I started with £400, a kitchen table, and a baby on my hip. Ten years later I'd built a beauty business, scaled it past staff, launched a skincare line, and nearly lost myself doing it.
The bit nobody tells you
The growth content online tells you to hustle, optimise, scale. What it doesn't tell you is that you can do all of that and still end up exhausted, resentful, and running a business you no longer recognise.
I know because I did it. By year five I was hitting the numbers everyone congratulated me on and quietly crying in my car between school pickups. Something had to change, and it wasn't going to be another marketing course.
What I figured out
The women I admired most, the ones still standing five, ten, twenty years in, had built something underneath the business. A way of working that didn't ask them to disappear into it. They priced properly. They hired before they were drowning. They said no to things that didn't fit. And they did the unsexy middle work that nobody posts about.
I rebuilt mine on those principles. The business doubled. The hours halved. I slept again.
Why I coach now
Because there's a particular kind of woman I keep meeting. Clever, capable, already doing the thing, and one good conversation away from the next ten years of her career going completely differently. I want to be that conversation. That's what the programme is.
I'm not a guru. I'm not selling you a six-figure dream. I'm a woman who built a real business, made all the mistakes you're about to, and would quite like to save you the ones I can.