Introduction

‘Do you know how to do anything right?’

Those were the words my manager yelled at me when I was working at one of Australia's top four accounting firms. It was 10am on a Tuesday morning. My manager had asked me to get a client file from the file room and I had mistakenly brought the wrong one. I remember handing it to him over the cubicle wall and within seconds he turned to me and said, ‘This is the wrong fucking file. How hard is it to listen to my instructions? Do you know how to do anything right?’ He dropped the file on the floor and turned back to his laptop. I was so embarrassed, not only because I had brought the wrong file, but because most of the people on level 12 now knew I had messed up.

I picked up the file and replied, ‘Sorry, I'll get the right one.’ I walked to the bathroom, sat on a toilet and cried. It wasn't the first time a manager had been rude, but it was the first time I had questioned why I was even there. I kept saying to myself, ‘Surely this can't be my life.’ After a few minutes, I heard the bathroom door open and one of my colleagues walked in and saw me crying. The words she said to me in that moment changed my entire life.

She said, ‘You don't deserve this. I'm taking you to HR and you are going to resign. You're made for better things.’ And that's exactly what I did.

After spending six years as an accountant at a company that made my parents incredibly proud, I resigned. But I was torn — I had spent my life working hard at school and university so that I could get a great job and eventually become a partner. That was always the plan.

But I was miserable, and I had been for six years.

After I left my job, I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to:

• feel like a tiny cog in a huge machine, and not understand what the machine actually did
• be yelled at for making a mistake
• work 12 hours a day and weekends for a minimal salary and no recognition.

To this day, those are my three driving forces in business. Even on my worst days, I remind myself of why I wanted to start.

And that's what I want you to do as the first activity in this book. Get a piece of paper and write down the three or four reasons why you started a business, and why you don't want to work for someone else. These are your driving forces. Take that page and put it somewhere you will see it every day.

There will inevitably be days when you question everything in your business, and in those times, there is no one who pushes you to keep going more than yourself. Always keep those driving forces in your line of sight. You're going to need them.

From employee to business owner

After resigning from my job, I tried my hand at a number of other jobs, from media buying for the Commonwealth Bank to marketing at a small telecommunications company. No matter how interesting the work was or how great the culture was, I was still miserable. So, much to the dismay of my parents, I quit each job within 12 months of starting.

According to them, I was lost.

What my parents didn't know was that I had started importing handbags from Alibaba (a wholesale marketplace) and was selling them on eBay in my spare time. I spent my nights learning how to create incredible product listings and I kept tweaking and perfecting them to get more visibility. Every time someone made a purchase, I felt so excited. While the sales weren't enough to replace a full-time income, selling products online made me incredibly happy. I didn't feel like a small cog — I was in charge of the whole machine.

After quitting my third job, I decided to not apply for another one. Instead, I decided to go all-in on starting a business. It was risky and unconventional and there was no guarantee of an income. So, I gave myself six months to achieve three goals:

• make $10 000
• receive at least one order every single day
• have customers make repeat purchases.

I told myself that if I could achieve these goals, I had the foundation for a strong business, and I would never have to get another job. I got to work very quickly.

These are the steps I took to start my business:

• Found a product: I looked for a trending product and found that personalised leather accessories, such as card holders and pouches, were in high demand. At the time, there were only two main competitors in the market.
• Found a manufacturer: After researching on Alibaba, I found a manufacturer selling leather cardholders. I ordered the minimum-order quantity, which was 100 pieces.
• Found a personalisation tool: In order to do the personalisation, I needed a tool to emboss people's initials on the leather. I found a handheld hot stamping tool on Etsy.
• Created a business name: I used my daughter's name as inspiration.
• Set up a selling platform: I had no idea how to set up a website, but I knew that marketplaces had millions of active users, so I set up an eBay store and an Etsy store. From my time selling imported handbags on eBay, I knew how to create a great product listing, so I used that knowledge to build both storefronts.
• Worked out my competitive advantage: I knew I couldn't compete with the two big competitors with their paid marketing or public relations, so I focused on the customer experience. I looked up the negative reviews of my competitors and saw that customers experienced slow dispatch times and terrible customer service, so I made sure I excelled in those.
• Set my pricing: I would not advise most businesses to compete on price, but I knew that if people were searching on eBay, they were searching for the lowest price, and so I priced my cardholders $10 cheaper than my competitors.

It took two months from idea generation to launching my business.

Within the first week of starting my business, I had sold ten personalised cardholders.

Within three weeks, I had my first repeat customer.

Within two months, I had to purchase the next batch of inventory from my manufacturer.

Within four months, I had made $10 000.

I had hit my goals, but I also had a huge realisation. I was unbelievably happy. This was what I had always wanted to feel in my career. For years I had searched for a sense of pride in my work, but never found it. I realised that my satisfaction was never going to come from money or a job title, it came from having the freedom to try new things, test different strategies, talk to customers and control the business process from product generation to sale.

Starting a second business

Fast forward two years to 2018, I had a small office with three staff and three commercial monogramming machines, and we were shipping off 60 to 80 orders a day. One day, during the school holidays, we had packed all our orders and were waiting for the postal worker to come and collect all the packages, but as I looked around the room, all I could see was plastic. All the orders were packed inside single-use plastic mailers, and I knew that inside those mailers was plastic bubble wrap. I also saw my two daughters sitting on the ground playing with plastic bubble wrap and it made me feel pretty disgusted. I had never truly considered sustainability in my business before, but I knew that the amount of plastic I was using was terrible for the environment. When I got home that day, I was determined to find a replacement for those plastic mailers. I wanted something that looked like plastic but could be composted or dissolved. I searched online for days but came up empty-handed.

So, just like any entrepreneur, I said, ‘I'll just create it myself!’

Over a period of nine months, I designed a prototype, sourced manufacturers, ordered samples, tested them in my home compost bin, re-designed it, ordered more samples, switched manufacturers, composted more samples, tested them for packing and shipping products, and finally came up with a compostable mailer that I loved.

I ordered 10 000 white compostable mailers to use in my business.

I was pretty chuffed with myself — I was eliminating single-use plastic in my small business, and I had created something that didn't already exist. I remember talking about the mailers on my Instagram stories and I asked if any other business owners would like to try them. Within 24 hours, I had dozens of people asking for a sample.

So, again, in true entrepreneurial fashion, I turned to my husband and said, ‘I'm turning this into a business.’

He replied, ‘Go for it.’

As this was going to require a big investment to get started, I needed to gauge demand for a product like this on a bigger scale. This is how I tested demand.

I set up a very basic landing page using MailChimp (an email marketing platform). On the landing page, it had an image of a compostable mailer, a title that said ‘Need sustainable packaging for your business? Get a free sample of a compostable mailer’, and a form for them to enter their name, email address and shipping address.

To drive people to that landing page, I created a Google ad and targeted anyone who was searching for ‘sustainable packaging’ or ‘eco-friendly packaging.’

In one week, we had over 1000 sign-ups. This meant...