Founder's Story
Transition from Corporate Exec to Empowered Entrepreneur & Transform Your Future with Erika Glenn | Ep. 184
Sun, 09 Mar 2025
We sit down with Erika Glenn, an award-winning C-suite growth and healthcare executive, sought-after keynote speaker, and business consultant who is also the CEO and founder of Glenn Professional Services. Erika shares her journey, transitioning from a secure corporate role to building a scalable business, with her TEDx talk at over 500k views. Her insights on personal branding, strategic leadership, and embracing technology are invaluable for any entrepreneur seeking to transform their career and reclaim their life.Topics We Cover:• Transitioning from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship• The inspiration behind building a powerful personal brand• Overcoming the fear of leaving a guaranteed paycheck for entrepreneurship• Practical strategies for scaling a business with a clear vision and empowered team• The importance of mentorship, communication, and tailored go-to-market strategies• How technology and AI drive operational efficiency and innovation• Lessons learned from decades of experience in diverse industriesKey Takeaways:💡 Investing in your personal brand provides a competitive edge and a safety net during transitions.💡 Overcoming fear is essential—focus on your strengths and learn from your mistakes.💡 A clear strategic roadmap, including effective mentorship and process optimization, is crucial for sustainable growth.💡 Technology and AI are transformative tools that boost efficiency, creativity, and overall business success.💡 Empowering your team and evolving from a hands-on operator to a visionary leader is key to scaling.Resources & Mentions:• Glenn Professional Services – Expert business consulting and growth strategies• Personal Branding – The importance of building an authentic, differentiating identity• Strategic Mentorship – Leveraging guidance to avoid common pitfalls• AI & Digital Tools – Enhancing business efficiency and innovationConnect with Erika Glenn:📢 Website: https://erika-glenn.com/Our Sponsors:* Check out Avocado Green Mattress: https://www.avocadogreenmattress.com* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Chapter 1: Who is Erika Glenn and what is her professional background?
Hey everyone, welcome back to Founders Story. Today we have Erica Glenn, and Erica, you are an award-winning C-suite growth and healthcare executive, which I'm gonna find really interesting to talk through corporate to business, because that is something I am a big proponent of and have experience as well.
You're also a sought-after keynote speaker and business consultant, co-founder of Glenn Professional Services. Your recent TEDx on YouTube has over 500,000 views, which I've watched it a few times. It's amazing. But Erica, I'm excited to have you on. And I really think it's great to start off with your story and how you went from executive to business owner.
Yeah, so really excited to be here, first of all. So thank you for the opportunity. But I've had a really interesting career, went from a provider system in healthcare to a payer and PBM, and then over to a digital health startup or health tech company. And so in the process of just learning about business and all the things that need to be done in order to make a business successful,
Chapter 2: What challenges does one face when transitioning from corporate to entrepreneurship?
You get to a point where you really just want to branch out on your own and apply those same principles and help others with different problems that they're trying to solve to make their business more successful.
I know it can be really scary going from getting a paycheck guaranteed every two weeks to no guarantee of a paycheck. And I personally also went from working in the corporate environment to then being a business owner. How did you overcome this? And what do you see with other people when they do this transition? Because I think it's a pretty big one.
It's a pretty big jump. Certainly, if you have the opportunity, save ahead of time so that you have a little bit of coverage there because it's going to take a little bit. You need to kind of sit with it and figure out what you're good at, what you can market, and how you go to market to make sure that you're successful.
Chapter 3: Why is personal branding important even when working for others?
It is a thought, I think, that sits in every entrepreneur's mind, but investing in yourself, you'll never lose.
How do you see investing in yourself even when you are working for someone else? Because I think there's this there's this thought that I see many times people are like, OK, when I work for someone else, I don't build my personal brand. I wait till I'm on my own, which I think is a big mistake. And I don't know. Not every employer is OK with it. Some are. Some are not.
But how do you see people throughout their career building up their personal brand and not necessarily waiting until they start a business to do so?
Yeah, about three years ago, I started working with Heather Monahan, who was my executive coach. And I hired her because I wanted a neutral voice in the background. Certainly, you have plenty of coaches and mentors wherever you work, especially when you're an executive. But I wanted somebody that didn't have the bias or the agenda.
And through her, she really pushed me to start with branding more broadly. I will tell you that there are employers that like it and there are employers that don't. I would even go further to say there are certain executives that like it versus the ones that don't. What I will say is even when they don't like it, your brand will come in handy. It'll help you negotiate differently, better.
It helps you level up. People know you when you go out and you're able to help other people in the process. So it brings great candidates to you and it looks good for the business. Whoever you work for,
to have the bigger brand you know the reality is when you work for someone else you could be fired you could be your position could be terminated uh you know things could happen that are totally out of your control um and so having that building that up at least you have something to fall back onto uh
Now, when it comes to pivoting and changing, it can be really hard for people to understand the timing of doing so. Even just making a change from one thing to the next, many times people, you know, they can't let go of something to do that when they need to, when they should. I know you've had a lot of pivotal moments in your life about when you had to change and adapt. Can you go through...
What makes people do this in a successful way?
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Chapter 4: What role do mentorship and coaching play in professional growth?
You've got to be open to risk. And what I've done in my career has been exactly that. I was an IT person turned to sales leader, turned into general manager of managing companies. a $200 million plus P&L and close to a thousand people. The skills didn't necessarily translate, but it allowed for me to take risk while I was still in that corporate type of atmosphere.
I would tell you that last year when I exited CVS and went to Redox, which is the startup, I was not ready to go on my own. I was, you know, Some of the fear probably held me back, but going to a startup and seeing the differences and just really the change and how substantial the change is gave me a lot of confidence that I could go out on my own and do what I do best.
I can relate. Five years ago, I was terminated or my position was terminated and the company asked me to reapply for a new position. And I thought this is the prime time for me to finally leave and 100 percent go on my own. So I feel like sometimes we need to be like pushed or forced.
to do something, because it is hard, right, when you're in that corporate environment, especially at an executive level, to then leave and that fear. When it comes to the misconceptions around scaling and growing a company, or even if you're an employee and you're scaling and growing the company that you work for, what are some of those misconceptions?
Yeah, I think the biggest is people can just go out and sell. Can I go out and sell to one person? Sure. Is it sustainable? Absolutely not. You also have a, you know, it could be one salesperson, it could be 10. Nonetheless, you have to train them. And so it is really, really important that fundamental processes exist.
And systems, I'm not talking about IT systems, but systems are put in place to make sure that you can have repeatable cells over and over again. Otherwise, you're just really, it's a different cell every time you go out. So another is training, I think.
For your executives, anybody that's talking to people, your sales team, anybody messing with a client, there needs to be some sort of process letting them practice. You do not want them practicing on the client themselves. And that way you can also steer, hey, you did really great here, but try these three things.
So it makes them better, but it also makes the presentation and being more buttoned up in a much better light as well.
Wow. I mean, sales is the lifeblood, right? If you don't have sales and you don't have revenue coming in, you could have the most amazing product, but it'll fade into history. When it comes to training and leadership, as you continue to lead more and more people into the thousands, was there something that you had to change within yourself?
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Chapter 5: How can authenticity enhance personal branding?
That is a great call out. And the fact that you can adapt and change and recognize, I don't know if everyone can look deep inside and recognize what they are or are not doing. I think many times, I don't wanna use the word stubborn, but many people are stubborn where they just, whatever they're doing is the right way and they don't change. And that might hold them back in their career.
Sounds like you've had a lot of great mentors. You've had a lot of people to learn, good and bad people to learn from. If somebody is thinking to themselves, you know, I need a mentor or I need a coach, what are some of the things that you look for or how do you even approach somebody for that?
So I remember the very first mentor I had, mentoring wasn't even a thing then. And so it was somebody I respected a lot. I worked with him on projects. He was an executive. And I went to him and I said, hey, I want you to be my mentor. He said, what is that? And I just said, well, you just teach me the business. You teach me, you know, all the things I need to know to run a successful business.
And he said, I'm happy to teach you. But I get here at five o'clock in the morning. This was two hours away from me. So for hours. many months, I would get up to spend a couple days kind of in his presence before everybody came in, just learning from him. It's really about finding somebody that you're working with that can give you feedback.
You have to be open to taking that feedback to do something with it. But making sure that you're ready for that opportunity and willing to show up when it's presented is also important. If you're looking for an executive coach or somebody offline, Again, that's where that brand shows up.
You need to make sure that it's somebody that has been where you're going and also somebody that's compatible with you as a leader and generally so they can help you.
Amazing. I, I'm totally a big proponent of mentorship or hiring a coach, you know, finding someone that can really help up level yourself. Cause it's very hard. Look, it's very hard to look within and see those things, uh, you know, or to just guess what you think you need to do versus somebody who's already had the experience. Um, when it comes to authenticity, as well as personal experiences.
How can people use these when it comes to building their brand and how that brand is perceived by the public?
Yeah, I think If you have nothing else with your brand, and trust me, whether you know it or not, you have a brand. It's really whether you want to control the narrative. But the best thing that you can do is when you do show up in social media or wherever else, you've got to be authentic. Because if you're not, people can tell. If you're just repeating content, if you're
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Chapter 6: What are Erika Glenn's upcoming speaking engagements?
I do agree with you that in a corporate setting, it is not pushed to have a brand. But I will tell you in negotiations for exits and things like that, it's also very important that you have a brand because people don't want you out there talking negatively. And you can negotiate on a much different level and much different terms to help you Be ready to go start your own business.
So now you're doing you're putting yourself out there. You're getting over the fears. Now you just did the TEDx, which it looked amazing. You're speaking all around the world. So what's next for Erica?
So this week I'm headed to Paris to speak on International Women's Day. And then next week I'm headed to Boca Raton to speak with an incredible lineup of speakers just around it being Women's Month. So really excited about both of those engagements and I have a couple podcasts coming up as well as some interviews.
So one of the most important things I feel like is having a good strategy when you are starting, when you're starting something new, when you're entering a new product, entering a new market. I know you have a lot of experience with go-to-market strategies and the things that you've built into the hundreds of millions in a P&L environment.
So when somebody is starting out with that, they have a great idea, product, service, and they're ready to go. What's a good strategy or what have you done where you're like, okay, this is what I always have people do?
From my career, the favorite or my favorite way of doing this, we had a diabetes product or service that we brought to life and we were We had brought in that company to actually sell to our customers. They exited the company and we had to build something.
And so not only were we building something new, we were also selling against the people that had, we had literally like walked into to sit down with the clients. So in that case, I literally took a week away from the business and I sat and kind of gathered all the evidence. I looked at market Intel.
understood the pricing, looked at the products, did comparisons, looked at what is the competition saying about us and how do we go ahead and put that in the sales pitch so that when it's time for it to come out, there's no question to be asked. You've already answered the question. So I essentially spent a week just going through, looking at the product.
I came back with a list of 10 things and I said, you've got to change the product in these 10 ways in order for us to be as successful as we need to be. In addition, I came back with a new pitch. So I worked really closely with marketing. I had said this is not going to work like you're going to have to give me something different. We started from scratch, rewrote it.
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