EE521 - Mentor Moment: Laura Dowling - Why Consistency Beats Virality

Welcome to this week's mentor moment. Everyone wants that viral breakout sensation moment. The reality, most successful personal brands are built long before anyone notices. This week, your mentor is Laura Dowling, aka The Fabulous Pharmacist, and she shares what overnight success is usually years in the making. Enjoy your episode with Laura. Laura, welcome to the pod.

Thank you for having me.

You've got your own podcast. It's one of those things where I'm like, oh, now she knows all the tricks. She knows what's coming. She knows what I'm going to ask next. How are you?

I'm very good. Thanks a million for having me.

It is a pleasure. You are up there with our most requested guest.

Really?

Yeah.

That's interesting. I would have thought people are sick of listening to me now at this stage.

No, I think you've built a pretty special brand over the last couple of years. You kind of exploded onto the scene, didn't you?

See, that's the perception that people might have. But, you know, I've been I've been tipping away at this for years. I've been a pharmacist for over 20 years and then working on my products for 12 years. And then, you know, I initially went on Instagram many years ago, but didn't do very much with it because there wasn't stories or videos back then. It was just posts and I'm not great with pictures and just writing stuff. But it was really over COVID that it kind of took off because my patients in the pharmacy couldn't come in to me. So I just started putting out the videos online about the kind of things that they would normally come in to me for. Generally, it was a lot of females, midlife, all that kind of stuff. And that's how it really took off. But yeah, this perception of what happened overnight is absolute horseshit. Yeah.

What a weird one. Another overnight success that wasn't overnight.

I

think that's the trick with social, isn't it? Because people look at your day 800 and they're at day eight and they think, oh, why aren't I there yet? It's so slow. Like social skews your reality of what's possible because you can get a banger. You can get a clip that goes to like 500,000 and then the next 50 might be like 500,000.

Yes, and I think you just have to keep showing up and keep doing it. And I think if you're constantly chasing the virality, it's not going to work out. No. And I think that sometimes people think the amount of followers that you have is indicative of how successful you are. And I actually feel the opposite because I think that you can have a really engaged following and have much less following than, say, the next person. But people are really interested in what you're saying. So I would question that whole, oh, let's go viral thing. Let's do a really... Let's do a hook that's going to draw people in, but then the video is nothing about that hook. And I think that in the healthcare space, you have to be really careful with that because I don't want to frighten people. Like I could do a hook that's like, you're going to die or this is terrible or you might get cancer if you do this, but that's just scaring the shite out of people. So I think it's important to stay really true to yourself and have those ethics.

Okay, I'm