How This Business Owner Made Her Ultimate Leap

Hello, my beautiful friends! Welcome back to another blog post.

Today, I'm very excited to share Victoria Marcouillier's inspiring journey to entrepreneurship.

Victoria is a wife, mamma-to-be, and the CEO of BrandWell Marketing. BrandWell, is a website and branding studio for the female entrepreneur who wants to level up her business with stylish and professional branding.

I'm very excited for her to share her journey because I know it will inspire a lot of you. If you have been tuning in to She Did It Her Way podcast for some time now then you know that every lead-up and leap story is always different from person to person. So I'm really excited to share Victoria's journey on the blog today!

Victoria started her company, BrandWell, a little over a year ago. And she's very new to the entrepreneur life, but it's something that she's always dreamed about. She considers herself a type of entrepreneur that was born ready for it! She felt that she was born to become an entrepreneur, growing up with an entrepreneur Dad, she has seen him start and sell several businesses which inspired her to do the same.

When Victoria was starting, she wasn't quite sure what her business is going to look like and how it's going to be, but she knows for sure that she's going ditch her nine to five, run her own business and live the life that she dreamed of. That was always the goal. But just because it's a goal doesn't mean that it happens right away. And her journey was delayed a little bit because she went to school for advertising and public relations. She enjoyed doing that and took a job for a web design and marketing company at the beginning of 2016. At first, she didn't know what she was doing but working for that company had helped her discover what she is capable of doing, in terms of web design and marketing. Even though she wasn't working for herself, she knew that she was learning a lot about the industry and that someday she will be able to go out and do this on her own. It was about the same time that she got married, it was a big year of starting a new job and getting married!

She's loving this industry, and then getting married and then all in the same year, her husband also started PA School. So that was an exciting and kind of scary journey because it also meant that for a couple of years, she was going to be the breadwinner of the family. Fast forward to two and a half years or so working for this web design company where she started thinking, "Maybe this is what I was going to do.",  "Maybe this is the business that I'm going to create someday."  

HOW SHE GOT STARTED:

She started doing web designs for her friends and eventually to other people. She had the thought that she can do it for herself and why does she work for someone else. She has that "ah" moment in 2017, thinking of doing this job for her own. But she also knew that there was no way she could give up her full-time job and the stability of a paycheck every two weeks while her husband was in school. She needed to think for the right timing to take her ultimate leap. "I think a lot of times when it comes to when am I going to take the ultimate leap. There are a lot of things that you have to consider and some people are like, oh, like, what's the worst that can happen? You just you fail, right? You fail you get back up. You try again. But for us, you know is our second option was, I now gave up my steady income. If the business didn't do well, then my husband and I still had, you know, $12,000 tuition payments coming in every three months. And we didn't want to go into debt. So that was a big part of our story like trying to cash flow PA school and do it debt-free." She knew that if she's going to start this business, it has to be alongside her fulltime job.

In October 2018, she finally takes that first step and made an LLC for BrandWell. Her first client was a friend of her husband who owned a bunch of restaurants and wanted to take on a catering business that needed a website. She did the website, which she says not that terrible but it's certainly nothing like what she creates today. She then proceeded to set up her company's business bank account, set up her LLC. She quotes, "I knew in the back of my mind if I want this to someday be a legit business, I have to treat it legit from the start."

So for a year, she built BrandWell on the side. "I created the LLC, I set up the bank account before I had $500, to my name for that business. But I'm so glad that I did because that allowed me to keep my business very separate from my own, my husband and my personal life and our checking account, which is what our main goal was to pay off PA in school and get him through that." She started getting clients through just word of mouth and telling her friends about it.

Late in January of 2019, she started promoting it on Instagram. Pretty early on she made that commitment to show up. Keep in mind she was working fulltime but she makes sure she gets that post out on Instagram to show her followers that she's being consistent and that she'd show up to them sharing her works.

"And that was like a huge key to success in my first year. of business, just the consistency. And you know, I started with literally one follower, probably my mom. But anyway, I started just by showing up every single day and providing really good content and sharing some designs and just sharing motivation and really sharing a lot about what I was doing. I talked a lot about how I was working full time. But, you know, this was my ultimate dream. And I wanted to help other entrepreneurs launched their business by building them beautiful websites. So that is kind of how I started to grow." and by the end of know, 2019 Victoria had built this business that was actually sustainable, and it was providing a great supplement to her fulltime job income.

THE ULTIMATE LEAP:

Victoria shared a story about her deciding that ultimate leap. She thought she has two tickets out, it's either she can wait for her husband to graduate from PA school, or wait until she gets pregnant then she can resign from her fulltime job and take that ultimate leap. Managing her fulltime job and her side business was a bit of a struggle for her but the thought that someday it's going to look different, and with her passion for her business, is what kept her going. Victoria and her husband tried to start their family and have a baby, soon enough she can resign from her job and focus on her business once she gets pregnant. However, it was not working according to the plan... it's taking time for Victoria to get pregnant and her business is expanding and demanding more of her time. It came to a point where she is saying yes to a client without realizing she doesn't have enough time for one more website.

Victoria felt burnt out with this cycle, she and her husband then sat down and talked a lot about the next step that they should take. They talked about how the business is going? And if it's the right time to take that leap? With her supportive husband, they decided it's time for her to put in that resignation. But when is she going to take that leap?

"I listened to one of your podcasts, Amanda actually, I used to listen to you all the time when I would go for walks on my lunch break. And you had talked about setting a leap date, like having an actual tangible deadline that you could you know, set in your mind whether it was a year out, six months out a week out whatever it was, and this was probably summer of last year, and I was like, Okay, I'm setting my leap date going to be October. I'm going to tell my boss and I'll give them some notice, you know, but I'll be done before the holidays. It'll be awesome. And so I set that week date and on September 29th, which also happened to be my birthday, we took a pregnancy test and it was positive for two days before I quit my job. It was just so cool how the timing all worked out!"

Victoria then left her corporate job and is now super ready to take her business full time! The timing worked out for her and she has four months left to continue to get her business ready for the baby.

THOUGHTS TO PONDER:

"A big secret to success in my book is treating your business like it's bigger than it is. Even if that's just a mindset thing. So for me, that's kind of how it started. Like, in my mind, I knew that BrandWell was going to be big someday and I believe that with every fiber of my being and I tried to act and appear whether it's online or when I talked about my business to friends and family as though I was already there, you know, whether I had maybe designed five websites and maybe I didn't have any money to my name and that bank account, I treated it like it was, you know, I was three years in or five years in."

"I would I want to say get an LLC right off the bat. And that's like a little bit more than 100 bucks and maybe 150. But just, you know, make it professional invest in something that's going to hold you accountable to growing that business into being something legit."

Until next week again for another inspiring post!