Industry Spotlight: Navigating Midlife Career Shifts With Erin Keating

“Industry Spotlight” is our newsletter series where we interview professionals from across the entertainment industry about their current jobs and career trajectories. Our hope is that you will learn more about the positions you're already interested in, discover new roles you may not have considered, and utilize the wisdom of those who've paved the way before you to forge your own path for success.

We sat down with Erin Keating, the co-founder of Broad Collective, a membership network for women growing their own businesses in mid-life and the host of the podcast Hotter Than Ever, which helps women 40+ imagine a second half that is freer and more satisfying. She pivoted to her new career as a creator from a robust career as a TV exec who produced Emmy-winning series. Here, we discuss her career and what it takes to make a mid-life shift.

Hollywood Resumes: Tell us about your journey working in traditional media, at the forefront of digital media, and then becoming a creator and founder.

Erin Keating: It’s been a long and winding road!  I started as a writer/performer in the basement theatres of NYC and built a 20+ year career as a television development executive before taking the leap to entrepreneurship.  

My first job in TV was as the assistant to the General Manager at Comedy Central in New York, which was basically my grad school in how the media business really works. I did stints at NBC and BBC America, a branded entertainment company, and an online comedy startup, and then spent 6 years at IFC TV, where I really earned my stripes as a development executive working on shows like Portlandia and Will Ferrell’s The Spoils of Babylon.  

We relocated to LA after my twins were born and worked at Big Beach (Little Miss Sunshine) helping to start their TV division, and then I got recruited by Snapchat, where I spent 6 years working on a mission to reinvent filmmaking for mobile (5 years before people were calling shows for your phone “verticals”). Three promotions, an Emmy, WGA and NAACP Image Award later, and then Netflix had one bad quarter that flipped the entire tech-meets-media industry upside down, and I got laid off.

I was burnt out from decades of nonstop work, and if I'm honest, I already knew everything needed to change before I lost the job.

I got divorced, took an Eat, Pray, Love-style trip to Italy, and started completely over. I launched the Hotter Than Ever podcast in 2023 to talk about all of it - the personal and the professional - in my own voice, for the first time since I started my corporate media career. Building an audience of women going through the same thing led directly to co-founding my membership network for women building businesses in midlife, Broad Collective. This company is the practical, nuts-and-bolts career-centric version of what the podcast started.

HR: You've worked in scripted and unscripted, comedy and drama, indie and mainstream. How did you avoid getting pigeonholed?

EK: Comedy has always been my true love, but as my boss at Snapchat said when he hired me to make mobile series in all genres, “Comedy people can do anything.”  And I’ve always been an indie girl, 5 years ahead of the mainstream, for better or worse.  

What I do have is one consistent skill: I'm good at sitting with a creative partner and helping them find the sharpest, truest version of what they're trying to say, then getting that into a format an audience will actually respond to. That skill translates whether you're developing a sketch comedy show, a stand-up special, a docuseries, or a 30-second mobile video. 

I also love tech, and I have a bias toward novelty, so if it hasn’t been done before, I want to try it. I think that’s part of being a Gen X-er - we’ve had to be super adaptable because our careers have spanned the pre-Internet era through smartphones and apps and AI, and we’ve managed to pivot successfully through every iteration of the media ecosystem.

HR: What advice do you have for entertainment professionals considering a transition as the industry shifts?EK: Stop waiting to feel ready, because ready is not a feeling this transition offers. I had a producer friend tell me once that you once get the next thing, only in hindsight does it look like you planned the whole trajectory. Nobody plans it. You take the next right step with the information you have.

Practically: The skills you have built in your media career are likely some aspect of creating something an audience will pay attention to, and those are exactly the skills the creator economy runs on. You already have it. What you might not have yet is fluency in the new grammar: how to build an audience directly, how to price your own or your clients’ expertise, or maybe how to show up without a logo behind you. That's not a talent problem. Don't let the fact that you'd be a beginner at the tools stop you from trusting what you already know.

HR: Tell us about Broad Collective. Who is it for and what led you to start it?

EK: Broad Collective is a membership network for professional women pivoting from conventional careers to building their own businesses in midlife. My co-founder and I are both former media executives who jumped into the creator economy solo, hit the same walls everyone hits, and realized the bigger opportunity wasn't fixing it for ourselves. It was building the thing we needed and couldn't find.

Our members have decades of hard-won expertise. What they don't have is a roadmap for turning that expertise into content, an audience, and revenue on their own terms. We're not a coaching program or a networking mixer. We're a collaborative mastermind of midlife peers at the same professional level that provides support, strategy, tools, and techniques to navigate building businesses online. Our rooms are warm and encouraging, but also super practical.

HR: What key skills from your career led you to go out on your own as a creator and founder?

EK: Three things, mainly. First, talent development: My entire job for two decades was helping people find and sharpen their voice for a specific audience. That is, almost verbatim, the job of building a personal brand or a content strategy. 

Second, I’m a builder with lets-put-on-a-show energy. I have always been the one to rent the theatre before the script was written, the executive willing to go to bat for unknown talent or lean into a format or idea for which there is no set process…yet. I love creating something meaningful out of sweat and a dream, and I’m not afraid of hard work.

Third, pattern recognition across formats and platforms. I've had a front row seat to every shift in mass media since the Internet showed up, so I'm not scared of a new platform. I've watched enough of them get born to know the fundamentals don't change: Know your audience, know your “why now,” tell the truth well, and do the same thing over and over until your success becomes inevitable.

HR: A lot of your work centers on women navigating midlife shifts. What are some common themes you see?

EK: The biggest one I call “good girl debt.” So many high achieving women spent decades being rewarded for following the rules, staying likeable, not taking up too much space. That strategy worked, until it didn't. Corporate structures shifted, ageism showed up, and following the rules stopped paying out. The good news is that when your estrogen drops in midlife, you find new access to what I like to call “the fu*k-it.” We care so much less about what people think of us - and that’s exactly the spirit you need to start your own business.  

The second is “high-status vulnerability.” My peers have built serious professional credibility, and the idea of showing up online as a beginner, potentially posting badly, being new at something in public, feels like it could unravel everything they built. It won't. But naming that fear out loud is  a big moment of relief I see in new members.

HR: Entertainment professionals are increasingly isolated navigating what's next. Talk about the importance of community and how Broad Collective addresses it.

EK: Isolation is the default state of this “connected” era. It’s so demoralizing to feel like you have to figure everything out alone, whether you're a solopreneur at your kitchen table or a former exec 3 months out from a layoff. You don't have a built-in room full of colleagues anymore, and AI is going to tell you that every idea you have is really good.

What our members consistently say drives them to stay, more than any single piece of content or new tool they’ve learned, is being in a room with people at their same professional level who get it - without a long explanation. Broad Collective works because we curate for that peer match, and because the community is structured around actually doing the work together, not just talking about doing it. Community isn't an add-on here. It's what we’re built on.

HR: What’s next for Broad Collective?

EK: Right now we're heads down filling Fall ‘26 cohorts, growing our membership, and making sure our peer experience and peer coaching framework hold up at scale. We host regular Lives on LinkedIn where I interview experts and members and give folks a taste of the type of problem-solving we do in the Collective (and if you sign up for our mailing list you can get notified about when those are happening!).

HR: How can people find you, connect, and join?

EK: You can find Broad Collective at www.broadcollective.com to join the mailing list, learn more about what membership actually looks like, and apply.  

You can also read my thoughts about reinvention, business and content on Substack and LinkedIn and follow us on Instagram @broad_collective.