Salome Schillack (00:00):

Welcome to episode number 106 of The Shine Show. Today's episode, I interview someone who I have the world of admiration for. Dr. Una shared inside of the TRIBE Mastermind that I'm a member of. Her success in her last launch showcasing her students' success. So she literally launched her program by bringing on her students and having them share their knowledge and share their experience. And I'm going to have her tell the story.

So let me introduce Dr. Una to you. Dr. Una is a pediatrician, a business coach, a podcaster and founder of Ivy league Pediatrics in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Over the last decade, her practice has thrived. It's been voted Best of Gwinnett for six years in a row and rated five star by over 300 patients. While building this, she developed a love for entrepreneurship and has since built many other successful businesses. Like many doctors, Dr. Una was ignorant, scared, and felt like an imposter when she started out in business because she was trying to be a great clinician, not an entrepreneur.

Over the years, she's learned that the two do not need to be mutually exclusive. So she embraced both worlds. And as a result, she's able to enjoy the practice of medicine, develop her other interests. And best of all, not miss time with her family. Armed with the wealth of knowledge and depth of research, she founded EntreMD. This is an organization with a singular mission of helping 80,000 doctors create financial freedom by building profitable businesses. She does this through the EntreMD Podcast and the EntreMD Business School. And I am honored to present to you my interview with the fabulous Dr. Una. Enjoy.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show.

Dr. Una, thank you so much for coming on The Shine Show today.

Dr. Una (02:53):

I am so excited to be here. I'm feeling like a celebrity.

Salome Schillack (02:59):

I'm very glad. Thank you very much for that compliment. You and I are both in Stu McLaren's TRIBE Mastermind and I heard you tell a story of an accidental launch that gave me goosebumps. And I was like, I have to have you on to come and tell the story of the accidental launch. But before we dive into that, can you just share a little bit of who you are and how you make a difference in the world? You make a lot of differences in the world with people, but tell us a bit about yourself, please.

Dr. Una (03:31):

Well thank you for saying that. And if I may, I was in a group two days ago and someone was like, "Oh my goodness. I fired my Facebook ad agency and I took this course and I have been killing it on Facebook." It was your course. I was like, "Yes. And I know her and I'm going to message her." It was so cool. I'm just saying, you're making a change in the world too. Big change.

Salome Schillack (04:01):

Thank you for saying that. Now I'm going to go on a hunt for that student. Oh, thank you so much. There is nothing that warms my heart like hearing stories like that because I know Facebook ads can be a minefield. We got to teach more people, we got to get more people to do great launches.

Dr. Una (04:19):

And that's your zone of genius and I appreciate that you've owned it and that you're changing the world with it because it's like rocket science to me. I'm just like, "Well, she's a genius because I don't know what that is." But anyway, so, I'm Dr. Una. I am a pediatrician by training and my mission and my business came out of a pain that I had. Because I finished with my training, I worked for about 15 months, I went to start my own practice and it was with the concept of hang the shingle and they will come. And I hung the shingle and they did not come. I realized that my medical education did nothing to train me for business, nothing at all.

So in the beginning I was a super shy, introverted and all the things that would make a business work were things I didn't want to do. I thought I couldn't do. I thought people who had big businesses were doing well because they're better than me. As opposed to knowing they just know something I don't know and they're doing it. So somewhere along the line, I figured it out that, wait a minute, I'm just missing business skills and they're skills and they're learnable. And I started learning business style working. It became fun. It became like a game. And then I was like, wait a minute. There are many Dr. Unas out there who are having the hardest time with business and they think is just because they can't. I'm static. This is who I am. This is a problem I have. And I'm like, no, you just are missing some key skills and if you learn these skills, you can do all I can everybody else.

And that's when I founded EntreMD and I started helping physicians learn to build profitable businesses so they can have freedom to live life and practice medicine on their terms. So, that's my story.

Salome Schillack (06:21):

I love it. And so needed. I don't know if you know my little experience with physicians. I used to be a pharmaceutical rep. So this is my backstory. I used to go around and sit down with you all and talk about all sorts of... I'm sure you've had your fair share of pharmaceutical rep conversations. So I know, especially for the women, the importance of building those successful practices that takes them away from having to be the person seeing every single patient every single day and having their income rely on seeing patients. So this is such a needed thing. That's fantastic. So you learned the skills and then you started EntreMD?

Dr. Una (07:08):

Yes. EntreMD. So entrepreneurial MD.

Salome Schillack (07:11):

MD. Love it.

Dr. Una (07:12):

That's where the name came from.

Salome Schillack (07:13):

All right. So tell me all about how you started it and how you accidentally created a massively successful launch.

Dr. Una (07:22):

So I love that you're asking these questions because when we look at the highlight reel of an entrepreneur it's like, I made a decision and then I'd registered my business and then I lived happily ever after. It really doesn't work that way. From your laughter, people should go, "Yeah, that's not how that works." So I started off, I was like, okay, yes, I'll do this thing. And I was like, okay, what do I do? I've helped some people set up practices and other businesses. So I'm like, well I'll do some one-on-one coaching consulting type stuff. And so I did that and I was like, yeah but if I really want to make a dent, because I want to make a dent, my [inaudible 00:08:03] is I want to help 80,000 doctors figure this stuff out.

I was like, you can't do that one-to-one. And so I'm like, okay, so why don't we host a meetup. And I do this meet up. You hear meetup, it's like 100 people showed up. It was six doctors. And I was like, well, we have six, it's one-to-one. And then so we did that. And then after that I was like, well, why don't we do an event? So I did my first official event, was 50 doctors who came from nine states and all that. And that's when we became a thing. We're now kind of official.

Salome Schillack (08:40):

Sorry, when was this?

Dr. Una (08:42):

This was in 2018. So this is about three years ago.

Salome Schillack (08:47):

And this isn't an in-person event?

Dr. Una (08:49):

Yeah. Pre-COVID.

Salome Schillack (08:50):

Yeah, Pre-COVID.

Dr. Una (08:51):

It was in person, that was so much fun. And that's when I launched my first program and all of that stuff, I loved it. We got amazing results. But it was 12 weeks. And after 12 weeks it's like, "Bye guys." And it hurt me because I'm like, no, all the successes we just created are nothing but a stepping stone for the next thing. And that's when I started toying with the idea of something that's more long-lasting where you can experience success but then you can build on that and build on that. And that's when I launched the EntreMD Business School. So it's a membership type model and you start here and you're going all the way here and it's so much fun and it gets such crazy results. It's so good.

Now, so my accidental launch was this. I had no plans of launching. We had started the school. I had some students in there. But I obsess, as you probably do, when it comes to my class, I obsess over them. How can I get them more wins? How can I help them overcome self-limiting beliefs? How can I help them overcome objections? And I was like, these doctors, they're building businesses, but they don't realize how brilliant they are. They don't realize how much what they do is needed. They don't realize how cool they are. And I'm like, what can I do to help them have a paradigm shift? What can I do to have them completely change their minds about who they are and have such expansion that they can't go back? And I was like, yeah. So I had this idea. I was like, I am going to host an event and I'm not going to be the speaker, they're going to be the speakers.

I was like, they'll be the speakers. So I'm like, "Hey guys, guess what?" They're like, "Oh yeah, we're excited. But we're nervous because if you're excited, we shouldn't be nervous." I was like, "We're going to do an events. It's called the EntreMD Business School Expo and you guys are going to be the speakers. Everybody's going to have their 10, 15 minutes slot." And it was like, we're going to put you on the stage. It was virtual, but we're going to put you on the stage and you're going to show off your brilliance. And you're never going to be the same.

As an entrepreneur, and I teach this to all my students, I'm like, when you go out to speak, you're speaking for transformation. But you have to have a call to action because you don't want to just inspire people and leave them. And the best way you serve your people is by bringing them into your world so you can serve them. And so after I came up with this idea, I was like, wait a minute. Well, when I'm done with all that, what's my call to action? I was like, I'll just open the school for enrollment, no biggie. I'm not going to push it too much. And that's what it would be.

And so we did a few training sessions. We did some mock talks and I gave feedback and all of that and they killed it. I was in tears all three days. We had 21 of them speak. And people are like, "Oh my gosh, you're amazing." Some of them got new clients from it. The group was on fire because they're like, "I did not know I was in the midst of all of these amazing doctors." Because everybody got to hear everybody's story and what they did and I was in tears. I was in tears. It was so good.

Salome Schillack (12:17):

There's so much I want to unpack there. But I just want to say, isn't it just incredible to just give someone else that little bit of a push, that little bit of just a facilitation, and then seeing them find it inside themselves and then seeing them step into it and own it. And what I love so much about this is how these women were already in a community, but like you say, they didn't know they were amongst such incredible other people and you just had to bring it out in them. And you raised the bar for everyone else because now everyone else is going, "Well, if I'm hanging out with these incredible women, I must be as incredible as they are. So, wow."

Dr. Una (13:12):

It was good. And part of the amazing thing is you could see from, okay, we're going to do an expo and this is my mock talk, to what they did on stage. It's like everybody could see everybody else's transformation. It was beautiful.

Salome Schillack (13:29):

That is an incredible gift that you have. That is an incredible gift that you have to be able to identify that and then facilitate it and take it from idea all the way through to life change. That is phenomenal. And, okay, so the women they were your students and you had them speak at the expo. And how did you fill the room? Because the other women, were they already members of your membership? You said you decided to sell the membership at the end so how did you fill the room?

Dr. Una (14:07):

So they're not all women there are some men.

Salome Schillack (14:09):

Okay, sorry.

Dr. Una (14:10):

Yeah. It's mostly women, but there are some men as well. So what I did was I spread the word on Facebook, Instagram. So social media, I did a lot of that.

Salome Schillack (14:19):

And by spreading the word, it was all organic. It was [crosstalk 00:14:23].

Dr. Una (14:22):

It was all organic. I was about to say that. I had a senior presentation, so I hadn't done the $5 Facebook ad strategy. Okay. People, if you're thinking about Facebook, you just need to work with her. She has all this stuff. So I hadn't seen that yet. So I did it organically and I had them share about it as well. I'm like, you're speakers, go spread the word. We had about 200 doctors sign up for it and they came on live and it was amazing.

So it was all organic. And of course it was an experiment in a way. It wasn't that I anticipated that they may not do a good job or anything like that. Because again, these are phenomenal physicians, but we hadn't done it before. So I was like, I know what they're going to do. This is going to be amazing. But we'll probably do it on a much bigger scale the next time we do it.

Salome Schillack (15:18):

Oh, I can't wait for that one.

Dr. Una (15:20):

Yeah. I would have done your Facebook ad strategy by then.

Salome Schillack (15:24):

But I love that you were able to tap into the genius of these other doctors, but you were also able to tap into their networks, which is another really cool strategy that anyone who's just starting out... What is so magic for me about this is you said you started with six and that very first meeting you thought you were going to get hundreds, you got six. And I am willing to bet you served your ass off for those six.

Dr. Una (15:52):

I always serve whoever is in front of me because I'm very clear that in whoever is in front of me is all the people I want. So I never serve six differently than I'll serve 100, ever. Because they're the people who are going to go out and say, "The next time you should be here." They're the ones who are going to get wins and go tell other people, "I worked with her and this is a win I got." I serve now as I would, if I were serving 80,000.

Salome Schillack (16:22):

Absolutely. And there's the abundance mindset where you know it starts here and you know it starts with giving. That's amazing. Once you had the expo and you casually had the call to action for the membership, how did that go?

Dr. Una (16:40):

So it was the easiest launch I never planned to have because I didn't have to say anything. The doctors who had come to the event were like, "Wait a minute. You mean I could be classmates with these amazing people?" Sometimes if I talk or you talk, people are like, of course, because this is your thing. But there's a beauty in hearing somebody say, "I didn't even believe I could start a business and I just got my first clients." Because sometimes the million dollar theme people can identify with that. So they're just like, well, good for you. But when someone else's like, "Oh, I launched my practice and this is what my first day was like." Or someone else was like, "I was comfy. I thought I was okay and I realized, wait a minute, I can scale what I have." Then different people identify with that.

So without intending to do that, the 21 speakers were just saying, "Come join us." So once I said, "We're open, we'll be open for a few days." Then the docs came in. We had 20, 23 new doctors join the business school and a fantastic group of doctors, it was such an amazing addition. So at the end of the day, the business school was so much better because of the expo.

Salome Schillack (18:10):

Yeah. And I love that you established this safe space, this beautiful community for them, even before they came into your membership, before they became students. They already felt like they belonged and they already felt like this is my tribe. This is where I want to be in and this is who I want to be in and this is how I want to show up. Whereas for a lot of us that work starts the day people purchase our memberships or our courses because now we have to establish that community. But you already had that established because you used the people who were the examples of how you show up. That's brilliant.

Dr. Una (18:49):

I wish I could say I thought of that. I thought it'd be a good idea. And that's the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship is one foot in front of the other. When you take action, you never know what's going to happen on the other side of it. And that's exactly what happened. People think it was totally planned out. I was going to have a launch. Nothing like that, nothing at all.

Salome Schillack (19:10):

Yeah. That's funny that you say that. I was having a conversation with my students about this, the context in which we were talking about this was hiring team members. And I said to them, "It's the same thing. It's you set out with an intention to get a specific skillset or a specific experience or values or person. What you end up with is usually not exactly what you wanted, but the beauty is in taking the best of the applicants that you get and then going, 'Well, maybe I have 90% of what I wanted, but I also have this 50% of something else that this beautiful human brings in and how can this help me grow?'" And it's just the same principle being applied in different ways over and over.

Once you had your students coming and they were part of your community, it's a membership, right? So is there a start and a stop, or?

Dr. Una (20:08):

So we recommend at least a year, but there's no stop. There are many people who are not going anywhere after a year.

Salome Schillack (20:13):

Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic.

Dr. Una (20:15):

Again and it's all because I tried the 12 week model. I didn't like it. I tried a few of those and I'm like, we'll just leave this. And there will be people like me who are like, "There's more and I want to experience more."

Salome Schillack (20:29):

Yeah. Awesome. How are you launching it again next time? What are you going to do that's the same? What are you going to do that's different?

Dr. Una (20:37):

Do we say who knows?

Salome Schillack (20:41):

Well, yes, you can.

Dr. Una (20:42):

Who knows? But the expo I am going to do again and that's regardless of launching, because it's beautiful to see people morph into the next level of themselves. It's just a beautiful thing to see. And so I'm going to do that again. But I have done the launch that's primarily an email sequence type of launch. I really love live events, live masterclasses, webinars, all of that stuff. So I would do a number of those things. I haven't done a lot of Facebook ads. A lot of the things I've done have been organic.

Salome Schillack (21:21):

Yeah. Well, you've done so well with it that I'm confident you'll continue to do really well with it. And I wanted to have you on because you haven't run ads because I want people to see that you can have success without ads as well. And that's coming from a Facebook ads manager. But there are ways to do this.

Dr. Una, where can anyone who wants to learn more about your business, who wants to learn more about you, where can they find out more?

Dr. Una (21:48):

So they're already on a podcast app of some sorts.

Salome Schillack (21:53):

Yes.

Dr. Una (21:53):

So I have a podcast, it's called the EntreMD Podcast. So E-N-T-R-E-M-D, EntreMD Podcast. And so of course they can go listen, subscribe, rate. That would be awesome. And then everything else would be from my website entremd.com.

Salome Schillack (22:10):

That's fantastic. And we are going to link to all of that.

Before I let you go, I want you to leave us with one thing that you want to say to anyone who's just starting out, who's thinking about launching and who is just getting ready. And what would you say to someone who's trying to find what you unlock so well inside themselves?

Dr. Una (22:37):

Well, I would say this. A lot of times, we're in tune with what we consider as deficiencies. I'm shy. I'm an introvert. I can't speak. I can't rise. I'm not even sure if my idea. I'm not sure anybody will pay for my idea. And the truth of the matter is none of that is true. None of that is true. You are here on this earth to solve a problem. And that problem you solve is the framework for your business. So just start putting one foot in front of the other. You don't have to figure it all out. It's fine to do it messy. It's fine to do it scared. It's fine to do it when you think others are looking at you weird. It's fine. Just start. And every day commit to get a little better, not a lot better, just a little better and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And if you would do that in six months, in a year, you'll be shocked where you find yourself. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I'm not. I'm not the most confident person. I'm not the person who can plan the most. I currently don't even have a ten-year plan or anything like that. And that's okay. But start. My zone of genius is taking action. And by taking action, I overcome all my limitations.

Salome Schillack (24:02):

I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you so much for telling us your story. And if you are an MD or a doctor or a physician and you're looking to build a business, then I want to strongly encourage you to go and follow Dr. Una and learn from her. Thank you so much for sharing your magic with us.

Dr. Una (24:21):

Thank you for having me. This was a treat.

Salome Schillack (24:23):

You're welcome.

Well, wasn't that just inspirational? I loved talking to Dr. Una about her successful online course launches. And if creating a successful online course launches matters to you, then I want to invite you to sign up for the wait list for The Launch Lounge. The Launch Lounge is our membership where we teach you how to profitably launch your online courses and scale those online course launches to six figures without hiring an ads manager. We're opening the doors to The Launch Lounge on the 29th of July. And if you sign up for the wait list there will be goodies. So you can either go to wherever you're listening, tap the link in my bio, or you can go to shineandsucceed.com/TLLwaitlist. That stands for The Launch Lounge. TLL wait list. I can't wait to see you next week. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.