Startup Physicians

Building Your Personal Brand in the Startup Ecosystem with Sarah Johnston

• Alison Curfman, M.D. • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Are you a physician considering a career pivot or wanting to explore opportunities outside traditional medicine? In this episode, I sit down with Sarah Johnston, a career branding expert and founder of The Briefcase Coach, who has helped hundreds of executives, including myself, navigate career transitions. We explore practical strategies to optimize your LinkedIn profile, craft a compelling executive resume, and build a personal narrative that opens doors. Sarah and I also dive into the mindset shifts necessary to step into new roles, from overcoming self-doubt to embracing your transferable skills. 

Sarah Johnston, a former healthcare recruiter and industry "insider," is dedicated to empowering talented high-achievers by equipping them with the necessary tools to succeed in their job search. Driven by her passion for empowering professionals, Sarah founded the Briefcase Coach, a renowned global executive branding firm. Operating worldwide, the Briefcase Coach has successfully served clients in all 50 states and across six continents. Sarah was recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice in the career space in 2019 and acknowledged among HR Weekly's Top 100 Most Influential People in HR. Furthermore, Balance Careers named Sarah's resume writing firm as the "best" for experienced executives. JobScan named Sarah a "top follow" in 2019, 2020, and 2022. Sarah is a graduate of the University of Georgia.

Episode Highlights:

[0:44] - Introducing Sarah Johnston and my journey to career clarity with her help.
[2:40] - Sarah’s background as a recruiter and her transition to building a global resume writing firm.
[4:46] - Why physicians struggle to identify and market their transferable skills.
[8:52] - The value of reframing “failure” and using data to tell a compelling career story.
[9:59] - Why LinkedIn is essential for physicians and how to overcome the “ick factor.”
[15:54] - Crafting a LinkedIn headline: Using keywords to align with your career goals.
[19:47] - Leveraging opportunities within your current job to build skills for a future pivot.
[23:13] - Volunteer work and side gigs: A pathway to gain experience and open doors.
[28:19] - The long-term career impact of stepping out of your comfort zone.

Resources:

Sarah Johnston’s Website: The Briefcase Coach

Checkout our services at StartupPhysicians.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, rate, and leave a review. Don’t forget to share this episode with fellow physicians who might be interested in startups. Together, we can shape the future of healthcare! See you next time.

Sarah Johnston:

You want to control the narrative when someone searches for your name online, and everybody's going to Google or chatgpt these days to search, you want LinkedIn to be one of the first options, and when they click on that profile, you want them to like what they see, and you want to tell them what you want them to think about you. So I say fully optimize your profile, put a headshot out there that represents you in the absolute best light, and then don't be afraid of connecting with people. It's a social platform. People are there to network and to meet people. And so if you're looking for something new, I recommend reaching out to three to five people per week with a connection request, because that just opens the door for more conversation.

Alison Curfman:

Hi everyone, and welcome back to startup positions. I am so excited to have a special guest with me today, and I'm excited that you guys are tuning in. I found that in my journey, as I moved from academic medicine to more of a community health system, and then wanted to expand my prospects, I had a very hard time understanding what is my skill set that's translatable to other settings, and what do I need to do to position myself. And many of you who've heard my other podcasts or heard my story know that I was directing a program at a small hospital that was really focused on complex children, and I was really motivated by that work, but it wasn't financially sustainable and fee for service. And when that program ended, I remember finding myself in a place where I knew I wasn't happy or well supported for my growth where I was, but I just didn't know what to do next. And I'm so happy and my life has been changed that what I invested in first was to work with my guest who's here today, Sarah Johnston, who is just an incredible expert on helping people brand themselves, find new jobs, create all the supporting materials they need to tell their story in a really compelling way across multiple different tools and platforms. And so Sarah made such an impact on my life in my career, I have gone back to her and used her services multiple times, but I think that her perspective is amazing for physicians to hear, and so I wanted to be one of the first guests I brought on. So thank you, Sarah, so much for being here today. I would love if you could introduce yourself and share a little bit about what you do.

Sarah Johnston:

I am so excited to be here and just really honored to have watched you evolve. You know, I think you mentioned that we've known each other for a really long time. I met you during your residency at Wash U and you've always been such a powerhouse, and so it's just been so fun to see you supercharged and on a mission to something that you are making such an impact at. But kind of going back to my business and my story, as we mentioned, we met during residency, during my husband's residency as well, and I was working as a recruiter. I loved recruiting. It was really rewarding work. But knowing that we were going to move several times throughout you know, our marriage, I wanted to create a business for myself that I could take, that was mobile, and so leveraged my transferable skills to start my own executive resume writing firm. I've now been in business for almost 10 years, and we've worked with over 1000 executives across the world. I've worked with people on every continent except for Antarctica. Wow.

Alison Curfman:

That is so amazing. I really loved seeing your growth as well. And I think that your skill set is one that is so foreign to physicians who have been through, you know, traditional training, because we, we don't have, like, a ton of perspective on job markets and how to make ourselves marketable. I mean, we have, you know, our our table of this is where I've trained. These are my publications. But nobody really trains us on base things

Sarah Johnston:

I tell people all the time, it's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar, and physicians especially are so overworked and head down and you're taught not to brag about yourself. So like, it really helps to have an external person validate your skills and show you your worth and all the ways that you can make an impact, even outside of that medicine bubble I

Alison Curfman:

will share from my perspective, when I first came to work with you, I didn't even know what I was looking for. I was just like, I know Sarah. She's great. She seems to have a business that helps people who are in a career transition. So I love to chat with her and see what exactly she does. And I know that the first service I did with you was to write my executive resume, and I think my LinkedIn profile and a bio, or we might have just started with one of those things, but what we did was not a document. It was so much more than that, and I think that even if someone is not planning to work with a professional on this, there are some best practices and ways that someone could walk through this serve and exercise. I found that what was the most valuable to me was really the momentum I had and the confidence that I got from talking to a third party who had to basically pull it out of me, what I've been able to accomplish, I was actually at a stage in my career where I not only wasn't very happy, but felt a little bit like a failure that you know, this great program that I had started and run with a team, just didn't survive, and it felt like a failure. But instead of framing it that way, Sarah asked me so many questions that I would never thought to ask. She always wanted me to quantify things. How many people reported to you? What was your budget? What were the outcomes? What were you know? What were the impact? I want to know a number. I want to know percentage and and this FIRST CALL we had was, I mean, 90 minutes or so. It was a long time, and I felt like she she was uncovering things for me that I would not have advertised myself as a strength is that something you see a lot. Sarah, oh, all the

Sarah Johnston:

time. And I think again, going back to physicians, especially when you have just been grinding for so long and on a singular path, it can be overwhelming to just decide to make the choice, to make the decision that you want to do something different and next. And I think a lot of times physicians just say, Okay, I've hit a wall. I'm done. I cannot do what I'm doing anymore. I need to do something else, but don't know how to take the steps forward. And so I think one thing that you did really well, Allison, is that you took some time to do inventory and figure out, like, like, what you're good at, ideal next jobs. And I like to tell people you know, before you start working on a resume, you really need to think about who your target audience is, because that's marketing 101, you need to know who's going to be reviewing your documents, even, even it might evolve and it might change. You have to have an audience in mind as you're writing this resume or writing your story. So I think spending some time reading job descriptions, doing informational interviews and networking calls with people is time well spent before you start working on those documents. Absolutely

Alison Curfman:

And for me, I feel like before documents, it was even just like, what's my story? Gaining confidence in that. And it was a very like self fulfilling prophecy, that as you were interviewing me and helping me uncover skills that I I didn't even know. These were skills like, literally, I to me. Skills were like, can you put it in a central line, and not not so many other and more broad skill sets that can apply in multiple, multiple areas of industries. And I felt like, when you first delivered to me this executive resume that told a story and was very compelling with both a story, a narrative and data, I was like, Oh, wow, someone might hire me. Like, I could probably go find a job with this sort of a document.

Unknown:

I also think you might not have liked it at first. Tell me if I'm wrong. Like, I think I kind of had to talk you into it. I

Alison Curfman:

didn't, I didn't like it because I felt again, I was kind of in this mindset of, like, my program failed. I don't want to talk about that, but then when you wrote about it, it was really all about the impact. It was about. And I had been measuring things and program all along. We had a lot of metrics. We had publication on it. And you know, sometimes it's really your emotion you have to overcome. And if you take that part out of it, or someone like kicks it out of you, like you did for me. Yeah, it was uncomfortable, but I remember being so floored when I got it back, and I was like, this really tells a story, and now I feel like I have, like, multiple directions I could think about. And then the next thing we worked on was LinkedIn, which we're going to talk about LinkedIn. I was also very against LinkedIn because I don't really like social media. It makes me uncomfortable. I couldn't figure it out. I was like, Oh my gosh, people can see if I look at their profile. How does this thing work? So I would love for you to chat for a minute about why physicians need to be on LinkedIn and your thoughts on that whole area.

Sarah Johnston:

Area, oh, yeah, I hear this from people all the time. They're afraid their patients are going to find them on LinkedIn and reach out. They're they're concerned about the ick factor of, oh, I don't want to be a, you know, an influencer or whatever. I don't want to put content out there. But the thing is, is marketing is all about visibility. And if you want more opportunities, if you want people to call you, if you want people to think about you when there's something new, you have to be visible. And LinkedIn has really high domain authority in terms of an SEO perspective. And so if you think about Google search results, LinkedIn is often one of the first 10 results when someone searches for your name. And so I tell people all the time, you want to control the narrative when someone searches for your name online, and everybody's going to Google or chat GPT these days to search, you want LinkedIn to be one of the first options. And when they click on that profile, you want them to like what they see. And you want to tell them what you want them to think about you. So I say fully optimize your profile, create or put a headshot out there that represents you in the absolute best light. And then don't be afraid of connecting with people. I think that's where folks get the cringe factor. Like at the height of the cringe factors. They don't want to connect with folks, but I think it's just an absolute open invitation. It's a social platform. People are there to network and to meet people, and so if you're looking for something new, I recommend reaching out to three to five people per week with a connection request, because that just opens the door for more conversation.

Alison Curfman:

Yeah, I had a lot of ick factor too. And to be honest, I still, like, have a lot to overcome as far as my mindset around social media, the marketing and putting myself out there, but I have quickly come to find like, when it comes to other social media platforms, I basically, like, don't connect with anyone. I don't want anyone to see. I don't even post on most social media. I actually don't even know how to log into some of them, but on LinkedIn, like, I basically just across the board, like, unless somebody is, like, actively trying to, like, sell me something in the connection request, I pretty much accept all of it, and I'm just like, whatever, they'll weep themselves out. And anytime I have a meeting, whether it's a discovery call or a if I'm at a conference, I keep a note on my phone as I'm like, having quick conversations, and I see their name tag in front of me. I keep a note on my phone. I just write their names down as I'm going through my day at the conference, and I just connect with all of them. When it comes to the startup world, which is what this is all about. It's like the number one thing we use, actually, this came up recently. I was meeting with a company, and they were like, we really want to hire a CMO chief mindful officer. That's an ob die. And I wanted to see if there's anyone in your network that would be a good fit for this stage of company, this vision we have. And with that background. If I want to recommend someone, I'm going to send their LinkedIn profile. And so you want it to tell a story and to match the narrative that you're trying to build around your career impact and where you're trying to go absolutely.

Sarah Johnston:

And I was actually just talking to a venture capital partner with NEA Vanessa Marc co I think very highly of her, and I was asking her about LinkedIn, and she says that she is going to go on someone's LinkedIn profile before she meets with them, and she's going to examine their profile. She's going to see how socially savvy they are, how they market themselves, because that's going to be how they market their brand. And so I think most VCs and investors are going to be going to that platform

Alison Curfman:

and when we're building a company. So in the different phases of a company, when we were like pre seed feed level, we needed a lot of advisors, because we only had a couple of co founders. We were incubating within a firm that had a lot of resources we could use. But when it came to expert advice, you know, early, early stage companies do hire a lot of advisors and consultants, and we would just be sure, we would be putting it out there with our networks. We would be getting suggestions. And if this person, if they didn't have a LinkedIn profile, I don't even think we would consider them. And then same with as you started to get our funding and our momentum, and started to recruit and hire an executive team. We actually had a whole people search function within the firm that supported our growth, and we would have kind of alignment sessions with all of leadership around what exactly we're looking for in a role, and what were we pulling up we were pulling up their LinkedIn profiles. So I think that if someone wants to move into more of a startup environment, as far as even, even if you're trying to just get some advisory roles, I don't think you'll even be considered without a strong LinkedIn profile

Sarah Johnston:

absolutely and make sure that you're using the right keywords that someone would use to search for you. And for your skill set, that's a big miss that SD people make. They try to be cute as say, cute and clever gets trumped every time by accurate. So use words that someone would sit on LinkedIn and search for to find your skill set. How

Alison Curfman:

do you come up with those words? What would you tell someone who may have been like me, who kind of felt like a deer in headlights?

Sarah Johnston:

I would recommend you assess other people in your space. So visit profiles of people that you admire or that you want to be more like, and look at how they're marketing and branding themselves. You don't want to be exactly like those people, but you want to see what others are in your space are doing. I would also say, look at some job descriptions for roles or opportunities that you might be interested in. So if you're trying to position yourself for a CMO position or a COO role, you might want to consider looking at keywords and themes from those job descriptions and using those in your profile. That's

Alison Curfman:

such a great idea, because if I was looking to be a chief medical officer for a very specific type of company, like in my specialty, and nothing's quite come up yet. There's no reason why you can't use cmo jobs from a, you know, kidney care company or another early, you know, as long as the company's kind of the same stage as what you're looking for. Yeah, it's great advice to go look at, you know, what other people are looking for in candidates, and then position yourself around that absolutely okay. This is going to show my ignorance. Okay, right under my name on LinkedIn, and you wrote this, there's a like a blurb of you can Is this your keywords? Where you put like mine says trusted clinical advisor healthcare startup co founder, the the tagline that comes up when you first look at someone's LinkedIn profile. How do you advise people on what to put there absolutely

Sarah Johnston:

that that is one of the most important sections of your LinkedIn profile, your headshot and your tagline, or your your header like that, shows up on every search. So when someone is looking for profiles, you're going to just see that until they click on your face to see more of your profile. So you want to be really thoughtful about the content that you put here. When we crafted this for you, we thought about kind of your unique value proposition and the words that someone might search for to find you. Well, they might find you because they are looking for someone who's a value based care expert. You founded a business that is one of the leading pediatric value based care models. They might be interested in you because you are a healthcare startup co founder or an advisor. So we've thought about all the ways in which you might show up or someone might care about connecting with you, and we tried to load your load all those keywords in your headline. I think a lot of people are hesitant to have a long headline. They might feel vulnerable, or they might feel like it just feels like a try hard. And I would just say that this is the most important space for keywords from an SEO standpoint. And when it comes to rank, you want to make sure all those words are there. Another

Alison Curfman:

thing that I learned from working with you was the power of actually weeding things out that don't contribute to your story. I had a lot of random publications from residency and fellowship that I contributed to that didn't really add to the story or the brand that I was trying to build and and I think your advice was to really highlight the key ones that were really impactful to the sort of area that I'm trying to aim for, and not let it get cluttered up with. Well, just because you, you know, have this publication on anaerobic blood cultures that doesn't necessarily contribute to your story? Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Johnston:

It's kind of like Marie kondoing your content. You want to make sure that, yeah, you're selecting the right content that's going to resonate with your audience. Just because you spent 80% of your time doing this one thing, it doesn't mean that your audience needs to see 80% of your resume content centered around that you really need to think about what your audience cares about. And so if you're a physician transitioning to something new or next, maybe you don't spend the majority of your time on your resume talking about patient care. Perhaps in studies, think about your innovations or strategy work that you did, whatever you know that your audience values

Alison Curfman:

Awesome. Well, one of the things that I notice is that a lot of physicians are actually a full time w2 employee and sometimes have a bit of a limited mindset of what their options are, as far as starting a side gig or preparing for a transition, what are things that you would suggest to physicians while they're a full time employee that could make themselves more attractive when they make a pivot. Oh,

Sarah Johnston:

I love this question. I think you can, as a w2 employee, or someone who is employed by a health system or hospital, think about ways that you can leverage a new skill set. Test and try out, you know, maybe your pivot. So, for example, if you really value patient safety and that's something that you care about, consider raising your hand to run a QI group, or maybe be on some kind of task force or subcommittee that work can really make a difference and can be a story that you can tell when you're in an interview, the other thing that I would consider is look at your health system or hospital and see if they have an innovation fund. I'm based in the Raleigh, Durham area, and there's this great story of some physicians at Wake med hospital, Marc peeler being one, and they tapped into their hospital's Innovation Fund, and they got some state funding from their health system to start a medical device. And this medical device is going for FDA approval right now. It's under the company, 410, medical and so, you know, there are opportunities around for you right now, while you're w2 to take advantage of funding or resources.

Alison Curfman:

Yeah, yeah. The other thing I tell people who are considering doing something as a side gig is to make sure they really look at their contract. I have come across people who either one some health systems, if you're going to do any sort of consulting work, you have to do it under the umbrella of your employer, and they will take a cut or two that you actually when it comes to creating something, can't actually start and create something while you're employed unless you're willing to basically let them be like a co founder in it.

Sarah Johnston:

That's a really great suggestion, and so certainly look at your contract and maybe meet with an employment lawyer before you make anything official, so that you are protected and that you own the rights to whatever you do. I

Alison Curfman:

think most contracts say you just have to disclose it, and it needs to not be a conflict, which is very workable, but I always warn people that they need to take a look at that before jumping into something new, absolutely. The other thing is, I noticed there were some gaps in my skill set. And you're talking about this in the in the setting of if you're employed, and there's Qi work you could do. I love Qi because it actually is very translatable to the healthcare startup world, because it's we see this thing, it needs to be fixed. We made a solution. We started with an what we call MVP, or minimum viable product, and we are iterating on it and improving it, and measuring results, which is like exactly what we do at startups. And so Qi is so common in in academic and traditional medicine, that this is a great way for physicians to be able to to showcase that sort of skill set, but for people who look at their resume and their story and they say, Well, I haven't done any of those things, what are your thoughts around other than Raising your hand for opportunities within your organization. Are there even other ways you've seen people do, maybe even volunteer work or lower paid work on the side, to be able to start to develop a skill set that they weren't Absolutely

Sarah Johnston:

I know a physician who decided that that working with patients one on one was too draining for them, and they really wanted to change their lifestyle. They wanted to work remotely, and they loved writing, and so they started volunteering, doing medical writing, and wherever they could, they would maybe write blogs for their hospital or blogs for private practice, and then they started doing work for medical journals, and that now has led to this individual running a medical writing practice. They have multiple people working for them, and they have just full range and freedom over their schedule. And so they're really happy in their role, but it started with them taking small steps. And I think it's important to also remember that when you make a pivot, you may not make your physician's salary in your first year, or even your second year, and that's hard for some people. You might be working as an OB, making 350 A year, running a medical journal might not pay that much, and so I think you have to be willing to make some sacrifices short term or even long term, to achieve the lifestyle that you really want to have. Yeah, and you

Alison Curfman:

can design a transition plan. Also, you can say, Okay, here's where I am right now. And if I start to build this up on the side that I do in my own free time, and it's allowed in my contract, then once I hit a certain threshold, then I could consider going down to point nine or point eight, I think that even just that slightest difference in FTE can make such a life changing difference for physicians, because a lot of us are just pushed in so many directions, and what's considered full time is really demanding in. But it's not just fitting within work hours, and it was so many physicians who were, you know, charting well into the night every night, I still practice medicine. I have two places that I practice pediatric emergency medicine, but by having cut it way back and doing it on my own terms, I love it. I love going to the ER. I love taking care of kids. I love talking to parents, and sometimes in the midst of a transition plan or a pivot, you can find a new joy with the career that maybe you were feeling burnt out from before. And I think

Sarah Johnston:

you also have to get over, and I don't know if you felt this way Allison, when you're making a pivot, just this shame and disappointment of feeling like you're letting people down. And I think that when it comes to to people that I've worked with in medicine, they've been so singularly focused on building a career in medicine, and so many people have invested in them to achieve that success as being a physician, and they feel like they're letting people down, whether that's their parents who paid for medical school, their spouse who moved across the country, for them to go to residency or fellowship. It could be their attendings that they work with their fellow colleagues. They feel like they're choosing an alternative path, and they feel judged by their choice. But the thing that I tell people all the time is you only have to make yourself happy and maybe your spouse and your family, but you have to choose the path that is going to make you happy and help you sleep better at night, and no one else can like you. Just have to shut out the noise. And once you focus on your path, other people will get on board and will see that, that that you made the right choice for you

Alison Curfman:

absolutely and I think that you have to realize that there's a lot that you can do with your clinical skills. And that's what I'm constantly telling people, is there, it's not truly a huge career change. It may be, but it's, it's still the foundationally based on your clinical knowledge and skills. I could never have had any of the positions that I've had recently or lately without having gone to medical school residency fellowship and working full time as an attending. That is my foundation. That is what allowed me to take these roles. And so it's just applying your skills in a new way and really evaluating what it is that you want and how to get there. And I think that you know, for people who may say like, Oh, I've never been on a Advisory Board, or I've never done clinical product design, well, guess what, there's people that would love your skill set for a lower price point to let you get that experience on your resume. So if there's a startup that's bootstrapping something and they really want advice on, you know, their clinical model or something that they're designing, that could almost be a knowledge exchange, and they would probably be happy to pay you in equity, which we'll talk about compensation in a future episode. But for someone who's just starting out, you could get so much experience working with founders and helping them create product and really developing that skill on the side. Or you could do an advisory board for a nonprofit, like there's so many nonprofits that would love to have a physician advisor. And you can really build that skill on your resume and make yourself more marketable. And that

Sarah Johnston:

you know, little thing that you do, whether it be, you know, one hour a month or 15 hours a week that grows. You know, your career is a journey, and everything that you do builds on your skill set. I was talking to, I did a resume recently for a CEO of a health plan, a state health plan. And this person started her career as a physician, and and when she left medicine, the traditional medical path, her parents were so disappointed, because they felt like, you know, she had invested so much in that career path, and she took a role that was maybe a sidestep or even a step backwards, but she feels that she's making an even greater impact now in the work that she's doing, and she's impacting more patient lives. And so you know that sidestep or that that little volunteer hour that you do that could result in a bigger opportunity for you long term.

Alison Curfman:

And yeah, just to close with that, I feel like my work with you was, I think, about six or eight months before I jumped into the private equity world, it actually wasn't even on my radar as a possibility, but having worked with you and built my story and my narrative and really understood what I was aiming for, and all my skill sets packaged them in these tools with my LinkedIn and my CV and my bio, when that opportunity came, I was so ready for it, and I was well equipped, and I came across very well for anyone out there who is considering doing this exercise, I certainly think there is a lot of ability to DIY this, maybe, maybe use chat, GPT or Claude to help, you know, go back and forth and ask questions and try and really do. Pull it out of yourself how you would want to position yourself. But for anyone who just was like me, and maybe is in a rut and was like, I just need someone to help me with this, I would highly recommend Sarah and her company and her services. I know it was life changing and career changing for me, and I think Sarah has this very, very unique view on physicians being integrally part of physician life. And I really want to thank you, Sarah. And if people want to find you or your services, where would you want them to go? Thank

Sarah Johnston:

you for that. I would suggest going to my website, briefcase coach.com,

Alison Curfman:

awesome. Well, I will put that in the show notes and any other closing thoughts,

Sarah Johnston:

I'm just excited for your audience for choosing to invest in themselves and to think about their next steps. I think so many people are reactive, and they let their career happen to them. And so by taking the steps to get your branding in order and to create that LinkedIn profile, you are being proactive, and you're taking your career and making that choice

Alison Curfman:

for yourself. Thank you so much, Sarah. I'm so happy to have you here. Thanks,

Sarah Johnston:

Allison, me too. You.