ER shifts, MBA coursework, and connecting health to hair care: Meet Dr. Ellana Stinson
What do you want to be when you grow up?
It’s a question we get asked from the time we are old enough to show interest in particular school subjects, in hobbies, sports. It’s also one many of us continue asking ourselves well after we’ve passed the threshold of adolescence and stumbled into adulthood. But for Dr. Ellana Stinson, it’s a question she knew the answer to in seventh grade.
“I’ve really built this career around just really wanting to help people and solving problems within healthcare,” Stinson reflects.
While she always knew a career in healthcare was in her future, she didn’t expect to also become an entrepreneur launching her own line of clean, non-toxic hair and scalp products amidst a global pandemic, or to pursue her MBA on top of her full physician schedule in order to help elevate her business. Dr. Stinson caught up with MBAchic to discuss how her personal hair care struggle inspired new professional and academic goals and shares why furthering her education is helping her realize her dream of helping others both in and outside of the ER.
An MBA and a pandemic
Figuring out how to pursue an MBA can feel like a puzzle, and timing is everything. There are always other professional or personal challenges that pop up in constant rotation, but the pandemic presented a particularly interesting backdrop for a doctor deciding to dive into a rigorous academic program. “This is when we started to see all of healthcare kind of crashing down, and being in the emergency department during the pandemic, schools should have probably been the last thing on my mind,” Dr. Stinson admits. “But I actually started looking into some schools and some programs. I wanted to find the right school that would allow me the freedom to still practice medicine and be able to get a good financial solid foundation, and a program that was going to support me and my interest as well.”
As the number one ranked college for entrepreneurship for 30 consecutive years, Babson College located in Wellesley Massachusetts ended up being the perfect place for Dr. Stinson to pursue her passions. With various learning program models, all Babson MBA students learn the same course content from the same expert faculty, and earn the same diploma. Dr. Stinson opted to power through a traditional two-year full-time program, but the accelerated one-year program is a popular alternative. Students can specialize with seven different MBA concentrations, including STEM-designated concentrations in Quantitative Finance and Business Analytics & Machine Learning (Dr. Stinson completed her MBA with a focus in Finance in 2023).
Dr. Ellana Stinson
Balancing an MBA and the ER
Deciphering how to balance school and work is a personal decision that will look different for everyone. During her first year at Babson College when she was taking mainly foundational classes, Dr. Stinson says she made a conscious decision to pull back on work responsibilities to build a solid foundation for her MBA. For her final year, she navigated juggling a full time work and school schedule ahead of her mid-May graduation.
For even the most ambitious type-A MBAs, taking on a full time program while maintaining a packed professional schedule can be daunting and downright difficult. Dr. Stinson describes her flexible schedule as a huge help. While all of us non-emergency room workers might beg to differ – she describes her lifestyle as “a bit easier to balance,” than some of her classmates.
“We have morning evenings, night shifts, you know, being able to negotiate with my hospital, like, ‘hey, I’ll work these days and I’ll work the non-desirable shifts,’ just so I can make time for my schooling,” Dr. Stinson says. “But in general, I’m a super highly organized person, so that really helped. In addition, because I’m an ER doctor, I also function very well in chaos, so this almost came naturally to me.”
A self-described “big-picture” person, Dr. Stinson admits that while she often visualizes end-goals she has her sights set on, sometimes she jumps into a pursuit without knowing what steps she needs to take to achieve her goal. In order to stay highly organized, she abides by a tight succinct calendar (linked across devices, praise to the modern Tech Gods) and leans into her network of family members as well as former and new mentors for additional support when she’s in need.
“Advice that was given to me from a friend is, you have to lean on your networks, especially when there’s moments where you know you’re not going to be able to perform at your best, you have to recognize when you can offload work,” Dr. Stinson says. “Some people who are type-A really want to make sure that they’re doing everything, but you have to recognize you’re not going to be able to do everything. It’s almost like you have to build a team of people that can kind of help you in certain spaces to help keep you organized honestly.”
Building a business
We know what you’re thinking. An ER doctor probably has a ton of free time, so why not launch a low-stress side-gig like a haircare start-up, right? Well, that’s what Dr. Stinson set her mind to in 2019, before the idea of pursuing an MBA program came to fruition. Some personal health issues related to fertility and thyroid cancer resulted in major changes in Dr. Stinson’s hair, and ignited her business inspiration. After a trip to a top dermatologist fell flat when Ellana was handed a product that would address some of the issues she was having but also damage her hair, a lightbulb moment occurred. The difficult experiences offered a new perspective to view haircare issues through a healthcare lens, and once she started confiding in friends, she quickly realized she wasn’t alone in the issues she was facing.
“Just recognizing, two of my friends [were] also having babies and seeing changes in their hair and how it really impacts your mental health, you’re not only having these internal health issues that are affecting your hair and your scalp, but it’s also affecting your mental health,” Dr. Stinson tells MBAchic. “I ended up just really starting doing my own research and kind of understanding hormones in the body and understanding more about the hair and the scalp from a health aspect.”
In 2020, she officially launched Safo Hair, a natural plant based hair care line that focuses on scalp health and addresses issues of hair loss, thinning and breakage. Recognizing a connection between one’s health and how it presents in the scalp and hair, she has developed products that she hopes will eventually enable her to bridge the hair care and health care industries. Dr. Stinson’s undergrad chemistry degree came in handy as she dove into research and began understanding where customer pain points existed within the marketplace. Once she started conducting customer discovery interviews, she knew she wanted to pursue her MBA to round out her financial knowledge.
“McKinsey put out a report around how black women [in] particular, about 80% of them are unhappy with the products that are on market, but at the same time it feeds into other disparities that we’re seeing around how a lot of the products on the market are not safe for black women, as far as the chemicals they’re using,” Dr. Stinson recalls.
Formulating a line of dermatologist tested products that are natural, plant-based, paraben- and silicone-free has proven to be an exciting, invigorating, and challenging journey. Her experience echoes a similar entrepreneurial roller coaster that other small startups navigate, full of highs and lows, fears, failures and triumphs. In school, student life tends to be crazy busy. Between info sessions for various companies, meetings for clubs, mixers for cohort events, coursework and tons of one-on-one coffee chats to meet new people, adding building a company to the mix is not easy, but Safo Hair is one example that it is possible. Read more about another MBAchic member’s journey to juggling school and a startup here.
Safo Hair by Dr. Ellana Stinson
Leveling up with an MBA
An MBA provides the skills needed to grow companies from start-up stage to IPO. From marketing strategy, operations management, and data intake methods to successfully scale small businesses, many consider this investment as an essential stepping stone in their entrepreneurial career. Being able to manage and grow a small business, Dr. Stinson describes the classes specifically tailored to understanding phases of growth, and social media influencer planning as indispensable.
“Those types of things are essential to how I am growing my business and I’ve learned a lot of these skills in my MBA program,” she says. “Not to mention also understanding the financial side of it, which is extremely important with cash flows and your profit and wealth statements and income statements, I just think that overall, I feel a lot more confident in running a business now with this MBA than I did coming into the MBA program.”
Initially established through self-funding, Dr. Stinson quickly pivoted Safo Hair’s financial strategy while immersed in her MBA program and reduced hospital hours in the first year of her program. Seeking a more sustainable option, she decided to jump into a number of local accelerators, partaking in pitch competitions and won a few grants.
“I ended up winning a pitch competition with an investment group out in New York,” Dr. Stinson recalls. “We ended up starting a crowd fund, which they paid into. I also got money from family and friends. My first crowd fundraised around $66,000, which really helped me get over that hump to actually launch. I think had I not done that, I probably would not be launched to this date.”
Her advice for emerging entrepreneurs? Do as much networking and research as possible and create a custom funding plan that works for you. While the amount of venture capital funding that goes to women-led companies is substantially lower than their male counterparts, there’s still hope. A variety of venture capital funds that invest in women and underrepresented-led early-stage founders do exist. In need of inspiration? More on that here.
Coming from a healthcare background rooted in science and facts, Dr. Stinson says the most surprising tool she’s learned from her entrepreneurial journey is the impact of strong storytelling.
“You don’t think about that when you’re not already in the entrepreneurial space, but that telling of your brand story is critical,” she says. “I have seen companies who have horrible products, but they tell an amazing story, and they sell like crazy, like hot cakes. I think that’s the one thing that really took me aback, the psychology of marketing and branding well.”
Building health equity
The pandemic revealed the intersection of community health with health equity and exposed a lot of injustices that many are striving to correct. Attaining health equity requires addressing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care. It’s at the root of Dr. Stinson’s work, and while she wishes the product-gap would close completely for women of color, she knows there’s a long road ahead to make progress. She says there’s a vast disconnect between hair and health and she wants to help shape more intentional communities.
“Our hair is not separate from our bodies and we need to think about our hair as part of our healing journey and our health journey. What’s really critical, at least for me in this space, is making sure that people are educated on what they’re putting on their hair and their scalp, to know if it’s safe, and if they’re putting the right products on their hair and scalp,” she says.
“My goal is to make sure I’m building sustainable companies and organizations that will continue to do good in underserved communities.”
Photos from Dr. Ellana Stinson and Safo Hair
