Board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. Sharon McLaughlin felt alone as a female physician entrepreneur.
Having created a successful skin care line for her private practice, she yearned to connect with other women entrepreneurs, to network and share experiences. Unfortunately, what she found was a ghost town.
So just like any good entrepreneur would do, she went and created her own solution! She is the founder of the popular Facebook group Female Physician Entrepreneurs that has over 6000 members, some of whom I’ve interviewed here on the BootstrapMD podcast.
On this episode, she also shares the trials and tribulations of starting a new business, her new ventures including an online weight loss program, and her consulting company.
Be inspired by her story, and how having a sense of community with like-minded individuals who have mutual goals can be the foundation of something big.
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https://www.facebook.com/groups/FemalePhysicianEntrepreneurs/
– Facebook group Female Physician Entrepreneurs
https://sharonmackwellness.com/
– Sharon Mack Wellness – Whole Body Wellness Blueprint
https://sharonmackmd.com/
– Sharon Mack Consulting
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Hey, guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD. As you know, I love to highlight physician entrepreneurs and especially physician entrepreneur influencers. And today I’m honored to be joined by my friend, Dr. Sharon McLaughlin. She is a New York board certified plastic surgeon turned entrepreneur, she’s been involved in a lot of different projects evolved a skincare line, lingerie line, weight loss wellness program, I guess that’s kind of popular right now, weight loss. And you probably best know, her for the being the founder of the female physician entrepreneurs group, over 6000 members are in this group. They’re networking, and many of my guests have actually been inspired by being in that group. It’s the Facebook group that you’ll definitely want to check out. But without further ado, Sharon, nice to have you on the program today, too.
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
Dr. Mike, thank you so much. I am honored to be here, and you have always inspired me. One of our first talks together, you had talked about being an entrepreneur in medical school. And the thought of that, I was like, I all I did was study, you know? We went out once in awhile but all I did was study. Let alone trying to do entrepreneurship, or thinking outside the box, thinking like there’s more to medicine than just medicine, I can do so many things. So thank you for inspiring us and thank you for all the work that you do in this field. As far as, physicians entrepreneurship, you really have opened our eyes that there’s so many different avenues to go down.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Thank you so much, and you know, I don’t want the spotlight. The spotlight is on you today. But, I do appreciate it and speaking of medical school, you know, I’m not gonna give away my age, but I was in medical school and residency in the 90s. And one of the things that got me motivated, and kept me sane, was listening to music. And I listened to a lot of music that dealt with a lot of female singer songwriters. So my question to you is, how many times have you been mistaken for Sarah McLaughlin?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
More so in the past, because then people like, nothing against Sarah, I’m really sorry. I love your music. But now people are like well, who Sarah McLaughlin? But years ago, absolutely, yes, all the time. And it’s funny that you mentioned medical school and music because one of my favorite outlets was going down to Bleecker Street, and just listening to acoustic music. And I would just like, be lost. And I was like, I don’t want to leave here. I don’t want to go back to reality of all this studying. But it’s something we did.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
It’s something we did. And you know, it kept me sane through the boards and everything like that. But just a little fun question to start off with. So I want to know about your journey. You have a very popular podcast, you’ve interviewed a lot of physician, female entrepreneurs. But how did you get started in this crazy, becoming your own boss business?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
I had never really worked for somebody in private practice, it was always me, myself and I. And I started with skincare and the line really took off. It was just a private label. But it astounded me that you could actually make cash doing things outside of practicing. And then I set up a website as far as shipping, but I’m still shipping. So that was something I always kept in mind. Like it’s nice to have products, but that shipping and yes, you could hire it out. But I even thought back then, what a great thing just to have digital products online. Where that’s all you have to worry about is just you know, automating the system so that when someone purchases, you can download it or it’s kind of like hands off, right? I enjoy medicine very much but I believe that we can do so many different things. And as physicians, especially with the way medicine is right now, a lot of us get burnt out. And I was definitely burnt out. I’m gonna say it started around 2009 and I stayed in it until at least the end of 2011. I started a new job in 2012 with a company reviewing radiology requests, utilization review. But I’d gotten into that and I tell the story before, if you’ve heard it, if you haven’t heard it, I will tell you. I was very busy. I had a young family young daughter, she was sickly when she was first born. And I had a hard time managing everything. I just kept on going and going, I didn’t see an outlet, I didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I just felt like, you know, I was making money and how would I replace this money? At this time truthfully, my loans were paid off. My loans were paid off that first year I was out of medical school. Which was something I’d always promised my dad that I would do. But I just didn’t see any other way out. And then I was approached by the CMO of a hospital I was working at to do utilization quality management review for the hospital. And it was not a paid job, I said yes, because I didn’t know anything. I didn’t want issues with privileges, the hospital where I felt the most comfortable. Like I think most doctors, at least I can answer for myself, there’s always one hospital that just seems to be very special. And this place was special. In more ways than one I was actually born in that hospital. But it just felt like home. It was just a few blocks from where I grew up, and then on top of that it was all the people that I worked with in that hospital, they just made things easy for me. People can make things difficult, they can make it easy. And they went out of their way to make it easy. So when he said can you do this, I felt like I had no choice. I just said “oh, sure”. But I remember walking away and honestly there were tears in my eyes because I was like how am I going to do this? It was just one more thing at the back of the burner to do. So that’s how I actually ended up getting into quality assurance, quality utilization review. And then from there, I started doing consulting work. Honestly, I think at the time, those jobs were easier to get than they are now, lless competition. But I was able to make side income doing that, and it was a great start. And then when I got burned out with my practice, I shifted into that. This job opened up and I just took it. I must say, I didn’t really look into it, it was a stepping stone for me. I didn’t realize at the time, it was a stepping stone. I thought it was the answer to what I was looking for. The salary wasn’t great, but I took it because I felt like there was no way out. And at least I could be at home, and at least I had more stable hours than being on call. I did a lot of emergency room call. A lot of you know, lacerations. And then I did even the most closures which you could say there’s really no emergencies in dermatology. But these weren’t little life distal things. Some of them were and that was great, but others were like 5, 6, 7, at night and then you know you have to wait for OR time and half the nose was gone, or the whole nose was gone. And we’re talking like major reconstruction. You just never knew what you’re gonna get when it comes to MOHS. You could see the patient ahead of time and kind of guess estimate, but by and large it was a very unstable lifestyle. I don’t know if unstable is the word, but it was not planned. It was certainly not a nine to five, and it was always like one day to the next was different. And that definitely caused a lot of anxiety, especially with childcare, I never had a live in nanny, nor did I want one. So started from there, and then it just grew.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Just so I have the time line right, so you closed your practice?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
At that time. No, it didn’t.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Oh you still had it up, but you had to at least reduce your hours right?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
That’s correct. I tried to move more into skincare. I know that you can make money off of that. I did a lot of Botox and the injectables, to me that was like easy work. But I didn’t find it as rewarding, I have to be honest with you. I actually enjoy doing the reconstructive surgery. I enjoyed, you know, people that truly what I thought needed my help and that is what I was trained to do. And I think injectables are absolutely great, but they just weren’t challenging enough for me, they didn’t sustain me.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So you had your family at the time? And are you the only breadwinner of the family, or your husband also?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
Now he’s does pretty good, he’s a CRNA. Here in New York, can’t account for the rest of the country but, high twos, very high twos, like close to three for his salary. He always did extra overtime.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Okay, so and supporting you on this career transition?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
Not at all, Mike.Not at all. 100% not at all. We had a really bad marriage at that point. We were fighting a lot, and I remember talking with one of my girlfriends, Marjorie, if you’re listening, Dr. Reed. She said to me, “You know, Sharon he married a plastic surgeon.” and I was like, “but this is my life, Marge”. You know, I don’t get this I as long as I contribute financially, what difference does it make isn’t about me and being happy and I felt like I had to answer to people when I stepped away. And you know, my parents were deceased at the time. I don’t know what they would have said, but I know my sisters and we’ve had this discussion. Why, why why? Why are you doing this all this training? I don’t understand. And I was like, it’s not up to you to understand it is up to me to understand. And that was really a hard time in my life. I’m a cancer survivor. I think that was harder for me. You know, going through this transition was harder for me than going through the treatments.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Wow. So sorry to interrupt, just wanted to get an idea where you were at.
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
No, I do bounce around a lot and I slowly transition. But you know, here I am talking about burnout. But I had a full time job doing the utilization review, but I just couldn’t give away that practice just yet,. It’s something that we had worked so hard for, and I just wanted to, like, touch it somehow, you know, just keep it. But I realized that, you know, I was burnt out and I needed to let that go. So maybe finding the injectables not challenging enough was just an excuse just to let it go. I’m not sure. But I did let it go. It took a while though. I’ve always done wellness, though. That’s why I’m doing the weight loss now. But going through burnout, I think wellness is so important overall. And I know we hear a lot about physician wellness. So much so, especially when it comes from administrators, it’s hard because they’re not walking in our footsteps, right? But overall, whether if we’re physicians or people outside of medicine, we don’t take care of ourselves as Americans, and that’s why we have so many chronic diseases. So education has always been important to me. I’ve done blogs throughout the years, had a YouTube channel that I’ve done here and there, I’m more consistent with it now. But that was how I continued my practice, even though I didn’t really require malpractice at all, and it wasn’t in practicing seeing patients. But educating the public has always been important to me.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So you’re doing utilization review, you eventually did close that part of your practice. When did your entrepreneurship juices start flowing?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
Even in my practice though, because I was doing the skincare, then scar lines, right, like we knew about silicone gel sheets, and I found a manufacturing plant down in Texas that would do that for me. So I private labeled that. So that was good. I started doing my own line, actually. I manufactured me own skincare line for a while. But when I gave up the practice that went with it, because I was just like, I don’t want to inventory and at that point I was burnt, just nothing. But when I did do that, when I stepped away from the practice, the lingerie line actually came to be. So I ended up with double mastectomies, and trying to find lingerie that actually fit appropriately was really hard. So this is how this all came to be, as far as designing the lingerie line. I live close to New York City. So there was the fashion district, I have no design experience whatsoever. But I was determined to do it. I basically started Googling online designed, some protocols had it made, had the prototype made. And then I had it manufactured in Brooklyn, actually. And that did okay, but again, it was really hard to market. It was like fun, there was some interest, but I certainly didn’t throw myself into it. And I just kept on going back to what I was making as a physician. And my husband was not supportive. So, but I can’t blame in all honesty, I can’t blame this on him. It was just I myself felt like I need to contribute more. I wasn’t sure if we were going to get divorced or not. And I definitely needed a financial out, like I needed my own money.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, how are we today? What are we doing now?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
Still utilization review, I took a job with the state plan in New York State. And I’ve been doing that, it’ll be seven years in January. And so I’m able to work from home. Definitely better stable lifestyle, marriage is better, daughter’s doing good. And it still allows me opportunity to do some more entrepreneurship. Hence the start of the Facebook group, because I felt like I just needed those creative juices like you mentioned. The best thing to do, is to be around people that are going and doing, and didn’t have that in my life. So I felt like if I needed that maybe we can inspire each other.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
When did you actually start the group? And how did how did that evolve? Did you just say, I’m going to start up a Facebook group? Or did you have some entrepreneur friends and say, hey, let’s get together? How did it all get started?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
I just remember being in a Facebook group and saying like, this is all about like husbands. At that point, I was like, I want to talk about business, and I couldn’t find it at all. I didn’t know about Nisha made group, this group actually, Nisha had started her group long before I did or had this idea. I didn’t know about hers, had I jumped into hers maybe I never would have thought about the group. But wanted one space for physician, female physicians because they, I felt like I could relate to them the most, as far as burnout goes, and then doing other things. I think I was always creative, this is why I went into plastic surgery. So I had the idea, I had reached out to a couple of people. They said this is good. You know, I started Googling people actually. I googled female physician entrepreneurs. And the first one that popped up was Cheryl Ross. So I sent her an email, I said, Would you be interested in joining a Facebook group? I didn’t even know her. And she didn’t know me. And she said, Okay, put me in the group. And that’s I honestly started Googling physician names. And that’s how this it was word of mouth. And honestly, it wasn’t like it just started and boomed. People added, people out of their friends, but it was quiet and crickets. And I’m gonna say this, for months, I felt like it was quiet and crickets. I just was like posting every day, there wasn’t much engagement at all. And then slowly, like, we’re talking months, it started increasing. I don’t know if I ever thought about giving up. But I did scratch my head like, nobody’s talking here and there’s no engagement. Is this even worth persisting? But I saw the numbers were going up, so I just kept with it. And you know, it’s like anything else, you just have to keep with it. And I tried all different things, different articles. At the time, I don’t think we were we weren’t dinged as much for posting outside of Facebook. So I would like to find articles and forums, and I would talk about that, and what are your thoughts on that and, you know, ink.com, and success. And then find some entepreneurs and share their story, and then certainly promote within the group, you know, a lot of networking. The group is about discussion, but with so many people in the group, it’s not like a pitch fest, either. We do networking threads, we’re actually going to do a networking call tomorrow, where we kind of introduce ourselves, talk about our business for a couple of minutes, and then present a problem. You know, this was it was someone else’s idea in the group, not mine, I had wanted to do an entrepreneurship panel, we’re doing panels now in the group. And I just didn’t know how to bring that about. Our last one, I’m just going to tell you, our first one, I figured it was good to get started off with, it was all about intimacy and sex. And is that a discussion most of us have and as female physicians, some of us may feel, like how can we talk about those things? We should know those things, but you know, definitely infidelity and just problems, in the bedroom. So there were some specialists with expertise, and our group got them together, it was a great panel. Next week will be about physician burnout, but the panels will be related to things that, you know whether they’re social or things that we see in the group. So the panels started, that’s something that I’ve added to the group. But this all came about just because honestly, it’s election week, everyone’s so stressed. There’s some mindful groups as it is, so like what can I possibly add to my group? I’m always thinking, pivoting, trying to think of different things that will work. And honestly, some don’t work and others do. But you just keep on going and you try different things. So that’s what we’re going to do tomorrow, like a networking session where we introduce ourselves, talk about our business and then present a problem. Like, I’m having a problem with this, and then kind of brainstorm. It’s like a brainstorming session.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So election week, I didn’t even know. What are the big issues that female physician entrepreneurs have that we may not be aware of?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
I don’t know if they’re any different than the male, to be honest with you. I think, this is my own biased opinion, I still think that women are the primary caretakers of the children within the home, regardless of what the husband is doing. I could speak for myself, I see it. So then there lies the problem because there’s that guilt feeling, like, do you leave the kids, do your business, there’s no time to do a side business? And all I can say to that is just only takes 15 minutes a day, just take some time, map out what you want. That is the most important thing, is to have direction and outline. Because if you don’t, if you just sit down, and we know this was social media, we’re going to post on social media just we sit down and try to do it. Right? Your brain is a total blank, you don’t know what to post. But if you planned it out ahead of time, it’s the same thing with a business plan, if you plan it out ahead of time, you know what to do. And if you don’t do it, then there’s a question like, well, why isn’t this happening?
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Do you think that, and I agree with that because you know, they have an extra burden or extra responsibility of raising the family, childcare, etc. But I do sympathize with you in terms of, what does the family think you know about this? I had the same thing, I was not as rbrave as you. I didn’t even tell my mom until like a year later that I was leaving medicine. But, you know, luckily, I did have a supportive spouse. But you think it’s harder being a woman? Telling your husband versus, vice versa?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
I’m gonna say no to that, I don’t think so. But I will tell you, the ones that have a supportive spouse do better. I see it, there’s no studies that I know of to support this. But the people that are really excelling in the group, and I’m sure you see it, too, they have supportive spouses. And people that have fighting spouses, it makes it that much more difficult. And I’m not just talking about my husband, Bob. Just like in general. If you compare the two groups, there must be something to be said for that. Whether the home life itself feels more comfortable, and you’re just you have the support, and you just like oo, go, go, let’s go. Or you’re just kind of on your own, even though you’re married and trying to do this alone, it makes it harder for sure. But I’m not so sure that there’s difference between a male and a female. In general, I think that men are more out to try different things are more risk takers. That being said, I know the numbers are more equivalent now in medicine. Men are typically more the breadwinner, more male physicians, at least in the past. So their opportunity to even step away from medicine being the breadwinner is more difficult, right? Because they’re the breadwinner. So then what other job is going to replace their current salary?
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Do you think that the new graduates now, the younger generation, they’re more open for looking into entrepreneurship, as opposed to you know, older doctors?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
I definitely think so. You know, when I was younger, I would have like, early 30s, I used to see entrepreneurship in medicine, and it was the nurses. And I always wondered why physicians didn’t do that. I like at least the ones I was coming across. They would do home care, like pharmacy delivery, they did a lot of different things. They were involved in so much, even doing like the satellite, where they’re doing EKGs and trying to do contracts with the police, the local police. And I always wonderd, but then I was thinking, you know, maybe they have like a set salary doesn’t go much higher than that? So they want to try different things? Where the physicians are already at a higher salary. And it wasn’t until last 10 years, or whatever it is that I see definitely more physicians doing it. And it probably has to do with physician burnout, they’re burned out. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. And it’s like kind of a means to an end, like how do I do this now? The whole idea about fire and, you know, retiring, at least practicing medicine on your own terms, rather than being told what to do.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. I do think they do tend to be more open. But, you know, unfortunately, with medical school loans, you know, a lot higher than when you and I had back in the day, you know, it certainly is a big obstacle to climb. In terms of, building a business, what type of businesses are doctors in your group doing? Different types of business? Consulting? Where do they tend do go? Or is it akll over the place?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
It’s all over the place. But recently, there is a huge push to do coaching, a huge push. And I believe that’s because we’re healers. So when we see someone that’s down or sick or needs help, we want to heal them, we want to help them. And this is where coaching comes into play. There are a lot of coaches in the group. And recently it didn’t start off that way years ago. Definitely a lot of network marketing, I believe because it’s safe. It’s low income, like it’s a low cost to get into, right. And so there’s a lot of that, and then all different things. Wellness is huge as well, but I think that’s like inbred in physicians, wellness feels very comfortable to me. I hired a mentor back in the spring. And he’s very good with, you know, digital selling online. And he said to me, what do you want to do? And I honestly at the time was like, I could do like an entrepreneurship and be like the next Amy Porterfield. I was thinking that honestly, like, if I could push myself, that’s what I would do. But I always go back to wellness, because it’s something I feel comfortable with, even though I’m not integrative medicine or lifestyle medicine. It is like I could just read an article like skim it and like I understand it, where I can’t do that with, you know, digital marketing, it just is not natural to me. It’s something that is a learning curve. And I don’t feel that way with wellness. So as far as physicians go, something that’s related to what you’re already doing, and just maybe making, honestly, physicians like to teach. Informational products, I’m always going to push those digital products, because they’re easy to get started. Low cost, however you need, you need a following. So it’s either going to be organic traffic, or you’re going to do paid traffic. It’s a good idea and you just don’t come up with the idea and don’t try to sell it, test it test it with your friends. Test it with people that maybe are on Facebook groups, just try it. But we, as physicians, we like to teach, we know so much. If you have an idea, just try kind of outlining it and putting it into a course and see what happens.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yep, you gotta learn how to market. You could be the best coach, you could be Tony Robbins, but you know,if you got a one person email list nobody’s gonna hear you. So those are the skills like it or not, we got to learn, you know, social media, building a list, those are all things that for any type of business you’re going to need to learn. You mentioned one thing that, I thought was really interesting, is that you, you love medicine, you know that you still love medicine. Me as well, as someone who left medicine and then came back, you know, that was my first love. As I wrote in my book, you know how to love medicine again. But a lot of doctors go into entrepreneurship, because they don’t love it or something happened, they want to get out of it. What do you see? And again, in terms of your group, what do you see in terms of like success? And I’ll tell you what I see. But in terms of success of their business, do you see those who just want to do something else? Do you think they they tend to be more or less successful than those who still have that love?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
I believe that we follow our path. Right? So I for me, that one is hard to generalize, I believe that some people, like have incorporated their medical practice, they’re still practicing. And their job, their side job is very similar, although differently. Like somebody’s been working in the emergency room, but they’re still doing wellness, and those types of people do very well. Where others have given up medicine. But I believe it was more out of necessity. There’s some people in our group as I’m sure yours, they admit to being suicidal. And at that point, that’s like a dead end. Where do you go from there? You can’t. Do you know what I mean? It’s a dead end, that choice was basically made for you, your body made that choice for you. So yeah, I know, I’m not exactly answering your question.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
No, it’s good. I’m thinking in terms of, all the entrepreneurs what I call “want-repreneurs”, and not to be derogatory, but they’re surely people who want to start businesses and for whatever reason, they’re just not ready to, to go into that direction. I often see people who just want to escape from something. I don’t think entrepreneurship is necessarily the first thing that you want to gravitate to, is what I usually tell people. Just like yourself, find a job that can pay the bills, find something different. And then explore it. Because as you know, entrepreneurship, it’s not the most stable business, stable line of work, that you can do, and it’s certainly not for everybody.
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
No, there’s a lot of ups and downs, there’s definitely anxiety, like it depends on why you feel burnt out. There’s no magic button, right? We talked about this all the time, it’s going to require work. So where are you going to make the time? I think some of the people have done really well, when they’ve left medicine, because they have the time they have time to devote. But if you’re leaving with, you know, questions like I’m not sure…I don’t know, then it’s very hard to dive right into entrepreneurship and throw yourself into that business, because you have to believe in the product or your service. Otherwise, if you don’t believe in it, 100% if you’re not able to fully dive into it, how could you expect others to buy the product? Right? They’re not going to because, and I’m not really into this stuff, you know, but I do believe that there is energy out there. Like what you portray. You feel confident? Great. But if you don’t people know, and it’s very hard to sell. When it comes to selling online, if that’s what you’re going to do, it’s videos. You need to be able to sell, which means getting in front of the camera and talking about it. So if you don’t feel 100% that’s a problem.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, I totally agree. You know, I think we come to this conclusion, that the people who’ve done well, it’s because they love doing it. They enjoy it. You know, for myself, I love creating things. I love marketing. I don’t love getting on the phone and trying to sell something, that’s not my skill, but it is something that I have to learn to do. Or at least if I have employees to learn how to do it, it’s part of it. But it just comes with it. You know, in medicine, we don’t love 100% of everything. There’s things that we love, things we don’t love but overall if we enjoy what we’re doing, we should go and do that. But I still see some people who want the “get rich quick”. They see ads and I want to do that. I want to be the next Uber, I want to be the next, you know, Zuckerberg, whatever. Yeah, more power to you, but it’s just like anything you know, when we went into become a doctor, we didn’t say hey, I want to become a doctor and then you know, open somebody up the next day, right? We had to go through training. And then same with entrepreneurship. I like what you’re doing in terms of networking, where you have your more experienced entrepreneurs, and you’ve got someone who can learn from them or mentor them. And that’s, that’s the one thing that, I listened to you on previous podcasts and you mention it here is, you know, one of the reasons why you started the group was because you felt alone, correct? When you were going through entrepreneurship journey?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
Absolutely, there wasn’t a lot of support. Even though I have friends in medicine, they weren’t interested in entrepreneurship. They’re fine with it practices, fine working for a hospital system. They had no interest in doing something else. But if you surround yourself with people that are doing what you want to do, it makes it that much easier. I’m not saying you need to leave medicine, there’s ways to add ancillary practices, we have one of the physicians in the group that talks about that often, you guys don’t need to leave medicine, you just need to, you know, leverage what you already know. And start using some ancillary services. So that’s an option. But like Dr. Mike said, there is definitely no push the button, it’s going to require work. And if you feel like you’re burnt out already, then it’s really hard to throw that energy in because there’s just no energy left, right? Like you’re already like, the cup is empty. So it really goes back to working on yourself wellness, taking care of yourself, and kind of just thinking it out being in no rush. It will come and believing it will come.
You’ve done conferences. And for this reason, people should go to Dr. Mike’s conference. No, I’m not pushing it just for that. It’s important, because it’s not until you don’t know what you don’t know. And if you’re in a world where, I’m not happy, you don’t know what else is out there, because all you’re thinking about is being unhappy right now and how life sucks. But when you see other people succeeding and being happy doing what they truly enjoy, you can say yourself, well, they can do it, I can do it. I hope that you never feel like oh, they’re doing it and I’m kind of spiteful or jealous. Like look at somebody else and say, Yeah, they’re doing it, let them be the role model for you. If they can do it, you can do it. You’ve done so much with your life, you can figure this out. And if it’s not by yourself, and you hire a coach, or you hire other people, or you just start reaching out to people. These networking groups are great, because it’s a great way to see what other people are doing. But there’s nothing stopping you from reaching out.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, perfect, or Google them just as you did. And just as a side too, I love to have a conference. Unfortunately, folks have been asking. Nothing for 2020. But we’ll see what happens in 2021. But I want to segue to you talked about working on yourself, working on your wellness. You have a wellness program, can you tell us more about it?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
This is something I’ve been working on for a couple years. But the website, probably when I was just turning 50 it was cool, like weight loss and women over 50. And I just had the domain, I started the website and it just stayed there. I didn’t do anything with it. And then I had, well Covid came, and I really had a hard time with that. And I had some extra time. And I said you know I really want to do this. I reassess every once in a while. So in 2020 came that was like there was something on the back burner that I wanted to work on. And I was able to lose weight. And this was back last year at this time, actually, it was able to lose I had already lost weight. I’ve kept it off like over 20 pounds, which doesn’t seem like a lot for some people. But for me it was a lot. It was those pounds, are they put on during menopause, is it getting older? I’m not sure. And I had struggled to lose weight, I couldn’t do it. I tried all different things. And it was really a matter of just eating healthy, but it was more than, mindset too. So the wellness program that I created, it is a combination of nutrition, because I that’s like the most important thing. There’s some exercise, which is important but definitely not like the nutrition. And then it really goes into mindset. I actually do a guided meditation as far as weight loss goes. And then I do it’s self care as well. Importance of sleep and we go into other things as well, you know, other factors as well. But it is a whole body approach to losing weight. Not terribly expensive. You can say oh my goodness, why are you doing this? It’s it’s $29, I didn’t want to sell it to physicians. To me that wasn’t my target audience, it was a matter of having it affordable to everyone. So we’re actually getting together to put the pages together, the sales page and everything, around two o’clock today. So I’ll let you know how that goes. It’s for sale now, but I’m not happy with the sales pages, I just did it, I just throw it up there because I’m ready to sell it. But um, yeah, so you can find out more about that at SharonMackwellness.com. And then you’ll see that the sales pages will change in the next week or so.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
And how do we spell that is that?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
Yeah, it’s SharonMackWellness.com.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Awesome. Awesome. Well, this has been a tremendous half hour that we spent together. We’re going to go outside of the wellness, where can we go to contact you or tell us more about your group. Where can we go to learn more about that?
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
I actually started a another website. I have like five of them right now. So what I did was, I know you guys, what it did was it’s called Sharon Mack m-a-c-k because most people can pronounce McLaughlin. md. I didn’t spell check it at all. I was just putting it together last night. It’s one page going down, but it has all the links out to like the Facebook groups that I have. And so you could find out more about that at SharonMackmd.com. And the female physician entrepreneurs, the Facebook group, Female Physician Entrepreneurs group.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
You can find that on Facebook, Dr. Sarah McLaughlin, I mean, Sharon! Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for helping spread the word of physician entrepreneurship, and keep inspiring others. It’s been amazing to be friends with you over this time in it. It’s been a pleasure interviewing you today.
Dr. Sharon McLaughlin
And to my thanks so much for having me on. And really thank you so much for inspiring all of us.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Thanks again. And thanks, everybody. Remember, if you’re not if you’re stuck, there’s more opportunities for networking. There’s people who have had the same problems that you do, you just need to go out and reach out to them. Go on to Dr. Sharon’s group and just get inspired. The one thing you want to do is stop staying stagnant. You just got to keep moving forward.