Shaking The Snowglobe Of My Life (My Life Story, Part 1)

I had a bigger dream for my life. So I escaped to a new, bigger place.

I leapt out of bed.

I had boundless energy.

What could I do with this day? What could I do with this year? Anything was possible.

I took a quick inventory of what I had:

1. A couple of months' worth of living expenses in the bank.

2. A business that wasn't making anywhere close to covering my living expenses, and there wasn't a clear path to getting there either.

3. One client, who I had doubts was actually going to pay me.

I grinned. It was the first day of the rest of my life.

I had just quit my job.

This was me on a snappy day in Brooklyn back in February 2015, when I first started my marketing agency, Bobsled Marketing. I would sell Bobsled 7 years later.

This anything-is-possible feeling has come rushing back to me this month as I wind up my tenure at Acadia and am figuring out what to do next.

Since a lot of readers know me from my Bobsled/Acadia life, I want to share some more of my personal back-story. While it has felt a little indulgent to write all this out, as I map out the topics I want to cover on this Substack, I think this will be helpful context for later on.

In this life story series:

1. Part 1: Shaking The Snowglobe of My Life (this is what you’re reading right now)

2. Part 2: Starting and Building my Company

3. Part 3: Selling my Company

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

I was born with privilege in the sense I was born middle class in Australia. I had access to an affordable university degree where I could graduate with very little debt. My parents were both entrepreneurial in their own way. So they were both supportive when I later went in this direction.

I was also fortunate to be born in the late 1980s so that when the time came for me to enter the workforce, I was on even footing as a female. And later, when I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, I got access to medicine and technology that keeps me alive today. So these are all things that stacked life in my favor, that I didn't work for, and that I don't take for granted.

The internship

I started my career in the financial services industry. I had studied marketing at university and initially was a junior marketer for an investment arm of the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney. Getting my first full-time job was a major effort. Even looking back now I’m impressed with my grit.

There was less than $100 in my bank account when I flew across the country from my hometown of Perth to Sydney to do a summer internship. I knew no-one in Sydney except for my cousin and her husband, who even then I didn't know super well. Bold as brass, I invited myself to live with them for a few weeks.

They went away for Christmas which left me totally alone in this big city. Their neighbor kindly invited me to Christmas lunch. The neighbor turned out to be anorexic, which didn’t make for a very jolly Christmas. I felt very alone.

But although I was a fish out of water, I was desperate to make it in Sydney.

Perth now seemed so small and suffocating by comparison. I was also running away from a bad relationship. I needed a new life. If I could succeeding here, it would be ticket out of Perth and toward a bigger life for myself.

The internship paid peanuts, something like a pro-rated $35K per year. All the other interns were local Sydney-siders from good schools living at home with their parents. Although I felt like an outsider at times, I had a great time at work and made lots of friends with the fellow interns.

With the weeks of my internship slipping away, and the prospect of having to return to Perth if I couldn’t support myself, I worked hard in my internship and fortunately was offered a full-time graduate position.

There was one semester left of university before I could graduate. A huge percentage of my tiny salary had to go toward rent — Sydney is expensive and the graduates weren’t well-paid. I worked full-time and kept a full-time courseload too, so I could qualify for a bit of government assistance and finish my Marketing degree as quickly as possible. It was a pretty miserable time where I was only working and studying, scrapping and saving — something my well-heeled intern friends couldn’t quite relate to. But by and by, I was a working professional, wearing suits, sharing an apartment with one of my best friends, and enjoying my youth in the beautiful city of Sydney.

Lesson learned: I shook the snowglobe of my life, and got an entirely new scene.

Moving to New York

Fast forward a couple years later and I had finished my graduate program at the bank, where I'd worked on rotation through four ifferent departments. My last one was an internal management consulting department filled with whip-smart people from AT Kearney, Accenture, McKinsey, and the like. I found it thrilling working on such big projects with such talented people. I thought I had found my dream job and was on top of the world.

Then, the illusion shattered. My boyfriend at the time, now husband, had tired of his job at a financial newspaper and wanted to travel the world, specifically north America. Although the idea was enticing, it was such bad timing for me as I was just settling in to my dream job. But I decided that there would be no 'ideal' time to do something like this, and I was still young enough to catch up later. I gave my notice and we flew to New York to try our luck.

I quickly realized that I was way out of my depth. Our best shot at staying in the US rested on my ability to get a job in the financial services industry, but it turned out to be very difficult. It was 2011, and young people were camping out, protesting on Wall Street about the flaws of big banks. The country was still coming out of a recession. And I was still pretty early in my career with a rather small network.

Unwilling to take a step backward, I hustled like crazy for 3 months and eventually got a job lead through a Partner at McKinsey, who’d I’d worked with on a project back in Sydney. It was one of the biggest strokes of luck in my life. Thank you, Angus Sullivan.

Lesson learned: I felt like I got lucky, but the reason why Angus opened his network for me was because he’d seen me at work in the past. At the time I didn’t understand his willingness to help. I’d later understand as a manager that when you see talent, you do your best to help fan their flame and hope some sparks will later come back your way. 

Our new life in New York was exciting, and made sweeter by all the hardships. Here are a few of the highs and lows:

• Got married at City Hall (10/10 recommend)

• Got beat up on the street by a gang of wild teens on Halloween

• Had to ask a friend to be the guarantor on our apartment in Queens, because I didn’t even have a social security number, let alone credit history

• My husband wasn’t allowed to work for a few months due to visa rules, so he took random background acting jobs and ended up in some random films

• We rode our bikes everywhere around the city, even through snow storms

  

The side hustle

Although there was no shortage of excitement in our lives, I seemingly out of nowhere decided to start a side business. Looking back, there are little clues all over the place from my childhood. But at the time it seemed pretty random.

I had made a tripod lamp for our apartment, because we couldn't afford the nice ones from Crate & Barrel. It was hard to find the parts I needed to make it, so I decided to setup an online store selling lamp making parts. It was 2012.

When I tell people this now, they remark how random it seems. Why that business, and why then?

But there's a few threads that led me there.

1. My parents were entrepreneurial and they engaged me and my brother in their ventures. My Dad ran the local driving school and installed roofing insulation as side-hustles to his work as a school chaplain. And my Mum was an Avon lady in addition to her job as a bank teller. They would not have considered themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ — it was just a way to supplement their income.

2. I was in New York and there's something intoxicating about that place, and America in general. There's a strong smell of possibility in the air.

Entrepreneurs were not yet idolized in the way they are now, but public admiration for entrepreneurship was starting to emerge. Instagram got acquired by Facebook and that was a big deal. I started listening to podcasts about entrepreneurship, and particularly about "lifestyle businesses" which didn't require outside capital. So looking back now, being drawn to an idea is not so random, even if the subject matter —DIY lamp supplies — was.

I threw myself into that business. I was the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. I made the website, learned CSS, joined online business communities, learned how to write blogs and make video tutorials, and understand the USPS’ pricing tiers. I listened to e-commerce podcasts constantly and learned that I could sell my products on Amazon, so I started tinkering there too.

How much money was this whole thing making? Very little after all the costs. But it was intoxicating. I was working my bank strategy job during the day, doing my ecomm thing after work, and loving all of it. But as often happens in the corporate world, overnight there was a bit of a management shake-up and my future looked a little less secure.

I created a lot of content for my first business including video tutorials and a published book. (I was even paid an advance for it!) Content creation would be an important skill for me to lean on later.

Career failure

One night at a work happy hour, I learned that I could double my income if I moved from the prestigious role of strategy into sales. Double? That sounded pretty good. Then I had another thought. These sales people — business bankers — basically worked with business owners all day. They networked and did "sales" but they also had to know a lot about finance and credit, how a P&L works. What if one day I could be a business owner? I would need to know how to sell. And I'd need to know my way around a P&L. It was basically a way to get paid to be trained in how to operate a business. I was in.

I took the sales job and kind of sucked at it.

Really, I'm not being modest.

I was on vacation in 2014 with some friends I was copied on an email from my boss' boss — one of those emails that you’re definitely not supposed to be copied in on. "When should we cut our losses on these employees that are not performing?" There was a list of employees, and my name was on there. My stomach dropped. In the corporate world, I had always done pretty well. Met or exceeded expectations.

Failing at this job — even if it was a job I didn't even really want — killed me.

Lesson learned: This job felt so wrong to me. I was not happy with who I was while in this job, and I didn’t perform well. It all made sense later when I reflected on my personal values and realized they were out of alignment in this job. 

It was time to put a new action plan into place. I started my scheming in earnest while still on that holiday.

I got to work shoring up my credibility as an Amazon consultant. I had my own experience with my lamp supplies business, but that was still so small and I needed way more credibility.

I mined my list of bank clients for potential projects. There was an apparel wholesaler who operated out of a dusty, disheveled warehouse in Brooklyn. They sold second-rate clothing without brand names to discount retailers. Perfect.

I negotiated a wholesale rate for mens t-shirts with the two 60-year old partners of the company. I schlepped samples to a photography studio in Manhattan where my husband acted as the fit model. I came up with a brand name, created product listings on Amazon and drummed up product reviews from friends (this was when incentivized reviews were allowed). I didn't make much money from this project, but I now had a tiny scrap of credibility and my own belief that I could do this.

Around the same time, I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. (That’s the incurable, insulin-dependent type.) This was extremely confronting since people with type 1 diabetes have a shorter life expectancy, with estimates ranging from 7.6 to 19 years less than people without the condition. Things just got even more real for me.

It was time to shake the snow globe again.

I quit my banking job and went all in.