We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Pamela Nelson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Pamela, thanks for joining us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Success is multifaceted. The characteristics that I believe it takes to be successful are: 1. Truth
2. Perseverance
3. Faith
4. Self-awareness
5. Patience

Pamela, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a business owner, researcher, and nurse. My company was started out of a strong desire to answer the call to increase the diversity of clinical research participants for clinical trials and the number of minority professionals in the medical research industry over 21 years ago. Here we are today with the same issues. We provide a full range of program evaluation and research operation support services in a customer-centric business model. Our teams are committed to maintaining the customer’s projects on time and within budget. Our expertise includes market, consumer, and clinical research; service lines are end-to-end support with data analytics, survey design, and evaluations. We are functional service providers for Phase I-IV and post-marketing clinical trials. Our experiences include Recruitment, Study Rescue, and Inspection Readiness Audits. (Study Rescue is often coming into an ongoing project lagging for various reasons, typically for enrollment, site access, etc. We can get new team members, project managers, or site support to get these projects back on track. Another area of expertise is our Inspection Readiness Audit. Working with the quality program, we can conduct vendor and site audits to ensure that all documentation and processes are being conducted as required.) I am a research consultant and project manager with over 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry with roles in Nursing Administration, Research Compliance Monitoring, Project Management, and Community Health Education. I have been a trusted business leader and advocate for small and diverse businesses and currently serve on the DFW MSDC Minority Enterprise Input Committee (MBEIC) and also co-chairs the Health Industry Group. I work to alleviate health disparities by increasing access to healthcare and solutions. An accomplished speaker and author, I speak to professionals and the general public often about the problems faced with health disparity and health inequity. As a child, I was impacted directly by a lack of health literacy and understanding of the healthcare system. The problems that I faced as a child, led me to a career in nursing and ultimately to champion health literacy, chronic disease management, and preventive healthcare. I have written several articles on health literacy and access and authored Declutter Your Mind (A Biblical Perspective) which is published and available on Amazon.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

For several years I operated the company and struggled to play catch up to what I thought was a world of people who had a knack for running a business and learned it all in a class or something. I was struggling weekly to keep up with projects, payroll, marketing, and all the other necessities for a business. I finally ran across a book by Verne Harnish entitled Scaling Up. That book and a book by Lauri Beth Jones, Jesus CEO became my mantras. I also found the book, The First 90 Days as CEO to be a big plus. Actually, I read each one annually. The reading is a refresher and a reminder of how far I’ve come since the first time I read them. I read them initially in 2017, the business was going through a major downturn, I had so many problems going on at once, I wanted to just run away from it all. But focusing on resolving the problems helped me to move forward and continue to grow the company.

Have you ever had to pivot?

In 2008 in the midst of the financial meltdown of the company, we were going through losses of revenue from projects, long-term payments, and projects that could not move forward because of problems with manufacturing. Needless to say, I ended up letting go of some of the team, several found other jobs and I was left with a small crew that we just could not maintain a research project with the staff we had. So, I started consulting to county health departments, and biotech companies and teaching about healthcare products.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bracaneco.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bracane123/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamela-nelson-rn-phd/
• Twitter: pnelson_bracane
• Youtube: @pamnelson9096