Today, unlock a world of innovation at the crossroads of entrepreneurship and public health consulting with Leah Roman and Vinu Ilakkuvan. They bring to light the motivations behind a groundbreaking survey on self-employed public health professionals, revealing the often hidden sides of self employment. Through candid conversations, we learn about the economic prospects of consulting and the pressing need for more academic training and support networks to arm future public health entrepreneurs with the tools for success.
You’ll Learn
Today’s Guest
Leah A. Roman, MPH, MCHES is the Owner & Principal Consultant for Roman Public Health Consulting LLC, where she helps public health organizations design effective e-learning solutions. She has 18+ years of experience providing training and technical assistance, health education, and project management services. Leah has a BA in Psychology (University of San Diego), a master of public health degree (Boston University), a certificate in e-learning instructional design (University of Washington), and is a Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES). Leah lives in the Philadelphia, PA area (USA) with her husband and two children.
Vinu Ilakkuvan, DrPH, MSPH, is passionate about strengthening community-driven efforts to address the upstream, root drivers of health. She is Founder and Principal Consultant of PoP Health, a public health consulting practice that partners with community coalitions and collaboratives to transform health in their communities through policy and systems change. PoP Health helps coalitions engage in community collaboration, action planning, participatory evaluation, and effective storytelling. PoP Health also issues a biweekly newsletter, Community Threads, with tools and strategies for anyone seeking to improve community health
Resources
Join The Public Health Career Club: the #1 hangout spot and community dedicated to building and growing your dream public health career.
Today, unlock a world of innovation at the crossroads of entrepreneurship and public health consulting with Leah Roman and Vinu Ilakkuvan. They bring to light the motivations behind a groundbreaking survey on self-employed public health professionals, revealing the often hidden sides of self employment. Through candid conversations, we learn about the economic prospects of consulting and the pressing need for more academic training and support networks to arm future public health entrepreneurs with the tools for success.
You’ll Learn
Today’s Guest
Leah A. Roman, MPH, MCHES is the Owner & Principal Consultant for Roman Public Health Consulting LLC, where she helps public health organizations design effective e-learning solutions. She has 18+ years of experience providing training and technical assistance, health education, and project management services. Leah has a BA in Psychology (University of San Diego), a master of public health degree (Boston University), a certificate in e-learning instructional design (University of Washington), and is a Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES). Leah lives in the Philadelphia, PA area (USA) with her husband and two children.
Vinu Ilakkuvan, DrPH, MSPH, is passionate about strengthening community-driven efforts to address the upstream, root drivers of health. She is Founder and Principal Consultant of PoP Health, a public health consulting practice that partners with community coalitions and collaboratives to transform health in their communities through policy and systems change. PoP Health helps coalitions engage in community collaboration, action planning, participatory evaluation, and effective storytelling. PoP Health also issues a biweekly newsletter, Community Threads, with tools and strategies for anyone seeking to improve community health
Resources
Join The Public Health Career Club: the #1 hangout spot and community dedicated to building and growing your dream public health career.
I feel like any ideas around kind of how we can have more consistent kind of connections and peer support in this world of public health consulting are very welcome and like if folks have ideas A like, go forth and make them reality. But also, I think, if there are ways that we can all work together to create those spaces, I think that's always something we're all looking for.
Speaker 2:Welcome to PH Spotlight, a community for you to build your public health career with. Join us weekly right here and I'll be here too. Your host, Sujani Siva from PH Spot. Hey, Leah and Vinu, and welcome to the PH Spot podcast. So lovely to have you both and yes, it is Leah Roman. I think you're one of my most popular returning guests to Leah.
Speaker 2:So a lot of our listeners will probably recognize your name and I'll definitely link up some of our older episodes. And then Vinu is going to join me again on the podcast in a couple of weeks and we'll be sharing her career journey. But today we're going to talk about a very, you know, favorite topic of mine, which is entrepreneurship in public health, and both Leah and Vinu have done this, and additional individuals and I think we'll talk about them as well they weren't able to join us today have done some incredible work understanding this space I think one of my favorite pieces of work that I've found to date, and I'm really excited to get into it. And I think we were even saying there might be a part two, depending on how today's conversation goes. But maybe I will give you the chance to maybe just do a quick introduction, leah, for our listeners, and then Vinu, I'll hand it over to you to also introduce yourself.
Speaker 3:Sure Well, thanks so much for having me again. Hopefully people are tired of hearing from me. So my name is Leah Roman, I'm a public health consultant and I'm calling in from the Philadelphia area in the United States and I've been working in public health in some capacity for the past 18 or 19 years now, and I have been an independent consultant for 11 years. So I just had my anniversary in January.
Speaker 3:I was a generalist earlier in my career, so when I consulted I did everything from, you know, grant writing to needs assessment to evaluation. But in the last three to four years have really narrowed my work down to working in e-learning and instructional design for public health projects, specifically for projects that are serving adult learners and that is often the public health workforce so often helping clients to develop online courses and trainings for our workforce. And so you know, we've talked in previous episodes, which we'll link to, about my career journey, and when I was reflecting on that this morning, I was thinking how interesting it is that I've really circled back to a lot of the things that I've liked in the last 18 years, so taking you know, health education and training and technical assistance and putting those things all together and working in e-learning and instructional design, so that's what I'm currently working on now.
Speaker 2:That's awesome and I know when I started PH Spot, you were one of the individuals who I don't know how. I reached out to you and you had this incredible community of public health consultants and entrepreneurs, so it's been super inspiring to see you kind of evolve and be at where you are right now. Venu, tell us about you, and this is the first time I get to talk to you, so it's super exciting for me Me as well.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. So, yeah, my name is Venua Luckavan, I am also a public health consultant. I'm based in Fairfax, virginia, and my consulting practice, pop Health, is really focused on partnering with community coalitions and collaboratives that are trying to transform health in their communities. I have a special focus on kind of policy and systems level change work and really kind of run the gamut in terms of how we support those coalitions and collaboratives, in terms of kind of connecting with community members and really making sure they're driving the work, action planning and associated kind of strategic meeting facilitation, participatory evaluation and learning and then effective storytelling.
Speaker 1:My backgrounds in health communications and I've always, you know, I've loved writing, I've loved dancing, so kind of storytelling in all its forms has always been a passion of mine, so kind of similar to what Leo was saying as well, kind of bringing all the things I love doing most together and that's one of my favorite things about being a you know, public health consultant and entrepreneur is sort of having the ownership to be able to do that and the flexibility as well. So very excited to be here today.
Speaker 2:Love it, so sounds like well, I was looking on both of your LinkedIn's and Venua. You've been in this like world of public health entrepreneurship as a consultant for almost seven years now and, leah, you mentioned you're kind of hitting 11 years, or just hit 11 years. So what was it that inspired one of you, or all of you, to kind of come together and publish this piece of work called the self-employed public health consultant and entrepreneur workforce in the US? I remember when you started, I think, circulating the survey at one point and I was like, okay, I'm not in the US so I can't answer this, but I believe I really hope to kind of get to see the results of it, and when it did come out it was incredible work that you had all done.
Speaker 2:So like I didn't hear any of you say, oh yeah, I work in like researching the workforce or any of that. So where did that inspiration come from? Do?
Speaker 1:you want to start, venua? Sure, yeah, I think it was for me just very personal, I think, as I entered the kind of public health consultant workforce myself seven years ago after having been in kind of full-time public health employment for nonprofits, for government whatever and was entering this space and just found myself with lots of questions right around the kinds of services to offer, how to structure pricing, what pricing should be Like. I was just grappling with all these questions and you know I found the Facebook community that Leia has been running so wonderfully for all of us and it was just incredibly helpful to get connected to a community of consultants and it was great to have questions answered, to connect with folks et cetera. But obviously there are sort of like these broader questions of just like what is the state of this field and where are people overall and on average, and those questions are hard to answer without something like a survey and it so happened that our other colleague who couldn't be here today, that's worked with us.
Speaker 1:Laura Reynolds runs a group in DC called Women in Public Health and Women in Public Health DC was doing a compensation survey for all public health folks in DC, so not limited to consultants, but Laura really had a leadership role in getting that survey off the ground with that group and I saw that and I was like I would love to do this, but specifically to consultants and not focused on a specific region, but really looking nationwide, yeah, so then Leia was obviously a natural person to turn to kind of managing this Facebook group and this network, and I knew she had been in this space for a while. So, yeah, kind of reached out to both of them and proposed this idea and it sort of went from there.
Speaker 3:But I'll turn it to you now and I'm laughing when I think about it, because this started probably four years ago or something and it just like the scope expanded, as I think we originally started with, hey, we should just do the survey within the Facebook group, maybe. And then it turned into well, we should ask more broadly for people even outside of it. And then we were like, well, why don't we think about getting IRB approval in case we wanna publish this? We've sort of followed all the research protocols. So the project also, I think, started kind of small, but then got bigger and bigger, and so, as Vinu mentioned, laura was involved, and at the time Kealoke Worthington was working with her, and so she's our other author. I wanna acknowledge both of them and we miss having them here today, but they had wonderful contributions. So we ended up.
Speaker 3:Then turning to the networking group that I admin, and so, for people who are listening, who aren't familiar, I have a Facebook group that is actually approaching its 10-year anniversary, which is pretty amazing, and this is for self-employed public health consultants and entrepreneurs. I checked this morning so I'd have accurate numbers. So we now have 186 members, which is wonderful. We started with like three people. I have a larger spreadsheet of everyone who's in there who's approached me about joining, but then also people who've approached me who then didn't join for some reason, and that has like maybe 250 names on it.
Speaker 3:So we had this collaboration between Vinu, and Laura came in with the idea and I had access to the population that we wanted to survey, and so that's really how the collaboration got started, and I think it was really exciting for me, because so much of this I mean really all of it has been anecdotal, has been just us helping each other and that's been wonderful. But I think the idea of having some concrete data that we could share was really exciting, especially as we are seeing and again, this has been anecdotal, but we feel like this part of the workforce is growing, but it doesn't really have any spotlight on it at all in any sort of organized or official way. Besides my networking group or there's a couple other consultants that are offering training and support to people who want to be on public health entrepreneurs, but not through any sort of official channels like membership organizations and things like that. So we wanted to try to move things from anecdotal to actually having some hard data.
Speaker 2:That's cool and I'm sure you and I have talked about this, leah, and I think it's a great teaching moment, especially for our listeners who are like, yeah, I'd like to dabble into consultancy or entrepreneurship. It's about taking an idea that came to mind and, vinu, you were inspired and personally inspired when you saw Laura's work and just put it out there into the world to a few people who then came around that inspiration and that idea and look at where you guys have brought it four years later and I think it's an incredible teaching moment for anyone listening. If you have that itch for entrepreneurship or wanting to do something in the space of public health on your own, I think sharing your idea with a few people around you never know where it's gonna go. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, if I remember correctly, you had 120 people respond to the survey. That's a really good sample size. Especially you have 180 people in the group, and do you know if the responses came from only individuals in that group or were there people from all over?
Speaker 3:It was broader than that and some of the people in the group are international, outside of the US, but the survey itself was only for US-based consultants. So we did market it more broadly through our networks and I think you probably saw it on LinkedIn when it was going out. We sent out email blasts to everybody on my spreadsheet and then also just did like a warm email introduction to different colleagues of ours who may have access to consultants. So, yeah, so it went beyond the group. The group was essential in helping us pilot the survey. So we did have five people who volunteered to take an initial version of it and they gave us both written and oral feedback, which was really helpful. And then we did some, I will say, renovations, some revisions and renovations on the survey to make it better. So the group was like really supportive in getting it going, but we did have people filling it out outside of that group as well.
Speaker 2:Super cool. What would you both say was kind of the most surprising findings for each of you?
Speaker 1:I think that the split in terms of part-time and full-time consultants was 50-50. And that in and of itself was not surprising. But this is a place where, when we kind of dove further into the data and looked at some of the demographic differences with all the caveats of this is a small sample size and not randomly selected and we can talk more about kind of the potential and likely, honestly, biases and things just in like who's in our network and who actually got this, whatever. But with all of those caveats, I still thought it was really surprising that when we dove deeper into the part-time, full-time split, there was basically 37% of respondents who identified as white reported other paid employment in addition to their business, compared to 85% of respondents who identified as black, and 100% of respondents who identified as Asian saying that they had other paid employment in addition to their consulting business.
Speaker 1:And I know we had some conversations in analyzing and interpreting this data around why that might be and that's all speculation at this point. But I think when we think about having your own business, there are obviously a number of risks and other things associated with that, both kind of just logistically you think about health insurance, things like that depending on whether or not you have that through someone else in your family, and also just the security economic security, financial security, a steady paycheck, etc. So there might be various reasons kind of underlying what is showing up as inequity in terms of just people who are juggling multiple things versus people who are kind of fully in self-employment on its own. So that was something that really kind of struck me and that I would be very interested to kind of delve into further.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, okay. And how about you, leah?
Speaker 3:It's interesting, I think, for me, because I also, I think you know, when I had a course on consulting and then coached people I think I've heard a lot of what we heard in the survey before, so I don't know nothing really like made me be like, oh my God, I can't believe that, you know. But there were still things that I think really popped for me and I think because now, working in instructional design and e-learning, I'm always thinking about people's learning needs, and so I thought it was really fascinating that. So only 7% of our respondents reported that their academic programs had offered courses or training on business or entrepreneurship, and again, that might be changing. So we had a you know, this is a more experienced group, so on average, most people had between five and 20 years of experience in public health. So none of them have been in school to get their MPH, most of them in the last like year or two or five. So that may be changing.
Speaker 3:But, you know, I think it did show a big discrepancy between the skills and knowledge that people need to run their own businesses and what they've been able to get in their academic program, and I think, you know, anecdotally, this matches what I think we're seeing in practice, which is that we've had to develop these kinds of training programs ourselves. So I, you know, developed a course on consulting because people were asking me and I was like trying to help, you know, and now there's other consultants that are, you know, developing similar kinds of trainings and peer support and things like that. So I can see that you know, sort of private businesses are trying to fill this gap. That's not happening in academic setting or, you know, from public health training centers and things like that. There's this gap in skills. So for me I think that was, I mean, only 7%. You know, reporting this, I felt like that was a really glaring learning need.
Speaker 2:And maybe just going back to kind of what Vinu found interesting around the demographic. I wish I had kind of dived in deeper and I don't know if it's in your full paper around the demographic differences. So I'll definitely go back and do that, because that was an interesting point that you pointed out and I do hope to do that, and then maybe for our part two conversation dive into that a little bit. But yes, the training piece I think is huge and I don't do it in a kind of way where I'm actually coaching individuals, but inside the public health career club and our membership community I am seeing more and more individuals interested in consulting and I think you had listed the four biggest struggles that people had when starting a business and it was that setting up peace, getting clients right and I think some of those things.
Speaker 2:We've all had to learn it, and I'm well versed in how to set up a business in Canada, but then I can't really help individuals in the US because they don't really understand the different forms and the ways to do that. So I think there is a huge gap there for university programs, if not having their own courses, but at least bridging that gap for students, introducing them to the business schools or having that option to say like, hey, you can take these courses in the school and then these are the ones that we would recommend. I think there's some low hanging fruits that I think could happen For me. I think a stat that I wasn't surprised by was that 92% of the individuals were women in your sample, so I wasn't at all surprised, I guess. Just public health I've always worked with the predominantly women workforce and so I wasn't too surprised and 95% of individuals had a graduate degree. That was also not surprising.
Speaker 2:I did love the piece that you had on how much money do they take home.
Speaker 2:I just recorded kind of a solo episode on like how much can you get paid in public health and I made sure to include your piece at the end there because people don't consider self employment in public health and I think there was a career advisor in maybe I think it was at the School of Public Health at Harvard who had said I think they had started recommending that as an option to people because I think their students didn't even know that was a possibility within public health.
Speaker 2:And just for our listeners in case they didn't get a chance to read this, the net income reported for full time public health consultants or entrepreneurs were around 80,000 US dollars. And then the part time one was also interesting because I think people were able to take home about just under $30,000. So I'm thinking you know, if you do have stable income that pays you maybe you know $70,000, you can supplement that and bump your salary up $30,000 more. If you did have that luxury with that additional time and flexibility but yeah, any sort of interesting points you both can remember around how much money could be made.
Speaker 3:That was a big one that people told us like when we introduced the survey, people were like we want to know how much money everybody else is making and how much we should charge.
Speaker 3:I wrote a blog post about pricing your consulting services I don't know probably five or six years ago. You know, to this day it is the number one most popular blog post that I've ever written. People really want this information and there hasn't been like an easy way to get it. So that the comparison, you know, because some people made you consulting two projects a year, and so when we were even making the questions, it was like how are we going to ask this? And so we actually asked people to go to their tax returns because we really wanted some accuracy in terms of money. And then you know when we did end up, even though a lot of us don't charge hourly, necessarily, we didn't want that metric of you know the average hourly rate, because that's a big one both, for I think consultants are often kind of scared to charge that much. Like. So we got, I think it was a hundred. I don't have it right in front of me.
Speaker 3:I think it was $120 an hour which is a pretty big number, and I think when you first start that's really scary to charge. I think many of us were charging like $30 an hour when we first started and like way undercharging, not accounting for all of our expenses and things like that. I also think that's an important number for clients to see, because you know I have had people balk at that and be. You know, when you look at that as a whole, like oh my gosh, it's so much money, like why would I, you know? But it's important to understand all that goes into that. So I think it's really helpful for people to see like this is actually the average, like this is the going rate, and you know we do have a significant amount that then goes for taxes and goes for our expenses, and so it's not like we get all that money in our pocket. I mean, that was the number one thing people told us that they wanted to know.
Speaker 1:And I think it was also helpful to get a sense of the breakdown. You know we had a breakdown of 83% of respondents earning their revenue via sort of charging at an hourly rate, 68% via project based rates, 18% via fee for products and 10% kind of on retainer packages. And I think that kind of breakdown and those were not necessarily mutually exclusive. I know many of us do project based rates for some projects, hourly for others. But I think that kind of breakdown is really helpful too. And again, kind of just personally, when I started consulting I had a lot of questions about not only how much to charge, but how to charge, like what pricing structure makes sense. So I think it's helpful just to know the options that are out there. And again, kind of the lay of the field in terms of, okay, most people are kind of in these buckets and I think that can be, you know, reassuring, helpful, motivating, inspiring, whatever, depending on where you are and where kind of the averages are. And then, yeah, I mean I think for folks who are considering entrepreneurship and public health.
Speaker 1:I know for me when I first started and we can talk in a little bit about sort of people's motivation for getting into consulting, because I know that was another thing I was really interested in and I think is valuable on a couple different fronts, kind of understanding that motivation.
Speaker 1:But for me the initial start was more out of necessity, of what needed to happen in my life at that moment, and I found myself quite surprised by, you know, just like the income potential that exists in this space, and it's certainly not anything that anyone told me about or introduced me to in any of my academic programs and things like that. I feel like you hear about working in government, working in nonprofits like, etc. But I think that in a lot of ways I have found kind of the income potential as a consultant to be substantially higher than what was in the range of, like, the places I was working full time. And so you know, I feel like that's important for people to hear that this is a viable option and one that you know it has certainly challenges and things but also a lot of benefits, and I think that's part of what came through in terms of people's motivation to start consulting as well as continue it.
Speaker 2:I think we're at a point in like just public health careers, that this option is being considered more and more, and I'm very happy to see it because I think the potential for earning is as high, especially with cost of living going up. And I just find I know I still have a full time job and then I have a page spot.
Speaker 2:So I'm one of those individuals with a full time job and an entrepreneurial initiative. But I do love kind of all the things that come with that right, like the flexibility, the ability to just be creative and work on projects, the way I spend my time with my son right. So I think a lot of those perks are there, although the risks can be high at the beginning. And I think that's where potentially exploring a transition period where you are maybe doing both and then eventually taking some time off from one or the other and kind of like easing your way into it. And to your point earlier, leah, you know it was a request that was very popular about income potential when you were doing your survey, and I think it's probably because we don't talk about money, whether it's in public health or other industries, but I think more so in public health it hasn't been a topic that's being discussed out openly.
Speaker 2:You know, even if you look at Glassdoor or some of those directories and repositories, you can't really find information on public health salaries. There have been some independent work, like you mentioned. Laura's group has done some. I know Daisy is another individual I met on LinkedIn who's done some. You know, personal work on just collecting public health salaries. But I do hope we can kind of open that up a little bit more and your survey definitely allows us to explore that a bit more. And you know, leah and I had a webinar it was called Pricing for Profit when Leah was doing her course and it was a popular session. People had lots of questions. And when you are stepping into consulting or any entrepreneurial venture, it's hard to really understand what your value is, what you should be charging, and I think there's the hourly rate or the value based rate, like just different ways of doing it.
Speaker 1:So I think the black to your point of how, like we don't talk about it enough, there's not enough transparency around it, and I think that black box of it all puts public health, students and people who work in public health at a real disadvantage.
Speaker 1:And I mean not, I mean I think that black box around sort of income and salary exists in a lot of fields, maybe even all of them, most of them, I don't know, but like I think it really puts us at a disservice because you know, we don't know the benchmarks in order to then seek out our value, whether it's someone applying for a full time position or beginning consulting, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:So I feel like that definitely was a big motivation for us in creating the survey and asking the specific questions we did, associating up with the tax returns like we always talking about, like all of that was really from this place of like we want to see more transparency, we want to provide a benchmark, we want people to be able to have a better sense of that. I don't know that this is going to reach this particular audience, but I always, like anyone who's an employer or posting requests for proposals, it drives me absolutely crazy when there is not a salary or a budget range posted. Like, you have a budget range, I like I know you do so like, please don't put out an RFP without a budget range, because it's a colossal waste of time for people who are submitting. You know, again the black box of it all like doesn't help the hiring and it doesn't help the person applying again, whether it's a full time job or an RFP.
Speaker 3:So sorry, that's just my little soapbox for a second and I also think I just want to mention too, like I also think the transparency goes in both directions. So I think that there's transparency about the high end, like wow, like what you talked about venue, like you can really make a good salary doing independent consulting.
Speaker 3:I also think that we need to be transparent, that not everybody is making that much money right, like so some people in our survey, we're making a lot of money now that could be, because you know, I've had years where I've made less money, like during the pandemic, when I was homeschooling my kids and I had a new baby and like all that stuff, you know. So there's obviously variations, but I think, especially with social media and people doing their products and their courses, there's a lot of people out here who are bouncing into the space and being like I make six figures and this and that, and maybe they are, but we don't always know what somebody's net is, so that person can have an enormous amount of expenses and all sorts of other things. So I do think there's also some like false advertising, that owning your own businesses for everybody and everybody can work 20 hours a week and make six figures, and that's not always true either. So like, I think we need some transparency on both sides so people know what they're going into.
Speaker 3:Over the last 11 years I've met plenty of consultants that have really struggled. They've gone back to full time work, they've had trouble getting clients, they've had trouble getting high paying, you know consulting gigs. So like it's all there, the whole spectrum, and there's so many factors. I mean we can have a whole session just on that, but I think I like transparency. You know really at both ends of the spectrum in terms of how much money people are making.
Speaker 2:I love that. Yeah, I was going to add like just full transparency and to add to the conversation. I've run PH spot for about seven years now and haven't taken any salary because I've just invested it all back in and I found the biggest value for me is to hire a team so that I could get time back with my son. That's my biggest motivation, like I want to build something, that's the driving factor, but every single dollar goes back to funding a team who can keep it up and running so that I can spend that time with my family. So I think there's lots of ways to do it and I think, like you said, both Vinu and Lea, the transparency needs to start both ends and I'm very happy that you both have started us off with this.
Speaker 2:I know how I want to use this word that you've all put together and I have some ideas with PH spot and I definitely like sharing it. When I have young kind of early professionals considering consultancy or entrepreneurship, this is a great resource for me to send their way, just to be like, okay, go read this, you kind of get an understanding. Hence why I wanted to bring you both on the podcast so you know they have a starting point. But curious to hear you know what you both and others on the team who kind of inspired this work, what you're hoping to do with this.
Speaker 1:I think for me two things come to mind. So one is and you know as someone who went through a master's in public health the DRPH like was in kind of this academia world for a while, as well as and I'll get to this in a second worked at state health departments, nonprofits. First, the academia piece. I think that I would love to see public health academic curricula reflect more of the actual information around kind of public health, entrepreneurship and what that looks like, what it might entail, as well as skill building around things that you need. I've always felt that you know public health inherently is a very applied field. So I feel like the academic curricula around public health to me it's really important that that, especially in a program like a DRPH that's very much intended to be an applied sort of a spirit degree, I would love to see those academic curricula reflect. And again we can go in into the details of the sorts of things you need when you're a consultant but you're talking about, you know, establishing legally a business, liability concerns, you're talking about hiring, you're talking about pricing there's, you know accounting and tax things involved, like there's a whole gamut of things that come into play and I would love to see more of those kind of practical skills built in, and some of those are specific to entrepreneurship and some of them honestly aren't. You know, if you're, you might be a full time employee trying to market a particular public health initiative and I just think there's a lot that could be done to really make the academic curriculum more robust and inclusive of a range of career paths, including entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:The other audience I think about a lot is traditional public health employers. You know, I worked at state government, I worked at nonprofits and I think this is where I find the information around kind of people's motivation to enter into and stay in consulting really interesting. And again, not that it's surprising, but I think, just boiling it down to these things around autonomy and ownership and flexibility, I think it's a great sort of list of reasons for traditional public health employers to keep in mind and to think about how they can craft roles and jobs that allow more of those things that people are seeking, as Leo was saying, and I think it's such an important point like that transparency on both ends and the fact that there are a lot of us who struggled at the beginning, a lot of people who continue to struggle in consulting. I also would agree it's not a path for everyone. It involves a lot of things, and some people might thrive having to do all of those and other people.
Speaker 1:It might not be for them, and that's totally okay, but for me it's sort of I want to see the public health workforce, regardless of whether they're entrepreneurs or consultants or not. I want to see that workforce treated well and be in jobs that they're satisfied with, and so I think there's a lot that traditional public health employers can learn from this about like. These are the things that people are seeking, and I don't think, you know, flexibility and autonomy and ownership don't have to be the purview of consultants and entrepreneurs. Like those things can be integrated into full-time jobs in public health, and I would love to see more of that happen as well. So that's another kind of audience potential use for this that I would love to see.
Speaker 2:Excellent. How about you, Leah?
Speaker 3:I think we talked about one of them which was, you know, I think, the pricing piece. I was really hoping people would use that, especially consultants, to feel confident in pricing. So that's a big part of it which we already discussed. The other part that I was jotting down some notes is that I really would love to see these data help us get support for the segment of the workforce in some sort of official way and even like just acknowledge that we exist and we wrote about this a bit in the paper. It feels like we're a little bit behind in terms of acknowledging the self-employed part of the workforce. So, like the American Evaluation Association has a really active topical group that is for self-employed evaluators. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics they have a whole self-employed group as well, and so they do professional development in there.
Speaker 3:Continuing education, there's obviously like a lot of peer networking and support, and that really doesn't exist in public health. There isn't some sort of centralized database. I mean it's me really Like. I mean we joke that I'm like the keeper of the list, but kind of, you know, and so it would be nice if you know an organization like APHA or SOPHY which is for health educators. You know there's enough of us now that it feels like we could have a section or a topical group for self-employed, and I think then through that mechanism, you know, we could get the peer support we need. We could get the professional development we need.
Speaker 3:We could maybe do some kind of ongoing survey to look at all these issues. You know in terms of what our professional development needs, you know what are the financial, you know questions Like how much are we charging? And you know different income things. I think having a place for us to be together in an official capacity would be wonderful. I mean I love the networking group and I'm planning to continue it, but certainly I mean, like all this research. I mean you know you're kind of doing it in your free time, on the side, and there's limits to what is available, and so it would be nice, I think, if we've made all this data public. Could the right person you know take this? Or could we use it to advocate to have a section for us in these types of organizations?
Speaker 2:That's wonderful, both of your future plans with this. Is it in the future plan to do some outreach and like pitch these ideas, whether it's with universities to include curriculum in this area, or even APHA to see if they would consider? Like a committee, I think?
Speaker 1:in theory we would love to do all things. I think that to Leah's point. You know this is a side volunteer project for us.
Speaker 1:And there are limits to bandwidth and time and all these things, you know. I mean, I feel like to Leah's point too. I think, again, this is where, like, if there was a section at APHA or like some sort of more formal structure that could provide some kind of protected time or budget to do something like I mean, I do think this would be great to do on a more you know, a survey like this could be done every year or two, If it could be done in other countries, like there's so many ways that this could expand and be helpful. I think right now it's sort of a time bandwidth issue, but that is not to say, you know, I think we would be interested and we haven't talked specifically about this, but, like I do think it would be great to, you know, get a group together to propose something to APHA or Sophie and see if there is any traction to that.
Speaker 1:And I think this is the sort of thing I think we all work on stuff like this. That's sort of like it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it's hard to imagine, like who would fund this besides ourselves? Like I don't know, but I think some of these more. I think that's kind of why we gravitate towards member associations is sort of like being kind of mission aligned in that way, and if there could be some traction there, that might be a way to at least kind of formalize some of this work and make it more consistent.
Speaker 3:And I'm trying to remember this is years ago now, I feel like somebody in the networking group approached APHA Are you remembering this to venue and like they said they would need I think they would need like 50 signatures from members that they wanted this group, but at the time they were not adding additional sections. I'm pretty sure this is what I'm remembering, but this was years ago too, so that you know, things may be different at this point and it's also, I mean again, sort of the where's the best place for us. I know again, this is anecdotal, but lots of people in the networking group now that they're self employed are no longer APHA members because the membership is so expensive, and so when their employers used to pay for the membership and the travel to the annual meeting, a lot of us went. But now like I can say, like I think I went when it was local one time since I started consulting, but I mean the meetings are like almost what, like $1,000 or something.
Speaker 1:I don't either, so it's a good point, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think for a lot of us we're not APHA members anymore but like, maybe if there was something for self employed we would be. You know, I am a Sophie member for health education, but I think that's something to think about too is sort of where can we gather, but in a way that's also affordable, you know, for those of us who are self employed and don't have a you know, a employer who's able to fund our memberships and travel.
Speaker 1:It almost makes me wonder if we need a not to have our own organization association with virtual meetings?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, this is how we ended up with the Facebook group, right. Because it was like this, doesn't exist and how can we, all you know, gather together? But yeah, I think, I think that's really the place where we're stuck is because this was totally unfunded. I'm a time tracker. I actually didn't track my time on this project, maybe because I didn't want to know.
Speaker 3:But, I would say easily hundreds of hours.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, you know at this point where it kind of is where it is, I think, until we are able to have maybe some sort of funding, I would love you know, in terms of like linking this to my consulting work, like I would love to work with like a public health training center or university to create a curriculum you know, I think that there's some subject matter expertise there but then also from the instructional design side, I would love to like think about what that kind of course or training would look like.
Speaker 3:So I think, you know, I also see possibilities to integrate this into my niche of consulting, I think, and that would be a way for me to do it in a funded way and we could base you know things on. You know, and, as Vinny said, I mean, obviously there's limitations to these data, but I think they do give us a really solid picture, more than we have had in the past, of you know, the kinds of skills and experiences that people are looking for to try to start their businesses, and so much of is transferable. I mean, I think if you were running a nonprofit, you would still like need to understand like a lot of these things. So I would love to you know, use it in that way, going forward.
Speaker 2:I love the live brainstorming that just took place I had to just sit back and watch you both bounce off ideas.
Speaker 2:It's awesome and for anyone listening, who's, you know, working at a university, who's a professor, who's part of APHA, you know, I'm going to encourage them to reach out to the two of you if they have any ideas. And definitely PHSpot we're here to leverage our platform to support in any way we can and that's also a question I had for the two of you. You know, how can the community at large listening? Or when we publish it on our social media platforms, in our newsletter, how can we help with this work and any future ideas you might have, aside from the ones that we've already talked about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the ones that we've talked about are probably the major ones. I think that there is always a desire for community, right? You know, that's one of the wonderful things about PHPOT, that's one of the wonderful things about Facebook group that we has started. And so, you know, I feel like any ideas around kind of how we can have more consistent kind of connections and peer support in this world of public health consulting are very welcome. And like we've thrown some ideas out there, I'm sure there are others.
Speaker 1:I've thought a lot, especially like initial part of 2024, like I feel like when I'm doing end of year reflections or start of year kind of planning, brainstorming, you know, one of the hard parts of being an independent consultant, solo entrepreneur, is that it can be lonely, sometimes like it's your thing, and I've often felt like I would love to like get together with other people who are also like reflecting on their last year of public health business in the coming year and to be able to reflect together, brainstorm together, all of that. And so if folks have ideas, a like, go forth and make them reality. It's not something that has to come through us by any means, but also, I think, if there are ways that we can all work together to create those spaces. I think that's always something we're all looking for, and even better if we can get it funded in some way to help value our time.
Speaker 3:Yeah absolutely, and we you know it was a couple years ago I don't know if any of you are on this call, but we did through the Facebook group, we did like an end of year celebration. Were you there? I was, yeah, one of our group members, amy Schlatt-Hauer. I don't know if she's ever been on the podcast Sujani, but she's wonderful and she's an expert at designing virtual meetings and facilitation and things like that. So she actually designed a celebration for all of us and, you know, volunteered her time to do so, and so it hasn't been something we've been able to continue every year. Cause, again, it's, like you know, always hard to ask people to kind of do everything for free and volunteer through the group, but I know like we had a really big turnout for that. People loved celebrating the end of the year together and I think that's really what we're, you know what we're looking for going forward at.
Speaker 3:You know how could we kind of make communities and support for self-employed consultants like part of something that is sustainable over time? You can pay for programs, masterminds and things like that, but, again, not all of us have the biggest budget for these kinds of programs, and so if they were integrated into something we're already a member of, or it was just really affordable, I think more people would do it. You know, I think that's something I realized when, I, you know, created a course for this population. So, like aspiring or new consultants they don't have the biggest budget, right. So people who are coming up with products and services, it's great, but you know, people don't have like $1,000 a month for your coaching program or this, or I mean, some of them do, but, you know, not everybody has that.
Speaker 3:So, like, how can we help people who have maybe a low budget for this kind of professional development or support system and how can it be integrated into alumni programs from our MPHs or whatever? Is there something like who can we partner with to make this affordable and accessible to people? I said certainly. Also, you know, there's the equity issue that Venue talked about, you know. So those of us who are able to take the leap without having, you know, needing to worry about health insurance and this, and that are those, the same people who can afford the masterminds and the trainings and this, and that you know, or is there some way that we can make it more accessible and equitable, you know, to everyone that wants to start their business or who's just starting out. So I think that's a big piece of it for us too.
Speaker 2:I love that. It's a big call out to the community and I really hope we'll get a few people reaching out with some ideas, and I think that's where I lean quite heavily on the community you know when I'm stuck with something ask them and they'll tell you.
Speaker 2:So, very confident, we'll get some ideas. So thank you both for joining me on this episode. I'm pretty sure we'll have a part two. We'll have Laura here and dive into some of the topics. I think money was a big one, and then the demographic, the differences that we saw. I think those two will be some good conversation points. Maybe there will be a third one, who knows. But thank you, and I really appreciated both of your time and the work that you've put into this.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having us. Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Hey, I hope you enjoyed that episode and if you want to get the links or information mentioned in today's episode, you can head over to phspotorg slash podcast and we'll have everything there for you.
Speaker 2:And before you go, I want to tell you about the Public Health Career Club.
Speaker 2:So if you've been looking for a place to connect and build meaningful relationships with other public health professionals from all around the world, you should join us in the Public Health Career Club.
Speaker 2:We launched the club with the vision of becoming the number one hangout spot dedicated to building and growing your dream public health career.
Speaker 2:And, in addition to being able to connect and build those meaningful relationships with other public health professionals, the club also offers other great resources for your career growth and success, like mindset coaching, job preparation clinics and career growth strategy sessions in the form of trainings and talks, all delivered by experts and inspiring individuals in these areas. So if you want to learn more or want to join the club, you can visit our page at phspotorg slash club and we'll have all the information there. And as a space that's being intentionally curated to bring together like-minded public health professionals who are not only there to push themselves to become the best versions of themselves, but also each other, and with that I can't wait to see how this is going to have a ripple effect in the world, as we all work together to better the health of our populations and just have immense impact in the world, and I hope you'll be joining us in the Public Health Career Club. We'll see you in the next video.