Stephanie McKee Zielinski

I attribute my success to confidence. It's an unfair advantage because I was raised with great parents who raised me to be confident and have a lot of self-love. They were really encouraging and positive, and as someone who's volunteered in the foster care world for a few years, I just realized how rare that is. Being someone who can confidently be a confident public speaker - it's by no strength of my own, kind of. It was huge that I was raised with parents who were like, 'oh yeah, you're awesome,' because I always believed that. And that's pretty rare.

The best career advice I've ever received is probably to strengthen negotiation skills. I think, especially as women, that's a skill set that we don't necessarily get to practice a lot, and we get intimidated by it. But it's really valuable - whether you're actually negotiating with clients, or just in everyday projects. Just knowing how to arrive at a middle ground with anyone you're working with is valuable.

In a social media influencer world, a lot of people want to have a strong online presence, and TV looks really glamorous, having a YouTube channel looks glamorous, being a public speaker looks glamorous. But I would say think of those platforms - whether it's TV, any social platform, or public speaking - think of them as a means to an end if you are already a business owner. I didn't go into TV because I wanted to be on TV. It started with my passion for art and understanding of art, and then morphed into electronics and helping support all of these businesses who are selling huge numbers of electronics through HSN. My advice is that being a TV personality or a social media personality is not an end in itself - it should be a means to some other business end. Because at the end of the day, when you're in business, you're just trying to be profitable. A lot of people who chase just having that image end up not being profitable.

The challenge is diversifying streams of income, because I don't think anyone who works as commercial talent has just one gig. So just continuing to find the next way that I can use my talents in public speaking and presenting on TV - ways that those can translate beyond HSN and maybe even beyond social media. As for opportunities, if you have public speaking skills or presentation skills, and if you work in broadcast media or social media, they can translate into each other. The baseline is the public speaking skills - if you're a good presenter, you could go into either of these domains, like the entire domain of social media. It translates well into broadcast media and commercial talent. An opportunity for anyone who has this skill set would be finding a commercial talent agent, booking commercials, booking UGC opportunities (user-generated content) for companies who want short videos to post on social media about their products and services. All of those things are similar opportunities.

Education is most important to me. I actually was a public school teacher for 8 years, teaching art. I love getting to learn every day, and I loved helping other people learn.