7 things you probably didn’t know about me—and how they’ve impacted my business journey

There's a human behind every business—and sometimes it's fun to learn a little more about the people you listen to all day long. We all have experiences that make us who we are, which can affect how we show up and impact our audience and our clients. In today's episode, I'm sharing a few things about myself that you probably don't know and how they've impacted my business journey through the years.

– How comparing yourself to others doesn't take into account your life experiences.
– The countries I've lived in around the world and how they've shaped me personally and professionally.
– How starting out as an accountant was just the beginning of my professional career and how I've tweaked and pivoted since then.
– Why I get bored so easily and need to be challenged (or I'll procrastinate until the cows come home!).
– How learning new things keeps my brain engaged while also helping me to better help others (and my business).
– A sneak peek into my personal life around relationships, kids and travel.

 

7 things you probably didn’t know about me—and how they've impacted my business journey

Today, I'm sharing a couple of things that you might not know about me and how these things have affected my business.

We are humans who run a business, but we are not our businesses. And I know this can be really challenging if you are somebody who has a personal brand like I do, where it can be really hard to delineate where your life, your personal life ends and your business begins. So I'm going to share a little bit more of a personal post today.

Sometimes I think it's a bit fun to learn a little more about the people behind the business, the people that you follow and listen to all day long. And I know with the people that I follow, I love to hear a little bit more of their lives outside their business. I also am a big believer that all of the experiences that we have make us who we are and impact how we are able to show up and impact our clients and our audiences, and share our value with them. When you're comparing yourself to a competitor who has similar expertise, maybe similar offers, they're in the same industry as you, it can help sometimes to remember that you've both had completely different life experiences and some people are going to resonate with yours, others are going to resonate with theirs, because your personalities are going to be different.
There's all of those other things outside of just your knowledge and your expertise that form what somebody is looking at when they are.

Okay,  what are a couple of things that you might not know about me?

 

First of all, I've lived in five cities in four different countries.

So I was born in South Africa. I was there until I was about eight years old. Grew up in New Zealand, left there about 12 years ago and moved to Australia. And then I spent most or some of 2018 living in London. Now, I think personally, I think moving countries and moving cities has been a really useful thing.

I didn't maybe realize it at the time, but it made me very flexible, made me adaptable. I had to learn how to make new friends, all of that. And then growing up in New Zealand and also here in Australia, it's really interesting because Tall Poppy Syndrome is such a thing where everyone likes to cut down the successful person. For example, if somebody's successful, people may say, oh, but they must not have a social life or, or they're only successful because of this or that.
And it was really interesting to then spend a bit of time living in London where suddenly I'm a little fish in a big pond and nobody cares what I do. That was really kind of freeing. I think anyone who's lived in different places will be able to tell you, it's such an experience to to have that fresh start, to be somewhere new where nobody really knows who you are, you don't know who they are and nobody cares and it's great.
And then on top of that, I'm also an Italian citizen, and I speak Italian. And I know that one day I really would love to spend a whole year living in Italy. I've got a business that supports it, so why not?

 

The second thing you might not know is I started my career as an accountant.

It's very different to what I do now. I studied accounting and finance at university. I was in tax for a while, then I worked in insolvency for a while, I got halfway through completing my chartered accounting qualification, and then I quit in 2016.
There were a couple of different factors. So I'd been side-hustling as a social media manager for a while. I had started my first business which I'll tell you a little bit more about in a minute, but I'd started that business I was also side hustling and I was working and I was studying and I was pretty burnt out and one day I woke up and I had really bad back pain which was kidney pain, and then I went to hospital that night.
Seven days later, I got out of hospital. I was on sick leave for another week, and basically I returned back to the office, and it was like, well, here's a pile of work that you weren't able to do while you're on leave, so do it, and you're expected to stay back late to get it done, and why aren't you staying back late to get it done? That was kind of the environment and the culture that I worked in. So I ended up leaving well before my first business was profitable enough to actually sustain my life. And I mean, I did end up running out of money and getting another part time job. And there's a whole story there. And the real impetus to quit was I just had to get out of that job. And at the time it was horrible. Now in hindsight, I'm really glad that it happened because I think it's what gave me that push to leave. And if I'd not had that push, then I potentially would never have had the confidence to go to make that leap from the fortnightly pay, getting that paycheck in my bank account to the instability and the income fluctuations of running my own business. And I think having that background in accounting, in tax, in insolvency, certainly in the first few years of my business, it was great because I didn't have to pay an accountant.
I did all my own taxes. I saved so much money, but it's also helped in the ways that I can serve my students and my clients, especially in Freedom Fast Track, which is a bit more of a holistic program. It's not so much focused on sales and marketing. It's more focused around your business model, looks at things like your operations, your expenses, all of that.
I have the ability to pass on the things that I learned. So I've been working with clients in my accounting career and help my students with that in Freedom FastTrack. Also, fun fact, I have most of a master's degree in strategic advertising, that was my career pivot after accounting. I want to go and do advertising.
But I didn't finish the degree because the very last subject in the last semester was a group assignment subject. So like the entire semester was a group assignment, a group project, and I was living in London at the time and the thought of trying to do a group project remotely was impossible, there was no way that was going to happen.
So I never actually finished that degree, unfortunately. I like to think that I basically have that degree because I did all of the coursework. I just didn't do that one final group assignment.

 

Fun fact number three about me is I have ADHD like many other entrepreneurs do.

I know to anyone who knows me personally, that is probably going to come to you as zero surprise, to those of you who watch my business from the outside, it might seem a little bit surprising because I am pretty consistent with this podcast.
Actually no, I'm very consistent with this podcast and my business is pretty structured. To be honest, this podcast is the thing that I have been most consistent with in my entire life. I can't think of anything else that I have done three times a week for the last six years. Not even fitness.
When I feel like doing things, I do it. When I don't feel inspired to do them, I don't do them. But I've had to put so much structure in place to stay consistent and to not miss episodes when I don't want to record them and not burn my business to the ground when I get bored and want to try something different.
It's been a real work in progress putting that structure in place. I now I have the accountability to my team. I have the accountability to my listeners of this show. I have the accountability to the students in my programs. So I can't just be like, Oh, no, I don't feel like doing this anymore, which is great. It's great to have that accountability. It's been such a challenge throughout the seven, eight years. I don't even know how many years I've been in business now, like eight years. It's been such a challenge resisting that ADHD urge to pivot every time that I feel bored and I get bored a lot. I do think that it's part of the reason why I like to always start new things, do new things, try things out, experiment.
I need that novelty in my business. I think that's part of the reason why there are so many people with ADHD who run businesses because we need that novelty and we can't necessarily get that novelty working for somebody else. Whereas in a business we have the creative freedom, we can do what we want, but the challenge can be sticking with something for long enough, persisting with something long enough, not burning it to the ground the minute that we get bored.
If something interests me, or if it challenges my brain, like if I find something really hard to understand, or really challenging to execute on, I can hyper-focus on it for hours. But on the flip side, if something bores me or it feels like it's not very challenging, I can procrastinate it for days, weeks, even months sometimes.
Same with little routine things like this podcast, even though I really enjoy podcasting, I've been doing it for nearly six years, so the novelty and the excitement isn't there anymore. And now it's more reliant on the routine, the habit, the accountability that I have to my listeners for me to keep showing up and doing it.

 

Fun fact number four is I'm a massive nerd and I'm always trying to learn new things.

So maybe this goes along with the ADHD brain but I'm constantly going down rabbit holes trying to learn new things and I think it's really benefited my business because if there's something, if I find that there's a knowledge gap somewhere, then I think, cool, I need to learn everything that I can about this thing.
And then that means that I can help my students better as well. I do a lot of online courses. I do a lot of trainings. Some of them are related to business. Some of them have nothing to do with business. Last year I did my NLP master practitioner training, so I can use that to coach my clients a little bit better.
I'm learning to code in Python because maybe one day I might want to create an app or I might want to create some kind of tool or software that I can share with my students to help them get better results. And fun fact, I started this year, literally a few weeks ago, a master's in neuroscience because I want to understand my brain better.
I want to understand the brains of my students. I want to understand how I can help my students and my audience to take imperfect action, to learn better in my programs, to be more productive in their businesses, to overcome the mindset stuff like procrastination and perfectionism, all of those things.
I'm a week in and it's so challenging, but it's also been so interesting and so relevant. And I'm quite excited. As to how I'm going to apply the things that I'm learning into the programs that I have, into the content that I share.

 

Fun fact number five, this isn't my first business.

So like I said, I was an accountant originally. And while I was an accountant, I side-hustled as a social media manager for some local cafes. I started a blog back in 2013 maybe and I got really good at social media and then I started reaching out to cafes and with this is an example of like the work that I've done, your social media presence kind of sucks.
This was like also in the heyday of Instagram. So if you were a cafe and you weren't on Instagram, what are you doing? So. It was really easy to pick up a bunch of clients and I started doing that. And then I realized, I'm really good at social media. I could probably start my own business and market it for free on Instagram.

So I started my first business, which was called the Sugarfree Box. It was a subscription box with sugar free snacks, and I ran it for about a year before I closed it down. The reasons I closed it down, firstly, the business model wasn't viable. So, shipping parcels in Australia is very expensive and especially if you have customers in regional areas where you can't just send a courier, you have to send it by Australia Post and they charge you more for certain areas.
So I was making like 2% of profit per order and I was still having to pack and ship all of the orders myself because I didn't have enough volume to outsource that part of it. So I had to be in Australia all the time to pack and ship orders even though I'd quit my job to have the freedom to travel a little bit more.
So I realized like, this is not viable. This isn't working. It's not serving the vision that I want. I want the freedom to travel. I don't want to be tied to one location and I can't get somebody else to pack and ship the orders because I can't afford it because I'm making 2% profit per order.
And also none of the third party pack and shipping companies would even talk to me because my volume wasn't enough. I wasn't selling enough orders. Plus I didn't know what Problem I was really solving. I didn't really know what my selling point was. And ultimately the total addressable market wasn't big enough to scale.
So the total market of people in Australia who were interested in sugar free snacks on a subscription basis wasn't really big enough to scale. So I realized after a year,  this business model is not the right business model. And I mean, I'm glad I realized it. I'm glad I closed it down because I could have kept persisting with what was a broken business model.
And eventually it probably would have burned out and given up and maybe gone back to a job altogether, never gone into business again. So then I was working part time As the head of marketing and content for a startup. And I started then my second business where I was essentially a marketing consultant.
And I started to think about, how can I scale this? And obviously the most logical way to scale when you're a one on one marketing consultant is to start to build it into a marketing agency. I was doing client strategy. I was doing a lot of like marketing management. So Facebook ads management, social media management, all of that.
And I started hiring people to help me manage that for my clients. At the same time though, I also launched my first course, which was about Facebook ads because I had a lot of people inquiring with me asking, can you run my Facebook ads for me? My budget's a hundred dollars a month. And it was like, well, if you've got a hundred dollars to spend on Facebook ads, there's no point paying me.
I think I was charging something like $700, I was very cheap. So there's no point paying me $700 to spend your 100 of Facebook ads. You'd be much better off learning how to run them yourself. So that was where the idea for my very first course came from.
I also then launched a membership and I realized that I much preferred the course and the membership side than running an agency. I didn't really want to scale it up to be a huge big agency. So I slowly started letting go of clients as I was replacing the income that came from selling courses and membership income.

 

Fun fact number five, I don't have kids or a partner.

I get asked this a lot. So that's why I'm telling you this. I get asked this a lot because I don't share much of my personal life online or on Instagram. Unlike many other people in similar businesses who show everything, I don't really show much other than when I'm traveling, you might see a little bit behind the scenes.
And honestly,  I've spent most of the time since I started out in business single, and I do worry that one day I might regret prioritizing work over relationships and family and all of that. But the plus side is that I have been able to make my business my priority over the last seven years.
I've been able to focus on it. I've had the freedom to be able to travel to conferences and events. I've had the freedom to be able to travel for fun as well. But yes there's always been the thought, Ooh, might I regret this one day? And I also have a lot more time in my day than my friends who have kids.
I do look at some of my friends with kids and they're so productive because they've only got a few hours in the day while their kids are at school. And I look at them. I'm like, wow, maybe if I had that kind of limitation on my time, I would actually be able to get a lot more done rather than my days at the moment feel kind of almost endless and that can lead to me being a lot less efficient than perhaps if I had a limited time frame, right? I have friends who can get so much done in three hours in a day and I look at them and I'm like, wow, I'm impressed.

 

Fun fact number six, I'm a massive travel and adventure junkie, and that has been a huge part of my business.

Why? The reason why I started in business. So when I was in my corporate job, I realized pretty quickly like, I'm not going to be able to do all the travel that I want to do with the limited amount of leave that I get.
So for me, having that freedom to travel is a huge part of why I started my business. I love long hikes. In 2022, I hiked a trail here called the Lara Pinta Trail, which is 230 kilometers. It took me just under two weeks and it was so much fun.
It was two weeks offline. I was by myself sleeping in a tent, cooking my meals on a little gas stove every night, dehydrated meals. It was pretty miserable by the time you've eaten dehydrated meals for 12 days straight and yeah, to me that's like my kind of happiness, right?
The left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot for 12 days straight. That was the most quiet my brain has ever been. The first few days, yes, I was overthinking in my head, thinking through all my thoughts. By about day four, there was nothing left to think about and my brain was silent and it was magical.
I do one day dream of hiking the Te Araroa Trail in New Zealand. It's a very long trail. It's about six months long, from the top of the North Island of New Zealand to the bottom of the South Island. It's about the same length as the Pacific Crest Trail in the U. S. Which, I think I'd also like to do that one one day, but let's just do the first six month one at a time.
Um, I also love skiing. That's one of my big travel things. I spent a month skiing in January this year in France. And I think it's something I'm going to do every January going forward. So now I know in December it becomes, how can I set my business up to have that month off in January every year?
And when I talk about intentionally designing your business around the kind of life that you want, this is what I mean. It's identifying like, Oh great, I want to spend every January skiing. What do I need to do to make that happen? It's not necessarily like, Oh, somebody online said that they built a business where they only work 10 hours a week.
Maybe I should do that. Instead, it's working backwards, it's reverse engineering the kind of business that you want and then putting in place the systems, the structure, the frameworks, the business model that enables you to have that. For me, sometimes when I travel, it's offline completely.
So in early 2021, I took an entire month offline to travel down the coast of Australia in a van. When I did that long hike, I was completely offline the entire time. There was no way I'm carrying my laptop for a 14 day hike. Sometimes though, when I travel, I do work a little bit, but it really depends on the kind of trip and what my intention is for the trip.
But usually when I'm in a different location, I find that really useful for getting out of the day to day routine and to work on the business a little more than the usual kind of working in it. And a little hack like if you can't go away anywhere it might be really helpful even just booking a little staycation for a couple of days like a weekend or something in a little hotel nearby or an Airbnb.
Just to be in a new location because when you're working from home, I know most of you work from home in your little home office and you get up in the morning, you sit down at your desk, it's very easy to just run on autopilot. But when you're in a different location, it's much easier to switch from the being in the business to looking at the business as a whole, seeing the forest for the trees.

 

Final fun fact number seven, I am an introvert.

I know this is a bit of a surprise. I get this a lot. My audience says things like, Steph, I can't speak on stage or I can't start a podcast or I can't show up online because I'm an introvert. Yes, so am I. I've just learned to switch on my energy or dial up my energy when I'm doing these things, but they do drain me.
Even just recording podcast episodes drains my energy and I can't record more than three in one day without needing a very long nap. Last year I went to a conference in America and American conferences are huge. Like we had thousands of people in the room and my energy was so drained by being around so many people.
So I would just pop up to my hotel room for a little nap and then go back to the conference and then go for a little nap and then back. Because there's only so long that I can sustain that extroverted energy, that kind of outgoing energy before I need to recharge. I've had to figure out in my business, I've had to figure out the balance in my days and my weeks.
So if I'm teaching a workshop in the morning or I'm doing a Q&A session or if I have a one on one call on Zoom, I know that I'm going to struggle then to get some deep strategy or deep thinking work done afterwards. I need a little rest first, or I need to go for a walk, like something to kind of recharge my brain after the extroverted part of showing up online.
Same goes with things like webinars and anywhere where I'm having to show up for an audience online is really draining. Also I can't tell you how great having naps in the middle of the day are. So if that's something you need to do to be able to show up more then do it. You have my permission.

 

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