Hey, badass. So I was thinking we could play a game. I am going to say a word out loud, and without any overthinking or self-editing, you are going to be honest with yourself about the first image that pops into your mind. Not the second one, not the third one, but the first one. And the magic word is entrepreneur.
Who flashed into your mind?
[00:00:25] Entrepreneur Stereotypes
I think for a lot of people, they're often this white, male, tech bro kind of personality, based in Silicon Valley. They've just founded an app, they're speaking on stage, or they are being interviewed on some kind of panel, and whoever your character was it probably wasn't you, right?
And this is how our brain works. Our brain likes to give us shortcuts, stereotypes, and schemas about the world, what it means, and how it all works, and that's how our brain saves precious energy. But what's happening is that a lot of people think that they aren't inherently an entrepreneur or that entrepreneurship is something that you're born with, or it's something that you either have it or you don't.
And when you're thinking in this way, it's going to create detachment for you. It's going to make you think that it's something that's possible for other people, but not possible for someone like you for a whole variety of reasons, because you don't look like them or sound like them or whatever that looks like.
In today's episode, I want to walk through the three major signs that entrepreneurship is right for you, regardless of whether or not you've ever thought about yourself in that way. Whether you believe or see yourself as an entrepreneur right now doesn't actually matter to me. What matters to me is opening your mind to the possibilities of shifting your identity and trying new things and believing that you can be something when previously your brain has told you that it is not for you.
And maybe you'll walk away from this episode thinking, oh yeah, I'm definitely not an entrepreneur. And that's also fine because that's good information and we like information and we like self-awareness. But I want to make sure that thought, if it is true for you, is based on self-awareness and honesty and radical accountability of your life and not based on fear and doubt and limiting beliefs and bullshit excuses that are keeping you stuck.
[00:02:47] My Personal Journey into Entrepreneurship
I can tell you that I never, ever thought of myself as an entrepreneur; I am very introverted. For the majority of my career, I struggled with a big fear of public speaking. I certainly didn't have any entrepreneurial backstory selling lemonade on the side of the street or anything like that.
I had never done anything that you could categorize as an entrepreneurial venture before. And I didn't feel any major connection to Steve Jobs. I wasn't reading books about entrepreneurs. I wasn't taking any entrepreneurship papers at university. Honestly, it just wasn't in my realm of possibility for me.
I didn't think much about it. I was a dedicated corporate devotee. I lived and breathed human resources. I love anything to do with developing people, training people, recruiting people and helping them to fulfill their potential at work and do work that they love. And I doubled down and I got my master's degree in International Human Resources and I was carving out my International Global Human Resources career.
Working for Fortune 500s, tech startups, and consulting, I was a one-track mind. I wanted to become the human resources director of a Fortune 500 company. That was my goal. And when I started taking side hustling seriously and I launched my YouTube channel, there was a part of me that absolutely wanted to explore making money online and potentially becoming a digital nomad one day.
At the end of the day, if I'm honest with myself, I thought that I would perhaps make a little bit of money online that would help me pay off my student loans faster. It would help me to travel more. Like I never really thought that I would end up here. Certainly not for the first few years, because I just didn't have the belief or the identity system that allowed me to think “Hey, Rosie, you're an entrepreneur.”
And now when I'm looking at the empires that I've created and my wonderful team and all of the fun and all of the content and all of the crazy stories I have to tell along the way. I realize that I've navigated a lot of these ups and downs with a really fierce entrepreneurial spirit that I just never realized I had.
But looking back, there were signs that I had the potential to make a really great entrepreneur and that it would be something that I really enjoyed. I had just never tried it or really put much thought into it. It's interesting when you discover a whole part of yourself that on one hand was there and was showing you signs, and on the other hand you're discovering for the very first time.
So I can definitely relate to you if you're sitting there right now thinking like, “I'm just not a typical entrepreneur”, whatever that means. Now, what does that mean to you? Do you have to be extroverted? Do you have to be extremely self-confident? Do you have to be a great public speaker?
What are all the assumptions that you're holding around the concept of entrepreneurship? Now just before we dive into the three major signs that entrepreneurship is right for you or would suit you and align to you, the way you work and the way you make money and the way you contribute to the world, I just want to note that entrepreneurship is more than being a remote worker.
There's a difference between being a remote worker or a “digital nomad” where you can work from anywhere but you're still working for a company and you're still working for someone else. Entrepreneurship is very much when you've created your own thing and you've created an economy and a market and income and revenue around that thing.
So I wanted to differentiate between those two models because just because you have freedom and flexibility and remote working doesn't mean that it's got everything else that comes with entrepreneurship. At the end of the day, it's still a structure. It's still a system. It gives you a container to work within.
It gives you a reliable paycheck. It's a very different life and approach than the entrepreneurial game, which people associate, rightly and wrongly, I've learned, with uncertainty, risk, and all of those other things. Huge chance to fail, that kind of thing. I can also understand why entrepreneurship is that one step further into the unknown, but we are very much focusing on entrepreneurship, and specifically the kind of entrepreneurship where you would put yourself out there to some extent and create content and build an audience and build a community and work with people either through coaching, mentoring, services, online courses, whatever that is. So that's what we're really referring to when I'm talking about entrepreneurship today. I'm not talking about creating an app that's never existed before and I'm not talking about selling products online, on a website, on Etsy or anything.
I'm talking about that flavor of entrepreneurship. Looking back at the three big signs that entrepreneurship probably was a really good option for me, and might be for you too. I'm going to start with something that might be a little bit controversial because I am a career coach and I've got two sides to me.
I've got Badass Careers which is helping people to thrive in the corporate world and really own their professional trajectory and do work that they find fulfilling but within the context of corporate. And then I've got Badass Empires which is helping people to do work that they find fulfilling, make incredible money, make an impact and all of that good stuff as well, but working for themselves as an entrepreneur.
[00:08:56] The Frustrations of the Corporate System
I'm not here to say that corporate is inherently bad, but looking back, one of the major signs that I had that entrepreneurship would be a better fit for me is that I was becoming incredibly jaded by the corporate system.
Even though I loved the work that I did in general in corporate, and my professional trajectory was incredible, I was working all around the world, I worked in France, I was sent to work in London, Copenhagen, Mumbai, and Shanghai, helping people to fulfill their potential, helping people to do work that they love, helping people with their career strategy.
Such a cool job. Many cool jobs over the course of my career. I realized that I struggled, I would say more than most, with the container of that work. It's like the work itself was really enjoyable for me, but all of the system and the rules and the structure around it, I found inherently and there are a lot of great things about corporate and this is why I will always be an advocate for people carving out a really exciting profession and really exciting career within the context of corporate because there are a lot of great things on offer.
Income stability, paid leave, being surrounded by really cool and smart colleagues. Having a lot of senior leadership, role models, mentors to learn from, great networking. There are incredible opportunities for people in corporate to take ownership of their career and become an intrapreneur where you have that entrepreneurial scrappiness but from the inside out and you're making a difference using the resources and the structure of a company.
That is a really perfect fit for some people. But for me, the corporate system would upset me and frustrate me more than the average. And maybe you can relate to some of these points that I'm going to share with you. And maybe you understand what it feels like to feel this way. For example, I became allergic to corporate politics. I just couldn't stand it anymore. Just, the injustice or the anger I felt or the frustration when I saw completely incompetent managers being promoted, for example, or being able to stay in top-tier jobs for years and years blocking anyone else from getting that opportunity just because they had nowhere else to go.
Or, really inappropriate behavior, getting swept under the rug, or really bad decisions being made by leadership because they had these political pressures “outside of their control” that were influencing those decisions. Or decisions being made about me and my career or my friends' careers around, sorry we can't give you that promotion or we can't give you that pay raise.
Because it's HR's decision or Global's decision. People who have never even met you. And just that concept that you can get in, put your head down, do amazing work, achieve amazing results, and yet, it's not enough to succeed and it's not enough to get promoted. You have to play the game.
I think a real breaking point for me was when I was running this really prestigious high-level training program for future leaders. So there are a lot of people in their 20s and 30s in the room who are marked as high potential, aka they're going to be the future leaders of the company of this massive Fortune 500 global group. And they flew in from all around the world and we had speakers from really impressive business leaders and thought leaders and did all sorts of great coaching and workshops and it was an amazing training.
It was a training that was dedicated at really nurturing the leadership potential of theirs and then helping them to become a change agent within the company. So identify an area of change or a project that they wanted to work on to improve the company and allowing them to lead that. So it was a super cool training.
But the energy, the vibe was very much “we are young and motivated and we want to do things differently. We don't want to work like the political old dinosaurs of the company. We want to create our new rules. We want to disrupt, we want to change this company for the better.” At the time I was in my late twenties, early thirties, and I was the program manager, which meant that I was running sessions and introducing the speakers. I was the company contact for that program. I was the leader of that program. It was offsite. We were together for a week and it was my program. And we had the second in charge to the CEO come to speak at one of my trainings, who's now the CEO of the company worldwide, for the number one group in the world. Number one beauty group in the world, I'll let you guess who it was.
The reaction of my team and my managers at the time, was that they had to send themselves, the senior leaders of my department, to welcome this person, to roll out the red carpet for this person, to look after this person, and to introduce this person to the group, because I was not senior enough to do it.
I put my foot down and I said, no. I called them back, and I said, I was speaking to my manager's manager, and I said, “that is sending the complete opposite message of everything we've been trying to create this week. Like Rosie's not good enough because she's too young because she's too junior because she doesn't have a say, no, you have to trust me with this. You have to trust that I can do this alone.”
And so it happened and it went well, and I really stood my ground. But my point is that things like that were really starting to get to me. All of these rules, all of these “because it's how we do things”, “because that's the way it is”, it was really starting to frustrate me.
Another thing that was really starting to frustrate me was the fact that we wasted so much time. I just wanted to do a good job, I just wanted to take action, I just wanted to move my projects forward. And yet we wasted so much time in meetings, and meetings about meetings, and the endless morning teas.
You always have someone interrupting you, messing up your daily schedule, pushing or pulling you into something, sending you off on a tangent, interrupting you in some way, somehow. This frustration was starting to boil. I just wanted to get my work done, and I felt like the only time I could get work done was when I was staying late or getting into the office early, just so I could have some alone time, and just so I could breathe.
I also felt like my ability to take action and perform was being hindered. I was being hindered by lazy or messy or incompetent co-workers or politically charged co-workers who I felt were always holding me back. I had to go through so many tick-the-box exercises, so much bureaucracy, so many validation loops, having to get buy-in from senior stakeholder A and just stroke his ego just to make it work, even though he knows nothing about the project.
All of that felt like it was really holding me back from what I was there to do, which was just to do a good job and fulfill my mission of doing a good job. There were also things like the rigid structure. So I always questioned the fact, like, why do we have to be there from 9am till 6pm?
I'm not a morning person. I work better from 10am till 7pm. Why is that so strange? Again, this is pre-COVID, so I feel like there was less flexibility in general in the workplace. I remember having to go through this huge process to apply to have one or two days of working from home allowed in your contract.
Or, structure even the way of being like, “oh no, you can't do that or work on that project because you're not senior enough” or “that's not your role title” or that, you exist in that little box for now. Things around that, around this structure we had to adhere to just didn't make sense to me and felt suffocating in terms of my potential.
And of course, one of the worst parts, I think, of that whole corporate system is having to ask permission to take leave, or sometimes even just pop out for a doctor's appointment. I remember thinking to myself “I'm an adult, I perform really well, I always exceed the expectations. So if I'm waking up on a Wednesday and I'm not feeling that great in the morning, why can't I take off Wednesday morning and just chill, work a bit in the afternoon, go hard on Thursday, and deliver all my results by Friday as promised?”
Like, why can't I do that? Human energy doesn't work like that and things like that were just really grinding my gears. And if I'm looking at all of these scenarios essentially, why was it getting to me so much? All of these examples are really underpinned by very strong values, very strong convictions, so having an opinion on something having values that felt like they were potentially being compromised and the sense of kind of rebellion or wanting to challenge the status quo and I think that's a big sign of an entrepreneur.
If you're someone who's able to question, “why does it have to be this way? Could it be a different way?” And not just take that default status quo as the truth, but wonder if there's a different way of doing things. And I think this frustration I felt with the corporate system and how jaded I felt by it was a big signal to me that I didn't want to work in the conventional way.
I didn't know what else I wanted to do, but I definitely didn't want the conventional structure and setup of the corporate system.
[00:19:05] The Importance of Purpose in Entrepreneurship
The second big sign that I think that entrepreneurship would work really well for someone, aside from wanting a different way of working or a different system to be able to create for themselves and being able to work on their terms and design their weeks on their terms and, work when they want and when they don't want and take accountability for that, is the idea of having a really big why, or a really big sense of purpose.
Entrepreneurship, it's hard. It requires a lot of courage, it requires a lot of internal motivation to keep going, it requires a lot of grit, a lot of resilience, and all of that. You have to stick to it, even though no one's watching, and no one's telling you, you have to do this, you must do this.
You have to be accountable to your dreams and to yourself. And at the end of the day, it's you who wakes up in the morning and creates the results for that day. And what I have seen consistently is that successful entrepreneurs are driven by something bigger than themselves.
If we take Badass Careers, for example, that's an absolute 100 percent purpose-driven business. This business was around helping people to love their work. And because I'm so attached to my purpose, and because I want that so badly for people, it allowed me to keep going even on the days where I was doubting myself, where I felt scared of showing up, where I felt like I didn't have anything to say.
That desire to make an impact and help a lot of people made me intrinsically motivated and it made me impatient to do. I was seeing way too many people out there stuck in jobs that they hated, having their potential completely wasted away, and I was like, I can help these people, it shouldn't be the case let's go.
Having that mission, having that purpose, and being the kind of person that craves purpose, being the kind of person that, that loves the idea of being able to connect the work that you're doing to something bigger than yourself, is always going to be really helpful in the world of entrepreneurship.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a massive sense of purpose around what you do, although. That's the ideal. It can also just be that entrepreneurship is so personally meaningful to you that gives you a lot of purpose and a lot of drive as well. So for me, for example, when I married a Frenchie and I realized that I would have to split my life between France and New Zealand, that was extremely meaningful and important for me. To be able to work from anywhere.
For some people it's their kids and wanting to have more flexibility and freedom and time with their kids, especially when they're young. For others, it's incredibly meaningful to them that they're able to travel the world and see all the beauty that this world offers.
For some people, they come from two different cultures and they really want to live between two countries. They don't want to be forced to pick just one. And for some people, it's just that they can't take the effect of corporate on their mental health anymore. They don't enjoy that system that I was just speaking about, and they want to work differently.
And so I think if you're the kind of person that has this mission, whether it's professional or personal, and it makes starting a business and working in this way where there's so much freedom and so much autonomy, really purposeful for you and really meaningful for you. If you're the kind of person who can connect to that concept and wants to seek out that feeling, I think entrepreneurship is going to be something that is going to be much more likely that you stick to compared to someone else.
That doesn't have a bigger reason, a bigger why, a bigger sense of purpose around this way of working. And not to say I wasn't helping people to love their work in my corporate career, I was. But there's a difference when millions of people are watching your YouTube channel and getting help from you, and you're working with thousands of clients all around the world. The size of that impact is just incomparable.
[00:23:33] The Willingness to Get Scrappy
The third sign that entrepreneurship was right for me and might be right for you too, is this willingness to get scrappy. The thing is, you don't need to feel like you're an entrepreneur, you don't need to know anything or have any prior experience.
I started from zero. I had no knowledge of entrepreneurship, of marketing, of digital marketing, of business building, online product creation, nothing. But you have to be willing to figure it out. You really can't stay a victim in entrepreneurship. Saying things like, “I'm bad at tech, I don't know how, I can't find the time, I've never edited a video before.” We've all had fears and doubts and limiting beliefs pop up in this journey as an entrepreneur, trust me. But the difference is we don't live there, we don't stay there. I'm bad at tech becomes how can I figure this out, there must be a YouTube video on this, I'll find a tutorial somewhere.
“I don't know how” becomes “who can I learn from.” “I can't find the time” becomes “I'm going to make the time because this is so important to me and it's going to change my life.” “I haven't edited a video before” becomes “cool, let me figure out how to edit a video, I'll watch tutorials online, and then once my YouTube channel is making money, I'm gonna outsource it and delegate it to a video editor.”
You have to be willing to get scrappy, resourceful, and solve problems. Entrepreneurship is just solving problems. You need to have that scrappiness and the fight to solve problems every day and just figure it out.
As I said, I didn't know how to do anything either. Four years ago, I had none of this and I know that when I'm looking back on my past I've always been the type who's been able to set a really big goal and then reverse engineer the steps to make it happen and break it down into baby steps and that's the inherent quality that every entrepreneur needs I think. The rest can be learned because you can google anything, you can ask someone, you can do an online course. One of my clients is using platforms like Skillshare and Udemy to learn all of the tactics around growing on Instagram because even though I can teach her about that, she wants to preserve our calls for that even higher-level strategy and business model design and content machine design. So she's taken that into her own hands so that we can focus on other things. That's that spirit, right? And of course, you can always take the big leap of faith and invest in a coach to show you how as well.
The thing is that when it comes to entrepreneurship, no one is coming to save you. You need to make this happen for yourself. And you need to make it happen for yourself every step of the way. Yes, there's a lot to learn. Yes, there are a lot of problems to solve. But if you can trust yourself that you have the ability to figure things out, find information, try things, tweak things, and solve problems, I genuinely believe anything else can be overcome.
It's like a lot of people say, I can't be an entrepreneur because I can't deal with uncertainty and like the revenue uncertainty. Hey friends, I can tell you I'm really bad with uncertainty. I'm a very anxious character. I've got a lot of money trauma and uncertainty is not my friend. But what did I do?
I upskilled myself, I invested in coaching and I learned how to create a business that had very predictable revenue streams, and predictable numbers. I know now if I launch and X amount of people attend my masterclass, I'm going to make a roundabout Y amount of sales. I know that now. So things feel so much more stable and predictable and, I have a forecast and I'm able to make well-informed decisions.
But just because I'm not great with uncertainty doesn't mean that I don't deserve to become an entrepreneur. It goes back to this, can I get scrappy? Can I figure it out? And the answer was yes.
[00:28:07] Embracing Your Entrepreneurial Potential
So those are my three big signs that entrepreneurship might be the most aligned pathway for you. If you're feeling jaded by the corporate system, if you want more freedom and flexibility and autonomy and to actually be able to navigate life feeling like an adult who gets to make their own decisions and structure their own time and is still trusted to do cool things and get great results.
If you are the kind of person who likes to attach to a big sense of purpose, or you have a big why, or you've got a big reason for wanting to work in this way because it's going to allow you to touch more lives and make more impact, or it's going to facilitate your lifestyle a lot more than the professional corporate structure could, and you've got this willingness to get scrappy and figure things out, honestly, the rest is easy.
I would love to hear from you and see if anything's clicked for you today about what it really means to be an entrepreneur and what this might mean for you and your identity or if I've helped you to see excuses or fears or doubts that you had about yourself in a whole new light and realize that maybe you do have what it takes to get out of your own way and give this thing a crack.
So let's carry on the conversation over on Instagram. Go polish off that crown, get to work, and keep on building that empire of yours, a shit ton of income, crazy impact, a business that you adore. Just by listening to this episode, you are one step closer to your very own badass empire.
Now I want to hear from you. Tag me in your stories or send me a DM over on Instagram so I can learn what resonated with you most. Oh, and if you're the kind of badass who is willing to help us out big time and take a few minutes to rate and review this podcast, make sure you send us a screenshot of that review at hello at badassempires.com so I can send you a juicy freebie to say thank you!
Until next time, keep showing up for your future and we'll keep smashing goals in the next episode.
