The Mistakes I Made

The mistakes I made building an online business and what they taught me along the way.

The mistakes didn't stop me from succeeding. They taught me how to succeed better.

There is a lot of external advice available when you start a business. Some of it is useful, some of it is contradictory, and some of it comes from people who have built something entirely different from what you are trying to build, or perhaps never built anything at all. Then there are the lessons that only seem to make complete sense once you have experienced the consequences of getting them wrong yourself.

I have made plenty of those mistakes.

None were catastrophic. They didn't bring the business crashing down or stop me from eventually building something successful. More often, they were decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, or carried what felt like very little risk, until experience showed me something I couldn't yet see.

Looking back, I can identify several moments where I made business harder than it needed to be. Sometimes I relied too heavily on what was already working. Sometimes I listened to voices that had no business directing my decisions. At other times, I chased attention, let circumstances interrupt my consistency or consumed information without actually doing the work. And, perhaps most importantly, I've spent plenty of time playing not to lose when I could have been playing to win.

What I find most interesting is that I built a successful business while making those mistakes.

You don't have to get everything right to succeed, but you can save yourself a great deal of time by learning from someone who has already got it wrong.

1 - Don't mistake early success for a complete strategy.

One of my earliest mistakes was putting too much faith in something that was working.

When I started my online business, I followed the proven steps one by one. I was taught to establish four legs of marketing. The thinking was simple: don't rely on one source of leads. Build several ways of reaching people so that if one changes, you still have others working to keep the business operational.

It made complete sense. I just didn't do it.

Facebook took off almost immediately for me. I was getting traction, conversations were happening and the business was moving, so naturally I put more of my energy into the thing that was producing results. Why would I spend time building something else when this was working so well?

Then Facebook changed its algorithms.

Suddenly, the platform I had relied upon wasn't delivering in the same way. Because I hadn't spent the time establishing the other marketing legs, I felt the impact far more than I needed to.

It was an early lesson in the difference between having a successful marketing strategy and having a resilient business. If I had established those other channels from the beginning, the algorithm change would have been something to work around rather than something that could materially affect the flow of my business.

If I were starting again, I would still take advantage of the channel that was working. Of course I would. But I would also build the others alongside it. A business needs to be able to adapt to changes in the environment rather than having its future tied too closely to one platform, one strategy or one source of attention.

2 - Don't let people who aren't building your life influence how you build your business.

The second mistake was less technical and far more personal. I listened to people who weren't building my life.

In the early days of starting a business for myself, I allowed external voices to get into my head. Some were people who didn't necessarily have my best interests at heart. Others simply had a very different idea of what a sensible or conventional path looked like. Rather than trusting that my business was mine to build, I became conscious of how it might be perceived.

So I marketed where I thought I would be accepted rather than where I was most relatable. I hid parts of my success and was more careful about talking about what I was doing than I needed to be. There was nothing inherently wrong with the strategy itself; I simply wasn't showing up with the confidence required to make it work as well as it could.

That distinction took me some time to understand.

When I stopped worrying so much about what other people thought, I became willing to market in more places and, more importantly, to let people actually see me. The business grew, but there was another benefit I hadn't anticipated. It felt freer.

I wasn't spending so much energy managing other people's perceptions of my choices. I was spending it building something I believed in. There is a lesson here that extends well beyond business. If you spend too much time wondering what your friends, family, colleagues or former colleagues will think about the decisions you are making, you can end up building a life that makes sense to everyone except you.

You don't need everybody to understand your decision. You need to be able to stand behind it.

3 - Don't confuse attention with attraction.

There was another version of this lesson that took me a little longer to learn, and that was the mistake of trying too hard to be interesting.

There was a period when I became caught up in the idea that I needed to grow my following. TikTok had its trends, Facebook had its trends and Instagram had its trends, and I started following some of them in the hope that I could increase my reach and blow up my audience.

It worked, to a degree. My numbers moved. But the people I was attracting weren't necessarily the people I wanted to build a business with and, more importantly, the content didn't always feel like me.

I was creating attention rather than connection.

Great if you're in the entertainment industry, but not if you're building a personal brand around an online business. People aren't necessarily looking to start a business with the person who can entertain them the most. They are looking for authenticity, trust and a process they can understand and duplicate.

Eventually, I stopped trying to work out what the algorithm wanted from me and asked myself, who am I and who am I becoming.

The answer was simple.

I love the kids and I love being a mother. I love animals and plants. I love to travel, I love fashion, I love creating experiences and I love the everyday life I have intentionally created in the beautiful home we live in.

So that is what you will find on my page.

Not because it is the perfect content strategy, but because it is actually me.

If you love to dance, dance. If you love to sing, sing. If creating funny videos or following trends genuinely feels like you, then by all means, make that part of your brand. But if it isn't you, don't perform a version of yourself because you think the algorithm will reward it.

When I stopped trying to manufacture an audience and became more comfortable being myself, the right people began to find me. The conversations became more aligned, the audience became more relevant and the business ramped up again.

Sometimes the simplest marketing strategy is being yourself and allowing people to see your personal growth and life transformation. Mine didn't happen overnight. It has been one foot in front of the other, and that is the story I want people to see.

4 - Don't wait for your life to become perfectly convenient.

The fourth mistake was allowing my circumstances to dictate my consistency.

There were periods, particularly through the stages of divorce, when life created a genuine stop-start pattern in my business. There were plenty of reasons to pause, and sometimes I did. But over time, I began to recognise a pattern in myself: if I waited until everything around me felt settled before I acted, I could be waiting a very long time.

Life doesn't tend to arrange itself neatly around your goals. There will always be children who need something, circumstances you didn't anticipate, difficult conversations, emotional days, practical responsibilities and things that genuinely demand your attention. That doesn't make those things unimportant. It simply means they can't all be allowed to determine the direction of your life.

I learned this in other areas, too. I finished my university degree during a season when I didn't particularly need the qualification. I finished because I had started it and wanted to finish what I had begun.

That experience changed something in me. I began to understand that discipline isn't necessarily about feeling motivated. Sometimes it is simply deciding that something remains important even when your emotions, circumstances or environment are telling you to put it down.

There were times when the business became a welcome distraction from what was happening around me. There were other times when it required me to be disciplined enough to do the work when I would have preferred to focus my attention elsewhere.

My circumstances were real, but they didn't have to become the author of my future.

That became part of my understanding of emotional wealth. Not the absence of difficult circumstances, but having enough awareness to decide where my attention goes and what remains important despite what is happening around me.

5 - Don't consume personal development without implementing it.

The fifth mistake was one I made despite having access to some very good personal development. I didn't use it properly.

I listened to the audios. I listened to them on repeat. I thought I was doing the work. It wasn't until later that I understood I was consuming the information rather than applying it.  I came into this business not really knowing what personal development was, so in hindsight, this was one of the most valuable lessons I could have learned. I'm grateful I kept going until the lightbulb moment hit.

The workbooks weren't simply written versions of the audios. They contained activities and questions designed to take the concepts into real life, into my habits, observations, thinking and behaviour. Once I understood that, the value of the material changed completely.

There is a difference between hearing an idea and becoming aware of how that idea actually shows up in your life. You can listen to something about emotional control and think it sounds useful, but the real learning begins when you find yourself in a difficult conversation, notice your reaction, catch yourself before responding and recognise that you are beginning to behave differently.

That is where personal development becomes practical.  The real value comes from asking the questions, completing the exercises, noticing your behaviour and paying attention to what keeps repeating.

Personal development isn't simply about knowing more. It is about becoming more aware of what you are doing with what you already know.

6 - Don't play not to lose.

The sixth mistake is probably the one I am still working on: playing not to lose.

I notice it most clearly when I play tennis. I love winning, but what I really enjoy is improving. There is something incredibly satisfying about hitting a shot I've been practising and realising that it has finally become part of my game.

Business is much the same for me. I enjoy the results, but I also enjoy the experimentation: trying a different marketing angle, starting a new conversation, testing an idea, seeing what happens and learning something from a result that wasn't what I expected.

But there is still a part of me that can become cautious.

As a solo mum, I have responsibilities that make risk feel different. There are people who rely on me, decisions that affect more than just me and, underneath that responsibility, a very human fear of getting something wrong.

The ego has a funny way of convincing us that not losing is the same as winning. It isn't.

Playing not to lose can keep you safe, but it can also keep you from taking the shot you have spent all that time preparing for. I don't think the answer is to become reckless or ignore responsibility. For me, it is about becoming more willing to set the bigger goal, test the idea, put myself forward and allow the possibility of winning to have as much room in my thinking as the possibility of failure.

I'm still working on that one.

When I look back at the business I have built, I don't see a perfectly executed plan. I see a lot of learning. I see decisions that worked and decisions that didn't, times when I was confident and times when I wasn't, moments when I followed the training and moments when I thought I knew better. I see a woman learning how to run a business while simultaneously learning how to navigate motherhood, change, responsibility and her own growth.

And I think that is worth saying because you can still build a successful business while making mistakes along the way.

When you're building something of your own, you don't need to be someone who never gets it wrong. You need to be willing to learn, stay curiously playful and remain connected to the reason you started.

The business I built didn't come from getting everything right. It came from being willing to keep learning, keep experimenting and keep becoming better at the person who was building it.

xx

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