How I built a successful business… that I hated

I've been sharing the behind the scenes of my business journey a lot lately, and today I'm talking a little bit about how I built a successful business that I absolutely hated.

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So the current business that I run is not my first business. If you've read my last few blogs, you'll know that I had a business that failed. And then I had a business as a marketing consultancy. So what happened was after my first failed business, and while I was working at a startup doing their digital marketing, I decided to give the business thing another crack. And that was when I started Wild Bloom, which was what I wanted to build into a wellness marketing agency.

I didn't realize at the time that building an agency was not going to be particularly sexy, not as sexy as it might look online and that it would be so freaking difficult. Hats off to anyone who has built an agency because it's not easy. It's really challenging. Maybe for somebody who enjoys managing people more than I do, maybe it would be easy for you, but I didn't realize that most of my job would be managing people. I just wanted to do marketing work. I was good at marketing. I loved marketing. I did not enjoy managing people. I'm not really a people person. So that was something that I wish somebody had told me before I'd set out with this goal to create an agency.

 

Anyway, at the time I was creating a lot of really good thought leadership content. I was writing about a lot of marketing topics. This was before I launched my podcast. I was writing about marketing topics, but I was almost taking a, not a controversial view, but I was taking a different perspective from the generic marketing advice that everyone else was giving at the time. And people started organically finding me through Facebook groups, through word of mouth, through even Google searches at the time. And before I knew it, I had a bunch of marketing clients.

 

My business was bringing in enough money to live on, which was quite nice, and it wasn't quite enough for the lifestyle that I wanted, but it was better than what I'd had for the last year and a half since I'd quit my corporate job. Unfortunately, I was also working a lot to keep up with all of the client demands. In 2018 I decided to go overseas for a year. I spent half the year in the UK and half the year in New Zealand. While I was in the UK, given that it was the complete opposite time zone to Australia, I found that I was getting client calls at 3:00 AM. I was having client emergencies on Sunday nights and even just taking one week off, I remember I wanted to take a week off to go sailing in Greece where I knew I wasn't going to have any internet. So there was no point even trying to take my laptop. So trying to try to plan to take one week off took so much preparation.

 

And I remember being on about day three or day four of that week off and stressing, feeling this low level anxiety of what am I missing, like what client emergencies are going to be happening, what emails I'm going to come back to after this trip. It was really stressful. And on top of all of that, I was over delivering for a lot of my clients. I was putting all this work into creating their client's strategies and nobody would take action on them. I would pour my heart and soul into coming up with an awesome marketing strategy for a client. And it would just sit there and gather dust and I'd create social media content. And my clients wouldn't find the time to share it.

 

It stopped lighting me up. I stopped enjoying the work that I was doing, and I knew something had to change. After I launched my first course, I started to realize that there were other ways to do what I loved doing and help people. So I actually launched my first online course before I went overseas, but it never really occurred to me that it could become a significant part of my business income. I always thought it was going to be like a nice little top-up income stream. I never thought it would become my bread and butter, which it is today. What happened was then I started launching a few other courses. I relaunched the ones that I had and in early 2019, I fired my last client and I went all in on creating and selling digital products.

 

Then about six months later, I niched into launching.

I'm a big believer in starting as you wish to continue. And I don't think that even if I'd stuck with the original business, working with clients, I think it would have taken a lot of work to remove myself from the business and to get the level of freedom that I do have in my business today. Whereas when I started this business, I started it with the intention of only wanting to work a couple of days a week, of wanting to have time to pursue other projects, other businesses, other ideas. And that's how I've managed to create this business that I actually love versus a business that I actually love vs a business that I hated, that drained my energy, that didn't light me up. And that took up way too much time. It actually made me a bit of an awful person to be around.

 

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