My entire business journey so far

I'm quite excited and a little bit nervous to share today's blog with you because it's my entire business journey so far. I've shared snippets of it here and there, but I don't think I've ever shared the entire business journey from when I started out five years ago to where I am today, and it'd be very easy for somebody who's only just started following me maybe in the last six months or the last year to assume that it's been smooth sailing and to look at the last 18 months that I've had in my business and think like, “Wow, Steph has a really good business, life's been really easy for her.”

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Everything that has happened in my business journey so far

Nobody has really seen what happened before my business grew last year, so that is why I'm sharing the entire business journey from my very first business, which I don't really talk about very much and which I will be talking about a little bit in the next couple of blogs because it taught me some really valuable lessons. Yes, closing it down was difficult, yes, my ego and my pride were very, very bruised, but the lessons that I learned from that business mean that I do not regret it at all.

 

My background

Okay, so let's start from the beginning. To give you a little bit of context before I start with business one, I'm going to give you a bit of background from my upbringing and from the early stages of my career. I was brought up with two incredibly hard-working parents. They're both doctors. They both worked very, very long hours.

They worked days, nights, weekends, and they instilled in me the value of hard work, which was great. It was great for the most part. It became a bit of an issue when my business started to grow, but that's a whole other tangent. They paid for my education, they sent me to a good school, they paid for my uni degree, and I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I studied accounting and finance because that would get me a respectable job. I worked my butt off.

I moved to Australia from New Zealand, and I landed what I thought was my dream job, working for a pretty good company. Then, a few weeks into this job, I realized that something just didn't feel quite right. I felt like I was a square peg that had been stuffed into this round hole, and I started questioning like, “Is this what a career is supposed to feel like? Is this what work is supposed to be? Surely, this can't be it,” and a few months into that job, I really started questioning, “What am I doing here? I've studied for four years, and here I am in this job where I'm filing things, I'm proofreading, I'm faxing documents.”

I wasn't even using my brain, and it killed me. While I was working, while I was doing the filing and all of that, I started listening to business podcasts to pass the time, and I started listening to all of these people who were getting interviewed on podcasts like Amy Porterfield's Online Marketing Made Easy. That was probably one of the first ones I started listening to, and I heard all these stories of people who were doing their own thing, who were being their own bosses, and I thought, “Wow, I would love to be one of these people,” and deep down, I just knew that I was wasting my talent, my time, my brain on this career that wasn't helping me to grow as a person. Around the same time, I had decided also to quit sugar. As part of being in a really unfulfilling job, I found myself every day eating five or six little mini chocolate bars that were just sitting there in the office just because I was bored, and the little sugar hits helped me to get through the afternoon, so I decided I needed to quit sugar.

 

My first business

While I'd been quitting sugar, I realized how difficult it was to find interesting sugar-free snacks, and that's where the first business idea was born, my first business. It became a subscription box that delivered sugar-free snacks every month. Now, when I told other people about the idea, everyone tried to talk me out of it. They told me businesses fail, you have a really good job, don't risk your job by trying to start a business, all of these little negative thoughts, which only made me more determined to make the whole thing work. Deep down though, there was that part of me that was absolutely terrified, that maybe they were right. I mean, like who was I to start a business?

I had no clue about business, but I also felt like now I had something to prove. I had to prove to everyone that I could do it. Now, because of the nature of my job and the kind of firm that I worked at, I couldn't tell anyone about what I was launching, so I felt like I was living this double life, trying to do all of the things. I was trying to get this business off the ground, I was sourcing suppliers, I built the website myself, I marketed it all, I did the bookkeeping. I literally did everything myself because I was on such a tight budget.

 

My health scare

I was getting up at say about 4:00 AM pretty much every morning, working for a couple of hours on my business, then going off and doing a full day at the office in my day job. Two weeks out from the official launch of my first business, so we were getting close to crunch time there, I was playing netball, and suddenly, I found myself unable to breathe. My chest was just so tight, and for those of you who don't know what netball is, for our U.S. listeners, it's like basketball, except you can't move. Once you catch the ball, you can't run with it, so I was playing netball and I didn't realize it, but I was having a panic attack. It wasn't until I had got home and spent a couple of hours crying and I guess decompressing in the bathtub before I could breathe again normally.

The nightmare didn't really end there though, because then, the next morning, I woke up with pretty bad back pain and a fever and I almost went into work that day, but luckily, I didn't because, by that evening, I was in hospital with a really severe kidney infection, where I stayed for a whole week before they sent me home for another week of sick leave. It was quite funny because on my first day, my first day out of hospital, my boss called me and he asked when he could drop my laptop off, which was kind of … I laugh at it now because I couldn't even read an issue of Vogue or watch an episode of Orange Is The New Black without falling asleep, let alone even thinking about the brain power that it would take to do some work. When I finally arrived back at work after two weeks off on sick leave, I arrived to find this massive mountain of paperwork on my desk, and I realized, “Wow, okay. These people I work with don't actually care about me.” I burst into tears.

I've never been somebody who's ever cried at a job before, and I just burst into tears. Now, I quickly realized that this was not the job for me, that I would rather be completely broke and working on the business that was exciting me rather than at a job that made me miserable, so a few weeks later, I handed in my resignation and went all in on my subscription box business, which at this point, was not bringing in a whole lot of money. We're talking maybe a couple of $100 a month, but I just knew that I couldn't stay in this job anymore and I trusted myself. I thought, “You know what? I can make this thing work.”

Turns out, I could not make it work, so my savings ran out after a couple of months, which was not great. I had to swallow my pride and I applied for some part-time jobs, and the one that I ended up getting couldn't have been better – I was at a startup working as their digital marketing coordinator, and my boss from that job is still one of my good friends to this day because he became like a mentor to me. He'd been in business for, I think about 15 years at this point, and here I was in my first six months of business. I was working three days a week for him, and meanwhile, my subscription box business was kind of struggling.

I just wasn't loving it, and I couldn't figure out how to scale it because I just didn't have the time to be packing and shipping all of these orders, and to top it all off, I was making maybe $2 profit on each order on average. Some orders, I was making a loss on because Australia is such a big country, that to ship an order to a rural address, that I was paying more in postage than I was getting paid for this order, basically. I didn't really want to admit to anyone that I'd failed, but I slowly came to realize that I had created this job instead of a business and I realized, “Okay, maybe it's time to cut my losses and shut up my shop,” which I did. It was really difficult, and I remember reading and rereading and rereading that email that I sent to my customers, telling them I was closing doors, and it was difficult, but in hindsight, I'm so glad that I did it and everyone was so much more supportive than I thought they would be. Nobody said, “Ah, I told you so,” which is what I was expecting people to say, but actually, everyone was really supportive.

 

My agency business

Now, my boss at the time was super flexible. He encouraged me to start working with some clients, and I gave business another shot, so I'd started taking on these marketing consulting clients, and I really wanted to build an agency. This is where the idea for my second business, Wildbloom came about, which was a wellness marketing agency. The thing that I didn't realize though, was that when you build an agency, if you're the head of the agency, you don't actually really end up doing that much of the work. Your job ends up being managing people, and I don't love managing people.

I love doing marketing. I love helping my clients. I don't love managing people, so while I managed to get a lot of clients into the business and I was doing the work and I started to hire a small team, I realized along the way, “This is not what I want to be doing,” but it actually worked out really well because I started to notice a trend with a lot of the inquiries that I was getting in my inbox to work with me. A lot of these new businesses didn't have the budget to pay for a marketing agency to do the work for them, but they did have the time to learn how to do it themselves, so this is where I started to come up with the idea for my first online course, which was called Facebook Ads That Flourish, and it taught business owners how to DIY their Facebook ads.

 

Before you ask me about it, it's not for sale anymore because I realized that I don't want to be having to always keep up with Facebook's changes. I'm not a Facebook ads expert. I just simply wanted to teach people how to run their Facebook ads. That first course launch that I did back in November 2017 funded two months of travel through Europe, which was awesome, because up until that point, the only money I had coming in was my client retainer money every month, and that retainer money also meant client calls at 3:00 AM. It meant waking up to emergencies in my inbox.

 

Starting my podcast

It meant spending my days in this constant state of guilt because I felt like I should have been working when I was traveling, and worry because when I was in front of the Eiffel Tower, looking at this beautiful tourist site, I was worrying about what other emails I was getting in my inbox, and when I actually caught myself replying to an email in front of the Eiffel Tower, that was the point where I realized, “This is not working for me. Something needs to change here.” Fast-forward about six months, and I had launched my podcast and I'd started firing my clients and decided to go all-in on creating and selling digital products, so this is where I began building my personal brand. I still had Wildbloom, and that was where I was working with clients, but I slowly started to build some more stuff around stephtaylor.co.

This was when I launched my podcast, which I created with a grand total of $300 and a very dodgy microphone that I covered with this hot pink sock, because the audio quality was not great. If you go back to the early episodes, like anything before probably episode 100, you'll notice the difference in sound quality, but even though this podcast had not very good sound quality and I wasn't a very confident speaker back then, it still went to number one in the business charts during launch week, which was the best kind of surprise ever. Within probably the first six months of launching that podcast, I'd hit 100,000 downloads and I was speaking on stage at a podcasting conference alongside podcasting legends, Pat Flynn and Jordan Harbinger, and I had such crazy imposter syndrome because here I was on the same stage as these two really successful people, and although I might've looked successful from the outside behind the scenes, my business was anything but successful. I had this entire suite of digital products. I had a Facebook ads course, I had an email marketing course, I had an Instagram course, I had an Instagram eBook, I had a Canva template.

I had all of these products, but I wasn't actually the expert in any one thing in particular. I just wasn't standing out. People would come to me for the free content because I gave so much free content away on my podcast about general online marketing. But then, they would go to the expert when it came to paying money, so they'd come to me for the free Facebook ads podcast episodes, the free Instagram podcast episodes, but then when it came to investing in an Instagram course, they'd go to the Instagram expert. The breaking point for me was when I launched a brand new course. I knew that this was make-or-break.

 

My webinar failure

I had put all of my money into Facebook ads. I fired up my webinar platform. I had 700 people registered. I was pretty confident it was going to go well, I hit the “go live” button, and nothing. It was like the spinning wheel of death.

My webinar platform had crashed and nothing … I was left hanging. I couldn't do anything. The support team for the webinar platform were offline, given that it was mid-morning here in Australia, so it was late evening over there, and I just didn't know what to do, and I knew that without the webinar, people wouldn't buy the product. They needed to see the webinar.

Without people buying from me, I didn't have enough money to stay in business, and this was probably the lowest of my low business points. I actually went home from my co-working space at about 11:00 AM, climbed into bed with the large glass of Shiraz and started applying for jobs. I applied for a whole bunch of jobs, and a week later, a hiring manager called me. She asked me if I would come in for an interview, and before I could even think about what I was saying, my brain automatically burst out with “No, thank you. I've already accepted a role elsewhere,” and that was the point where I knew that I wasn't ready to give up on this business thing just yet, but I also knew that things couldn't keep going the way that they had been because I was broke, I was hating my business.

 

My podcasting launching course

Something just had to change. What I'd had quite a lot of was friends in the business space asking me for advice on how to launch a podcast, so I thought, “Okay, let me try and let me launch something to teach how to launch a podcast. Let me launch a group program,” so I launched this group program to my email list. I said, “You know, I'm going to take 10 spots. If I can fill 10 spots, we'll run it.”

“It'll be for eight weeks. I'll teach it live week by week.” I hadn't actually created the product or anything, I just launched it to my email list, and I had two people out of 10 sign up, so I obviously couldn't go ahead with that and I refunded those two people, so there we go. Another flopped launch, so there we go. I've had two flopped launches in a row.

I was feeling pretty down about myself to be completely honest. I was feeling pretty down about my business. I wasn't sure if I had it in me to continue. For some reason, I managed to find the energy to get back up again, and I emailed my audience. I reached out to a few people who'd been interested and I asked them, I said, “You want to learn how to launch a podcast.” “You've asked me for a product. Why didn't you sign up for this?,” and the insights that I got from that changed my business forever, because that was where I found out that the thing that had stopped people from signing up for the group program was that they didn't want to learn in a group program format, they wanted to be able to do it in their own pace. I found out that people were worried that they wouldn't be able to attend the calls live because it overlapped with the summer school holidays, all of these reasons that people hadn't bought my group program, so I decided, “Okay. Let me turn this into a self-paced product.” I launched that to my email list and sold $3,000 worth before I'd even made it.

 

The successful pivot

Then, I spent about a week throwing it together. It was a very stressful week, but I got it there in the end and I relaunched it again. That second launch brought in two and a half thousand, the third launch 2,800, the fourth launch 3,400, and I kept relaunching it, relaunching it, relaunching it, and eventually, I automated it, and 12 months later, it brought in over $800,000 in sales and helped over 4,000 students. That was the weirdest feeling, going from being at such a low point in my business to suddenly everything moving smoothly, feeling easy, feeling aligned. Since then, I've taught over 1,000 students how to create the same success and freedom with their own digital products through my Digital Product Creator's Vault and through my signature course, Launch Magic.

In 2020, my business became a million-dollar business, which blows my mind. That was what I was planning for 2023. I was planning to hit the million-dollar mark in 2023. I had set for 2020, my revenue goal was $250,000. I hit that in March in just one day month, which was wild, but the best part is that the way that I designed my business meant that I still had time to go to the dog park, to go on week-long getaways to the beach, to take a month off in February this year and travel around Australia in a van, so unlike my previous two businesses, this one actually works for me instead of the other way around.

I'm no longer packing and shipping orders. I'm no longer replying to emails at 3:00 AM or doing phone calls at 3:00 AM, and I'm so incredibly grateful for everything that happened along the way, because through my first business, I discovered that freedom is my highest value. I discovered that I didn't want a physical product business because I wanted to be able to keep on traveling. Through my second business, I learnt that I didn't want to build an agency, even though I thought I did, so I would say, like if you're … Wherever you are in your business journey, just be open to things not going the way that you've planned them to.

I wouldn't have been equipped for the quick growth that I had in 2020 if it weren't for all of the failures that happened in the four years before it, and even though those failures felt horrible at the time, I now understand why that had to happen to get me to where I am today. I would not have had the capacity to hold that kind of growth if I hadn't fallen down and got back up over and over and over and over again. One thing that I do wish I'd done more in my journey was to enjoy the process. When I first started out, I thought that it had to be a really hard slog, and that one day, I would wake up and I'd be successful and magically, everything would be enjoyable, but it wasn't actually until I'd consciously decided that I wanted my business to feel fun and easy that I started to enjoy myself in it. Honestly, business does not have to feel hard for you to be successful, and just because it feels easy or it feels like a struggle, it doesn't make you any more worthy of the success than if it's easy.

There you have it. That's my business journey from top to tail. I hope that if you're going through a low point in your business or if your journey isn't looking like what you imagined it to look like, I hope that this is a bit of a reality check, that most people's businesses that you see on the surface, there's a lot more underneath that tip of the iceberg.

 

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