Ep.91/ From a Toxic Work Environment to Changing Health Care Benefits: Colleen Kavanagh of SoulBeing
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“I said ‘why did I do this’? Why did I leave my job?” Colleen Kavanagh opens up about ditching corporate to bet on herself! She’s a mom to two toddlers and two rescue dogs, an entrepreneur for social good and CEO of digital health benefit company, SoulBeing, a children's book author, and visionary of a world where the best idea + the best execution wins every time. She discusses the challenges of starting her own business, toxic work environments, facing obstacles in corporate America, and she offers advice for entrepreneurs. Colleen emphasizes the importance of overcoming fear when starting something new and highlights the significance of clarity in achieving goals.
She reflects on her transition from a corporate career to entrepreneurship after becoming a mother, citing a pivotal moment where she felt underestimated in her previous workplace. Colleen discusses how a toxic workplace led her to prioritize her values and make a change. She shares insights into the struggles and triumphs of building a successful, people-centric company that supports working moms.
In this episode you will learn:
Handling the defining moment in your career that changes your entire life (4:45)
Why it took almost 10 years to escape a toxic work environment (and how to do it much faster) (10:20)
Building a corporate culture that is truly people-centric, supports parents, and why it is not only "nice to have" but sustainably profitable to do so (13:35)
Advice for starting your own business (21:36)
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Starting a business can be a scary and bumpy ride.
Colleen Kavanagh is a mom to two toddlers and two rescue dogs, an entrepreneur for social good and CEO of digital health benefit company, SoulBeing, a children's book author, and visionary of a world where the best idea + the best execution wins every time. She discusses the challenges of starting her own business, facing obstacles in corporate America, and offering advice for entrepreneurs. Colleen emphasizes the importance of overcoming fear when starting something new and highlights the significance of clarity in achieving goals.
She reflects on her transition from a corporate career to entrepreneurship after becoming a mother, citing a pivotal moment where she felt underestimated in her previous workplace. Colleen discusses the toxicity she experienced in her corporate environment and the eventual realization that led her to prioritize her values and make a change. She shares insights into the struggles and triumphs of building a successful, people-centric company that supports working moms.
Plus she shares a humorous parenting moment involving breast milk at work.
In this episode you will learn:
Handling the defining moment in your career that changes your entire life (4:45)
Why it took almost 10 years to escape a toxic work environment (and how to do it much faster) (10:20)
Building a corporate culture that is truly people-centric, supports parents, and why it is not only "nice to have" but sustainably profitable to do so (13:35)
Advice for starting your own business (21:36)
Quotes from our guest:
“Create a life that you love, but also and maybe more importantly, learn to love the creating.”
“We know that when we go to Google, we're going to find the provider that's best at SEO, not the provider that's best fit for meeting your health needs.”
“Start now. You're never going to feel ready. It's never going to be the perfect time. If you have an idea and a passion, start today. Start small, start big, just start.”
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COLLEEN’S LINKS:
Follow Soul Being on Instagram
Colleen (00:02):
Instead, I spent the next 12 months crying most days saying, why did I leave my job? I have no income.
Kim (00:08):
CEO of Digital Health Benefit Company, Soul Being Colleen Kavanagh joins us. She talks about the challenges of starting her own business, being underestimated in corporate America and her best advice for other entrepreneurs. Oh, she also adds an embarrassing parenting moment at work involving breast milk. I love a good embarrassing moment.
(00:30):
Welcome to the Exit interview with Kim Rittberg. Do you work for yourself and want to supercharge your business while still having fun? Well, this is your go-to podcast part MBA Part Cheer Squad. Every week I'll be joined by top business owners who share the secrets to their success. After I found myself working during childbirth true story, I quit my executive media job to bet on myself fighting the fear and imposter syndrome to eventually earn six awards, an in-demand speaking career and features in Fast Company and Business Insider. Now I'm here to celebrate all you rock stars betting on yourself and I want to help you win. Tune in every Wednesday to hear from remarkable founders and don't miss our Solo Friday episodes, a treasure trove of video and podcasting mini masterclasses with me. Exit the Grind, enter success on your own terms. Don't forget to subscribe today and grab my free video tips at my website, kimrittberg.com.
(01:31):
One thing I really appreciated from our upcoming guest is her candor, the fear of starting something and sometimes the beginning is very bumpy. I always think, and I actually gave a keynote on this about fear that the fear is what holds us back. And of course sometimes your fears come true. Sometimes things do go wrong in the beginning, in the middle, later, but when you have that clarity about what you want to do and that it's really the direction you want to go in, it really helps you fight through that. I think the clarity is one of those things that really, really helps and more about Colleen is I loved hearing from her about her path, the problem she faced in corporate America despite being a high achiever and now how she's building a successful company and mom friendly.
(02:17):
Alright, let's jump into it. We are going to be talking to Colleen Kavanagh, a mom to two toddlers and two rescue dogs, an entrepreneur for social good and CEO of digital health benefit company, Soul Being. She's also a children's book author and visionary of our world where the best idea and the best execution wins every time she lives in coastal Maine with her partner Matt and their little crew where they're renovating a 1912 carriage house while living in it. I'm so jealous. Wait, am I jealous? Is it hard to live? I think actually the carriage house sounds amazing, but then the renovation sounds hard. Oh
Colleen (02:47):
Yeah, it's a little bit of both. I would say it's 80% wonderful and 20% headaches, but we are enjoying the ride.
Kim (02:53):
I love it. I want to hear all about what got you to start soul being, what was the at which you're like, I'm done with corporate, this is it for me.
Colleen (03:02):
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it was like most of us have a series of events over a long time, but I worked for 10 years in my previous corporate career. I worked for a large conglomerate company in the healthcare space and I was really focused on hospital-based clients, so I was traveling a ton. I lived in five different cities in six years and I really embraced and enjoyed that lifestyle throughout my twenties, but as it does for most of us, that began to shift. I met my husband, I wanted to be closer to my family and really start planting roots while this was all going on, there was a lot going on the corporate side too. It's an old historic company that I worked for. It has a lot of antiquated ideas and systems in place and although I will always caveat this by saying the people I worked with were brilliant and kind and well-intended and incredible advocates for our clients, there was just an environment there that became pretty toxic for me for a number of reasons.
(04:02):
And when I ultimately had my daughter in 2018, at the end of 2018, it really changed my perspective and my priorities and made me see how I envisioned work as a part of my life in a very different way because now I had a different source of purpose and I wasn't fully identifying myself with my career. It shifted a lot for me, but really also ultimately gave me the courage to say, if I'm going to be working 60, 70, 80 hour weeks, what impact do I really want to be making? So I will always be so grateful to my daughter for that gift of clarity that maybe I had just been too blind or too distracted to see for quite a long time before she came along.
Kim (04:45):
Tell me about that moment. I read your intake form and I was like, I want to hear from that from Colleen. Talk to me about a moment when you're talking to a colleague and they're talking about the future leaders of the business. Tell me a little bit about that.
Colleen (04:59):
Yeah, there was one kind of defining moment. There were a few defining moments, but one that really sticks out in my mind was a conversation I was having with a superior who I had an immense respect for. We had an incredible collegiate relationship. He was a mentor to me in many ways, and we were just casually chatting at this event that I had largely put together for some of our clients, and it was a super successful event. We were kind of wrapping up toward the end of the night and talking about careers and talking about our team and honestly really talking about just how grateful we all were for each other. And he called out two of my male colleagues who I'm still very close friends with, and they were my peers at the time, and he said, these two guys, they're going to be our future leaders.
(05:44):
I can't wait to see what they do with this business someday. And I was so taken aback because these were peers of mine that I was consistently outperforming at the time. And it just struck me that even this leader that I had grown so close to and had such respect for and I thought saw me clearly still was not seeing past my gender to really fully embrace my full contribution to the team. And it felt like a slap across the face honestly, because if I wasn't proving myself day in and day out to this person who I thought was my fiercest advocate, then I wasn't making the impact that I thought I was. And that really led me to question a lot of things and helped to open my eyes to other things that I think I had been ignoring for a long time that were going on in the institution.
Kim (06:34):
Institution. From that moment where you realized you were not being seen as a future leader, even though you were actually a good worker and doing well, how long did it take you from that moment to leave
Colleen (06:46):
Years? Probably I think probably two or three years before I actually made the leap, but it certainly helped plant the seeds of doubt that this was where I wanted to spend my life making a difference and made me question really how I had outsourced my own value to others to validate me and to make me feel like I was worthy for so long. So this one throwaway interaction that this person probably has no recollection of, really sat with me and helped me reshape the role that I wanted work in general and also this specific career to play in my life.
Kim (07:29):
Okay. So you walk away from that moment and you start rethinking your career, so you rethought it and you now have a new map. What's your new mantra after that?
Colleen (07:38):
New mantra? Probably there's a couple that I like to live by. I would say the one that I think of most goes something along the lines of create a life that you love, but also and maybe more importantly, learn to love the creating. So not only are you taking steps intentionally every day toward building the life that you want, and I look around me right now and I'm so grateful and in awe that I get to have this life that I've been able to create this life. But also I think what has led to that gratitude is really embracing the process of getting there, the journey of making it happen in all of its messiness and chaos because as any mom or parent listening to this knows there is a lot of chaos and it might look smooth in retrospect and you can tell a good story, but when you're living it, it feels like a mess and that can be hard to love if you're like me.
Kim (08:33):
Yeah, it's funny. I think one thing I've always been good at actually is not knowing where it was leading. I never saw myself as a super hierarchical career, but it does increase a little bit of the anxiety. Where do you see yourself in five years? I'm like, well, continuing to do work that I like, continuing to have some flexibility in my schedule, having time for my kids and everything else. I don't know, having some creative, having some business, I don't know. And so I do know, I'm like, okay, I want to have impact and ownership. That's something I know. I'm like, I want to have impact, however that plays itself out and I want to have ownership. I spent a lot of years of my career. I was a writer and producer for tv, and so a lot of times my job, I'm doing a good job if I am basically a great puppeteer for someone else.
(09:18):
So now at this stage of my life, I want to be able to use my own voice and have projects that are like mine. So those are the two things that have been driving my professional in the last several years. But it does create a little bit OFX anxiety because people are like, what's your goal in five years? I'm like, I don't know. I'm speaking more now. That's fun. If I keep doing that, that's cool. If I keep having more clients and doing what I'm doing now, great. But it becomes harder when you don't have that hierarchical goal.
Colleen (09:42):
It's harder, but it's so powerful because it allows you the flexibility to evolve. Whereas if you have this really rigid idea of this is what the next five years looks like and this is what success is going to look like at this time, you're not allowing yourself room for growth and you're not allowing yourself the ability to make a pivot when it comes along because you're so laser focused on an outcome rather than the experience.
Kim (10:06):
Yeah, definitely. I mean, both my parents, my dad's an immigrant, but both my parents did a lot of travel and I did a lot of travel, and I think that once you sort of embrace the, I don't know where next week or next year will take me, that kind of mindset is less rigid. And so that's definitely served me. Okay, so I want to talk to you. I want you to tell our listeners, I know it took you 10 years to escape a toxic work environment. How could our listeners do so faster?
Colleen (10:31):
Yeah, I think it's all about self-trust, and I did some reflection on this recently and I've been thinking a lot about self-trust and as recently as yesterday, because my daughter's now five and she's been saying for about a year that she's been wanting to get her ears pierced. And I've had this idea in my mind that she's just too young to make that permanent of a decision about her body, and I had to do some real soul searching over the past couple months because she hasn't stopped asking for it. And what I realized, and it was such a profound realization from such a simple life moment, but I realized that I was having trouble teaching her to trust herself because I still am learning to trust myself. And if we can teach our kids that from such a young age so that they have that powerful sense of their intuition and the tools to listen to themselves, I think that that is the key to extricating ourselves from any bad situation, whether it's a job, a relationship, a party, a date.
(11:32):
I can't tell you how many dates I sat through before I met my husband where I was like, this is the worst. And yet I sat there for an hour and a half, finished the dinner and went home and cried. And I could have saved myself a lot of time and money in tears by just saying, nice to meet you, but nope, this is not going to continue. But I think that the ability to develop those skills of self-trust and I think they are skills could have served me so much better, so much earlier because I knew I had this inkling from very early, from those first weeks. Another quick story I remember from my first weeks at this job, so freshly graduated from college, moved from Boston to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for this job. And it was in the first two weeks of training that a female leader in the company was giving us a training.
(12:24):
And most of my training class were young females. We did have some males, but it was heavily female. And she looked around the room and she said to all the ladies in the room, I encourage you to get a fake engagement ring unless you want to get hit on all day. And I kind of just remember looking around at everyone else thinking that this was a joke. This has got to be a practical joke. This is not corporate America. This is not how things work. We are not living in the fifties. But I found out that this was the beginning of what would be a very long and deep experience of corporate sexism that I would be facing. And again, this is a woman I respect to this day. She's well intended. She's trying to work within a system that is not built for us and do her best to protect us, but moments like that were not rare. And every single one of them was another reminder to me that this is probably not the right place for you because it just made my skin prickle. I had all of those physical, emotional, mental signs that this isn't right for me, and yet I prioritize this external idea of what success is over my own gut feeling.
Kim (13:35):
Yeah, totally. Talk to me about soul being what it does and about building the corporate culture. I love. One of the things I love is your all about supporting moms. And not only is it good to people, it's good for your business. So tell me a little bit about the company and all of that.
Colleen (13:51):
Yeah, so Soul being is a network of complimentary and alternative medicine providers. We operate as a healthcare benefit, so we supplement a health plan and fill in on the gaps in coverage that many health plans have. We have 60 different services within our network and they're all evidence-based medicine. So some of the services that we cover are things like acupuncture, chiropractic care, naturopathic doctors, functional medicine doctors, nutrition and diet support, and then all sorts of mental and behavioral health categories, lots of talk therapy, couples therapy, family counseling, and some more alternative approaches as well. So again, a very inclusive model so that people have a lot of different healthcare options, but also all evidence-based and outcomes oriented. So a tiny bit of background, the reason that this came to be after my corporate careers, because I was spending all day every day in hospitals, mostly in the areas of the hospital where patients go when they're sickest because of my imaging background.
(14:48):
So I was spending my days in cardiology oncology, and I learned really early on in my corporate career that over 70% of the people that we're treating in our hospitals today are there with completely preventable illnesses. So that statistic is staggering. It's only gone up since then. And it shows that there's a real systemic issue here, right? This isn't an individual issue. There is something about the way that we've built our healthcare system and educated our society about health and barriers that we have put in place that are not in place in other countries of the world that have made it really hard to be well and live in America. So another theme here, the seed was planted early that Oh wow, I personally having lots of heart disease in my family, cancer, obesity, mental health, depression, anxiety, what are the steps that I can personally take first to ensure that I'm doing everything I can to not end up in the position of the patients that I'm treating.
(15:51):
And then I was also moving around from city to city with this job, and every time I moved, I had to find a new network of care providers to help support this. And I realized how difficult that is even for someone who works in healthcare to navigate this complimentary and alternative care market that's not standardized and not regulated. And today still the number one way that people are finding these services are going to Google. And we know that when we go to Google, we're going to find the provider that's best at SEO, not the provider that's best fit for meeting your health needs. So the problem had cemented itself in my brain a long time ago, and then when I did make the ultimate transition out of my corporate career into entrepreneurship, spurred by my daughter and a few other things that were happening at the time, I just said, this is what needs to be solved.
(16:39):
And I took my healthcare knowledge and I ran with it at full speed. But knowing, again, something that was incredibly important to me was building this foundation and this culture that was supportive of women and specifically supportive of moms because I was as a new mom in my old career, running into roadblock after roadblock that were preventing me from doing a good job and being a good mom. And I was like, this is not sustainable. We need careers and companies that are going to embrace the fullness of moms in all of their glory and all of the strengths that they bring to a career.
Kim (17:15):
I like to hear the good, bad and the ugly of being a business owner. What's the moment where you wanted to shut the door, cry under your desk and be like, it's over. I hate this.
Colleen (17:24):
Well, the easy answer is Covid. We were about to launch. We were about to go through our commercial launch, which was scheduled for March of 2020, and instead, I spent the next 12 months crying most days saying, why did I leave my job? I have no income. We sell primarily into the HR function and HR leadership. So for a good 18 months, they were a little bit distracted with some other big issues that they were dealing with and not super interested in hearing about a new innovation on the market. So that was early on the moment where I was like, can I do this? Is this going to happen? And there's no glorious story about how that happened. It was just persistence and patience and trusting the process and a lot of really scary days where I was deep in self-doubt and questioning myself. So for that first 12 months, luckily I had a team of family offices that had been our initial founding investors.
(18:22):
They were super supportive Through the process, they actually encouraged me to double down and invest in developing our telehealth platform because we knew that what was happening in the market was swinging heavily virtual. So they actually gave me additional investment to build out technology and delay our product launch. And I could not emphasize enough the gratitude I have for their vision and their support because it would've been very easy for them to say, this market's not the right time. Clearly we couldn't have predicted this. It's not going to happen. But now on the other side of Covid, we have seen such an increased in demand for what we've built because we are positioned with the right telehealth tools to support virtual care and remote workers, which is the future of work is a truly hybrid environment and often a fully remote environment for some companies as well as this real embrace of caring for yourself across all different types of health concerns. So specifically in the mental health area, the removal of that stigma or the lessening of the stigma in the mental health area has opened wide the door for us because employees are knocking on their employer's doors these days and saying, we need more support here and we need different support. Talk therapy is not one size fits all. It's not the best fit for everyone, and there's a lot of other options out there. So we're now reaping the benefits of what was an incredibly challenging period, and I think that's just entrepreneurship in a nutshell. Right?
Kim (19:54):
Absolutely. Okay. I want to do a little rapid fire. Are you ready?
Colleen (19:57):
Awesome.
Kim (19:58):
Okay. An embarrassing parenting moment. It could be working parenting or just parenting, an embarrassing parenting moment.
Colleen (20:03):
I have two that come immediately to mine, one early in my career and one of the last straws of my corporate career was trying to pump in the car while listening in on an informal meeting after the meeting that I had to miss to go pump in my car while my male colleagues were strategizing in a hospital cafeteria. And I'm trying to listen on speakerphone, and I just spilled the milk all over me and I had to go in for another meeting. So just fully covered shoulder to knee in breast milk sobbing. Just an absolute disaster. I think that's kind of a classic new mom in corporate America moment. And just recently we're potty trading my son right now, and last weekend he is taking a dance class and he fully pulled down his pants and pooped on the floor in the middle of dance class to my horror. So I mean, it just never ends. It's just really fun and messy and you have to laugh or you'll cry.
Kim (21:04):
Those are pretty good ones I have to say. Did you say, oh, I just spilled my water, or were you like, this is my breast milk, my shirt?
Colleen (21:09):
Oh, no. Yeah. No, there was no hiding it. I mean, they knew what I was doing. I was coming back in for the next meeting. Yeah. Yep. They knew.
Kim (21:16):
Okay. Keeping up with the rapid fire, what does success mean to you?
Colleen (21:20):
Oh, it's changed so much. I would say that success to me today is living life on my own terms and being able to define what a great day looks like on a day-to-day basis, and not holding myself to any external standards.
Kim (21:36):
Love that. What's your best advice for someone else starting their own business?
Colleen (21:40):
Start now. You're never going to feel ready. It's never going to be the perfect time if your kids are young, if your kids are old, if you're not having kids, it doesn't matter. If you have an idea and a passion, start today. Start small, start big, just start.
Kim (21:55):
Oh, I love that. Just start. Okay. Thank you so much. This is such a great chat. Where can people find you?
Colleen (22:00):
Best place to find us is on our website. It's www.soulbeing.com, S-O-U-L-B-E-I-N-G. There's a contact us form there if you want to learn more about our work. And we are on all the socials as well. Instagram and LinkedIn, probably most heavily our Instagram is Soul Being Wellness.
Kim (22:18):
Awesome. Thank you so much. And if you like the exit interview with Kim Rittberg, this very podcast, please screenshot it and tag me on social at Kim Rittberg, R-I-T-T-B-E-R-G, or email me. And don't forget, if you want to be featured on the show, shoot me a note. You can submit it into kimrittberg.com/podcast. You could submit your story and I'd love to feature you on it. And while you're there, grab my free download, 10 tips to Making video that Grows your Business.
Kim (22:49):
Thank you for joining us. Don't forget to exit the grind and enter success on your own terms. This is the exit interview with Kim Rittberg. Don't forget to grab my free download, how to Grow Your Business with Amazing video at kimrittberg.com and linked out in the show notes. I love to hear your feedback. Make sure to submit to me what you learned from the show and how you are crushing it on your own terms. Connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn at Kim Rittberg, R-I-T-T-B-E-R-G. And this show is edited by Jillian Grover and produced by Henry Street Media. I'm your host and executive producer, Kim Rittberg.