Heart and Hustle: What it takes to make it to the top

Of course I’m grateful for everything I’ve achieved. I’ve had so many amazing experiences. But I don’t mind saying that there are times when I wish I could just go back to one of my regular jobs. Even though I’m established, I work ten times harder than I used to as an employee (at least, it feels that way!) because there’s a little voice in my head telling me that it won’t last for ever. I’ve got to always be thinking ten steps ahead: if everything crumbles, what would I do? With that in mind, I’ve made sure I have some money saved up and a back-up plan, just in case I ever need to make the switch to something else. If it all disappears, I’ll go into marketing and digital advertising, because it’s what I know about and genuinely enjoy. In fact, that would be my dream career if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing. That’s my plan B and I think everyone should have one. Having a back-up plan doesn’t for a second mean I’m not pushing full steam ahead and committed to the path I’m on, but it gives me peace of mind.

… And about being an influencer

So now we’ve covered ‘girlboss’ myths, let’s move on to those around being a social media influencer – and if you’ve picked up this book it’s probably something you want to know more about. I know there are lots of misconceptions. The thing I hear most often is that we make money for doing nothing. The reality is that we’re just like most self-employed people. We are creating, distributing, working with customers and partners, we’re investing thousands of pounds in our equipment and we’re at risk of losing all of it at the drop of a hat. Like everyone who works for themselves, we have sleepless nights and worry about what’s going to happen next. For those who want job security, who want consistency, who want guaranteed money, who want overnight success, this isn’t the industry. You can be popular today, and – one Twitterstorm later – public enemy number one. You can find yourself working for free for weeks for the ‘exposure’ (which you can’t pay a mortgage with). You can even work for an agreed fee for months and not receive a penny. There is no trade union for bloggers!

HOW I LOST £60K

Cue my own horror story. In the not too distant past, I worked on a number of projects with huge brands via an agency. These were very recognisable brands and, when I was approached to create content for them, I was beyond excited to have been considered for the work. The payment terms were three months, which was a long time to wait to be paid, but I was willing to take the risk bearing in mind their calibre. I delivered video content for the brands and it was shared globally on their social platforms. My face was everywhere, and I was really proud.

But three days before my payment was due, I received a call that the agency involved in the deal had gone bankrupt … and I had lost £60,000 in one fell swoop. At the time, I had a three-month-old baby, a mortgage and a loft conversion that still needed to be paid for. Yep, that happened. In a moment of delirium I actually laughed, and then I cried. I spoke to my solicitors and my accountant. ‘Unfortunately, the agency have to pay all their creditors first, and maybe in five years from now, you might get a pittance after they’ve paid their landlords, their taxes and their employees, who haven’t been paid their salaries.’ I was at the back of the queue. I then reached out to the brands that still had my content on their platforms, and asked if there was anything they could do. I received one uniform response: no.

A number of other influencers were in the same situation, so I wasn’t alone. I’m not holding my breath for that money now. And, of course, stories like this aren’t confined to the social media world. Talking to other people who run their own businesses, I’ve learned that it’s all part of the wild ride. I tell you all this to show you that the life of an influencer is not all filters and flights.

Now the good news

Haven’t put you off yet? Good! Because, despite all the risks, I absolutely love working for myself and running my own business, especially one based around social media. It’s true – being an entrepreneur is not easy and it’s not for everyone. But for those who do want to be their own boss and are willing to put in the work, it’s incredibly rewarding. The career I’ve built means I get to go to wonderful places; I get to try new products and test everything out before it hits the market; and I get to create my own product-based businesses, all because of the relationship I have with my online community. And most importantly, I get to share what I enjoy every single day with people who actually want to hear it. That’s crazy!

Those are the highlights for me. For others it may be the autonomy they enjoy, or the flexibility in terms of organising their life outside of a traditional office. In fact, there’s research showing that, despite not knowing where the next pay cheque is coming from, self-employed people are happier than employees. A recent study from the universities of Sheffield and Exeter involving 5,000 people from around the world found that those who worked for themselves ‘were not only amongst the most engaged but also experienced greater opportunities for innovation, achieving challenging targets and meeting high standards’.

All that, plus you get to dodge the rush-hour commute #WINNING. Even if you don’t want to go it alone – or not yet, anyway – lots of what I’m going to tell you still applies. Because, really, you’re always working for yourself and your future (whatever your manager thinks).

How I started (stumbled into) being an ‘entrepreneur’

So, as you already know, I got my start in the City. I had a good salary, but meanwhile I continued my hobby of posting YouTube videos on the side. In time, I started making a small amount of money from the adverts played alongside my videos here and there, which was a nice bonus. I remember when I received my first payment from Google AdSense (I’d signed up to their programme that puts advertising on your content) of £60! When I saw it on the computer screen, I was so happy that I could make a little extra cash for drinks and so on, simply by doing something I enjoyed in my free time. I’d only been going for a year or two, making videos on fashion, beauty and makeup, and at this point I still didn’t expect this to be my main business. If anything, I was spending way more on clothing, makeup and camera equipment than I was making, as I enjoyed it so much! I remember one of my early requests, as a present from my hubby, was for a new camera costing around £200, which felt like a lot at the time. Back then, my friends and family were surprised that I was spending so much on something that was, after all, just a hobby. Little did they know that I was investing in my future.

After a while that £60 turned into £600. But I was totally naive, and didn’t know to tell the taxman about it. I was just enjoying the additional income. I found out later that not declaring this extra income would come back to bite me in the butt … but for now I was blissfully unaware. My career continued to move forward, and despite being made redundant from my first job during huge staff cuts, I was able to move on to working as a consultant in the City, then within an international financial institution.

But, even though I was becoming more and more settled in my career, the hobby that I’d been busy with in the evenings and every weekend for the past few years had begun to make me £2,000–£3,000 every month, and I was starting to receive offers for work and collaborations from companies and brands. Almost without meaning to, I’d developed my hobby into a fully fledged side business that was close to matching my City salary!

My first big deal

I remember when I booked my first four-figure deal with a brand. I didn’t have a specific fee or rate, and there was no rulebook or precedent that I knew of in terms of making money online. I’d been used to charging a few hundred pounds here and there to partner with brands, which I was happy with (considering that I’d been making all my content for free prior to that). Then one day I was approached by a production company who wanted me to make some videos for a fairly big brand. I remember the lady from the company saying in an email that they only had ‘3’ for the work, which I took to mean three hundred pounds. While I would have accepted that, the hustler in me said I wanted ‘4’. She responded to say that she couldn’t manage ‘4’ but that she could offer £3,500! The whole time she’d meant £3,000! By accident I had stumbled into finding out that I could potentially make enough out of this hobby to turn it into a business. That deal, coupled with my Google AdSense income, meant that was the first month I actually earned more than my monthly salary. My revenue was growing!

That experience was a real eye-opener. When I got married to Mike, what I generated through my channel contributed to the budget for our wedding, and went towards the deposit on our first house. But I wasn’t getting too carried away. I wasn’t prepared to leave the prestige of my City job, or the potential to be a senior manager or even partner, for a quick buck. I decided that I would keep up my hobby posting videos online on the side, while also maintaining the steady income and security from my day job … I was ‘multi-hustling’.

And I was learning so much along the way. As more work came in, I began to standardise my process by auto-responding to emails, creating a rate card, and putting aside set times to manage the business side of my social media profile. Before long, I was booking three to four projects a month, and making double to triple my salary, but I was still scared. I couldn’t fathom a future where I was reliant on myself and not a boss or stable company. What if it all disappeared? I knew that once I left my industry to do something completely unrelated it would be extremely difficult to ever go back. I wondered what my parents would think, what the bank would think, what my friends and colleagues would think. But the numbers didn’t lie. I could see this was a viable business. I didn’t know what the future was going to hold, but something told me that if I was smart about this, I could make it work.

Not just a leap of faith

I’m a fairly risk-averse person, and I like to make calculated decisions. Leaving a stable job to build my business online was not done on a whim. But I could see my revenue growing more and more. My calculations, based on the data that I had, indicated that I would continue to grow in the future. Planning for the next five years, I weighed up the pros and cons for pursuing my business, or staying in my City career. My business won. I made the decision then to become a full-time YouTuber (more on exactly how I got there later). Even now, I find it amazing – crazy, even! – that I was able to turn my secret hobby into my business. It came from a genuine place of passion and love, with no expectation of financial gain. When I first started there wasn’t even the option to make money in this industry. But I realised I could build a long-term future doing something I was happy to work on day, night and weekends, for ever and ever.

Finding your grind

You might be thinking, What exactly am I going to do if I want to go it alone? I’d better follow my passion, right? That’s what you hear all the time. But hold up a second. Because …

Passion isn’t everything

What’s your passion? Speaking candidly, I’d confess that my passions are sleeping in late, watching TV and eating food. I’d watch Netflix all day if I could! But you can’t make a living watching telly (let’s call the guys on Gogglebox the exception that proves the rule). You have to find something you like to do in life, but you need to acknowledge reality at the same time. And that’s a philosophy I’ve always followed, from choosing my first job after university to deciding to become a full-time YouTuber and influencer. That doesn’t mean abandoning your dreams – in fact, it’s the total opposite – but it does mean acknowledging the circumstances that you’re in and which lie ahead, rather than blindly ignoring them. That’s why, rather than telling you to focus on finding your passion in life, I’d say focus on finding your grind.

Here’s how I see it, whether we’re talking about finding a hustle IRL or building your brand online. The truth is, if you’re playing to your strengths, these should really be one and the same thing. This is important. Everything that I do, from my hair-extensions business to my clothing partnerships, works in synergy with what I’m doing on YouTube and my other platforms. The growth of my businesses has been natural because I’d already found what excited me and made me want to get out of bed in the morning. In fact, pretty much everything I’m going to say now applies as much to finding your business path as finding your space in the online world.

LIFE LESSON: As well as following your dreams, you want to find an equilibrium between your passion and your unique skills, while also appealing to an identifiable target market – or, if we’re talking about influencers, an audience. When you’ve managed that, you’ve identified a path that could be worth exploring.

Here’s another way of explaining that idea. There are lots of versions out there of this Venn diagram. In the digital world I replace Market with Audience. The sweet spot in the middle? That’s your grind:

Yes, you’ve got to have a PASSION for what you’re planning to put out into the world – you need to feel fired up, engaged, interested. What is it that sets you alight? What could you talk about for ages and not get bored? What would you be willing to dedicate all your free time (and perhaps, eventually, all your time) to? It might be making (and eating) great food. It might be running your own business. It might be being the best mother you can be. Only you know the answer. While you’re at it, ignore the naysayers. People can turn up their noses at other people’s interests. To that I say, who cares? Immerse yourself in what you love.

You also need to have the SKILL to back that up – that might be in the form of knowledge that you’ve acquired, because you’re so interested in your passion you learn everything there is to know about it. It might be in terms of experience, because you’ve spent so many hours, days, weeks, dedicated to actually doing it. Whatever it is, it’s not just a fleeting interest – you’ve got, or are prepared to get – the credentials. What does that look like? In my case, I was spending hours and hours on forums discovering everything I could about beauty and fashion and putting it into practise with my hustles. This was all before I started my YouTube channel, where I shared my passion for those subjects. Which meant I’d put in the time!

The third piece of the puzzle is: who’s your AUDIENCE, a.k.a. your market? Does anybody else actually want to share in the thing you’re passionate about? If so, who are they? Do you want to be an influencer in order to build on what you’re already doing in your professional life, speaking to your peers in your industry and impressing people who could give you work? Are you speaking to consumers, who might order your product or hire you for your services? Or are you leveraging your tastes and personality to build a following of supporters who like what you’re about as a person, with a view to launching a business that caters to them later on? They’re all totally legitimate options, but determine what’s important to you.

Once you know who your audience is, you can allow that to guide you. For example, if you have a blog aimed at fellow online business owners, it makes no sense posting photos that shout ‘Look at me, I’m a bad B on the beach’. It’s not related to your enterprise. Or perhaps you want to make you, as a personality, your product: do you eventually want to be able to partner with big brands, appealing to as many people as possible? Or do you only want to find a small sector of people who think exactly the same way as you – to find your tribe?

And if your audience is niche, and you’re worried that what you want to do online seems a bit obscure, or not mainstream? That’s totally fine! That’s the beauty of the Internet – you might not have anyone in your town who shares your passion for say, shark movies, but you’ll definitely find them online. You don’t have to appeal to everyone: I don’t. But I would rather have 100 engaged, enthusiastic followers, than 1,000 who aren’t that interested.

Try out your grind

You might need to try out a few options when you’re finding your grind. I’m a big believer in testing the water, be that IRL or online. You might think that something is your passion and, a little while later, realise you’re done with it. For instance, you know that I used to style hair to earn money. I loved doing it, but eventually, I got to a place where I couldn’t even be bothered to do my own hair, let alone other people’s. My whole attitude was: I need a break from this. I realised that as much as I had enjoyed it in the past, styling hair wasn’t something that I wanted to do for ever or even full-time. Yes, I had the skills and even the potential audience – or customers in this case – but it wasn’t going to be the right grind for me. I’d thought it was something that I was really passionate about, but I certainly didn’t want to go on to train to be a hairdresser.

So it’s important to cast your net wide and see what sticks, and what you connect with the most. If you think you’re going to spend the next five years reviewing eyelash brands online simply because you’ve decided there’s an audience who want that content but aren’t being catered for by anyone else, it’s more than likely you’re going to be completely bored. That is unless you can bring the passion, skills and knowledge to back that up. You’ll need the willingness and enthusiasm to really explore that segment of the beauty industry, so you can become an expert – the connoisseur! – of lashes. And if you can bring all that, great! You can be the go-to girl for eyelashes – the only one whose opinion matters.

LIFE LESSON: Passion alone is just one part of the equation: find the thing you’ll be willing to grind on and dedicate every hour of the day to.

Start off as a multi-hustler

I never tell people to just quit their jobs and start a business. In the same way, I wouldn’t recommend that people with an Instagram account suddenly jack it all in to rely on their social media output as their sole source of income. If you can make that work, great, but that’s putting a huge amount of pressure on you and there’s a lot of risk attached. My approach was much more softly-softly. As I said, at the start I had no idea that my YouTube channel would become my career. At university it was a hobby, not a moneymaker. I still worked my weekend job and did hair as well. Later, I made a few career moves, and continued with YouTube on the side. It is totally OK to do more than one thing until you’re ready to go all-in on your side hustle.

WHAT’S YOUR GRIND?

Ask yourself these four questions to help you discover your grind before you start putting yourself out there:

> What could you talk about every day and not get sick of?

> What would you do, or be interested in, even if you didn’t make a penny from it?

> What are you doing or do you know about already that you could potentially share with others?

> What could you keep on doing, without it feeling like a chore?

Once you’ve figured out your grind, that’s when you can start identifying your personal goals.

In the next few chapters we’ll be exploring how you can build your influence to help you achieve those goals. We’ll be looking at the ins and outs of social media, building and owning a profile and honing your content. Ever wondered about embarking on the influencer journey, or growing a brand online? Read on …

3 (#ulink_a578555f-7b22-5136-ba07-7d37fc411f63) | The importance of building a following on social media (#ulink_a578555f-7b22-5136-ba07-7d37fc411f63)

The joy of building an online presence is that you get to share what you’re doing with people all over the world. Admittedly, it can be very daunting at first. When you start out online, you can wonder if anyone’s even listening, or if they care. So before you psych yourself out, I’m going to spill the tea on how I built a following and all you need to know about establishing your profile (and becoming an influencer, if that’s what you want) from scratch.

The year one thousand