I cannot even tell you how excited I am to share this interview with you! The amazing Ellen Whitehurst has dished out some of the best business advice I’ve heard in a LONG time. From how to fully embrace your niche to how to keep going in the face of failure, she lays it all out in this interview. You’ll definitely want to check out her site and learn more about her and her extremely successful business.
In case some people don’t know about you and your amazing business, would you mind sharing what you do?
For branding purposes, I am called an ‘Ultimate Better Living Expert’ and also sometimes referred to as the country’s foremost expert on both Feng Shui and even an international expert on living a lucky lifestyle as well. Basically, I am passionate about taking ages-old solutions and remedies from traditions and cultures around the globe and apply those same positive results oriented pieces of advice to modern day dilemmas. So I’ll use Feng Shui and astrology and numerology and alternative methods of manifesting as well as many other time-tested tools to offer people their best and most fulfilling life ever!
You contribute to an array of amazing of publications like the Huffington Post, DoctorOz.com, Redbook Magazine, and iVillage. How did you land such opportunities? (Did you pitch to each or were you asked by them?)
Yes, I have been amazingly LUCKY (wink!) over the years to partner with some major lifestyle titles and am always so grateful to share my messages of attaining health, happiness, prosperity, love and, of course, luck! I actually answered a blind item in one of those public relations reporter inquiry services from a nationally known yoga guru who was looking for an aromatherapist to contribute expert content to an article she was writing for The Huffington Post. I asked her if she would make an introduction to her lifestyle editor for me and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with that pub.
Redbook was a different story. At the time I took a job as a monthly columnist with both Redbook and Seventeen magazines, I was being repped by agents at the (then) William Morris Talent Agency. My speaker’s agent asked me one day if I thought I could create content for any of the Hearst national women’s lifestyle titles since she had an opportunity to pitch authors and personalities to their head of branding there. I came up with my trademarked ‘Shuistrology’ (Feng Shui + Astrology = Shuistrology), a column that not only offered monthly astrological insights but also offered how to enhance (good energies) or negate (bad ones) through using tips and techniques from the world of Feng Shui. The EIC at Redbook loved the idea and I became a marquee monthly columnist for them. As you see, in both instances, networking and asking were critical components to nailing the gigs as was being really proactive about the opportunities and expecting an excellent outcome!
As for iVillage.com: well, the daily tips that I write for them (Ellen Whitehurst’s Feng Shui Tip of the Day) now goes out to over a half million readers each day and has been for the past five years. Those numbers have grown exponentially and helped me to interest Random House in buying my first book, MAKE THIS YOUR LUCKY DAY, as well as also interesting Starbucks in partnering with me on a super successful line of home goods including the sell through ‘Ellen Whitehurst’s Feng Shui in a Cup.’
But I targeted iVillage.com. I knew that I wanted to represent and share some space on such a wonderful women’s website so I did a little legwork and a lot of due diligence and I went after the editor I knew I had to impress. I just kept sending him content and copy until, I think, I either finally totally engaged him or plain and simply wore him down. Either way, it worked! So the really long winded answer to your original question is that I pitched and I was asked to contribute to these and scores of other well known pubs but not without my bffs creativity, persistence, tenacity, faith and patience by my side! We all make a dream team!
Your work definitely falls into a unique niche. How long did it take you to find this niche and embrace it?
I started my business by following some very traditional and standard marketing advice: find a hole and fill it! I had moved to the mid-Atlantic in late 1999 and found that I was in process of reinventing myself. Prior to that move I had been a successful commodity trader living up and down the East Coast but due to some personally devastating experiences (the deaths of both of my parents, my own infertility issues, a crumbling marriage, etc), I decided to pursue a path that I considered both my calling and my passion. I had been studying Feng Shui for years and when I checked the area I was living in I found that there was only one qualified practitioner. I hung out a shingle and was off to the races.
But this race is far from over and slow and steady will always win out. It’s been ten years since I started my business but it wasn’t until about five years in that I started thinking big and dreaming even bigger. That’s when I decided to pitch Starbucks. That relationship with that coffee company opened more doors than I can say. And because the promotion was such a huge success, and because sales were off the hook, I also truly began to embrace and believe that people would accept Feng Shui if I could package and market it in easy to apply AND easy to swallow ways. Consequently, and as a sort of organic extension of building this brand, I am now also considered a ‘fortune and luck’ expert and am embracing and building out that new piece of my business and my brand as I write.
I not only believe, I KNOW that no matter how unique your niche, genre or your brand, if you believe and add all the intention and elbow grease necessary, soon enough everyone else will believe as well I’m living proof.
What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs who are embarking into a field that their relatives and friends may see as unusual?
I had to laugh at this question because I definitely remember the ‘early’ days of me building my brand and an in-law telling me to “stop fooling around with this Chinese food stuff” and get a real job. Other friends and loved ones weren’t as dismissive or disapproving but were concerned nonetheless because they knew that I had to somehow take a unique passion and turn it into a way to make my living in order to put food on the table and raise my beloved son. But as I made strides each day, small or large, I would always and continually show those keeping a close watch how much I believed in what I do and how much I trusted that I could be both of service and be solvent at the same time. Ten years ago some well meaning relative signed me up to take a court stenography course but I held my footing and danced to the beat of my own drummer. One year ago MORE magazine called my brand “a mini holistic empire.” Jeff Keni Pulver recently asked me to speak at the Twitter 140 conf State of NOW which put me on stage next to some of the biggest names in the motivational speaking field and The Women Speaker’s Association named me one of “30 Women of Influence in 2012.”
Stick with it. Don’t listen to the naysayers. As my father used to say, if anyone else tells you that they’re just playing devil’s advocate, tell ‘em to go back to hell where they belong. Uh huh. And, really, the zeitgeist is changing regarding entrepreneurs and what they can accomplish and achieve on this planet now more than ever. Many avante garde and creative geniuses paved that way for the rest of us, so, we kind of owe it to them to carry on and carry through with our dreams. I studied and read everything I could on how Martha Stewart and Donald Trump built their brands (and then proceeded to pitch and do a deal with that last tycoon.) I’m always reading Guy Kawasaki and Mari Smith in order to keep abreast of the ever evolving social media model and also will drop whatever I’m doing to listen/read anything Sir Richard Branson has to say. Currently I am trying to round the educational curve involved in what’s sometimes called the ‘Brandon Burchard’ model or the ‘Dan Kennedy’ one. These business models encourage and extol the virtues of working to build your own brand as opposed to driving traffic to other ones. But if you are in the publishing world at all, or want to be, you have to engage in what’s called ‘building a platform’ and that platform should involve and include other brands that other companies will recognize in an instant.
Once you can align with more recognizable and/or notable names, the more other ones will want to do business with you. Just start somewhere. Find a business/brand that seems simpatico with what you’re offering and think of a creative way to potentially partner up that will bless and benefit both brands. Even if you are doing that for free to start. There is invaluable and untold relationships that can be built from your brand being aligned with other ones. And remember to always DREAM BIG! What’s the harm really? All anyone can do is say ‘no’ but you’ll have gotten the experience of pitching and perfecting your ideas.
Your business has grown so much over the past few years. Was there ever a point where you feared failure or encountered an obstacle that stopped you? How did you overcome it?
My business is growing and expanding again right now. I’m just about to launch the ‘brand’ new THE LUCK PROJECT, a 12-week multi-media experience that shows anyone interested how they can easily create their own really lucky life. My team and I have only just this week built the foundation for a new YouTube television channel that will offer our latest product, OM SHUI OM as free fodder as well as my monthly Shuistrology horoscope and my Magically Delicious empowering and, well, magical recipes. And I am in process of putting together a line of products that we will be debuting on Café Press sometime in the early Autumn.
Each and every single one of these endeavors and agendas have hit stumbling blocks along the way. The Luck Project was an endeavor I began in January of 2012 and here it is July and we are scrapping the entire site and starting from scratch. So the answer to your question of whether I’ve ever hit the wall and wanted to just shut it all down and start something entirely new is “YES!!”
I always fear failure, I think it’s human nature, but I never fear it enough that I give in to it. I’ve encountered more obstacles over the last ten years than I can count but I didn’t let them stop me. I let them educate me. I let them piss me off. I even let them humble me. But I NEVER let them stop me. Because I always believed in how what I offer can improve anyone’s entire life and, really, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. So when I encounter an obstacle I first try to see the opportunity behind it. If I can’t find that then I go to Plan B which is ‘has anyone else I admire encountered this same sort of challenge and how did they get through?’ Without fail (yes, pun intended) one or both of those recipes always works to allow me to cook up next steps – – even if some previous plans had to go down the drain. It’s all just part of the growth process.
And, you know every single time I persevered, I’ve been rewarded. And every single time I was only seconds from success too, so, had I stopped I would have never known the goodness that was waiting around the very next corner. That’s what keeps me going, my genuine and actual experience of perseverance paying off! I hope that everyone reading this takes those words to heart and hears my voice in their heads always cheering them on!
If you want to learn more about Ellen and watch some of her great videos on how to bring money into your life, be sure to check out her site.
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