Startup Savvy: Young Entrepreneur Sarah Michelle Boes Of SMNP Shares Their Secrets For Rapid Growth and Success
An Interview With Eden Gold
Remind yourself that It’s okay to be a curious novice. At the beginning of my business, I was very conscious of how young I was. Starting a test prep company at 25 is virtually unheard of, and I berated myself for not being the ultimate expert in every subject. However, there is a lot of value to being a curious novice and not feeling like you know everything. It makes you more relatable but also drives you to continue learning, which is incredibly important in growing a business. Every founder started as a curious novice and then, with more experience, became an expert in their business and field of work. You can’t rush this process — you just have to keep going!
The entrepreneurial landscape is more vibrant and challenging than ever, with young entrepreneurs at the forefront, driving innovation and redefining the boundaries of success in the business world. These dynamic individuals are not only creating new products and services but also building sustainable business models that thrive in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven environment. Their journeys are filled with lessons of resilience, strategic innovation, and the relentless pursuit of growth. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Michelle Boes.
Sarah Michelle Boes founded Sarah Michelle NP Reviews (SMNP), one of the leading names in nurse practitioner board preparation services. As a nurse educator, Sarah’s ultimate passion is to propel the lifelong learning journey of the nurse further while also bringing heightened awareness to the importance of mental health in the entire nursing education space. She founded SMNP to help nurse practitioner students achieve two goals: dampening their anxiety levels, building confidence before taking boards, and ultimately transitioning into practice. Her relatable, transparent, and innovative approach to nursing education has struck a chord with thousands of students worldwide. After her company was acquired in 2022, she now serves as the Chief Nursing Officer of Blueprint Test Prep. Sarah Michelle is a ranked Top 100 podcast host in the medical category. Her podcast, Real Deal Nurse Practitioner Club, deep dives into helping students prepare and pass their AANP & ANCC and hone their craft as new nurse practitioners. She earned her BSN from the University of Kentucky, her MSN in Nursing Education from Western Governors University, and her post-MSN-FNP from Eastern Kentucky University.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about cultural sensitivity, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a teacher. My parents were teachers, and I frequently found myself in tutoring and mentoring roles. However, I often also felt a gentle nudge towards nursing as it had left an imprint on my heart after an experience with my mamaw as a teenager. When the time came to make a proper decision between the two, I decided that nursing would give me more flexibility in my career, and I could always pivot to teaching nursing if I so chose.
While I was finishing nursing school, I had an encounter with an instructor that would ultimately change the trajectory of the rest of my life and career. After having a panic attack during clinical (my only public panic attack to date), she asked me to leave nursing school because I was “too anxious to be a safe nurse.” I felt like there were no resources for someone like me in nursing school — someone who was very anxious but sincerely wanted to succeed. When I decided to stay and fight for my spot within my program, I also decided that I hoped to one day make a difference for those in nursing school who also have anxiety like me. This would lead to me becoming an undergraduate nursing instructor for clinicals, courses, and lab skills and one day creating my first business centered around exam day anxiety for graduate nursing students (Sarah Michelle NP Reviews)
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Because my business is centered around those with exam-day anxiety, we tend to attract students who have failed their exams before. I welcome these students fiercely into my corner of the internet because I genuinely believe that if you can graduate from nurse practitioner school, you can pass your exam. With this in mind, during the start of my business, we had a student who had previously failed her NP licensure exam in 1999. It had been over twenty years since she had failed, and due to crippling exam anxiety, she never tried to retake the exam. After completing my live program, she was able to rebuild her confidence, find an anxiety toolkit that worked for her, and then pass her exam without issue.
You are a successful individual. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
- “Everything is “figureoutable.” I say this phrase nearly every day, and it is one of the core traits that has made me a successful entrepreneur. Being able to solve problems and, more importantly, be resourceful at every level of your business is critical. For example, when I started my business, I did not have a website or the ability to create one. That felt like an impossible task when I was trying to build out courses and build a community around those courses. Instead of getting lost in analysis paralysis and the perfect presentation for my courses, I was resourceful. I recorded my courses on Zoom and sold them via Facebook Messenger. As I started, I let students pay me through Venmo, Cash App, etc. Was it a great system? No. But did it allow me to get my course out faster? Yes. Continually being resourceful has helped me find success again and again within my business.
- Empathy — The core of my business started around being empathetic to others. There were lots of review courses that covered the clinical content already available, but none addressed mental well-being and managing exam-day anxiety. There were no courses that treated students like humans instead of numbers. My deep empathy for every student and my flexibility to co-create with them made all the difference. For example, I had a student who took my course in one of my live classes but then failed her exam. Instead of writing her off or telling her to jump back into the content again, I walked through her entire exam day experience with her on Zoom. We talked about her almost being late due to traffic, how anxious her mask had made her during the exam, and the fact that she couldn’t breathe when she had a couple of tough questions in a row. When I asked her what she did to manage her anxiety at the moment, she said she didn’t have anxiety despite the whole story she had just told me. By being empathetic to her and listening to her wholeheartedly, I got to the root of her exam day issue and helped her pass the second time around with a better anxiety tool kit.
- Creativity — While I now run and own the strategic vision of my business, I started as a creator. Test prep has been the same for a long time, but COVID-19 allowed me to explore new delivery methods. The routine way to do test prep is a two-day conference center experience that is long and overwhelming. Many students leave feeling overwhelmed and information overloaded. I knew there was a way test prep could be completed differently, so I created exactly what I wanted for my board prep. I created unique courses that involved my students and got them to participate instead of being passive bystanders. I found ways to deliver anxiety toolkits within the courses so students could walk in knowing exactly what to do if they got overwhelmed. I iterated and iterated each course with every one of my students at the heart of it until we got to something that we all loved together. Creativity feels like my superpower most days.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview about young entrepreneurs secrets to rapid growth and success. To start, how would you define success?
I define success as living the life that you want to live. Entrepreneurs and those around them often define success with a number. I commonly thought things like, “When I hit my first six figures, then I’ll have made it.” However, when you hit the magical goal, you just move the goalpost. Suddenly, six figures isn’t enough, but now you want to make seven figures instead, and so on. Therefore, success for me looks like making a meaningful impact in my community, especially across the nation, being a present parent, and working within a space where I feel my voice is heard. This also means my definition of success changes in different seasons of life.
What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly contributed to your startup’s growth, and why do you think it was so effective?
My biggest contributor to my early success was creating an intensely personal brand. I shared often about my own anxieties and mental health so that students could realize they were not alone. The other brands in my space no longer had a personal, high-touch feel. They were also run by people who were decades removed from taking their certification exams. Instead, I showed up as myself — 25 years old, fresh from taking my exam, and ready to show others how intense my anxiety was but how I still overcame it. While unconventional in my space, it resonated exceptionally well.
I also co-created most of my courses alongside my students. In the early days of my business, everything was sold via Facebook Messenger, meaning I interacted with every student. This gave me continuous feedback about what was working and what they felt they still needed. Showing my students that they could provide input and then see the course updated in just a couple of days was huge in building rapport.
Can you share a critical pivot point in your startup’s journey and how you navigated the decision-making process?
About a year into my business, I had to make a critical decision — would I be solely an education company, or would I become an ed-tech company? I was utilizing a third-party software to deliver my courses and question bank, but the needs of my students had far surpassed what that software could provide. Therefore, I began building my mobile app for our question bank. After months of work and countless hours to ensure the app was what we needed, I discovered that it had been built on “junk code,” which essentially means that something else will break when you fix something. I was devastated as we were only a week away from launch. It was deemed unfixable, and I had to revisit my previous decision. I knew that my students needed more than my third-party software could ever provide, so I hired a growth strategist to help outline what the next five years would look like as an education company versus an ed-tech company.
To explore that journey, I put teasers into the market to gauge what working with private equity or heavy capital might look like, what selling could look like, etc. It was then that I began receiving several offers to sell my business when I had merely been seeking to research what the future of my company could look like. It was a massive decision — was this the right time to sell? Should we build out more and revisit the market as an ed-tech company instead? Would we regret selling early? The only way I could make an informed decision was to visit the CEO of the company I liked the most in person and do an actual, authentic, old-school gut check. In addition, I had decided what I would be comfortable selling before starting the initial teaser process. There was a number that would be worth giving away the potential upside of keeping the business for myself. When the company I loved dearly approached me with that number, it made it VERY easy to say yes.
How do you balance the need for rapid growth with maintaining a sustainable and healthy company culture?
To be transparent, this one is tough; therefore, you have to be intentional about your company culture every step of the way — even more so in a startup. In start-ups, teams are often tiny and heavily dependent on one another, and almost everyone dips into various projects to get things done. With that level of intensity, having one poor part of your team can drag everyone down seemingly overnight. My biggest piece of advice here is to create a work environment where everyone truly feels like they are all in this together — that they are building this together. Show them the true impact and importance of their day-to-day work. For us, the success of our students and their glowing reviews when they passed their exams always made us feel that the work we were doing was making a real-life difference. Also, there is a layer of keeping things fun, too! It can make a difference if people are having fun with themselves and each other.
In what ways has your personal definition of success evolved since the inception of your startup?
My definition of success has rapidly evolved since the beginning of my business. When I first started my business, I just wanted to be able to pay for my $7K dental implant without taking out another credit card, as mine was already maxed out. When my business had its initial success, my definition pivoted to time flexibility and the ability to create a schedule that I wanted. And here recently, it has pivoted again to what I mentioned above now that I’m post-acquisition.
Based on your experience and research, can you please share “5 Things You Need to Succeed as a Young Person in Business?”
- Absolute, utter grit. Building a business will be hard. It is a normal part of the process that sometimes it will outright suck. When you own a business, it is your job to keep pushing, pivoting, and figuring out the next best move. When I was in the initial stages of building my first website, I found out the day before launch that my website would not be able to support subscriptions. That was the main reason I was creating a website at the time! After being told by the website designer I hired that doing subscriptions was suddenly “impossible” (which was a lie) and that he “could talk to my husband later about it on the phone since I was so emotional,” I had to choose for myself. Would I allow myself to be treated this way? Would I shut the entire business down and let it go because I didn’t know how to make a website myself? Or would I figure it out no matter what it took? I’m guessing you can figure out the option I chose — within an hour, I had hired a new website designer on the spot, and within three days, I had at least a functioning website I could work with for the time being.
- Be authentic above all else. One of the best things you can do is show up as your authentic and transparent self across the board, whether with your team, customers, potential investors, etc. When I decided to sell my company, I also simultaneously found out that I was pregnant. There was a lot of discussion about when and if I would disclose the information to potential buyers. I knew in my heart that if a company or investor would lose interest due to me being pregnant, it would be misaligned with my core values and would not be a place that I would want to sell to in the end. When I met the right buyer, I let them know pretty soon after despite guidance not to and was reassured that it was the right fit as my pregnancy was no big deal to them. By being genuine, you can build rapport and trust much faster, which is imperative when you are just starting out as a young person in business.
- Remind yourself that It’s okay to be a curious novice. At the beginning of my business, I was very conscious of how young I was. Starting a test prep company at 25 is virtually unheard of, and I berated myself for not being the ultimate expert in every subject. However, there is a lot of value to being a curious novice and not feeling like you know everything. It makes you more relatable but also drives you to continue learning, which is incredibly important in growing a business. Every founder started as a curious novice and then, with more experience, became an expert in their business and field of work. You can’t rush this process — you just have to keep going!
- Find your business community. It can be another business friend, a coach, a mentoring group, etc., but you need someone you can turn to when business gets tricky because it will. Becoming an entrepreneur can be very isolating if you let it, so seeking out a community earlier rather than later can be pivotal to staying within your business. I felt so alone early on in my business and decided to hire a business coach to learn from. Right after hiring that coach, I also found a community of all female entrepreneurs in a mastermind together. I also had my first extensive legal encounter when I received a cease and desist letter and had many people to turn to for advice. Because I was so new, I thought my business was over with one letter — I didn’t understand that in many ways, receiving this letter was a testament to the success of my business and now being a true competitor. Without my community, pushing through, keeping my business going, and overcoming the legal challenge would have been much more challenging.
- Make sure to pause and ask for what you want. When I started my business and began working with outside vendors, I was timid in my requests and would often assume people knew more than I did simply because they had been in business longer. This needed to change. Always be bold and ask for what you need and want — this goes for vendors, employees, potential buyers, etc. I almost declined my acquisition over the specifics of a non compete, but instead of turning away, I stopped and asked what I wanted. Even though delaying the deal closing was more complicated, it was the right decision for me and my future.
What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring entrepreneur that you wish someone had given you at the start of your journey?
While receiving business advice and guidance, especially from those who have done it before, can be life changing — remember that, no matter what, this is your business. You know it best. Don’t ever go against your gut. I was often told things like, “You can never sell a personal brand; you need to rebrand as soon as possible to remove yourself from being the key person.” or “You’re crazy to sell only two years in — why not wait and see what happens?” But I always went with my gut. My gut has yet to lead me astray in my business journey.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Hands down, mental health transparency. We have done a better job of this post-pandemic, but we still need to work on it every day actively. I was almost thrown out of school for having undiagnosed OCD and then was told by multiple professors and even a review course that I completed that exam day anxiety did not exist. It is simply not true, but it is easy to believe you’re the only one dealing with it when no one else is sharing it. I work hard to do this not only in my business but also in my personal life.
How can our readers further follow you online?
@Sarahmichellenp on Instagram is a great place! Also, via my website — www.sarahboes.com
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About The Interviewer: Eden Gold, is a youth speaker, keynote speaker, founder of the online program Life After High School, and host of the Real Life Adulting Podcast. Being America’s rising force for positive change, Eden is a catalyst for change in shaping the future of education. With a lifelong mission of impacting the lives of 1 billion young adults, Eden serves as a practical guide, aiding young adults in honing their self-confidence, challenging societal conventions, and crafting a strategic roadmap towards the fulfilling lives they envision.
Do you need a dynamic speaker, or want to learn more about Eden’s programs? Click here: https://bit.ly/EdenGold
Startup Savvy: Young Entrepreneur Sarah Michelle Boes Of SMNP Shares Their Secrets For Rapid Growth… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.