Business Backstage Blog: the highs, lows and WTFs of starting a business from scratch!

In the beginning another business was created. This has made many people very confused and has been widely regarded as an ‘interesting’ move.

You may already know my story, but if not, a brief update: I’ve started and run 2 businesses before this that both hit the 10 year mark, and at the end of 2024 I found myself incredibly inspired (although there are definitely times since then I’d use different words for it😉) and starting a third (but the first I’ve ever started on purpose- the others just kind of happened). If you go to any of my social media profiles you’ll see all the ‘proper’ business posts I do and my intention with them is to provide something of value to you every single time, but I wanted a place that I could share my experiences so that if you want to see the things that go on behind the scenes you can check in to these posts from time to time as well! These will have more of a ‘journalling’ style (ie anything resembling a concise writing style, accurate punctuation, sentence structure etc is going out the window), and selfishly it’ll give me a place to vent/scream into the void/have a bit of a rant etc, but I also hope that if you’re going through this journey as well (especially for the first time- cause DAMN that can be scary!), it may give you the understanding that you truly are everything you need to be successful at what you’re doing! So, onwards!

Episode one- the menace awakens…and reality hits

A semi-quick recap of the journey up to the first launch:

November 2024: I decided to do this! (queue the celebrations- I felt like I was walking on air, I was SO excited!!!!)

• That same day in November 2024 I also realised that I didn’t know the first thing about any of the things you needed to do to set up an online course and I needed to know it FAST, so I did what any business coach would suggest (NOT!) and sat happily with a glass of wine and dreamed about how easy this was going to be because I’d done this twice before and yes it’s going to be different but I’m good at this now so it’ll be so simple this time (yes dear reader this is called foreshadowing)
• The next day I started looking at what I’d need to get set up- the tech, how to promote the course, deliver it, etc etc. Decisions were made (after a bit of research). A thing I’ll give myself credit for here- I’ve learned that you need to make good decisions but also make them fast. So I looked for people who were doing what I wanted to do, checked that they actually were legit and had actually achieved the things that I wanted to achieve, and then went full on into getting every bit of wisdom from them that they were sharing (audiobooks are amazing for this!!!). I’d set a deadline of March 2025 to launch my course so I chose fast- and thankfully chose well! (Huge thanks to Tina Tower for her incredible generosity with the knowledge she has that she shares so regularly at no cost!)
• I had next to no time or money to do this, but I was going to make it work anyway. I decided to set up a personal brand to promote it (I’m still working on that but I figure that I’ve probably got about 80% right and I’ll come back and clean up the messy bits later). I knew that I’d have to sacrifice a lot of my personal time so instead of taking holidays over Christmas like I’d planned, I spent it on setting up a website, figuring out what the heck a landing page is, how do we get google and outlook and mailchimp and all the rest playing nicely together etc etc etc. I was starting to understand this was not going to be the walk in the park I’d first thought. Oh, and did I mention I had to go through a certification process to be able to actually teach the clockwork system?
• Fast forward to 2025- I had a lot of the basics in place but hadn’t even STARTED building my brand on social media- and without that, no-one was going to know I even existed! I started panicking because I didn’t want to miss my first launch date. Then the universe decided to help me out- I had been talking to a wonderful woman I knew through my other business who ran a weekly webinar and it went from me asking ‘could I maybe take people through what I’m offering and teach them something I think will help them as a way of promoting my business’ to wrapping up the meeting with not only that booked but with her also giving me another couple of amazing opportunities as well- I will be forever grateful to her for sharing in my vision! But then it hit me- oh shit- I really HAVE to launch this thing now, there’s no backing out- and I still was NOWHERE near set up! (Insert sped up footage of me doing lots of weekend and after hours work, trying to sort out technical challenges, and also trying to keep up with my other business as well- yep, I had probably bitten off more than I could chew but there was no backing out now!

Have I given you hope yet? Join me next time to hear how the launch went!