It's often a crisis that prompts a person looks for his or her larger purpose in life. For Ellie Scarborough, CEO of Pink Kisses (PK), it was a devastating break-up that set plans for a ground-breaking business into motion. Hers would be a business unlike any other in the marketplace and would inspire, encourage and teach women to be the rulers of their own lives.

After seven successful years spent working in the media as a TV news reporter, the end of a relationship encouraged Scarborough to question her overall level of life satisfaction.

“I recognized that when I started to question the little things, the big picture questions started coming up," she says. "Some of the answers that came back were shocking."

"What I loved about journalism was the idea that I could find truth and help people, and I wanted to continue helping people in a new, more intimate way."

With that realization, she put all of her energy (and resources) behind building and monetizing a website for broken-hearted women. Through PK, Scarborough's mission is "to remind girls that they have so much ahead of them, and this is just one small part of a grand adventure."

In other words, life doesn't end when a relationship does. The rest of the world doesn't stop and wait for the pain to subside, so the lovelorn shouldn't either.

With PK's “Betty Plan,” women are given access to message boards, advice videos and daily texts and emails that remind the users that they're "damn hard to break." The sassiest feature available? "Burn, baby, burn," where you upload a photo of your ex and watch it turn to ashes with the click of a button.

So aside from clever pick-me-ups and sound advice columns, how did PK, founded in 2010, rise to prominence so quickly?

"I had to use my skills as a journalist to be the best spokesperson on the planet for this," Scarborough says. "In order to maintain and build dominance in this field, I had to be out there talking about this and doing it better than anyone else who had any kind of similar product."

That kind of tenacity landed PK on the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and on countless national news segments. Scarborough says the amount of press PK received within its first year was an amount any company would be happy to receive in 20.

That entrepreneurial spirit is what continues to drive Scarborough, who recently developed and launched a complementary business for women equally determined to create a future on their own terms called Media Bombshell. Through this program, women will be trained by Scarborough on captivating an audience and nailing core soundbites in a poised, polished way.

When Scarborough takes a moment to reflect on the components of success that define an entrepreneur, she may as well be describing herself: "An entrepreneur is someone who has to be willing to take leaps, has to be willing to risk failure, and is a person who is willing and wanting to chase their dreams at full speed."

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Scarborough personally answers questions for CultureMap readers every two weeks. You can send your questions anonymously to ellie {at} pinkkisses {dot} com and look for what she has to say online.