we saw the full cycle, we built this and we eventually got acquired. And on March 2013, we were acquired by a UK based firm called Rialto, which I went on with them. I'm happy to talk about this, but we were at the point in the company where either we were going to have to raise a large amount of money because I didn't have enough to invest in the technology.

And pay people, or we had to get acquired. And the truth is what I realized as a nurse, as I had learned a lot in five years of building a company, but that my passion always lied more on changing opportunities for nurses and not necessarily the business side. So it made sense to me that an acquisition allowed me to surround myself with the expertise of people who knew how to run a business and make money and allowed me to focus on what I was good at, which was driving ways to engage nurses so that it empowered them in their careers and in their profession. And that's where my passion is. And I think that's just where life has unfolded. It's where my strength is. I'm trying to give a voice to a population and a profession that for years has been moderated and I'm worn down and not given a seat at the table. And recognizing that dichotomy in healthcare and that's my goal in life is to try to empower the profession of nursing so that every vertical recognizes their value and importance.

Well, I think that's huge because so many people don't recognize their importance and value. I would like to say we're very similar in that aspect. I'm not in the healthcare industry. I'm in the marketing and business field. But it's the same thing with entrepreneurs, having them realize their potential. And I'd say at the end of the day, everyone always doubts themselves on some degree. But then you have examples of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and people that Elon Musk that are making these big changes in the world. But here's what I also realize. There's people like you who are also doing the same thing. So tell me about who you helped and how you were helping them.

So.

I guess the starting point is as nurses, we work all the time by the bedside. So we're not in front of a computer, we're not on our phone. The ability to find and connect with new opportunities is very hard because by the time you leave the bedside, you're so exhausted that you don't have time to go put together a resume. Resume and put it out and search. Indeed. And spend hours searching for jobs. We're not sitting behind a desk. Also, nurses are often told how much money they're going to make, the hours they're going to work, the career that they're going to have. A nurse could have the exact same career on day one that she could have 30 years later. And that's very unusual for most professions. Right. We really can see nursing as a job. And what I always wanted nursing to evolve to is that it was a career, it was a progression that could take you anywhere. So without a platform that was focused on nursing specifically, it was very hard to validate.

Compare a nurse to a nurse to a nurse in terms of skill sets on a. On a wide scale, that would elevate everyone. So I really was always the belief that if you elevated one, it raised all boats. And so that's what we tried to do. We hire nurses. Started off with a job board and then we started to do medical mission trips, and then we started to do scholarships and blogs and nurse of the month. And what we were trying to do was to give a face of nurses to the world. And it allowed a lot of people. We had families with children with autism that were connecting with people. We had people that had families with elderly and Alzheimer's were able to find nurses. And the truth is we simply were the job board that made the connection. But many people were able to access nurses in ways they hadn't. And our nurses also had ways to access jobs that they hadn't before. So we tried to create a community that was focused around careers of nurses as our central to elevate the profession. And that had always been what was very empowering or inspiring to us. It was getting the voice of the nurse and their intelligence in healthcare out there.

Rebecca, what is the biggest transformation out of starting the company? Out of all the people you help, what's the biggest transformation you've seen from, let's say, someone who was looking for a job and they used your service and where did they come after that?

You know, I think it's the way that we presented nurses to the world. We didn't take a typical resume and just stick it on a website. What we did is we created new profiles for nurses. How could we exhibit them best to the world to show their skill sets? So it wasn't just simply listing their jobs. In fact, most nurses didn't want their jobs listed. We put a picture up and we put their skill sets up and how many years of experience and we changed the way that nurses presented themselves to the world and that was really empowering. And then we also started to look differently. How can we get nurses excited about being nurses? So for a short period of time, we started to send American nurses to go and work in Ireland. We connected with a firm abroad that was giving them opportunities to do something that they had never done before. And we tried to speak to the heart and aspirations of nurses, to sit there and say, you can look at this as a job, but the truth is you should look at nursing as a career and where can it take you? And we wanted nursing to be seen as a profession that could take you anywhere. And I think that's what the culture was that we believed. And one other thing that I think was very different from us than others is that we focused on the belief that.

This was about the nurse, it wasn't about the employer. And most other boards out there were focused very much on the employer. And what we've always felt, and I've always believed it was the nurse who was the valuable one in this. And it needed to be a company that would focus on the experience of the nurse above all else. And you would win. And that's ultimately why we sold is I found somebody who looked at me, my chairman, James McHugh, who's a self made man out of Ireland, and he Came over late in the discussion that I was having with another American company. And we sat in a meeting last minute and I looked at him and I said, if you're building another job board or empowering tool for employers, I said, you know, every other company is doing that. And I said, if you're building a platform that empowers nurses to do something more for themselves and for their community and their profession, then I'll consider it. And that's when he looked at me and he said, rebecca, that's exactly what I'll let you do. And that was the first time I had had a conversation with somebody who understood that we needed to reinvent the model and focus on the nurse, not as a commodity, but as the exception. And that's what Rialto is now focusing on, is trying to empower the nurse in their work life balance with a focus that it helps, you know, the, where they work in employment, but really gives the skill sets and the tools to nurses to be really effective at what they do.

It is such a great service that you created and the world definitely needs it. So what did you do to get the word out there? I know you love speaking. Can you touch upon that and what that's done to raise awareness for what you've done?

Well, that is totally so. So I wish to say that people wanted to hear me speak when I was starting a company and that was not at all the reality of the situation. I, I was a community college state, you know, professor and had a small startup and, you know, had three little kids at home. Like, people had no interest in hearing me speak. Right. So where did I become valuable? And I became valuable that one day, out of the blue, when I was a struggling entrepreneur, I connected with a friend of mine who also was an entrepreneur, and I said, I just, I don't get it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong in business. I can't figure it out. And he said, rebecca, I need you to go to this hackathon. I said, you know, Nick, what, what is this hackathon? Long story short, it was a three day event that changed and altered the course of my life. And it opened up the world to me in a way that I never experienced the world before. Because I showed up as a nurse at this medical hackathon and people really valued my opinion. And it was shockingly different from anything I had experienced as a nurse that people found me valuable, that they found my knowledge, my insights, my expertise as a nurse, importance to shaping healthcare solutions, that it fundamentally changed my view of the world. So I went on and studied the environment hackathons. And that's when I realized that these medical hackathons, very few numbers of nurses were attending, but a lot of these teams that one had nurses on them hypothesizing then that nurses had the practical knowledge to drive drive change. And that's when my life changed because I was determined that someone should host a nurse hackathon. And that's where my life changed because I went after that and connected with the university. A dean, Dr. Hanrahan, who if you watch the TED talk that I do, I tell you, she was one of the most innovative deans in nursing in the world. And she said, I'm going to run this summit on innovation entrepreneurship. Why don't you run a hackathon? And at the time, now this is what is, I think most interesting. At the time, this was 2015 and no one was talking about nurses as innovators or entrepreneurs. And if you looked over historically publications in the course of decades before that, there had been less than like five articles, a handful of them that had even mentioned nurse innovator and entrepreneur in the same sentence, unless the entire in the same sentence. It was crazy. So we weren't sure if anybody was going to buy into it. And two weeks before that event, we were sold out. And that's when she came to me and said, rebecca, will you become the director of innovation entrepreneurship? Because you have been struggling as a nurse entrepreneur, you're in the weeds. You don't know the skill sets, you don't know what you didn't know. And can you teach the other nurses what they need to know to be, you know, get something off the ground? And I did and I accepted that role. And for two years, Dr. Hanrahan and I built the leading nurse innovation entrepreneurship entrepreneurship program in the country. That led to fundamental change in the world of nursing to the, to the point that the American Nurses association appointed their first vice president of innovation History of the United States, as well as Johnson and Johnson pivoted their 15 year campaign of thanking nurses for their innovation, for their service to recognizing nurses as innovators. Now that is significant, significant change and especially in a profession where it has not changed largely in the last 100 years. So we were onto something. And so what happened when we started to do that is then I started to be asked to speak, how did we do what we had done? And I wish to say there has a formula, but we ran like an entrepreneur. We threw things at the wall and if they stuck, we ran with them and if they didn't seem like they were gonna gain traction, we cut them and we operated fast and quick and guerrilla marketed and tried to build a program that most people thought was a fad and was doomed to fail quickly.

Well, I'm glad it didn't and it's awesome watching you because I know you're making a dent in the world for the positive and it's one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on the show. So thank you.

Well, thank you, Mario. It's been an interesting ride.

So we're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round. Invest automatically, save for later and spend today. That's why I love Acorns. I used to think spare change didn't make a difference and saving and investing was an old fashioned manual process. It's not. And it's a game changer. If you're not leveraging, compounding interest in your business and life automatically, you're missing out. Acorns not only makes saving and investing easy and automatic, it makes it even more valuable. By investing with diversified portfolios, spare change, extra cash and rounding up everyday transactions, you can even set recurring monthly investments in the amount you desire to make good. Great. There is also a debit card option that will continue to help you save and invest even further when you spend plus no minimum balance and overdraft fees. Now for the cherry on top. They have partnered with 250plus companies and brands and growing with their found money program to invest back a percentage into your account with the everyday purchases when you shop, two of which you're probably listening to this right now through an Amazon or Apple device. Get started profiting from your everyday life and business simply and easily today@eainterviews.com Acorns Once again, that's eainterviews.com Acorns Here she is, everyone. Rebecca Love, we're back with the imperfect action round. Rebecca, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I am. Thanks Mario.

So the first question I have for you is what do you see is the biggest problem in your audience and how can they fix it?

Well, I think that the problem in our audience is those that have power in health care have not necessarily recognized the value of nurses into addressing the major challenges that we face in healthcare. So my fundamental belief is that if we that the reason that healthcare is in the conundrum that we are facing so many challenges is that we have failed to engage with nurses who represent the largest portion of the healthcare profession. And if we start engaging with nurses who are the end user of nearly every medical product on the market, we're going to find the solutions that have been so desperately needed to move and transform healthcare in the future.

That's very powerful.

Well, you know, we'll see if the message gets out there.

That is very powerful. All right, number two for entrepreneurs starting off, obviously you've had your success, but you already admitted to guerrilla marketing. Just throwing stuff against the wall. What's the fastest path to the cash?

Fastest fast to the cat. You know, you got to have your market, you got to understand it, you got to know who's going to buy it, and you got to have a service that somebody wants to pay for. And the reality is sometimes that's hard to do. So you have to show value. The fastest route to cash is identifying a pain point, largely a pain point that nobody else wants to direct themselves to us providing a solution for and then solving that pain point. And that's the fastest one. And that's simply, you know, and I. For young entrepreneurs that want to do something, if that's simply because you have a mom that's overworked and she can't get the laundry done and you're willing to step across the threshold and charge 10 bucks an hour to fold laundry, you're having a pain point. But that's your market. You know what the pain point is and you know you can solve it. That's the simplest step towards the cash. Identify your market, know who your customer is, and then you'll get there.

Very good. What have you found is the best way to maximize your customer lifetime value?

You know, honesty. I think that's it. I don't think any honest, any customer ever wants to feel like they're being swindled. And so you may always have to provide value. And value means that you can't offer the same product year after year. And the truth is, is that you have examples of companies that thought that their brand was going to carry them into the future. And one of the biggest ones is Kodak, for example. So Kodak owned the license to digital technology. And what they did is they thought that everybody would always use conventional photography. And what they did is they licensed this digital technology to Samsung. And as we know today, Kodak went bankrupt. And Samsung took the winning court home by recognizing the trends of the future. So what I can tell to you for this is that you always have to be disruptive and you can never rest on your laurels. What served your clients yesterday is not going to serve them tomorrow. So always look towards the future. Don't be scared of change. Because if you're an entrepreneur, it's the only thing you can count on.

I know there's about a thousand people I can think of right now that need to hear this, so thank you for answering. Wow.

Well, thanks, Mario. It was so fun. And thanks for doing the podcast.

I still have a few more questions. I was just there.

I thought you were just being nice.

No, no, I'm being serious. I know about it. I literally was thinking of people for that part. That's cool, though.

All right, Rebecca, so I want to ask you about books. What is the best book you could recommend that's made an impact on your.

You know, I am a huge fan of the Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper. It was one of those quick reads that changed the way that I looked at how to start a business, and I think that's a great one. And then, you know, and then the corny kind of book that surprisingly changed my way of the view of the world was the Secret. And I know it sounds totally strange, and I'm not a big believer in all of that stuff, but what it did really emphasize for me was that if you can visualize it, you can make it happen and. Or put it out there and aim your intentions to your goal as opposed to focusing on all the negativity around you. And it may come true, it may not come true tomorrow, it may take five years, it may take 10. But the truth is, it's your perspective in life that if you get up focusing on the negative, you'll attract more negative. But if you can get up and focus on the positive, one day that positive will come back to you. That took me a long time, a long time to believe when starting a company because so many things always went wrong.

So where can they find you?

So I currently am the managing director, U.S. markets for Salt, for Rialto International. So they can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Facebook. I would prefer not to give my email out, but there's ways to connect with me. I would suggest that you do that. And I am also launching an international society to focus on nurse innovators called Sons, which is S O N S I E L to keep this conversation going. So you'll find me also with Sonciel and driving this conversation forward. So pretty much any healthcare conference that you see coming up, I'll probably be at. And I look forward to meeting you. And please don't be shy. We all started somewhere and my story is no different than those people who are listening to this. I started at the bottom. I was absolutely a community college teacher, a nurse. I had three little kids. There is absolutely nothing different about where I was than anybody else out here. And, and I think that's the most amazing thing. I saw a study the other day that 75% of millionaires in the United States, which are not like, I don't consider myself part of that realm, but they were all self made, 75%. So they all started at the bottom two. So just because you're down and out on your luck doesn't mean that you're not going to climb to the top. Just keep that vision in the head and you'll be there.

Well, I'm glad you were able to share. It has been an absolute pleasure. It was good seeing you again. For anyone that is listening to this, I can tell you she's as awesome in person as she is on camera. We had the pleasure of shooting a commercial in New York together and for Sirius. Reach out to her. She's awesome and you should get to know her too. So Rebecca, thank you again. It's been great having you and look forward to connecting further.

Thanks Mario everyone. Good luck. Keep up to your dreams.

All right, Expert Authority World, that's it. Another great episode. We'll see you on the next one. Have a great day and God bless. You're already successful. You've worked hard to get where you are. We both know it wasn't overnight and hasn't always been easy. No doubt you're the expert on your subject matter, but do your prospects in your marketplace think of you first as their go to trusted advisor all the time. ExpertAuthorityChecklist.com is 100% free and reveals the 21 steps to determine if your prospects view you as the expert and authority of your marketplace or if it's just all in your mind important required steps like do you have a process in place for prospects to self identify if they qualify for your time and expertise or not? Does your current offer have the seven components of an irresistible offer required to make it a no brainer for your prospects? Do you have a real life paperback book showcasing you as the subject matter expert you can actually hand someone? Get your free Checklist now@expertauthoritychecklist.com Once again expert of Checklist to make sure you have the 21 steps covered. It better not be more, but don't leave those one or two things you may have missing go any longer. Visit expertauthoritychecklist.com and make sure you're being seen as the expert in authority today. Once Again, that's expert authoritychecklist.com get your copy now. Spare change? How's that going to make a difference? I know that's what I thought before I started investing with Acorns, throwing change in a jar is not very leverage and time consuming. But what about all the transactions you don't use cash for? You know, like majority, Acorns not only invest your spare change automatically with roundups, it also lets you add a preset amount to each transaction. Regardless, it's pretty inspiring to see how quickly and easily you can end up with a pile of cash instead A pile of receipts. Get started simply and easily today@eainterviews.com Acorns Once again, that's eainterviews.com Acorns thanks for listening to the episode. I hope you got a lot of value out of it. Let's continue the conversation over in the community expertauthorityworld.com we can have discussions, talk about the episodes, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Once again, expertauthorityworld. Com.