This week on the HIPAA Vault Show, we talk with Serena Mastin. Serena’s life journey has been marked by incredible resilience and determination, as she overcame numerous obstacles to achieve success both personally and professionally. Serena shares the valuable entrepreneurial lessons she learned along the way and how she’s been able to use her experience to empower others.
Transcript:
Adam
Hello and welcome to the HIPAA Vault Show. I’m thrilled to have with us today Serena Mastin, an extraordinary entrepreneur, author, and speaker. Serena’s life journey has been marked by incredible resilience and determination as she has overcome numerous obstacles to achieve success, both personally and professionally. From a very difficult upbringing to experiencing homelessness and the devastating loss of her husband, Serena’s story is one of triumph over adversity. And today we’re going to delve into Serena’s experiences, the valuable lessons she’s learnt along the way and how she’s been able to use her experiences to empower others. We hope you enjoy the show. And welcome to the HIPAA Vault podcast. Thank you all for listening and watching for joining us and welcome Serena Mastin.
Serena
Thank you so much for having me. I’m honored and humbled, so thank you.
Adam
Yeah, it’s great to have you. When were doing a little bit of upfront research on yourself and Pulse marketing, the first question I asked was, would our listeners have something to benefit from having you on the show? And my initial reaction was, like, here on the podcast, we typically focus on HIPAA healthcare technology and we often spend a lot of time on informing our listeners about the latest trends in security, healthcare and stuff. But I also really want our listeners to get some inspiration from time to time. Right? And I think our discussion today, hopefully will provide a little bit of that. So just diving right into it, starting out a little bit with your background and journey. So your life has been filled with tremendous challenges, from child abuse to addiction and homelessness. Could you maybe touch a little bit on that and tell us a little bit about how you found the strength to overcome all these obstacles that you faced in your earlier life and create a successful career for yourself?
Serena
Well, the interesting thing about pain is that a lot of people try to kind of run the other direction and life is filled with it. There’s always challenges, there’s always pain, it’s always in front of us in some way. And what I learned at a very young age from some of the pretty explicit traumatic events that I experienced is that the only way to push past it is to push through it sometimes to my demise. Right. I push through the pain. And at times I felt like I just wanted to get to the top of the mountain and be at the top and just be cheering, like, look at me, I did it. And what I recognized is that the truth in your journey, the truth in your experience and your wisdom is gained in every step when you climb the mountain. And so whether your journey has been just filled with tumultuous situations or rocks falling down at you or you’re sweating and bleeding on the way up, a lot of us try to just get past it.
Serena
And instead, embracing some of those challenges and moments and understanding how they impact our behavior, how they impact our lives and our choices and our decisions will give you a sense of self awareness to continue forward. So I like to call it post traumatic wisdom. So through all of my challenges, I had this underlying determination to keep going. So, yes, I’ve faced homelessness when I was 16, sexual abuse as a child, as well as many types of abuse. And then most recently, after starting the agency in 2013, I was building the agency and my husband was overseeing sales, and I was kind of doing everything else. And were growing. We had been pretty successful, but he struggled with mental health issues, suicidal tendencies, and multiple infidelities. And when you’re trying to manage a business and you’re trying to grow a family, it’s like every aspect of your life is impacted by some of those things.
Serena
And so when I finally found the courage to take care of myself, my health, my well being, in October of 2019, by March of 2020, he committed suicide. So not only did it impact me individually, not only as a person, an entrepreneur, it impacted my family, our children, and our staff. So were together for ten years by this point. The agency had been in business for about seven or eight years. And one of the things I learned from that experience is that creating a culture in which your staff are growing, thriving and love what they do when I was at my lowest, when I just could not see past my tears, they were the ones that rose up and carried the agency forward. And that’s why we are still standing today. So it’s all about culture and investing in people and understanding that your mental health and your well being are a huge part of every single thing that you do, whether it’s personal or professional.
Adam
Wow, thank you for sharing that. It’s really inspiring to hear about what you’ve been through and then, as you said, the rocks that have been flying your way and the boulders that have been flying your way.
Serena
Boulders, yeah.
Adam
So, yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. And you mentioned that you founded Pulse Marketing, and it was in 2013, I believe, right?
Serena
Yes.
Adam
It’s been going from strength to strength. It’s become an award winning agency. Could you tell us a little bit about so you mentioned seven, eight years ago, what inspired you to start your own business and what have been some of the factors leading to the success of the agency?
Serena
I was in corporate in large Fortune 500 companies and running 20 different marketing departments and divisions and doing all those things. And one thing I recognized and was really frustrating for me in the corporate world is that you serve one master and you don’t have the ability to keep everything in one place. We had to hire multiple different types of agencies, whether they’re digital, SEO, Web, creative and everything was losing the consistency, and it wasn’t cohesive. And so I wanted to create an experience for different companies that could actually have everything in one place. And so that’s when we created this fractional marketing department approach. So we can do the brand, we can create the messaging, which is the foundation of who you are as a company. We can build the website with the same tone, make sure that any type of advertising or social media, et cetera, all has a cohesive feel.
Serena
And serving small to mid sized companies has been so much more rewarding because we get to be part of their growth, like their growth, and watching them rise up and hire new employees. We’re making an impact on the community, and that’s what makes us so passionate about what we do.
Adam
That’s fantastic. And you’re also an author. You’re a speaker. As well as being an entrepreneur on the speaker front, you touch upon a lot of subjects like business growth, leadership, cultivating healthy business culture. Can you share some insights as to how your core values impact that and impact the success and failures of businesses in general?
Serena
So I’ve learned that your core values are not something that you just put on the wall. They’re not something that you just say in a meeting. This is something you live and you breathe every day. So one of our core values is we serve others before ourselves. And we don’t just deliver that type of experience for our customers and our clients. We actually deliver that same experience to our partners and our employees. And in serving nonprofits, we know that when you serve others, that’s how you develop strong, lasting relationships. So that would be one of them. Another one is, because we’re pulse marketing, we kind of found a fun way to tie in our hearts. So we pour our hearts into everything we do. That’s another one. And then we also have one that is we embrace feedback and we communicate with luv. And luv is an acronym.
Serena
It’s L-U-V for listen, understand and validate. Now, the cool thing about all of these cultural beliefs is we have something called a crush of the month. So in our Monday meetings, each of our team members will recognize someone and tie it into the cultural belief. And then the person who has the most at the end of the month becomes our crush of the month, and they’re crushing it, right? And then even bigger. What we do is, at the end of the week, each of my employees, none of the managers, but each of my employees receive anonymous survey. And they’re asked not to vote for themselves, but to vote for somebody else in the organization that has demonstrated one of our core values. No one sees those results except for me. At the end of the year, the person who received the most recognition will receive a trip anywhere around the world.
Adam
Wow.
Serena
Yeah. So we do that because it really encourages peer to peer recognition, not upper management recognition. So it allows them to start to not have to feel like they’re climbing the ladder to get above someone else, but they’re actually climbing it together.
Adam
That’s awesome. I really like that. And a little bit to pivot a little bit towards our listeners being mainly within the healthcare industry, and you touched a little bit on fractional marketing earlier. Could you maybe give an example of well, first of all, a bit more about fractional marketing. What’s the approach there? And then how healthcare companies can use it specifically? Because I know that you’ve worked with, I think, some med spa clients in the past that maybe do have a footprint within the healthcare yeah, we medical.
Serena
Billing, cardiology wellness, all of those things.
Adam
How can those types of startups or businesses specifically benefit from the fractional marketing approach?
Serena
Well, it’s tough to be in some of those businesses because the competition is so vast. And when you’re starting up even a smaller mid size office and you’re trying to gain new patients and go through that process, you can’t really afford to bring in a graphic designer, a marketing manager, to someone to actually nurture your existing patients and then create new campaigns to get potentially new leads. So the reason we’ve done it as a fractional marketing agency is so that if you can’t afford to have annual salary for a marketing manager and outsource to all these different designers and web people, we’ve created this. Fractional service where they can purchase a certain number of hours per month. And then our entire team, basically, they have access to our content designers, our graphic designers, our writers. They have the access to our intelligence team, which oversees your web, email, social media, and digital campaigns.
Serena
And then they have a personal director of projects that oversees everything. And so the beautiful thing is you have access to all of this for less than a fraction of the cost of hiring a marketing manager. And you don’t have to worry about the training. You already have experts in each of those areas. And then we serve and support you as if we’re an extension of your team.
Adam
Yeah. And for our listeners and viewers, for more information on that type of service that Serena and Pulse Marketing offer, you can visit pulsemarketingteam.com. Did I get that right?
Serena
You did.
Adam
Okay, awesome. Yeah. And then just a little bit more on that. And I know for healthcare specifically, fractional marketing seems to play in here specifically because I know that in the areas when it comes to case studying, case studies, and content writing, there’s a lot of nuance and subtlety that goes into that because you can’t mention patients or without, obviously, permission. And so a lot goes into that. So it sounds like fractional marketing would be ideal there because you get a specialist for that.
Serena
Yes, so the challenge with a lot of whether you’re launching new medical devices or you’re starting a new medical office, whatever it may be, there’s so many obstacles and red tape that a lot of younger individuals just coming into the industry wouldn’t know. So having an entire team of experts in a lot of these different areas allows us to collaborate and provide recommendations, insight and making sure that we’re following these guidelines instead of finding out the hard way when you’re bringing in someone that may know enough to be dangerous.
Adam
Absolutely. Yeah. So be sure to check out Serena and Pulse marketing team at that website. Moving on a little bit to your recently published memoir, exciting Times for you. Exposed: You Can’t Heal When You Hide. It delves into your personal journey and the healing process. Can you tell us a bit more about the book?
Serena
Okay, well, I hope that anyone listening is sitting down. So as a child, my biological father was a leader of a satanic cult and he brainwashed my mother. He sexually abused my sister and I. And when we did finally get out of that scenario, were put into witness protection. So even starting your life in some of those scenarios is hard enough. And then I made it harder later on in life because of all the trauma, the mental health issues, dissociation. All of that then led to a rebellious behavior as a teenager, which is why I was living on the streets at 16. And of course that led to even more tumultuous situations. And so after I climbed the corporate ladder and felt like I was on top of the mountain, started the agency, and then I saw my world crumbling again, I recognized that there’s patterns, there’s these integral patterns that we are shaped by from when we’re children.
Serena
And I started writing the book really just to heal. I wasn’t intending to share it with the world. And by the way, it’s explicit, it’s raw, it’s transparent, it brings you into every experience that I’ve faced. And so in writing it, I wrote it in that way. And what I recognized as I was writing it is that my pattern is I have a tendency to hide. I either am hiding behind the scenes, I’m hiding literally as a child in the closet, or I’m hiding behind being strong and being strong all the time and trying to carry the world on my shoulders and trying to protect everyone and sacrificing myself for others. And I recognize all these patterns evolved around hiding. And so I needed to find the courage to actually face my fear and to stop hiding. And by doing that, I published the book just a few months ago.
Serena
So it’s brand new and it’s scary that all of my deep, dark secrets are now in front of the world.
Adam
How does it feel? Is it relief?
Serena
There’s a part of me that has relief that it’s done because it was a two year process writing. And I’m not a writer. I had to learn. I had to hire a book coach to kind of understand the process. So it feels good that it’s done and behind me. But I also feel like I found a deeper sense of purpose through this process. And it’s really focusing on mental health and how I can support that more with my story. It’s identifying what other ways can I give to those who feel like they have to hide behind being strong or being whatever it is all the time. And so that deeper sense of purpose has also helped me heal and led me down a path. And my staff has been so supportive through this whole process that they’ve really allowed me to go through the grieving process while they rose up and really ran the company.
Serena
So it’s been a huge blessing through this whole process.
Adam
That’s fantastic. And congratulations on releasing the book. Is it on your personal website where our viewers and listeners can go and.
Serena
Stop and they could even go on Amazon and just type in Serena Mastin and it’ll be the only one that pops up.
Adam
Okay.
Serena
It’ll be easier that way.
Adam
Okay, cool.
Serena
And then you also my website is Serenamaston.com.
Adam
Okay, awesome. Awesome. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure we included that. And I think one very important point here is that you have climbed the corporate ladder. You’re an entrepreneur, but you’ve also had these experiences which no one would wish on anyone. But they are experiences and they’re unique, and so they’ve led to you having a different outlook and coming to different conclusions on certain topics. So there’s definitely a lot of value there for any potential readers, I think, of the book, because they’ll be able to get those insights without necessarily having to go through the experience directly. They can experience it through you.
Serena
I don’t wish it on anyone. The interesting thing about post traumatic wisdom is understanding that wisdom never stops. You’re always gaining it, whether you’re facing an obstacle or whether you’re learning something new. And people can use the experiences as an excuse to stay in where they are, or they can use it as fuel to push them forward. And I really wanted to make a difference and an impact in not only through the agency for small and mid sized companies and medical offices and wellness and all these different things that I’m passionate about, but I also wanted to make an impact on the individual that could potentially read this and it could change their mindset and moving forward.
Adam
And just as a little teaser, any lessons, advice, like, if you could give one lesson in terms of what you’ve learned through your life and maybe gained through your marketing career and how that shaped your approach to strategies and tactics in general.
Serena
I think the biggest thing is that when you face a lot of these challenges. You get defeated, you get depressed. You feel like you’re shutting down. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, working in specific industries, and I would say more powerful than the will to win is the courage to begin and get up again. And so it takes a lot of strength to do that when you’re in a place where you just can’t see past some of the challenges in front of you. But I would just encourage people to keep getting up and keep moving forward, because it’s those little steps that eventually they’ll look back and see how much progress they’ve made.
Adam
Fantastic. I love it. Well, Serena, thank you very much for being on our podcast, and thank you for sharing with us.
Serena
And thank you for having me. I’m honored. Thank you so much.
Adam
Yeah, it’s my pleasure. So to learn more about Serena and her work, be sure to visit her at serenamastin.com. You can also check out Pulsemarketingteam.com and buy her book on Amazon Exposed: You can’t heal when you hide.