IAM1392 – Founder Creates Mentorship Program Helping Women Entrepreneurs

Ellen Yin is the founder of Cubicle to CEO®️, a media company elevating the financial footprint of women entrepreneurs through their podcast of the same name, digital programs, live events, and a global community of 50,000+. Cubicle to CEO's mission is to make mentorship more accessible to the masses so all women, everywhere, can pursue what's possible. Ellen is an accidental entrepreneur who bootstrapped a $300 freelance project into over $1.5 million in revenue by age 27. She has been featured in Forbes, the TODAY Show with Hoda & Jenna, Yahoo! Finance, Thrive Global, HerMoney, the Statesman Journal, BlogHer, and more.

• CEO Story: Ellen landed a job as a marketer after she graduated from college. She knew that the cubicle office setting was not for her. Ellen was able to start a freelance after resigning. She grew the business successfully and turned it into a media and mentorship company helping women entrepreneurs.
• Business Service: Making mentorship accessible to people.
• Secret Sauce: Simplicity and clarity.
• CEO Hack: Book mention; Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden – Is there a long-term significance to what I am doing (task)
• CEO Nugget: Adopting data mindset. Learning the art of curiosity. Learning to use data to make a better decision.
• CEO Defined: To embrace the lifelong adventure of curiosity. And to always look at everything as an opportunity for what’s possible.

Website: ellenyin.com/getclients

Instagram: missellenyin, cubicletoceo

Pinterest: missellenyin

Facebook: cubicletoceocommunity

Youtube: EllenYin

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Transcription

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00:19 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:46 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Ellen Yin of Cubicle as CEO. Ellen, super excited to have you on the show.

00:56 – Ellen Yin

I'm super excited to be here. Thank you.

00:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, thank you for all the awesome things that you're doing and of course, taking some time out today. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Ellen so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And Ellen is the founder of Cubicle to CEO, a media company elevating the financial footprint of women entrepreneurs through their podcast of the same name. Digital programs live events in a global community of 50,000 people.

The CEO's mission is to make mentorship more accessible to the masses so all women everywhere can pursue what's possible. Ellen is an accidental entrepreneur who bootstrapped a $300 freelance project into $1.5 million in revenue by the age of 27. She has been featured in Forbes, the Today show with Hoda and Jenna, Yahoo Finance, Thrive Global, Her Money, the Statesman Journal, Blog, her, and many, many more. And of course, now the I AM CEO podcast. Ellen, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to I AM CEO Community?

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01:52 – Ellen Yin

I am so, yeah, I'm just thrilled to be here. And yes, you're so right. I feel like our energies are totally aligned because we both have CEO in our brand name and we are all about supporting CEOs.

02:03 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. I could definitely say that for sure. And, you know, they say words have power, but acronyms also have power. So I love to see that you have it in your name, and I do it, too. So what I wanted to do to kind of kick everything off is rewind the clock here a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:18 – Ellen Yin

Yeah. So my CEO story starts at the end of 2017. So I was 23 years old, recently graduated college the year before, and I was working in a corporate job as a marketer. And I had only been at that job for about 10 months. But I knew from day one that cubicle life wasn't for me. So I actually left a couple of days before Christmas. And I didn't have a backup plan. I didn't know I wanted to start my own business. I just knew where I was wasn't the right place for me. So I quit my job. And then in January, that next month of 2018, I was applying for jobs.

And in the middle of my job search, I actually reconnected with a colleague of mine that I met at my corporate job. He and his wife were local small business owners. They had two coffee stands, and they asked if I could help them launch their coffee stands on Instagram because they didn't really have a presence then. And so it was my very first freelance project. It was $300.

And I think for me, it wasn't about the money. It was truly an eye opener in realizing that I had a skillset marketing that I could monetize on my own and go land more clients with instead of searching for a job. So I actually did that. I stopped applying for jobs and I scaled, you know, that agency to six figures in the first year. And then we moved into education. And then since then, our, you know, our current phase of business, we are a media company that is focused on helping women entrepreneurs get access to the best mentors. So that's. That's the short CEO story.

03:57 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that, and I appreciate you so much for sharing it hearing more about what you do, and seeing what you do. We definitely are kindred spirits because I think in one of my first entrepreneur experiences, it was kind of eye-opening to feel that people will actually pay for the thing that you're passionate about and you know how to do. And I think once that, you know, that eye gets open, you'd like to have that opportunity to kind of open it up for so many other people.

04:18 – Ellen Yin

100%. Yeah. And I think that is why this, this type of work that you and I do, right? Having conversations with people and making it accessible to anyone who has an Internet connection or the ability to listen to a podcast is so important because we don't know what we don't know. And if you grow up in a. In a certain community or a vacuum where everyone around you does the same thing, it is very hard for you to imagine a life different than that for yourself unless you're exposed to other people's stories. And so that's why I think showing the possibility for others is so empowering.

04:52 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I often say, like, to me, like, entrepreneurship always equals hope and is exactly. For what you said is because you become, your environment becomes your reality. And when you again, you don't see that there is another way. And then you get opened up to that, then your environment opens up your abilities, your possibility, everything just opens up from there. So that's why I really love everything that you just said and what you're doing.

05:13 – Ellen Yin

Exactly. I'm so glad we're on the same page with that.

05:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. I know we touched on a little bit when I read your bio, but could you take us through a little bit more on the media brand and everything you're doing for the clients you work with?

05:25 – Ellen Yin

Absolutely. So our main focus is making mentorship more accessible to people. So something I often think about is how some of the most brilliant minds in entrepreneurship, right, leaders of 6, 7, 8, 9 figure businesses, it's very rare that you will actually get one one-on-one FaceTime with these types of people in a room unless you already have those networks that you can access.

And so for us, we always think about how can we bring their thought leadership, and their learned and lived experiences to more people through content that is accessible to everyone, no matter where you come from, no matter what your background is, no matter your experience or your connections. And so we do that primarily through our podcast, through Cubicle the CEO, which is the name of our podcast. And, we like to use our platform as a way to highlight underrepresented voices in media.

So particularly women in business, female founders, women of color, people who historically have not had as much, you know, just space to show up and share their stories in. What makes us different from most business shows is that instead of highlighting someone's general area of expertise or their backstory, we actually are very case study driven.

So every single guest that shows up shares one specific revenue growth strategy that they've already tested in their own business, and then they break down what worked in that strategy and what didn't so that our listeners can immediately implement that strategy instead of going through the expensive and often time-consuming learning curve of trial and error themselves. So that's really our goal, is to take what's already working in real-life businesses, spanning all different business models, spanning all different revenue stages, and actually allow entrepreneurs to implement what's working?

07:17 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely love that. So I know you touched a little bit upon what I like to call this secret sauce. Do you feel like, you know, maybe part of your secret sauce, the thing that you feel makes your organization or yourself unique and sets it apart? Do you think another part of it is your ability to, I think, I don't know if I want to use the word translate or distill down those lessons, the case studies, all that information and get that out there so that people can really understand that. Do you think that's part of your secret sauce too?

07:41 – Ellen Yin

Oh, man, you are very observant. I love this. That's a really interesting question because I think that actually is the most common feedback we get from people in our community, whether they're consuming our free content or whether they're in our paid programs, is that they feel that our content and our teaching really helps clarify and simplify things for them.

So those are the two words we hear the most often, simplicity and clarification. And I feel like that really is our company's superpower because there are so many things that can feel really complex in business. For example, one of our primary live event series is our Paid to Create challenges. These are our bi-monthly live course creation challenges where we help people turn the idea in their head into an actual online course that they can pre-sell and enroll paying students for before they even, you know, have created the course content.

And so many people, like We've helped over 800 people now through these challenges. So many people come into the challenge thinking creating a course is something that's going to take them six months, one year, that it's a future someday thing. Right? But we show them that you, you can simplify really anything in business when you cut out all of the, you know, all the trial and error and all the things that you feel like you should do.

I'm putting should in quote quotation marks because I think we place a lot of pressure on ourselves based on what we see other people doing. And we, and we again compare ourselves to maybe people who are five years, 10 years into their businesses.

And we're over here on day one of, let's say, your course creation journey. And you think that you need all the fancy things that people you're seeing out there being successful with courses, doing. And we show them. No, let's, let's simplify this and really, as you said, distill this down into the absolute necessities, the minimum viable product that you need to put out there to start making money immediately from an online course. So that's just one example of, I feel like how we're able to simplify things for our audience.

09:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's absolute gold. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:54 – Ellen Yin

So one of the most influential books I've ever read is called Procrastinate on Purpose. It's by an author called Rory Vaden. One of the concepts that I borrowed from his book that I found so helpful in terms of efficiency is that he says often, you know, we look at the things on our list, on our, you know, ever-growing to-do list and we ask ourselves what is important and what is urgent? Right. Like what is something that needs to be done in the near future as well as what is something that is important.

However, he encourages in that book for us to take one step even beyond those two factors and look at our to-do list through the lens of significance. So he asked us to ask ourselves, if I do this task today, is it only saving me time or is it only mattering to my business in terms of, you know, revenue or whatever it may be impacted today? Or if I do this task will actually save me time in the future, will actually pay off again in the future, is there long-term significance to what I'm doing?

And I think that is just such a massive shift for so many people because oftentimes as entrepreneurs, we sometimes live in that day-to-day survival mode where we're just trying to get through the end of the day and catch up on everything that we need to do and we always feel behind. But I think when you're able to look at the work you're actually doing through that lens of significance, it really changes what you prioritize.

11:18 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I love that you mentioned that. I definitely have to check out that book. I wanted to ask you now for what I call CEO Nugget. You might have already touched on this, but this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:35 – Ellen Yin

Yeah, absolutely. There are a few things that come to mind, but one thing I think is really important is to, you know, it's easy for people to say embrace failure like fail forward all of that, you know, kind of common things that we hear, it's always easy, easier said than done. But I think what's really helped me over the last number of years is really adopting more of a data mindset. So I kind of started thinking about my role as an entrepreneur, as a business leader, kind of like a scientist would in a lab.

And maybe it's because my dad is a scientist. So this analogy just came to mind. But, you know, scientists, when they're in the lab, right, they have a hypothesis about what they think will happen and experiment. But if their experiment proves their hypothesis wrong and they, you know, so to speak, failed, they don't look at that. That. That result that their research says and goes, oh, this, this means that I'm a terrible scientist. Like, my hypothesis was wrong, therefore I'm unqualified.

And all these, you know, things that we tell ourselves. Instead, they look at that research as new data, and it makes them smarter. It opens up perhaps gaps that they didn't see before in their research. And they go, okay, I'm a little bit smarter, a little bit wiser. Let me take what I learned from this time. What does the data say? Objectively, not my opinion, but what does the data say and how can I utilize this to retry the experiment with a different hypothesis and see how that works? I think adopting that mentality is so key and learning how to appreciate the art of, like, curiosity and not being so attached to outcomes, but rather really taking in the data and learning how to use data to make better decisions.

I think if you can detach from those outcomes and stop letting the results of things mean something about you if you can instead just look at things objectively and go, okay, how can I use this to, you know, be better next time? I think it makes such a world of difference. So that would be my little nugget that I would share with people.

13:41 – Gresham Harkless

I love that. And so I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote, unquote, CEOs on this show. So, Ellen, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:51 – Ellen Yin

Oh, my gosh. I don't know if you know this, but that is literally the same question I ask every guest on my show.

13:56 – Gresham Harkless

Did you know that I love it?

13:58 – Ellen Yin

That is so crazy.

14:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yes.

14:01 – Ellen Yin

For those of you listening, like, this is the first time we're meeting, so, like, our minds had this, like, moment in time.

14:06 – Gresham Harkless

I love that we met, like, years and years ago, apparently. Kindred spirits.

14:11 – Ellen Yin

That's amazing. Oh, man. I should totally be better prepared for this question, knowing I ask it to all my guests. I've never had to actually answer the question myself. I feel like, honestly, the definition changes for me every single day. But I think what it means most importantly to me is to embrace the lifelong adventure of curiosity and to always look at everything as an opportunity to explore what's possible. That's kind of our tagline for Cubicle to CEO as we help women pursue what's possible.

And I think that idea of possibility holds so much optimism. It holds so much courage and empowerment. And I just think that as a CEO, it's our job to forge more possibilities for more people through the work that we do. Right? We open doors, we solve problems, we explore things that other people may shy away from because they see them as obstacles. But for us, it's that unique perspective of looking at every challenge as an adventure.

15:16 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, Ellen, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want you to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, of course, how best people can get a hold of you. Subscribe to the podcast, and find out about all the awesome things that you and your team are working on.

15:33 – Ellen Yin

Well, thank you so much for sharing your platform. So, like Gresh mentioned, the best way for you to continue benefiting from the resources that we're putting out there is to subscribe to our podcast. So wherever you're listening to this podcast, if you search Cubicle to CEO, you can follow and subscribe us to us there. We release new episodes every single Monday. If you want to hang out with us on Instagram, my personal Instagram is Ms. Ellen Yin, and the company's Instagram is @cubicletoCEO. You can reach me on either platform. And never, never feel shy about dropping us a line in the DMs. We love to hear from you and we'd love to hear what's on your mind and how we can better serve you.

16:10 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And to make that even easier, of course, we're going to have the information in the show notes so that you can reach out to Ellen about all the awesome things that she's doing. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:19 – Ellen Yin

Thank you. You too.

16:20 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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