ļ»æHey, my badass. How are you doing? I hope that this episode finds you and your earbuds doing well. I have been go, go, go This month, I cannot tell you I've been all over the place. I think I counted five days that I've been at home. Out of the last five weeks, I have been up at the beach house. I've been over in concerts. I've had my Frenchyās father come out to New Zealand for the very first time. So we've been showing him around looking at the sights of New Zealand, went down to the South Island, had an amazing trip, had a wedding.
It's just been one of those months where it hasn't stopped. I just got home today, sitting down, recording some podcast episodes and feeling so happy to be home. You know the feeling where you're just craving your routine again. I mean, as much as we love the flexibility, we love being able to do this, and get around the place and make our business and our work work with our lives and all of our other commitments. Sometimes it just feels so good to know that I can hunker down and just have a nice full day of work tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and get a hit on some things. You know what I'm saying? Like balance isn't all about having time off, balance is about making sure that that work/life integration feels really good to you. And sometimes when I'm away and things are patchy and I'm off work for too long, I actually crave a little bit of structure and stability to come back in to make it all feel good again. So really excited to be coming at you with that energy of āhappy to be backā.
[00:02:33] Introduction to Vanessa Lau
So today's episode, it's a funny one. It's definitely something a little bit different. I suppose if we wanted to be fancy, we could call it some kind of observational analysis. But let's call it for what it is, a bit of people watching. I love a bit of people watching, but except this time, it's people watching on crack because I was very, very heavily involved in this story, which I will get to in just a moment.
But what we're doing today is we're going to analyse what happened to Vanessa Lau, online entrepreneur Vanessa Lau - so her rise, her pivot, her sabbatical, her return. She's quite the character in the online space, and whether you know who Vanessa Lau is or not (I mean, you can do a quick google stalk, of course) to get some ground work down. It doesn't actually matter. I will fill you in on all of the details, everything you need to know.
But what's really interesting about this person is that she has a really interesting entrepreneurial journey that we can learn from. So absolutely mistakes. We can be avoiding lessons that we ourselves can replicate because she's done them so incredibly well. And in this kind of reflection and analysis and thinking, this is where we get to get strategic as entrepreneurs, because the online entrepreneurship space is very new, very unforged territory. It's not been that long that we've had this kind of online business model in the making. So sometimes the best school, the best lessons we can draw from are from learning from other people who have been there, done that.
And when I say been there, done that I mean, like, you know, Vanessa's probably doing this for about five years, right? So this is kind of the time frame that we are talking about. And yet has become a very interesting person to watch and to learn from as she's navigating this journey, and I personally have been following along all the way since the beginning, so we will get into all of that.
But just to get started, Who is Vanessa Lau? Well, as I said, she's quite the character in the online space. She became a multiple seven figure online business owner in her early to mid twenties and essentially shot to stardom within the online business community because she was very, very quick to be cranking out these multiple million dollar years after just a few years in business, thanks to blowing up on socials, particularly YouTube and Instagram.
And she made her money selling her signature course Bossgram Academy, and full disclaimer, the Bossgram Academy was actually my very first investment into my own business. OK, so I am a very early adopter, very original student of the Bossgram Academy. And it's essentially a programme that teaches you how to use Instagram to grow an audience, attract leads and become an online coach. And then, despite this explosion of success, 3-4 years of having these multiple million dollar years blowing everyone away, being interviewed here, there and everywhere, being a keynote speaker for some of the biggest entrepreneurial conferences out there, she decided to walk away from everything.
She decided to shut up shop, fire her entire team, shut down her website, shut down the Bossgram Academy and just get out of the game. And very, very recently - I'm talking like a few weeks really - she's come back, right?
So some would argue that when she walked away, when she made that decision to shut everything down, she was absolutely at her peak. In fact, she had just had her first million dollar month. I'll say that again. Million dollar a month. And she was speaking there and attending events alongside the likes of Amy Porterfield, Sam Owens, Alex Hormoz, Sean Cannell from Think Media. You know, the big, big characters we have in the entrepreneurial space, these sort of founding members who taught us the 101 of email marketing and taught us the 101 of online content creation or funnels and all of these kinds of things. The 101 of YouTube. OK, so was very much well connected and just going from, you know, what looked like strength to strength from the outside.
So you've got this incredible person, fiercely intelligent, incredible educator, great content creator, and she's in her prime. She's doing her thing. She's been in the game just a few years. She's never been, as such, an entrepreneur before, and she's showing all of these big guns, how to do the thing and for sure, for me, throughout my journey, she's been a huge source of inspiration in a lot of ways.
And as I said now, after a one year sabbatical, she's back. She's come back. And in this episode I want to dissect with you some parts of Vanessa's journey and really draw out the key lessons that we can learn from her story as to why she blew up in the first place.
Why the system broke. What went wrong, right? Why it got to this pressure cooker point where her only option was to walk out that door and give my honest opinion on her decision to a Leave It all behind and then return, and also how she's handling her return as well. Because having been there since the beginning, having been deeply involved in her story, I've got some thoughts to share and with a bit of distance, a little bit of critical thinking, a little bit of analysis that makes me understand as well for myself what I do and don't want out of business.
[00:08:39] Personal connection to Vanessa
Now, just before I jump into these reflections, however, I do want to share with you what my personal connection to Vanessa is, because there's a reason that I am fascinated with this person.
In particular, we have had a journey that has crossed paths multiple times. I have had a proximity to her and a behind the scenes access to her that a lot of people don't necessarily have, so a little bit of insight as to where I'm getting my information from and what kind of experiences I'm drawing on in this analysis.
So first off, I just want to say that Vanessa has absolutely been a long term source of inspiration for me. I genuinely see her as a genius in marketing. She is bright. She is sharp. She is articulate. I have so many good things to say about Vanessa. She's been a business mentor of mine directly and indirectly for a very long time. And there were, you know, absolutely phases of my business where I was following her lead.
I referred to her as Queen V, internally to my team, there were absolutely phases of my business where I basically like, worshiped what Vanessa was doing in business, right? I really looked to her as an absolute role model.
So our journeys kind of started out in that we were both actually working at L'Oreal. So we had that connection from the get go. I was working at L'Oreal over in Paris, and she was working at L'Oreal Canada.
And thanks to the algorithm gods, her content started getting pushed to me. She started making these YouTube videos on āHey, I'm a millennial. I've quit my job. I don't know what's nextā. And I was really fascinated because I could tell that she used to work at L'Oreal and I could tell that the corporate system that she was trying to escape was very much something that I could relate to so very much early days
We started chatting and she was navigating quitting and all of that kind of thing. And at the time, I was really blowing up my personal YouTube channel, Not Even French. And she actually invited me to be a guest expert and go live with her to talk about YouTube growth in her Facebook community at the time. And when she launched the Bossgram Academy, I was one of her very first founding members.
Now what was really crazy about that launch is how incredibly well she did in her very first launch. I think it did around a quarter of a million dollars the first time she launched that and the price point was only 500 USD for early bird founding members. So it was absolutely wild to be part of that, and we've kept in touch throughout the years, we've voice noted, we've exchanged messages, we've been rooting for each other.
I've been on her podcast and then in late 2022 / early 2023 I was part of her mastermind. And her mastermind was an incredibly high level investment for me. So it was over 40,000 New Zealand dollars (and full disclosure, this did actually end up getting fully refunded, even though we had been a couple of months into the mastermind, because she decided to quit and walk away from everything).
But being part of that mastermind gave me that sort of backstage access to her, her thinking, her business. And of course, she told us in depth why she was walking away at the time and what she was feeling and what she was going through. So all of this to say, I do have much more of a behind the scenes insight to this human being than the average.
Now, over time as I've matured as I've been able to take a step back as I've seen things and heard things that have made me reflect on my own business values and how surprising sometimes it is, how you're doing some things incredibly well compared to your mentors, even though your mentors you're looking at them in other ways because they are absolutely, you know, showing you ways in which you can grow.
I think I've just had a little bit more of that emotional maturity and that self reflection, and I'm now able to say OK, objectively stepping away from that respect and that that almost fangirling of Rosie, you know, probably about three years ago, four years ago, when Vanessa was really like the guru for me.
I think now I'm able to objectively see parts of her journey that have made me think OK, that's absolutely not what I want in my business. That's not a decision I would make. And of course, while still retaining that wow, really impressed by your thinking there and really impressed by the way you're navigating that. So this should be a really balanced analysis.
But however it comes across, please don't twist this into anything. It's meant to be zero hate, just able to now mirror back someone else's experience through the filter of my own experiences, my own values and draw out some juicy insights that I think are gonna be really valuable for all of us walking forward.
[00:13:52] Why Vanessa blew up
So first things first. Why did she blow up? Why did she see such immense success so quickly? What was it about Vanessa that had these world leading entrepreneurial girls with their jaws on the floor?
Well, firstly, Vanessa, she blew up because she is an excellent educator. As I said, she's bright, she's articulate and she's fiercely strategic. She doesn't do anything by accident and keep that in mind for later.
So she quit her high paying job at L'Oreal, and because I was working in human resources at L'Oreal, I actually looked her up in the system to see what kind of role she had held, and actually, she was only about 18 months into her corporate career. OK, so it was a great job, but we're talking about a junior marketing profile here.
And she ended up walking away from her job at L'Oreal because she knew that's what she didn't want. And she ended up working at a cafe for a few months and again, this is really important to keep in mind because it very much became her origin story, right? Like from working in a cafe to seven figure entrepreneur. OK, so keep that in mind what Vanessa did really, really well is she shared her journey in real time.
So what I was absolutely taken aback by, because this was before I had started my own business, was her confidence and almost her audacity to see herself as an expert in real time. And what I mean by that is that when she got her 1st 100 subscribers on YouTube, she made a YouTube video on how to get 100 subscribers on YouTube.
When she got 1000 subscribers on YouTube, she made the video āHow to get your 1st 1000 subscribers on YouTubeā. You see what I mean? She had no qualms about teaching what she knew and that being good enough and that being a very recent fresh experience, and it worked really, really well for her.
She also very quickly started a Facebook group, which created a really strong sense of community and the sense of kind of I'm an early adopter, right, that mentality of Wow I've discovered Vanessa, She's so cool. And I've been here since the beginning, which also created the sense of raving fans fans that were, you know, it's almost like the Swifty model, like fans that would absolutely, you know, fight for everything that she was doing, loved her videos, loved her content and felt like they were a part of something
It was also very obvious to me from the get go, because I worked in training and development, and I was always really fascinated in people's learning journeys that she had heavily invested into courses in coaching.
For example, she did Sunny Lenarduzziās YouTube for bosses course. Before starting her YouTube channel, she mentioned countless books, like I don't I'm not sure if anyone else was picking up on this, but it was in her references and her comments here and there, I could tell she had actually been strategizing and thinking this through a lot, despite the whole, like Oh, I'm just throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks.
She had read a lot about entrepreneurship. She had done a lot of courses, and she had invested heavily into this concept of starting an online business. I can tell you that much for free, OK?
And I also realised that she invested and outsourced early. So even though she may have edited her first few videos - very, very quickly, she had a community manager working for her Facebook community. She had a video editor. That was very evident to me. So very early on in the game, I could see that she was investing into her growth, which is incredible.
So all of these factors obviously come together to help someone to blow up. But this was the turning point. So Vanessa did a video on how to grow on Instagram. So again, she was still in the era of kind of throwing videos out there ish, But, you know, she had the strategy. She was looking for high search volume topics and that kind of thing, So she was very much like I'm a millennial. I quit my job. I'm finding myself. I'm growing this YouTube channel. This is how I'm growing this YouTube channel.
And she ended up doing this video on how to grow on Instagram, which would have been part of her professional remit a little bit as well when she was working in marketing at L'Oreal. So she did a video on growing on instagram, and this video absolutely blew up. It went viral. And that video going viral off the back of that was an incredibly important part of her origin story, because from that point, she did not miss. She did not miss. She did video after video after video on growing on instagram, and at the time she had 8000 followers from her Instagram account.
Her personal instagram account turned professional instagram account because she used to post makeup photos and makeup tutorials. So she had already kind of, I guess, gathered a kind of following on instagram. But she definitely wasn't, you know, she didn't have hundreds of thousands of followers or anything like that.
And suddenly, because of this video, ironically a YouTube video, she suddenly had tens of thousands of Instagram followers and long story short, the more her Instagram was able to grow, the more she was able to gain in credibility and become this expert on how to grow an instagram following.
And she saw that the market was hungry to do this. She saw that these videos were blowing up time and time again. The algorithm was coding her as the Instagram Growth Girl, and she absolutely doubled down on this. She doubled down on what worked and she started offering coaching for how to do what I do and grow your instagram account, grow your social media following and become a coach.
And she started offering coaching packages at first for $2500 and then, honestly, after just a few clients because again that confidence wow upped her prices to $5000 to coach with her and then very, very quickly. After what felt like just a handful of people, a handful of clients shut down the private coaching and developed her scalable course Bossgram Academy for the coaches who want to use Instagram to get clients.
So very, very quickly, she stepped away from the intensive private 1 to 1 coaching model with lots of meetings, lots of coaching clients and moved into a more hands off model with, you know, a couple of calls per month alongside her course, the Bossgram Academy.
Now let's take a second here just to step back and have a think. So this person is not a certified coach. She hasn't been a coach for very long at all. And she really only chose Instagram because that was the topic of her YouTube video that blew up. That was the content that worked for her on the market. And you could argue that going viral was luck. And absolutely going viral can be a question of pure luck.
Sometimes, however, you create that luck, don't you? You can't go viral if you haven't been posting content. So she was doing the work. She was posting content, and this video did take off. It was that sweet spot of what the market wanted. YouTube obviously loved the watch time on this video. The video is performing well and it went viral. OK, so yeah, 100%. It's a little bit of luck, for sure, a plus, a very highly searched niche.
But to her credit, she knew what to do right. She knew how to run with it. And just like that attitude of being able to teach how to get your 1st 100 YouTube followers just as she got her very 1st 100 YouTube followers. Now she's packaged up this course around how to explode your instagram and become an online coach after a matter of just a few months of working as a coach.
OK, so she launches Bossgram Academy. As I said, I think it made an excess of $250,000 in her first launch, and it only grew from there and $2 to $4 million revenue years eventually actually became her norm as she scaled. And while her business wasn't necessarily, you know, it had a critical point where it was almost plateauing, and I know that she was really struggling with that.
But in general, we're talking about struggling because she can't seem to crack past $2 million a year right instead of instead of, um, moving up exponentially here and forevermore. Right? So she was very much hitting multiple seven revenue years.
She had the team, she had the evergreen funnels, you name it. OK, so she has this thriving business. So let's talk about what happened. Why did the system start breaking?
[00:23:10] Why the system started breaking
Well, there's a few points that I'd like to call out and the first starts with complexity. So because Vanessa blew up so hard so fast, I know that she felt a lot of self imposed pressure to keep growing, keep scaling, keep growing towards what could be this massive. You know, coaching company, media company, you name it right.
And we both did a coaching programme called Scale with Success. And this was another huge investment of mine. It was $25,000. So we're talking about like, you know, almost a house deposit in small town New Zealand like it's a huge investment, huge investment. And the idea of this coaching programme is to take one group coaching programme and scale it using evergreen funnels, evergreen content machines. Essentially, it's there to simplify your life.
And I know what I took away from that programme and I've been there, done that and I'm sort of looking at how Vanessa's tackled things and what she did do is she absolutely stuck to the one programme. So scaling of the one programme but in order to scale it in order to keep it booming, exploding. Because you can't just replicate viral videos, you have to have systems. You have to have the content machine. You have to have the traffic coming into your evergreen funnel.
And again, you can't replicate viral. You can't count on that. So I see Vanessa and she's hiring more and more people. Part time contractors, YouTube growth consultants, PR consultants trying to land her features in Forbes, trying to land her features in massive publications, plus actual contracted, you know, full time employees and operations and customer service and community management. She brought in launch managers. She brought in top tier experts to keep chasing these big, big numbers.
And the cost and investment of these people was immense. Not to mention the complexity of hiring, onboarding, training. All of those things - feedback. What happens if the standards are slipping? What happens if the performance isn't there? So a lot of complexity in her team.
She also implemented an immense evergreen content machine. She was putting out 1 to 2 YouTube videos per week, posting twice a day on Instagram, writing a long form CEO newsletter, repurposing it all to tiktok to YouTube shorts. She was doing keynote speeches. She was here, there and everywhere. Her content load was immense.
And I know that she was really struggling with the people management side of things. Again, she grew so big, so fast she had at least two major rounds of layoffs in her business. Plus, you know, sheād very openly and transparently with us some semi dramatic exits, you know, layoffs of individuals. And at some point I know that there was a lot of fear around lack of performance and how to fire and that kind of being the focus versus the positive stuff.
Like when I was in her mastermind, she was like, Wow, like, so impressed about the culture I created and the and the positive psychology regarding managing people and growing them and keeping them engaged where she was very much on the on the phase of, you know, these people are complex and they're hard, and I can't quite crack it right. So there's a lot of complexity and just the sheer size and scale of the thing.
[00:26:56] Lack of why
But the main thing that I think broke the system is Vanessa lacked a true why, and what I mean by this is that her business design, her direction, her business mission - it didn't come from the inside. It didn't come from her heart. It didn't come from her purpose statement. It didn't come from the deep work of having that clarity and knowing who you are and the impact you want to make on this earth.
It came from her video going viral. She was trialling things. I knew that she had a direction around millennial life coaching, which is why she was posting videos about Hey, I quit my job and here's how I organise my time and and here's how I do YouTube like it was kind of a general millennial life. Coaching direction wasn't specific at all, and she doubled down on that viral video.
And a viral video is not your purpose. And it's not your heart's calling. And it's not that sense of intrinsic mission and motivation that's going to fill your cup necessarily right. Sometimes you get lucky, and it is.
But in this case, even though she got a bit sick of putting out videos time and time again on instagram tips, Instagram hacks, she had to keep peddling them out because that's what people wanted. She was the Instagram to coach Pipeline Girl and a lot of the decisions she started making, therefore came from the outside, not the inside. It came from metrics. It came from data. It came from what her coaches thought it came from. That mastermind she was a part of. And it was all about growing the business and the money, but not about what she was actually doing.
And I know at some point she became absolutely paralysed in knowing what else to do next. She wanted to do something different, but she didn't know how and what she could do from here. And at some point, she was going to launch a YouTube course for beginners. The same kind of thing, right? Imagine Bossgram Academy. But BossTube Academy essentially subbing out Instagram for YouTube and she relied on a lot of people's opinions to decide on that.
Like she was surveying people. She was asking them, What should I do? Would you buy this? What do you think? And when she asked my opinion, I actually said to her, Look V, I don't want a YouTube course for beginners like I'm quite good with YouTube. I want to understand more about your incredible content, brain your mind for education and content. I want to know about your strategy. I want to know about the mistakes and pitfalls you've had in scaling. I want to understand the delegation and the team. I want a mastermind. I want something big. I want something in depth.
And she said that a few other people had requested that, too. And so she actually scrapped the YouTube course and launched this mastermind that I joined. And when she decided to shut down the business and walk away, she told us that day when she was telling us as as the mastermind, students, what was going on, that she had made a million dollars in one month and she felt nothing, because at some point, money can't be your way. She has the beautiful big house in Vancouver, right? She has the Porsche. She has these things that were important to her that she wanted.
But at some point it's not enough. At some point, what's getting you out of bed every day? What's filling you with a sense of desire? to keep going and to change the world right? The business growth and the money alone can't be your way. And I think that's probably the biggest thing that would have changed the game for Vanessa is if she still felt really connected to the work she was doing.
[00:31:15] People pleaser / imposter syndrome
Another thing I noticed with Vanessa, and we can all relate to this. This is very, very, very common, especially in women. But she's also, you know, and she's spoken about this openly. She's a people pleaser. She's experienced imposture syndrome. There's this thing around wanting people to like her and as that people pleaser. I know that.
You know, I saw her struggling a lot, having tough conversations with her team, like being able to do it, but it destroying how she felt, you know, things like refund requests felt very personal complaints.
I mean, I haven't looked into this, but someone close to me, said that even light challenges in her comments regarding her content in terms of her comeback in particular. Like, oh, I find this interesting or, you know, challenging how she dealt with the team or whatever it is. I've heard that comments get deleted very quickly, and I don't know if that's true or not. But it is true that the comments under her content are incredibly positive. And there's not a huge amount of criticism. But that could just be from her, you know, incredible community, she's built in so many raving fans
But there is this vibe which is not enjoyable. I think you know that exposure to having people in front of you, being confronted with a person's opinion that doesn't agree or doesn't agree with with what you've decided to do. And that's fine, because there are entrepreneurs like this and I completely get it.
But I don't think she really likes the client work aspect for that reason as well. I think she struggles not to over deliver as that people pleaser, and she got out of coaching as soon as possible.
And even with Bossgram Academy, she did fewer and fewer and fewer calls until the point where she did none at all. And I think it's all sort of tied up and not really liking that accountability and that pressure and being faced with the human beings, your team, your customers and them potentially challenging you.
Another thing that's really tough when you're a people pleaser, Is that you again, you're following the advice of others, and you're outsourcing your thinking and your opinion to what other people think. And this is why she was hiring these really senior consultants. Or at some point, she was talking about investing in software or, you know, trying out all these different paths that didn't really feel like her own. And her direction and her big dreams could change from one conference to another.
And what I just want to say on that, is that the person who has had their success in email marketing is gonna tell you that email marketing is the way, the person who's had the success on TikTok is gonna tell you that TikTok is the way, and none of them are right, and none of them are wrong.
It's like What you need to know is that there are a million different ways to have success, and if you rely on other people's advice and other people's stories and other people's anecdotes, it's gonna be really, really tough because what worked for them may not work for you because they're them and you're you. OK, so it's hard integrating the constant advice. And you should do this, you should do that of other people, even if they are absolute gurus, because they're them and you're you and your business and your values and what you want out of life could be completely different.
And I think a lot of that, you know, there's this sort of innate, people pleasing qualities, and then there's a little bit of imposter syndrome in there as well. I think from her viral trajectory, because at the end of the day, if you are charging people, I mean, as I said, it was like over 40,000 New Zealand dollars for me, if you're charging people that kind of money to learn how to grow a successful business, and you know in the back of your mind that a lot of your success came from the algorithm pushing out your videos and you're going viral and you know that the people in that room can't replicate that, that's not a strategy that's not a methodology. I can see how that would trigger imposter syndrome.
Now. I was there because I don't care that she went viral. Regardless of that, I saw all of the incredible qualities that intelligence, that sharpness, that strategic mind that I wanted access to. Whether or not I ever go viral like she did, I had so much to learn. But I can see why she would have felt the imposter syndrome of how can I teach these successful entrepreneurs like I had had my first million dollar revenue year by then, who am I to tell them what to do? Essentially.
And you know, the thing is with this mastermind again, because of the people pleasing, Vanessa doesn't do anything by halves. And so you know, of course, it wasn't just this casual online mastermind experience which it absolutely could have been because we just wanted to learn from her. But she was, you know, designing this outlandish mastermind where we were all travelling from around the world and doing international offsites. And we're talking about going to Mexico and Bali and all over the place, and it was extremely complex.
And she asked us, What do you want? And we're like, Well, it'd be cool if I could bring my operations manager. It would be cool if we could do this or we could do that and we could, and she was integrating all of this. And we're like, Yes, I'll add that in. I'll add that in. I'll add that in, and it obviously just became like, immense.
[00:36:37] Burnout
And so all of this ties up to also the fact that I think that something that we can learn from her journey is the burnout of it all. The burnout and the hustle of it all. Vanessa is incredibly hard working. I would say that 60 plus hour weeks were absolutely her norm. Working weekends were her norm.
She's an incredibly hard worker, incredibly productive and incredibly quick as it is, like she can get more done in the standard week, I'm sure, than the average person. Plus, she's pulling the big hours, and it's all sort of linked together, right? And I know that her partner is an entrepreneur as well, and they're often working, you know, not structured sort of hours, but a lot and often and seven days a week, which may not be the case as much anymore.
But it was absolutely the case at that time. So you can kind of see how her system started to strain her and started to head towards this feeling of dissatisfaction and lack of why and a feeling of burnout as well.
[00:37:40] Her decision to leave and return
So let's talk about therefore, her decision to leave and her decision to come back. Now her decision to leave. I have a lot of empathy for her because it was controversial. So she had launched this mastermind. We were three months into it. We had all booked tickets to Mexico, including myself from New Zealand to Mexico, not just for myself, but for my employee, for my husband. Because, hell, I'm not going to Mexico and not bringing him right?!
And a lot of people were very implicated in this mastermind and essentially to just show up on a call and saying like it's over, like effective this Friday. I know her team didn't have much notice. We didn't have much notice and at the time there were definitely there was a feeling of respect, like do what you've gotta do, you know, we were kind of like, wow, she must be at sort of mental breakdown level right to like like this is This is dire, right? Like, look after yourself. Look after your health, do what you've got to do.
And there was also another sentiment, I guess, underlying for some people of like, Oh, wow, like you're running away. You're running away from this big thing that you've built and these things that you've promised people. And I remember thinking at the time there was because I went through a little bit of a you know, the emotional reaction of sort of shock and then sort of, you know, went through my own acceptance curve.
And I remember there was a moment that I thought to myself. Well, how can you just get off that easily? You've got a team. You've got these clients depending on you, like you're a full ass adult. There it is, kind of like at some point, you have to take that accountability. You're gonna have to see it through to some extent. Like I'm not saying do the whole 12 month mastermind. But I'm saying, could we at least get to the end of Mexico or could we? You know what I mean? Like, could we get to a certain point.
It reminds me of when I was coaching an iteration of the career glow up that I really didn't like. It was too heavy in terms of my coaching hours, and I was feeling very, very drained by it all. I just guess the combination of the price point versus how implicated I was, how many extras I had promised. How many bells and whistles I had promised to the specific cohort. But I remember thinking to myself, you've promised this to these people for the next six months. So as much as you are feeling regret for those decisions you've made, you have to see it through. You know, you are an adult running your own business, doing the thing.
So there was definitely, like a moment where I was a little bit like, OK, um however, you know I and stepping back I was like, you know, I would rather have her step away and not do it and not coach us if she wasn't feeling, of course, because that will also affect our experience.
And they were also, I guess, like I mean in the chats that followed from the mastermind participants. We're kind of talking about it. We also knew that Vanessa doesn't do anything by accident again. She's a planner. She's strategic. She doesn't just randomly start her YouTube channel talking to Millennials. As I said, she'd been investing in Sunny Lenarduzzi course she'd been, you know, planning this business she'd been designing. She'd been thinking about strategy. She's not someone who just put stuff out there and like, OK, let's see how it goes.
So we knew like people were saying, we like this story. This moment is absolutely gonna be monetized one day like this moment in time is absolutely gonna be monetized, this decision and whether she becomes an author or a keynote speaker or whatever the whole burned my seven figure business to the ground is absolutely gonna become her next business.
So we kind of like knew that would happen or or predicted that that would happen. And just something that I want to mention before I move on to the comeback is that she did have a closing down sale of Bossgram Academy, and that announcement Post had, like over 22,000 likes and had a big, strong call to action on investing in Bossgram Academy and the the opportunity to invest in Bossgram Academy stayed up for several months.
So for sure that would have brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars like there's just no doubt in my mind that that brought in a lot of money. OK, so it was quite controversial. It was understandable. We had empathy, but there was a little bit of OK, let's see where this goes, right?
[00:42:09] What has she learnt?
So exactly one year later, she's made the big comeback. What has she learnt? So her angle is that she's taken this year off. She's lived, she's learned she's travelled, she's gotten engaged. And she realises that chasing more and more and more and more isn't the key to success in business. It isn't the key to happiness, and the best thing to do for her is to kind of become this like pressure free content, creator, lifestyle, sweet spot, low complexity, solopreneur vibes like having little to no team.
That seems to be her angle of how much is enough. And in that I can see very much that as predicted, she doesn't seem to be going towards courses or coaching or anything to do with client work, she's starting to lean more influencer. So she's speaking yes, about content creation, but also about her health and lifestyle. She's sharing more and more affiliate links. I think she wants that more indirect income of people clicking on her affiliate links and getting commission, or her selling simple, cheap digital products passively. So there's not that high intensity of accountability that comes with working with clients, and her line at the moment, as it stands, is she's just figuring it all out now.
[00:43:42] A few things I find interesting > concerning
From my perspective, there are a few things that I find anywhere on the spectrum from like interesting to concerning to anything in between, just from a pure observational point of view. And this is where we get into, I guess, the juicy part of the episode in terms of what can this teach us and what's really going on? And what does this mean for people? And what is her messaging really saying and really doing?
And this is a few points I want to bring up here because this could be a whole episode in and of itself. But essentially, what I wanna say first and foremost is that not everyone can drop their business for a year. She has combined over a million followers on social media, and we can't all sustain our lives and our families and our mortgages by being a solopreneur. OK, I can tell you hand on heart. I could not step away from my business tomorrow and pay my team, pay my mortgage, pay my whatever for a year I couldn't OK, so it's a very, very privileged position to be speaking from.
And she was saying in her comeback video that she made over 100k passively throughout that year, which was really supportive of her, just through people downloading her templates and her swipe files and things like that from the description of her YouTube videos that they were still continuing to get traffic as she left. But please, no way does this include her end of line Bossgram Academy sale. She would have had hundreds of thousands of dollars coming from there, and you cannot tell me otherwise.
So the messaging of, like live your life, you're never gonna get this time back. I'll only be young once, like concretely. Going to Coachella won't pay your mortgage, will it? So Let's just be real that this messaging of you know, screw the hustle and like, create what you want like yes and OK, yes. And because the only reason she can live like that now is because she lived very differently for five years.
Secondly, V doesn't do anything by accident, right? I get the whole messaging of like I'm figuring it all out. I'm seeing where I'm at. I was so scared to come back and she relaunched a year later with a new website. A new colour scheme, a new logo. Obviously that website had strategic thinking behind it. Who am I? What is my niche statement Now? What is my positioning? The copywriting, the font choices. The YouTube Channel banner, the long form YouTube video that had been edited beautifully, Whoever her video editor is. Oh, my gosh. The talent.
So for sure, there are people supporting her with her content. The video editor, maybe someone helping her to schedule her content. Maybe a bit of community management, Some admin. We don't know yet. We don't have those details. But what I can tell you is that we're looking at a minimum of three months of work here the positioning, the messaging, the website, hiring these people.
So for sure, you can say you took a year off and don't know what you're doing. But at least for three months, don't tell me that you haven't been strategizing and that you're fully a solopreneur now because you're you're not, and that's fine. But it's interesting because coming back, which has been to some extent planned, strategized right. It's probably a little bit of a grey area. People have been hired.
[00:47:29] Whatās changed?
I guess it's led me to think, Well, what's changed? Because what I can see is we've got this story arc from the beginning, which has - I quit my job at L'Oreal and now I'm going to become an entrepreneur. That was a big thing. I worked in a cafe, and now I've grown this business or I've grown this YouTube channel.
And then I've grown this business like that story arc, and now we've kind of got the same thing just at a different level, which is I quit my seven figure successful business to now this solopreneur content. Do you see how it's a really similar story arc? I quit everything, and now I've got the answer right. I've quit everything and now I've got the answer.
And yet behind that content is years of experience, years of skill building in terms of content creation, still hitting us with an expertly edited YouTube video every single week, still posting daily on stories still talking about how she's catching herself working weekends, the content flows are in place. The Instagram posts are in place. There's repurposing flows in place, like I saw that one of her annual objectives was productivity.
It's interesting to me how this person who is so fiercely strategic and ambitious is going to approach this concept of the just enough content creator, because Vanessa can now if she wants to. I'm not sure what she's doing, but work 20 hours a week and still easily make a million dollars a year like no drama. So it's just a little bit hard for other people to replicate, I think, and then behaviorally, I'm wondering what's changed.
And then the other point I just want to bring up is the fact that she's going for what looks like the influencer model. So we've got no client work, right? She's gonna be getting the Google AdSense coming in from YouTube. That's how they pay you affiliate marketing. She's selling things like her notion board templates, and she'll probably do some speaking gigs and things like that in the future.
And again, she can do that because she can. She can do that because she's got a million followers because she's this massive personal brand. If you were someone starting from scratch trying to make a living on those things on that passive, no client work kind of life, I can tell you that that is absolutely a long term grind. And it is potentially the slowest way of making money, the slowest way of making money that you could ever go for. And she can do this because she's a multimillionaire.
So I guess all of this to say that the messaging I'm waiting for is to click into place to be congruent and to be something that other people can actually replicate. That's what I'm keen to see, because if you're talking about a lifestyle and a methodology that people can use to improve their life or whatever it is, I'd really like that to be something that people can genuinely do, too and actually replicate similar results to you. You can't say, Look at my house. Look at my Porsche. Look at my lifestyle. Look at the fact that I took a whole year off and I could to people who haven't already become multimillionaires via their businesses, like you have through hustle, grind client work. It's just an interesting point of view now.
Do you have to burn out and hustle and grind to become a millionaire in business? Absolutely not. And I'm huge on the philosophy of finding that sweet spot and working the hours that you want to work and having that beautiful relationship with time and money that entrepreneurship can give you, which is that you don't necessarily need to work 40 hours a week to make three times what you're earning in corporate. That's definitely something I believe in, but I'm not sure I see her pathway or methodology yet.
That's something that canāt be replicated almost like the growing your business and growing on Instagram Pathway, which was hugely fueled by having about 10 YouTube videos on Instagram growth go insanely viral back to back. So there are patterns and behavioural things that are happening right now that make me wonder Where is this gonna go? It's gonna be really interesting to observe. So a very fascinating character to follow along.
And I hope that this episode has allowed you to reflect on some of the things that we can learn by observing others on their journey. Because none of us have this fully figured out. We're a test and we're tweaking - we're entrepreneurs. No one has the answer. No one has the way we have experience. We have methodologies. We have things that have worked for us. And a good coach can adapt these to other people's stories, for sure. But also make sure that you are very clear on your needs on your lifestyle sweet spot on your values on the life you want because I don't ever want you replicating your business on the back of anyone else's business design.
[00:53:04] Outro
I can tell you that for a couple of years there I was chasing Vanessa's model. I was following in her footsteps. As I said, Badass careers was founded off the back of Bossgram Academy and I scaled up to the team of 7-8 people and now I've scaled back on my own terms to a team of three or four people at any one time, and I'm much happier.
And I've stopped chasing the objective of doubling my business revenue in exchange for working so much less and having less stress and less pressure in my life while still earning amazing money. So I'm glad that this happened because had I followed and implemented every single step of the mastermind, although to be fair already at the mastermind phase, I was like, OK, that I like, that I don't like. That I get, that wouldn't work for me. I was already getting that maturity and that ability to step back, but I could absolutely have ended up where Vanessa is. Badass Careers absolutely could have done a $2 million year this year. $4 million year next year. Massive team, massive complexity, massive systems, 100% paid ads. I didn't want it and I'm so happy I knew that.
So if anything, let's remember our gurus - the people we look up to, myself absolutely included, are not perfect. That there is so much that we can learn from other people and we need to make sure it works for us, and we need to adapt their strategies to our lives and our businesses.
And at the end of the day, if you have a business that's not built off the back of purpose and your mission and your calling, I don't think it ends well. I think you'll burn out or you'll give up or you'll lose your passion or something's gonna happen where it's really hard to keep going. So keep that in mind as well. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint. This is a marathon.
This is your career we're talking about. This is your work we're talking about. We're talking about a business that we want to work really well and work really well for us for many, many, many years. And Vanessa's more is not always more, that's for sure. And we get to define when enough is enough and what success looks like to us, and we'll be able to stick to it and make that happen. Absolutely.
If we persist and it's sustainable and it feels good as we go, if we don't have that purpose, it's not gonna work, my friend.
So I would love to hear from you. What is your biggest insight or takeaway from this episode? Send me an instagram message @badassempires_. If you're listening to this on Spotify, you can actually leave a comment below the episode itself. I want to hear your reflections. I want us to learn from each other because it's integrating all of these different incredible perspectives that we're going to be able to do this faster and keep the momentum high and have beautiful business empires that work so well for us. So until the next episode, stay badass, can't wait to hear from you and we'll talk very soon.
