Interview with Lilian Sue
In this episode, we will uncover 3 keys:
- Conquering Entrepreneurial Mindset Challenges for Success.
- Empower women through self-belief, embrace uniqueness, and see failure as a path to success.
- Staying True to Your “Why” in Business.
Podcast Transcription
Episode 12: Lilian Sue – PR expert and Founder of In Retrospect Writing Services
Intro
Odiva Vasell: (00:00)
Buckle up, ladies. It’s time for you to meet the powerful and passionate Lillian Sue. Lillian knows the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and she has leveraged that into creating her own PR company, which helps you ladies get visibility and get in the mindset of really boosting your business sales. Let’s listen now. I’d like for you to welcome Lillian Sue. Lillian Sue is the founder of the company Retrospect Writing Services, and we’re gonna hear a lot more about how she helps empower women in their businesses. Welcome, Lillian.
Lillian Sue: (00:53)
Thanks for having me, Odiva.
Odiva Vasell: (00:55)
Yes, so tell me, when did you start this company?
Conquering Entrepreneurial Mindset Challenges for Success
Lillian Sue: (01:02)
Uh, I initially started the genesis of my company almost 16 years ago now when I was a university student. Originally, it started because at the time I was looking for paid internship opportunities. What you call a paid internship in the states, we call it Cooperative Education up here in Canada. Basically, it’s an add-on program to your degree for you to get work experience in order to make it easier to land a full-time job when you graduate. So, at the time, I was thinking to myself, “Well, if I want to land a position, I have to be able to show companies what I can do. In order to do that, I have to build a portfolio. All that academic writing and everything, none of that is going to cut it. So what am I going to do?” I basically sat down and made a list, and I was cold-calling and cold-emailing 40-plus companies a day locally, just trying to find somebody that was going to give me a shot. Ended up doing some subcontracting work for a local marketing agency, and that led to me building a freelance business focusing primarily on social media strategy and campaigns, and writing copy for websites, print collateral, taglines, a couple of radio ads here and there, you know. And as time went on, I had entrepreneurs coming to me and asking, “Can you write a press release? Is this something you do? Because there’s something that I want to get the news out on. Is this something that you offer?” And I got sick of telling people no. Wow. Basically, I just got sick of telling people no. And I said, “Well, let’s see. Let’s see if I can try this out. Let’s see if I enjoy it. Let’s see if this is something that I can add to my product suite that will help give clients value.” And at the time, I was also at a personal and professional crossroads. This was a year coming off my business that I didn’t make any money at all. No money. And I was struggling a bit because my mindset was focused so much on scarcity. I was acting out of desperation. I was not focused on getting in front of the right people. And at the same time, personally, I had just gotten engaged. We were wedding planning and we were moving. On top of that, I made no money in my business. So I thought, “What is the harm in trying out this new service, pivoting a little bit, taking my business in a different direction to see if I can continue to get in front of the right people, actually find the right people to get in front of?”
Odiva Vasell: (04:11)
All right, so, about getting it in front of the right people because you got tired of telling people no. So, this tells me that you had this talent, and word was getting out about this talent that you had in the writing area, and so you developed a business around that and pivoted. And I guess I understand a tough time in your life. Tell us a little bit more about that time in your life.
Lillian Sue: (04:48)
Uh, there was a lot of upheaval. You know, I was dealing with a lot mindset-wise. I was really struggling with continuing my business. I had a lot of external doubt coming in, questions being asked of me, like, “Are you sure you’re still in the right line of work? Have you thought about maybe getting a full-time job just to kind of steady things out? Because I mean, you are wedding planning, you are moving, you do need the money.” And I thought, at the end of the day, when things are going well, I still love what I do. My challenge at the time was trying to figure out how to keep going when things weren’t going well. And my answer to that for myself at the time was to explore something different with PR, was to get that education in it for myself, was to learn on the ground from people that were actually doing the work and actually providing value for clients to see if I could actually make a go of it, to see if I would enjoy it, to see if this was something that I could add to what it is I was already doing that would really give my clients value. So when I started working in PR and cutting my teeth with a local agency that had satellite offices in LA and New York as well, I worked with clients in a wide variety of industries: sports and fitness, fashion and beauty, indie film and television. It became a really big favorite for me, and that actually allowed me to spin off and do my own PR work for clients.
Odiva Vasell: (06:37)
Okay, so I see that you pivoted. You were writing from your college years, and then you pivoted into PR and got a lot of opportunity to learn from the best. Now, what inspired you to become an entrepreneur? Because we know the entrepreneur journey is not easy, and so your business is now primarily focused in PR. What inspired that?
Lillian Sue: (07:10)
Basically, my journey in entrepreneurship came from the fact that I was born and raised in a very traditional family. I am a first-generation Chinese-born Canadian. My parents are Baby Boomers and immigrants, and my childhood and most of my young adult life was very… It was drilled into me that I had to follow the cultural tradition of, “If you’re not a doctor or a lawyer, an accountant, or a pharmacist, you work a government job for 30, 40 plus years, you get a pension, and that’s it. The only thing that matters is financial stability, and you do your job, and that’s it.” And with my parents, I certainly did not see any passion, any joy. Not only were they both quite often miserable in their jobs, there was also no focus on needing a break, on prioritizing your mental health, on really kind of looking at it from, you know, life is too short to just think about how can I make money for someone else. So growing up, I really started to push back and rebel against that and rebel against what I saw as a lack of control in my own life. I wanted to really be able to build a life where I could make the impact I wanted to make, working with the people I wanted to work with. And PR is kind of an extension of my lifelong love of storytelling. I’ve been a creative writer my entire life. I was actually published in a couple of short story anthologies in high school, thanks to one of my amazing English teachers who found a couple of opportunities for me to submit. And I had originally, going into college, wanted to become a novelist. But this was before self-publishing was really a thing, and family members had said to me, “You’re going to starve, wishing for someone to take notice of your work.” So I thought, “Okay, how can I parlay my love of creative storytelling into a business where I help other people get their stories out there?” So what I was doing through copywriting and social media strategy, I’ve been doing with PR now. And one of the things that I had noticed in my work, doing a lot of PR campaigns, was I kept seeing a lot of clients come to me and the agencies I worked with with the same kind of limiting beliefs and unrealistic expectations when it came to marketing and PR. So a lot of the interactions that we had with prospective clients and people that became clients were things like, because they didn’t really understand how it all worked and that the power of it was really focused on the storytelling and the relationship-building component, they wanted guarantees, they wanted results, and tried to control the results that they were getting the way they thought you could do, like with advertising, things like…
Odiva Vasell: (10:55)
Bottom line.
Lillian Sue: (10:56)
So, that was an unrealistic expectation that we dealt with a lot with the limiting beliefs for a lot of the women I’ve worked with and talked to. A lot of fear and anxiety around wasting their time and energy, wasting their money, and also fear and anxiety around getting out there and sharing their stories. Because as women, and I actually learned this recently, that imposter syndrome was historically coined by men to describe instances when women were being, according to them, hysterical. So, I thought this is something that so many women suffer from that men don’t even seem to think about right most of the time. And it’s not even anything that we’ve said or done. It’s something that society’s going to pigeonhole us to make us play small, to make us doubt our own creative abilities, and to make us believe that we’re not worthy of getting out there and sharing our stories and we’re not worthy of being heard. So, facing all of that, I said, “I have years of this knowledge and experience. I have a lot of entrepreneurs coming to me and saying they can’t—they would love to work with me, but they can’t afford a campaign. What about coaching? What about providing that one-on-one personalized support and guidance to help women not only build a successful strategy to get out there but even before that, figure out how to develop a stronger PR mindset by recognizing where is the fear coming from, where’s the anxiety and the imposter syndrome coming from?”
Odiva Vasell: (12:55)
Yes.
Lillian Sue: (12:56)
What’s the root causes, right? What is triggering that in you, and how can we build healthy coping mechanisms to help you push past that?
Odiva Vasell: (13:06)
That’s fantastic. I mean you’ve touched on a lot of different topics. There’s a lot to unpack there, but what I hear you’re saying is you started from humble beginnings. You had to work through another kind of unseen obstacle in the culture that you were raised in, that predominantly you get a job whether you like it or not. You make sure that baby boomers make sure that they’re providing for their family for their kids to have a better life, whether or not they even enjoy the life that they have. And then you went into this, I guess, kind of male-dominated, I’m assuming, PR environment where they’re like, “Give me the bottom line, give me results,” without actually looking at building the relationship or telling the story, which brings on the client loyalty. And then, finally, you told me something that I didn’t know, that imposter syndrome is a phrase coined by men to label women who they’ve deemed as hysterical. And so now women are carrying the weight of this label into their business and feeling, “Am I worthy? Am I good enough?” And now you’ve got a business that works with that mindset first so that they can tell their story. All right, which is very key to also getting visible and really advertising your business, as now more and more women, they are the brand. But to be the brand, they have to get out there. That’s fascinating. Tell me about the impact, more about the impact. You touched on it a little bit, but as a woman with a multicultural background, what kind of impact do you want to have and relate to other women who have these same struggles?
Empower women through self-belief, embrace uniqueness, and see failure as a path to success in entrepreneurship and PR
Lillian Sue: (15:26)
My goal ultimately is to empower and educate women to really gain the confidence to learn how to not only make PR work for themselves but have enough confidence to be able to advocate for themselves and their brands when they go work with other publicists or PR agencies. I’ve heard from others that have said, “I did do a campaign, and I did get results. I had radio interviews and this other kind of thing. But the problem was they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up to the publicist because they believed that that person is the expert, therefore they’re going to steer the ship. I’m going to stay quiet.” And what happened was the results they got were not the results they wanted, and they didn’t get in front of the right audience members, the readers, the customers that they wanted to get in front of. And I want to minimize this by teaching women that a lot of what we think, a lot of these “what if” scenarios, the catastrophizing, we think it because we are scared of the unknown. Like, going back to the Imposter syndrome, that was something that was coined after the Second World War when all the men came home and basically said, “Okay, women, we’re back now. You don’t have to be part of a workforce anymore.” And, of course, a lot of the women were like, “Wait a minute, we made a good living, we kept things humming over here while you were all fighting. We know what we’re doing. We don’t need you to provide anymore; we can actually make our own way, right?” And for me, I really want to empower women to recognize that so much of the fear of the unknown and so much of the anxiety comes from what we look at as a loss of control when we put ourselves out there, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, when we allow ourselves to make connections with people we don’t know. There is that fear of, “I’m going to lose control of the narrative, people are going to judge me, people are going to dismiss me, they’re going to reject my story, and they’re going to see that I don’t know what it is that I’m doing or that what I’m talking about.” And for me, I really want to empower women to push past that because I lived it myself. I spent a lot of years essentially hiding behind case studies and testimonials because I thought, “Hey, that shows them what I can do, that should be enough. My work speaks for itself.” When, in reality, what I do in a lot of ways, Odiva, is almost immaterial because there are so many people that do what I do. What they can expect when they come to work with me, who am I, what is my journey, why does it matter? And I realized, I came to the realization that so much of my own fear of getting out there stemmed from a fear of a loss of control. I wanted control because I grew up without control, my life was dictated to me. So when I realized that and I made the decision to let go of that need for control and to embrace that freedom with the understanding that the people that will resonate with my message, the people that believe in my story, the people that find common ground with me, will be the ones to respond, that changed the game on everything.
Odiva Vasell: (19:38)
Wow.
Lillian Sue: (19:39)
It really wasn’t until I got it to that point that I felt that I was able to coach women through this, to empower them through this, to give them the mantras, the affirmations, and the recommendations for meditations and self-hypnosis to help them push past this, the same way I have, because a lot at the end of the day…
Odiva Vasell: (20:05)
I just want to hop in here and say, you know, I want to get back to some of the things you said. You explained to me that you do a lot more than just PR, especially with working with women, there’s a lot of mindset work to be done. You know, being in the visibility industry, women need that visibility, but they are afraid. One of the key things that they’re afraid of is the loss of control. I understand. And it’s not only coming from their backgrounds. One of the key things you mentioned is that it’s coming from the agencies that they work with. And I can relate to that experience as well. You have a brand, you have something you believe in, you take it to an agency, and they say, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. We’ve got to change everything.” You give them your product, your design, and they come back with something that’s totally different, something that’s totally generic, and they say, “We lose our voice.” And you say, “Oh, well, you’re the expert, so we’re going to let you steer the ship. You’re using my money, but I’m letting you steer the ship.” That is frightening, but I understand it because typically as women, we don’t think of ourselves as the expert, and we want to default to someone else who knows better, as we think. And when you coach these women, how do they get to the point because this is key, how do they… How do you bring them to the point where they realize they are the brand, they are what people want to see or who people want to know? How do you bring them to that point where they are steering the ship?
Lillian Sue: (22:16)
A lot of this comes down to where they’re at initially in their own mindset journeys because for a lot of the women that are stuck in that cycle and they don’t see a way out, they’re not necessarily ready to embark on a journey that requires them to get introspective about what’s triggering their limiting beliefs and where that’s coming from. For some of the other women I’ve spoken to, they know how they feel, and they say, “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of feeling this way. I’ve been running around in circles in this rat race, and no, I’m not getting anywhere. I’m not getting anywhere, and I think I need help.” And that is really the key, I think, for the people that are ready to do mindset work. Certainly, it was the key for me to be ready to invest in a mindset coach, who I still work with to this day. I’ve been with her two and a half years now, and we still talk almost every day. And I had to myself get to that point where I said, “Okay, I need that outside perspective because I can’t do it alone anymore.” So for the women that are willing and are at that point, I say to them, “Okay, when you are comparing yourself to another entrepreneur in a similar space and you see them landing those interviews, getting those events, standing up on stage, and being a speaker, you’ve told me that these are the things you want to do, but you think you can’t get there. Why is that? Where is that coming from? Why do you think they could get there, and you can’t get there, and why are you looking at it from a standpoint of you’re not making progress the way you want to?” We really dig into things like recognizing that everybody has their own timeline, everybody has their own journey. We dig into the fact that social media plays a big role in triggering imposter syndrome, triggering comparison syndrome. And for me, the most rewarding moments come when my clients get those lightbulb moments, when they sit there and they recognize, “You know, I’m not actually—I’ve been conditioned to fear failure because it believes that means that I’m doing things the wrong way. And now I recognize that there is no right or wrong way based on what an industry expert tells me. What is right is what’s right for me.” And that’s something that I really, really focus on with my clients when it comes to building a strategy. Because I say to them, “The framework in PR is what it is. You’re always going to need a media kit, you’re always going to need a story pitch because you need to have something to tell people, and you’re always going to need a media list because you need to know who you’re getting in front of. However, how that looks for you and your brand is going to be really different than it looks for someone else.” So in working with them on their mindset and their strategy, I always say, “I’m not offering a one-size-fits-all blanket solution here. That’s not what we’re doing. What we’re doing is focusing on who you are, why your story matters, and where you want to take that story.”
Odiva Vasell: (26:21)
Let’s repeat that again: who you are, why your story matters, and where you want to take that story. That is it, that is getting visible, that is standing up for yourself, that is being uniquely you. And that’s part of, you know, as also my mission with Fempreneur International, is to get women to stop comparing themselves to what others are doing and realize that it’s your journey that you’re on. And I like how you mentioned about failure. If you fail, some people think that you’ve done it the wrong way. But instead of thinking it’s wrong, think of it as part of the learning process for the entrepreneur journey, which goes on and on, and those “failures,” if you want to call them that, will happen so that you can step up to the next level. And can you give us, we’re going to wrap up now, but can you give us advice for women who are just starting out in their business, something that you learned along the way? What is a key nugget of wisdom you can share with us?
Staying True to Your “Why” in Business
Lillian Sue: (27:42)
In today’s world, where there is a lot of noise, particularly on social media, a lot of industry experts saying things like you have to show up every single day, seven days a week, several times a day, post videos, all of that kind of thing to make an impact with your audience, it can get really tempting to follow what someone else says should work. My advice to all the female entrepreneurs out there is to always go back to your “why.” Why are you doing this? What is your story? What is the impact you want to make with clients, with your brand, with your projects, with your causes, whatever it is that you’re doing? What is your “why?” And to support that “why,” build a business and a structure to your marketing that prioritizes making consistency work for you. Because consistency is key to making that impact and to adding value. But that doesn’t mean you have to show up seven days a week. It could be two times a week, it could be three times a week, whatever it is to prioritize your energy so you can keep taking those steps forward the way that you want to without burning yourself out and following someone else’s advice. Build the strategy and the consistency that works for you, prioritize your energy to reinforce your “why.”
Odiva Vasell: (29:23)
I like that. I like what you said about energy and getting back to your “why” because that’s like when I coach in communication and public speaking, that’s like when you get into the zone when you recognize your “why” of why you’re doing this, apart from whatever social media is telling you to do and apart from tech issues that plague us all. Getting to the core of your business, which is your “why” and being yourself, is a great part of that. The more you start being yourself in your business, the more you’re going to enjoy what you’re doing and the more you’re going to connect with the listener and the people that are watching. So, I really love this message that you’ve brought to us today. You are a strong and powerful woman, Lillian Sue, and you seem to have learned a lot of life lessons in just a short time because you look so young, and you are bringing that women supporting women energy into your business and recognizing that there’s a hole there, there’s a need there, and one of the keys is the mindset that we constantly have to work on. That’s one thing we have to consistently work on to get to the next level. I just want to thank you for bringing that message to us, and I will be looking for you to grow in this company. Give us the name again.
Lillian Sue: (31:05)
Uh, In Retrospect Writing Services. And speaking of growth, it’s my plan to continue to empower women to gain the confidence. I’m looking at expanding into more public speaking, doing more workshops, more webinars. I’m currently writing my first non-fiction PR book to really, you know, give women that resource, give female entrepreneurs that resource that can guide them on why PR is powerful, why they should consider incorporating it into their marketing, and all the building blocks of how to build a successful strategy to just get out there.
[Music]
Conclusion
In closing, this conversation is a powerful reminder that true entrepreneurial success hinges on more than just business tactics; it’s about the essence of who you are. Lillian Sue’s journey is a testament to the transformative potential of a positive mindset, breaking free from self-doubt, and embracing authenticity. The emphasis on understanding your ‘why’ in business not only guides your path but infuses your endeavors with purpose. Individualized strategies tailored to your uniqueness are your secret weapon. As you journey through the entrepreneurial landscape, remember that consistency and authenticity are the keys to forging meaningful connections with your audience. This conversation serves as a roadmap to navigating the entrepreneurial world with self-empowerment, a clear ‘why,’ and the power of being unapologetically you. So, as you embark on your entrepreneurial adventure, embrace these insights and continue supporting and uplifting each other, for the future is bright for those who dare to be authentic and resilient in the pursuit of their dreams.