If you know that this is your year to go big with your dreams, I’m talking today about how I got my start and grew my business to 7 figures. As you listen, I hope this episode inspires you to keep building momentum in your own business and allow your dreams to unfold.
It was only 5 years ago that I quit my full time job and decided to go all in on my side hustle. Since then, I’ve experienced more growth, abundance and fulfilment than I ever thought was available to me. So if you know that there is something else out there for you, hold onto that dream and know that it is absolutely possible for you.
In this origin story episode, I’m going back to my days working in recruitment and how my $50 side hustle literally turned into $100k in 100 days. I knew I had something to offer, and I said yes to every opportunity. As time went on, I scaled and grew my side hustle to the point where it was time to venture out on my own.
I attribute so much of my success to the fact that I just kept going. I had the discipline, I had a network which I was diligent to nurture and I had something really valuable to share. I talk about the early days in business, learning about building a personal brand, raising my prices and understanding how to mentor and coach others in an intuitive and authentic way.
LINKS
Doors are open for the Amplify Mastermind! Join me here
Send me a DM on INSTAGRAM 📸 here
Subscribe to my YOUTUBE channel here
Check me out on TikTok here
If you know that this is your year to go big with your dreams, I’m talking today about how I got my start and grew my business to 7 figures. As you listen, I hope this episode inspires you to keep building momentum in your own business and allow your dreams to unfold.
It was only 5 years ago that I quit my full time job and decided to go all in on my side hustle. Since then, I’ve experienced more growth, abundance and fulfilment than I ever thought was available to me. So if you know that there is something else out there for you, hold onto that dream and know that it is absolutely possible for you.
In this origin story episode, I’m going back to my days working in recruitment and how my $50 side hustle literally turned into $100k in 100 days. I knew I had something to offer, and I said yes to every opportunity. As time went on, I scaled and grew my side hustle to the point where it was time to venture out on my own.
I attribute so much of my success to the fact that I just kept going. I had the discipline, I had a network which I was diligent to nurture and I had something really valuable to share. I talk about the early days in business, learning about building a personal brand, raising my prices and understanding how to mentor and coach others in an intuitive and authentic way.
LINKS
Doors are open for the Amplify Mastermind! Join me here
Send me a DM on INSTAGRAM 📸 here
Subscribe to my YOUTUBE channel here
Check me out on TikTok here
[00:00:00] Ruby: Welcome back to the Flow State Podcast. I am so excited to be here today because I am gonna take things all the way back to the start, and there is something really refreshing about the idea of going back to basics and you know, reintroducing myself, but also coming to this point where, I'm realising, especially with the start of 2023 that, God, I've done a lot and I wanna share that.
[00:00:40] I wanna inspire those of you who know that this is gonna be your year and you know that this is gonna be your opportunity to really go big with your dreams. I am really hoping that what I share today, which is how I made a million dollars in flow, gives you the inspiration to somehow get started or to get going again, to get yourself really in a position where you are locked into the dream, you are locked into the idea and that there's nothing that's gonna stop you
[00:01:09] in terms of getting there, because we're so capable of so much, we're so capable of receiving so much more in terms of, you know, financial abundance and so much more in terms of doing what we do with our lives. And when you are able to break that pattern, you're able to see what is truly possible for you.
[00:01:27] The sky's the absolute limit. So I wanna go back to basics. In March, 2018, I went all in with my business. There's a lot of stuff that happened before 2018. I was side hustling. I was in and out of deciding whether I should go all in with the business. Instead, I took promotions at my job. So all these things were happening because I truly wasn't trusting myself fully.
[00:01:51] I was in such a place of self-doubt. I really wasn't sure how all of this was going to happen for me. I couldn't really get through the [00:02:00] how of financially planning out my future and seeing how I was able to go from one reality of life, which is working in a corporate and having a nine to five job straight into having this entrepreneurial lifestyle where I was traveling the world.
[00:02:14] So a lot of stuff happened before 2018, and I can definitely talk about that in another video. But for the purposes of this particular podcast episode, or if you're here on YouTube, I'm so happy that you're here. I wanna talk about from 2018 when I decided to go all in and I wanna do a bit of a spoiler alert.
[00:02:33] Within 19 months of going all in with my business, I achieved my first seven figures in cash. That doesn't mean cash received in my personal bank account. That means cash received in terms of sales being made and then allocating that out towards reinvesting in the business. Of course, reinvesting in terms of upgrading the lifestyle, but it was done in 19 months, and this episode is about how it was done.
[00:02:58] So exactly what I did to create that sort of momentum, the energetics, the belief system. And of course, the learnings and the lessons and the challenges that I got from that as well. So, as I mentioned earlier, it all began as a side hustle. It all began as deciding that I was able to create something from my knowledge base, something that people were asking me about consistently.
[00:03:24] And this is where I really want you to lean into this idea of what are people asking you? What are people coming to you for? At the start you don't really notice it as much. It's kind of like, oh yeah, it's like your first language, or maybe you are being helpful, you are just, giving up some of your time to put that aside and sit down with somebody to help them through their problem.
[00:03:47] I wanna say right here and right now, you are helping someone solve something that they can't do on their own and that is entrepreneurship. That is being a business owner. Literally, [00:04:00] you are solving a problem for somebody else. And the problem that was coming to me a lot that I could solve was helping people find jobs.
[00:04:08] I was a recruiter in my past life and I could help people find jobs through literally just making a couple of tweaks on their resume, uplifting their LinkedIn profile, and helping them show up with more confidence inside of the interview room. You'd be surprised how simple that sounds but also how many people just completely botch up the process and then they sit there wondering why they were beaten by another candidate.
[00:04:32] And it's usually just like really tiny tweaks that I could have helped them with in a period of four weeks to 12 weeks. And I loved that. I loved sitting down with those particular clients of mine. And I say clients, but honestly I was accepting like a $4 coffee at the time in exchange for this information, because I was leaning into what people wanted to hear from me.
[00:04:54] I had the bigger plan. I wanted to start a business, but first I needed to get to know what they needed from me. But at the same time, I had this wrestle between starting this newfound idea and this side hustle, and constantly being promoted at my day job. It's a good problem to have, I suppose. But at the same time, I really felt like the universe was really testing me.
[00:05:18] I'm like, what is going on here? I want to go into my side hustle. But I kept getting all of these leadership positions and I was so confused. I'm like, what is the actual universe saying? What is the sign right here? Should I keep going with this? And you are honestly not going to find the answer unless you pick one and you fully commit to it.
[00:05:40] So between 2015 and 2018, I picked the career pathway. I was being promoted. I went into leadership roles. I started to really get myself known in terms of my industry, I was being headhunted, getting consistent pay rises, all those wonderful things. And it still didn't scratch the itch. It [00:06:00] still didn't feel completely satisfactory to my fulfillment somehow.
[00:06:05] And it wasn't like I wasn't happy or that I was depressed. It there was just something else that was available. And I know you know what that feels like. For those of you that might be right in the pocket right now, you can't let that opportunity pass because if you do, it ends up spiraling into a ball of feeling a form of depression or feeling down about something, or feeling like you haven't lived up to your, biggest potential.
[00:06:30] So I knew at this point, 2018, I had to make the decision to do it. And I walked into my CEO's office that day, and I remember just how nervous I was, like my hands were just shaking. And I had actually rehearsed this conversation with my CEO Mark with my husband, Michael, just before I jumped on the train that day.
[00:06:51] and I knew that it was going to be a really ground breaking part of the rest of my life, and I did it. And the reason why I knew that this was gonna be a really cool thing to explore was because, you know, at the time in my side hustle, when I was making those resumes, I was doing a lot of this like side hustle work, either outside of work hours, of course, lunch breaks on the commute to and from work, definitely after work and on weekends.
[00:07:19] And when I started out, I was creating resumes for $50, $50, not $50 an hour. $50 flat rate to write a, you know, two or three page resume from scratch. And of course I had a lot of clients because I was so cheap and that was honestly the best 50 bucks that I had ever made. I was making more than six, the multiple six figures in my day job.
[00:07:45] And at the same time, I was more happy to do the $50 resume. That's how you essentially know. And more so than that, I was doing free live streams and free trainings, free speaking. I was starting to [00:08:00] be invited to speak on certain like career panels and things like that, and it felt so good to me doing those things for free than it did being at my day job that I knew it was the moment, it was the right space for me.
[00:08:13] So this $50 service, I eventually raised my prices and I went right up to about $750 for a resume package. And that was really cool. But what I didn't love from that was it was really transaction based. It was really like, I'm paying you $750 to write my resume and to give me an awesome cover letter and to give me some feedback.
[00:08:33] And then they were gone and. Didn't feel good about that. You know, I wanted to have a relationship based business, and so I made the decision that I would have a slightly longer resume career package, which was three months long, and it would involve me actually providing some career guidance and some interview mindset coaching, which was really the beginning stages of getting into understanding how to mentor and how to coach.
[00:09:02] And I was also noticing a lot of regular themes with the clients that I had people who just felt like they were stuck. They didn't know how to focus. They were just in total comparison with other people who were going for the same job as them. And that was honestly, like the very, very start of understanding energetics and understanding flow and understanding how people thought and helping them really break through a lot of their own bullshit.
[00:09:30] And I loved it. I remember just thinking to myself, wow, like this is actually so cool to be able to physically see someone go from a lesser version of themselves into a really powerful version of who they became. Now at this time, I also didn't have an Instagram. I did all of it through network connections, through LinkedIn, through referrals.
[00:09:54] I didn't have an email list, I didn't have a podcast. I didn't have YouTube. and [00:10:00] all of this was really a very raw start. I basically just, A social media channel, which was LinkedIn and I was still using it mostly for my career, but people would message me about these career packages cause they heard about me through friends or through colleagues.
[00:10:14] And I had a way for people to pay me, which was honestly just PayPal, but it was a payment system and I was really happy with that. I also worked out how to invoice people, so that was really great that I could have bank details there and they could transfer that to me. But you know, most of my career was spent in recruitment.
[00:10:32] Which meant that I had a pretty decent following on LinkedIn and , I wanna say I had about 5,000 people on LinkedIn at the time. I wanna make it clear. A lot of them were candidates, a lot of them were hiring managers, A lot of them were other recruiters because I was like an internal recruiter.
[00:10:50] I had a lot of external sales recruiters who wanted to network with me so that I could give them jobs and things like that. So in all honesty, they weren't good leads. They weren't, you know, people who wanted to buy career coaching services from me. But I still knew that I had some form of leverage.
[00:11:09] and that leverage became clearer and clearer when I started to talk more about my side hustle, I started to talk more about my business. So this is really a lesson that I wanna share with all of you. You cannot plan to create Rome without actually starting to make the thing happen. You know, speak to the providers and, have all of that momentum going in your business.
[00:11:32] And what I found was as soon as I started to speak about what my dreams were with my side hustle and how I was helping people with their side hustles , and their careers as well. I realized that there were other opportunities that started to really move through, and these opportunities were really wild to me.
[00:11:49] Like I didn't realize at the time just how amazing different, income streams could become. And what I mean by this is, at the start, I was so focused [00:12:00] on purely just serving like B to C, direct to the consumer, direct to client, helping one person at a time. But as I started to talk about career mindset content and how to move through fear and judgment and comparison, how to find confidence, how to go back to that moment where maybe that confidence was shot and cutting the cord and deciding that you get to be a new person in your career.
[00:12:25] I was drawing the attention of speaker recruiters. So people who would actually recruit for conferences or recruit for their events, and I would suddenly see a DM who would say, Hey Ruby, I really love what you're putting out there on LinkedIn. Would you want to be a part of this panel? Would you want to join us?
[00:12:46] To, you know, speak about a certain topic and sometimes it was about how to accelerate your career or the next generation of career movers, or how to get a job on LinkedIn, for example. And I was just saying yes to everything. Outside of those amazing opportunities to speak at these events and mind you, all of that was free.
[00:13:08] It was just done in my own time. I also started to get a lot of recruiting agencies, consulting agencies reach out to me and ask if I would facilitate certain sessions for their clients. And this was actually a really, really lucrative income stream, which I hadn't even thought about. And this is the thing, once again, when you put yourself out there, you can't sit there planning and conceptualizing what it could look like.
[00:13:36] You just need to put yourself in the game. And once you are in opportunities come. So I remember saying yes to one of the consultants that said, would you speak at this like one event that we have? It's a 50 person event and we want you to talk about personal branding on LinkedIn as the candidate, how to stand out from the crowd, how to put yourself out there in a way where [00:14:00] employers come to you.
[00:14:01] And I thought, yes, absolutely, I can speak about that. No problems. I put together a slide deck on Canva and I present them the content and they said, fantastic. We would love to pay you a thousand dollars for this talk. My jaw fell to the floor a thousand dollars for a 30 minute talk. I couldn't believe it.
[00:14:24] And to them it was honestly loose change. , honestly, they probably were hoping, not hoping, definitely not hoping, but honestly they were probably thinking, why is this chick not negotiating on this rate? So that really began the ball rolling where I was starting to speak at panels events and now consulting and becoming a facilitator.
[00:14:45] So that was really awesome. And of course, full circle, as I was speaking at these events and consulting at these companies, I would also have individuals reach out to me to say, actually I do need help with my career. And so began this sort of nucleus of flow, momentum, income, recognition, being known in the industry.
[00:15:06] And I was starting to bring in, you know, a couple of thousand dollars a week at this stage. And my audience grew, people were asking me a lot of common questions, and I knew that this was the time that I could really start leveraging a personal brand. And I didn't even know that's what it was called
[00:15:26] back then until someone said, can you come and talk about personal branding? and I thought, oh my goodness. I do have a lot of knowledge around personal branding. That's literally what I've been helping my candidates with, helping my leaders with inside of companies. And I really took this term personal branding, and I made it my own.
[00:15:44] And I started to research people who had really strong personal brands at the time. It was like Amy Porterfield, Marie Folio, Melissa Griffin, of course, Tony Robbins. All these people who had made a name for themselves, Gabby [00:16:00] Bernstein, and I was leaning so far into this world of personal branding that I knew at this time I could start it.
[00:16:06] So I began to do daily LinkedIn videos. Now, this really scared me a lot because I had the watchful eye of my employer. They were fairly cool with me being on LinkedIn, talking about recruiting stuff but there was that kind of fine edge talking about my business, and that was where it, later on, down the track, it caused a little bit of discomfort and a few challenges there.
[00:16:30] But in the beginning times, I was wading through this unknown and this newfound understanding that I had a voice and that I had a stage and that I could speak to people and I could really hold space. There was something there about my own natural talent where I was taking it from in-person one-to-one, in rooms of now 50 people into a space where maybe there was an opportunity for thousands of people to see what I had to say.
[00:17:01] And so this personal branding thing, I committed to it. I dedicated a daily video and I did it so much so where at the start, when you're forming a habit, you kind of have to remind yourself to do it. So I knew that I wanted to create videos, not in batch style, because batching to me back then just felt really
[00:17:23] inauthentic, or I didn't really know the art of batching, so I knew that I wanted to do it every single day. I wanted to have fresh content. I wanted to be in the moment of the day and share my thoughts and what came out. One fun fact was I created these calendar reminders. So every day for a hundred days, I had LinkedIn video, LinkedIn video, LinkedIn video, and these videos range from 15 seconds to three minutes long, just depending on my mood for the day.
[00:17:51] I just thought if I could share some ideas, if I could pass on some value, and perhaps some people would find me and I [00:18:00] would be seen, and maybe from there they would go to a website link and from there they would buy a career coaching package and maybe from there I might be invited to speak at more events.
[00:18:12] And they did. Gosh, did they do that? It blew up In 100 days I made a hundred thousand dollars. So I kind of defied that whole pathway where a hundred thousand dollars was really difficult to come by. And I honestly attribute that to the fact that I showed up daily. I had the discipline, I had a network, I had something really valuable to say I had a passion for it.
[00:18:39] I wanted to share that. And that's really the beginning times of how I got my start. So in 2018, by the time it was the decision, day 22nd of March, 2018 was the day I walked into my CEO's office and I just said to him, Mark, if I don't give it a go now, I never will, and I'm so appreciative that you've given me this ability to
[00:19:04] share what I wanted to share on LinkedIn and because it was like an entrepreneurial environment anyway, I worked at a tech startup slash ventures based business at the time. I was working amongst software developers and founders and inventors and idealist. It was a really easy transition into entrepreneurship.
[00:19:24] I learned a lot in that 18 months that I was working at that company, but my plan was really simple beginning this business. It was quit the day job, continue to show up daily on LinkedIn, sell my coaching packages and do that authentically, not off a script. Not to say a script is not authentic, but do it from the heart.
[00:19:46] Speak from the heart every day. Talk about my why. Speak about my purpose. Why am I so passionate about being a career coach? I'm not a career coach anymore. Obviously just wanted to make that clear cuz when I go back to [00:20:00] my origin story, sometimes I'll have people who message me saying, by the way, do you still do career coaching?
[00:20:05] I'm so far out of the game. You wouldn't want me as a career coach, I would have no idea how much things have changed in terms of the recruiting landscape. So I just wanted to make that clear. But the goal at the time was I had this a hundred K in a hundred days. I wanted to maintain it in some.
[00:20:22] and the number I picked was that elusive. $10,000 a month just to cover the cost of living. I had a mortgage, two kids, a lifestyle to uphold. I still wanted to have some pleasures in life, so 10 K was the number that I wanted and desired to have, and I wanna make it clear that I had no million dollar dreams.
[00:20:43] There was no possibility of me even thinking of that to be a reality in my life. I had a lot of shit in terms of my money story. My relationship with money was really, really bad. It was only a couple of years ago at that point that I had gotten out of some pretty major debts, but I knew at the time that $10,000 a month I could stick to that.
[00:21:06] I could do. So if this is you right now, I wanna show you how you can flip the script on all the things that's been holding you back from starting your business or going bigger with your business, no matter what part of your journey you are in. So I'm going to end this episode here and continue on in the next couple of episodes, it's gonna be a bit of a theme of how I made a million dollars in flow.
[00:21:31] But if you're listening to this right here and right now, the Amplify Mastermind, which is the Mastermind literally made to help individuals get to that 10 K month and consistently make that. And if you resonated with my story, if you love my start, if you can see yourself in me, if you can see the flow and the momentum and the energetics behind starting a business, this is the time to jump in.
[00:21:54] I'm gonna leave all of the details in the show notes below, it is incredible. The Mastermind is [00:22:00] coming together so beautifully. I'm doing two intakes this year. This is the first intake, but if you feel the fire and the passion now, don't wait for six months to get started inside of a mastermind. Do it before you feel like you are ready.
[00:22:13] This is how you accelerate. This is how you collapse time. This is how you make the most of this idea, the juices, the business, all of the things that's happening right now as you're listening to this episode. I can't wait to see you on the inside of Amplify. I truly know that this is gonna transform your life.
[00:22:29] I've literally had individuals like Carla Townsend, who went from $0 and she 13 Xed her income. And started to make more and more consistency because I helped her create her first mastermind. I helped her get online. I helped her raise her prices. There are individuals like Katie Wilkinson who was starting like a couple of thousand dollars a month and she's now doing like 30, 50, 70 K months with ease.
[00:22:53] If you wanna be like these women, check out the link below and I can't wait to see you in the next episode. Okay, bye guys.