Hello, my badasses! I hope you can hear the smile on my face right now. I am absolutely gushing with excitement over recording. Finally, episode one of the Badass Empires podcast.
This has been a really long time in the making. I have been strategizing, thinking about this, dreaming about this for so long. And, you know, it's such a natural extension of my purpose right over at Badass Careers, helping people do work that they love, build a career that they find truly meaningful and fulfilling, and that pays them well. Getting paid to do work you love - what better way to spend your 40 hours a week if you're going to have to spend 40 hours a week at work, right? It has been so energizing and such a beautiful mission.
At the same time, I've been doing my own thing for a while. I've known for a long time that there are a lot of people out there who want to find that fulfillment and do work that they love. But in the context of entrepreneurship, they want to work for themselves, they want the freedom, they want the autonomy, they want to be able to build something on their terms, and put all of that time and energy that they were putting into their professional career into their own thing that they own, and that becomes an asset for life.
Now, knowing that I can finally create this extension of that work with Badass Empires and empower, really empower these aspiring early-stage entrepreneurs, side hustlers, or future corporate escapees to do what I've done, essentially, and create that profitable, freedom-based business where they can work from anywhere, they've got the money, the impact, the purpose - I really can have it all. There's just something about that feeling of empowerment as you get to design your life and earn good money on your terms.
Okay, it's a very different expression of the concept of work. And, you know, I'm sitting here; I've just spent two and a half weeks in Australia, lots of sunshine, lots of time on the beach, feeling good. And I couldn't be more excited to dive in today and walk you through my journey from amateur side hustler all the way to multi seven-figure business owner.
Now, obviously, this journey has been incredibly life-changing for me, transformative to my core. So there are a lot of things that I can and will share. But it's gonna take time, right? This is what the podcast is for; you're gonna learn about my story, my journey, my experience, and my insights with every single episode. So I'll try to keep it as succinct as I can. But I think it's really important to hear the story and understand where I've come from because I really do view myself as the every girl, okay, like I'm just so normal. I don't know how else to say it. I don't have any specific gifts or talents, or, you know, being genetically blessed and looking like a supermodel or being particularly hilarious and a natural comedian. I don't have anything that necessarily made me stand out from the get-go or made me an instant hit online or anything like that. I'm just the kind of person who maybe can relate to.
I'm just someone who likes to grow, likes to learn. I like to set goals. Yeah, I have a big sense of purpose. And I did the work to figure out what that was, and I'm a hard worker. But I really want you to understand and gather from this episode that what I really want you to understand and take away from this episode is that all of this is possible for you too. And I say that framing the fact that I'm about to share a story with you that involves money and involves numbers; one of my values is about being extremely transparent. And I'm going to be very, very open about money, okay, about sales, about revenue. And I just want you to remember before I dive in that just over four years ago, I had none of this, okay? It did not exist. And so as you're listening, make sure that you're looking for the evidence in my story that, hey, maybe you can do it too. Because I'm really not that special. And I'm really not that different from you. Because if you're here, I know that you're the kind of person who's into growing themselves, developing themselves, becoming a better version of you. And that's pretty much all that's taken. And that's pretty much what I brought to the table, right, just over four years ago. And the only difference is that I've already started and I've stuck at it. Okay, so just wanted to frame that up before I dive in. This story is not here to inspire you and make you think that I am lightyears away, sitting on some pedestal. Okay, so the story is not here to overwhelm you or inspire you to the point where you put me on some kind of pedestal and think that I've got some otherworldly gifts, and it's possible for me, but not possible for you. That is not at all the point as to share with you because the gift of sharing transparently gave me the guts to get started. So it's about sharing with you what's happened to me over the past four years, what's been possible for me, what's been transformative for me, and therefore what's possible for you.
So therefore, it's all about sharing. It's really just about sharing what's happened to me over the past. It's really just about sharing what I've made happen for myself over the past four years, what's been possible for me, what's been transformative for me, and therefore, what you are 100% capable of doing too? Okay, so let's dive into the details. So let's get into the details. How did this all come about? Well, before I get into the side hustling, entrepreneurship, business pace, let me paint the picture. I just want to paint the picture for you for a second about baby Rosie. Okay, so just before. Okay, so before jumping into the side hustle and the business side of things, and the entrepreneurial game, and all those kinds of aspects of my life and who I am. Now, I want to start at the beginning. Let's talk about baby Rosie for a second because I want to paint a picture for you. So you can understand a little bit more about that origin story of my life. Okay, and I'm getting really vulnerable here because I'm sharing very personal details and aspects of my life. But the biggest mission that I'm on, again, is to empower you and realize that this is possible for you too. So I want you to understand how I started.
So I really want you to understand the gap between how it started and how it's going. Okay. I was raised in a small town in New Zealand by a single mom of three kids and a father who struggled with addiction. They were not together, so I was very much living at home alone with my mom. Okay. And so, for most of my childhood, my mom worked as a cleaner. And we had zero financial support from the wider family. You know, my dad wasn't really capable of helping out much, and my mom worked her ass off, and I give her so much credit for her scrappiness and her resilience and her resourcefulness. But sometimes it just wasn't enough. And without going into too much detail today, just let it be known that I've known food banks, school holiday foster care programs, you know, hunting under couch cushions trying to find spare coins; money was never flush. Money was always hard. Money was always very, very tight. Okay. So I do come from a place of adversity. I do come from a place of very much zero financial backing. Both of my parents had left school as teenagers; you know, not I'm not coming from one of those families where it was like, "Oh, yes, well, my dad founded three companies. So I was naturally going to be an entrepreneur." That's not my story. Right? I wish I could say to you that I was a born entrepreneur selling lemonade on the side of the street, always had it in me, but that's simply not the case. I was cripplingly shy; I got bullied a fair bit growing up because of that. I was basically mute and struggled to make friends. And you know, I always had my really close one or two right or dies at primary school. You know, I already had my close friends in my life, but I wasn't ever vivacious, loud, you know, a natural networker, not at all. Okay, and I just wanted to share this as important context that I didn't start this journey with any kind of special network or family backing or a trust fund to tap into or some kind of innate entrepreneurial spirit. Okay, far from it. I mean, I did start working from a very young age because I had to in terms of on the side of high school, you know, over the summer, making sure that I was working full time at the supermarket or picking beans or feeding pets or doing whatever I needed to do to make some money and that kind of thing. But nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not starting up my own thing, okay. And again, all of this to say if I can do it, you can do it too. No innate gifts or talents set up from the get-go; again, I'm the every girl. And so let's fast forward many years in life through to my side hustle era, okay, and what you need to know in between who did that shy girl from small town New Zealand become? Well, a really hard worker, a real goal-getter, quite smart at school, right? Things came to me pretty quickly in terms of knowledge.
Okay, so fast forward many, many years, a couple of decades down to my side hustle era. Okay, how did that shy little girl from a small town in New Zealand become? Well, before starting the side hustles, just a little bit of context. So I became quite smart, quite hardworking, quite studious at school. Okay, a real goal-getter. I was desperate to break free of my socio-economic constraints and create a different life for myself. So I worked really hard to, for example, get two degrees in four years instead of it usually taking 5 or 6. I launched my human resources career and got into a really prestigious management trainee program, then took on a human resources profile out of over 500 applicants, really tried to get into an incredible first role after university.
A few years after that, I met my French boyfriend who then became my husband eventually in Auckland, New Zealand. I ended up moving to Paris for six years. I did my master's degree in International Human Resources Management. And I worked for some of the world's biggest companies, Fortune 500 tech startups, consulting—you name it, the world's number one luxury group in the world. Really cool career moves. And I was very much striving to build a career and life that I loved. And something that was very, very far away from my humble beginnings.
So fast forward, here I am. I'm at L'Oreal headquarters in Paris, working at the global headquarters at the international level. And I am working as a Human Resources leader specialized in learning and development and leadership development, helping people to upskill on their leadership, their emotional intelligence, become changemakers, really helping people to fulfill their true potential. It was an amazing job and training. And, you know, I had experience and mentoring and coaching. And I absolutely loved my job. I left a lot of things about the actual work that I did. And I can truly say that I was fulfilled and doing the thing on purpose, right, I really did have a sense of purpose.
But there were also a lot of things that I didn't love about that situation. For example, being from New Zealand and living in France, I really didn't appreciate having to ask permission to please go home for a few weeks, right? I was missing weddings, funerals, really important events. I could only go back once per year, at a specific time of year, which was already generous. But at the end of the day, it felt quite limited. I had by this point, got married to this French dude—what an idea—who does that? And it started to make me feel quite claustrophobic. I was wondering how I was going to balance my friends and family and my culture, my roots back home, with this life in France, and how I could possibly share life between the two.
On the job itself, even though I loved the content of the work, I started to find the context quite exhausting, like the politics and keeping up with appearances and masking to fit in, and a lot of ways. And I also remember distinctly looking around me, and seeing women a few years ahead of me trying to juggle it all, you know, getting up in the morning, early morning in Paris, running to the crash, dropping their kids off, hopping on the Metro, the Metro is delayed, they're getting crammed, and these tiny little carts commuting for an hour to the workplace, getting their work done trying to clock off as reasonably, you know, well-timed as possible to rush back, juggle it all. It just looked really overwhelming. And I remember thinking to myself, like I don't think I'm capable of doing that. I just don't want that life. Like I want aspects of that life. But gosh, how do you make it all work? It looks really, really tough balancing a family, in-person work, all of that kind of stuff.
So I was starting to feel a little bit jaded by the concept of the corporate system, where you had to be at a certain place at a certain time, and do a certain number of hours to be deemed efficient and productive and successful. And you're only able to take limited amounts of vacation and all the rest that went with it. And so, this prompted me to start Googling things around, you know, how to work remotely, how to work from home, and remember, this was pre-COVID. So, at the time, that was pretty unthinkable for a human resources profile, where your whole role is around connecting, conversing with people, you know, creating trust with people. At the time, it wasn't really a thing, okay. And so I started getting into entrepreneurial podcasts, side hustle podcasts, YouTube channels, you name it, and started learning about this concept of making money online. And I tried some really random things along the way to make some cash online and see how it all works.
One of the things that I did, for example, was dropshipping, where essentially, you create designs for T-shirts or tote bags or mugs or notebooks or whatever you want to sell—stickers, you name it. And you upload it to a website where people can buy your designs. And essentially, the website will fulfill that for you. So they will print the design, they will send it to the customer, they will do everything for you, it means that you have no startup costs, no inventory, you don't have to, you know, order a box of blank T-shirts and print the design on them or anything like that. It's all done for you. And so if you sell a T-shirt for $30, you get to keep, say, $10. And they take the other $20 that it costs to fulfill that product for you. And that was quite interesting. In that, you know, I'm not a graphic designer. And I started to just have fun with it using Canva and finding really random niches. And at the time, Megan and Harry were getting married over in the UK. And I made this T-shirt with sort of that London Underground symbol, you know, where the stations are written on, you know, you've got the circle with the bathroom in the middle, and you've got like Waterloo station or whatever it is. And I just had that concept. And I've just put Megan and Harry in the middle, almost as if it was an underground station. And it really popped off. And I sold hundreds of dollars worth of that T-shirt, just dropshipping. And I've also done, you know, other random things like I tried consulting, so I acted as a New Zealand culture consultant, whether you believe it or not for a video game company who was building out a video game, based in New Zealand, and all of these kinds of things. Okay, so I started dabbling with the world of making money online. And, look, it was an interesting learning experience. It was money, but I definitely didn't see myself doing that long term. There was no purpose in it, no passion in it. But what it did is gave me this massive confidence boost that this was a real thing. And you know, it's not a scam, you actually can make money online. And so I started learning more and more and more about this concept of monetizing your passion and started learning specifically about YouTube.
The idea of YouTube fascinated me, and I watched a lot of YouTube videos at the time. And I always said, as a New Zealander living in Paris, France, I wanted to start a blog. I began learning about the benefits of YouTube and honestly, I obsessively studied it for about three months before committing to the concept of "Not Even French," which would be a YouTube channel dedicated to expats living in France, helping them navigate French culture, administration, and the French language. Even though I spent way too much time preparing it, obsessing over the look and feel, writing an impressive content plan, researching and writing all the scripts, and learning everything about search engine optimization, and all those kinds of things.
I spent an excessive amount of time learning about things like search engine optimization, to the point where, for a beginner, you would think I was trying to get my freaking PhD in the thing. I eventually launched this YouTube channel in September 2017. Let me tell you, it took me over two hours to film my first 15-minute YouTube video—over two hours and a full day to edit it. I was so shy, such a perfectionist. The sound of my own voice made me nauseous, and the idea of uploading it to the internet was overwhelming. But I pushed through; I did it, and I stuck at it.
I posted a video every single week for a year, and then two years. Just under the two-year mark, I had grown this channel to over 110,000 subscribers.
With this YouTube channel, my highest revenue year was about three or four years in, achieving $100,000 in revenue through a side hustle, right? This is just something I'm doing on top of my very busy corporate day job at L'Oreal. That combination of ads and brand deals essentially got to the point where brands were partnering with me for up to $2,000 to $5,000 per video for a shout-out. Not only did this help facilitate things like travel and paying off my student loan, but it also taught me so much about content marketing, building a personal brand, making money online, and various ways to diversify income streams. I think I had at least five revenue streams going at the time. And this was a real turning point for me.
So, fast forward to 2019, and Neil gets this job offer in New Zealand.
So, fast forward to 2019, and the Frenchie husband gets a job offer in New Zealand. Very ironically, I ended up following him home.
So we moved halfway throughout the year, and I committed to myself that rather than job hunt and try to find a corporate gig using my savings and income from Not Even French, I was going to give myself six months to start a business. I tested three concepts or niche ideas. The first involved continuing with Not Even French, seeing if I would enjoy doing that full time, discussing French people and French culture. I complemented that with cross-cultural consulting, helping expats and companies understand codes and build cross-cultural agility. I also explored YouTube coaching, teaching people how to grow on YouTube, and career coaching.
All of this was done either for free or at a very low price point for me to understand my entrepreneurial purpose. Unsurprisingly, my purpose was still to help people love their work, similar to what I did in the corporate space for many years. I got my master's degree in that area. This was a significant decision as I could have focused solely on Not Even French, but I knew I needed a new phase in my life with a clear purpose for sustained excitement and energy.
In July 2019, having just moved to New Zealand, I spent a few months researching, preparing, and testing different concepts. In September 2019, I launched my Badass Careers Instagram profile, thanks to the visibility from Not Even French. I gained 180 followers in the first month. Then, in October 2019, I officially launched my website and services. In my first month of business, I made just under $600. Things started picking up with daily posts, stories, and Instagram growth strategies. In November, I made $3,104, and in December, $3,520. By the end of the year, after four months of launching and testing the business, I had grown my Instagram following to 14,175 people, making around $3,000 per month.
However, due to low prices and over-delivering, I hit client capacity and realized I needed to raise my prices. In May 2020, I made a significant change by ditching custom packages, raising my one-to-one prices, and launching my signature offer—the Career Glow Up—an eight-week program covering career clarity, resume, cover letter, LinkedIn, networking, job search, interview skills, and salary negotiation. This move resulted in a milestone moment, making $29,000 in one month.
To put that into perspective, it had taken me about six months in business to make $20,000. Then, I just made $29,000 in one month after launching this program. I became an expert in helping people find clarity and design their purpose-led, impact-driven careers, loving what they do for work. That was my signature offer, helping individuals figure out what they truly want and then making it happen. After niching down and launching the signature offer, by August 2020, 10 months after starting, I had made my first $100,000 in business. By the end of the 2020 calendar year (January to December), I wrapped up with $180,000 in business. In 2021, I tripled my business, and my business revenue shot up to $550,000. By May 2022, I had achieved my first $1 million in total revenue in my business. 2023 marked my first $1 million revenue calendar year.
Now, obviously, I'm talking about business revenue, not profit. The great thing about an expertise-based, personal brand business, a lifestyle business, is that the profit margins are high. Much higher than a brick-and-mortar store or a product-based business. Essentially, it's you, your team if you have one, and some tech tools and systems. This means I can regularly pay myself more than I could in the corporate world. In 2023, I paid myself over five times my old corporate salary. This was a massive moment for me after years of hard work, being told I was on the talent list and a high potential, getting a 4% salary raise.
I now have a small but mighty team supporting me, allowing me to work and play in my zone of genius most of the time. From a personal perspective, due to financial abundance, we now own two properties, one in the capital city Wellington and a beautiful beach house in New Zealand, each worth over a million dollars. Our main home is fully paid off, providing a level of security I dreamed of at 33. We can afford to go back to France for three months every year, and I can work from anywhere, living between New Zealand and France.
Having this flexibility allowed us to prepare for the arrival of our first baby. I can adjust my schedule if needed, providing a level of freedom and flexibility that is priceless. Financial freedom allows for generational wealth creation, early retirement, or investment in passive income streams. Earning amazing money while fulfilling my purpose, impacting lives, and leaving a legacy is a dream come true.
It's not just about the money, but it is about the money. I get to earn incredible money, do work that I love, feel passionate every day, impact lives, and achieve both purpose and profit. You don't have to follow my steps to build your empire, but having the option to do so and building it up over time is empowering. Whether you're content with your 9-to-5 and want a side hustle for extra income or dream of building a purpose-led service-based business, we'll explore various topics in future episodes. I'm honored and excited to help you take your first steps. Reach out to me on Instagram at badass empires underscore, share your dreams, and let's connect. I can't wait to help you build your empire in the next episode.
