1 year ago, I left my $250k LinkedIn job and didn't think Entrepreneurship would look like this

Exactly one year ago, I handed in my badge at LinkedIn and ended my 15-year career in B2B tech sales.

I had worked at companies such as SAP, Mastercard, Gartner, and LinkedIn.

On paper, I was living the DREAM ✨.
But in reality, I was f*cking BORED 💀.Bored of living a life that was totally predictable and vanilla.

I had an ITCH….A bloody stubborn itch that life was supposed to be more exciting, even if that meant more uncertainty.

The itch to be responsible for:

• My own successes.

• My own failures.

• My own decisions.

• My own time.

• My own money.

I didn’t want to wait for somebody else to give me permission to progress, change direction or try something new.

I wanted FREEDOM.The freedom to do Whatever. The. F*ck. I. Wanted!!!

I had dreamed about starting my own business for almost 15 years, and every year, I found a new excuse not to:

• “When I have enough savings.”

• “When I have the perfect business idea.”

• “When the economy feels more stable.”

• “When Mercury finally gets its sh*t together.”

But in truth…
I was SCARED.Scared of losing my salary, my status, and (most of all) scared of what people would think if I tried and failed.

With no idea what I want my own business to look like, how I’m gonna make any money or having a particularly responsible emergency fund.

Excellent start…

I have always been very good at earning money.
Unfortunately, I also became extremely talented at spending it. 😅

That is the dangerous thing about a large recurring salary.
You put something on the credit card and think:

Future Alicia will deal with that.

Future Alicia always had another large salary landing in a couple of weeks, so she rarely complained.

Then I broke up with my ex…

I had been the higher earner, so he stayed in our countryside home while I moved into a rented flat in London.

For almost a year, I paid my share of the mortgage while also renting in a city famously known for its affordable housing (that was sarcasm obvs 🙄).

On top of that, I was paying around $1,300 a month for driving my Tesla.

I no longer needed a car. I didn’t have anywhere to park a car. But thanks to the finance agreement (and Elon), I remained the proud owner of a very expensive object I couldn’t use.

By the time I left LinkedIn, my credit cards showed approximately $38,000 of debt.

A financially sensible person might have looked at those numbers and thought:
Perhaps now is not the ideal moment to give up a guaranteed salary.

I looked at them and apparently thought:
Let’s add irregular income to the situation!! 😀

I was either extremely brave or completely delusional.

The jury remains out…

Working for some of the world’s largest companies does a lot…
But certainly not teach you how to run a business. 😵‍💫

In corporate life, almost everything already exists:

The product. The processes. The software. The brand. The case studies.
And, rather importantly… The customers.

On my first day of self-employment, I had none of those things.

What I did have was a laptop and an almost concerning belief that I would figure it out.

So I did what many newly self-employed corporate escapees do:

I started consulting.

I had worked at LinkedIn. Lots of people wanted help with LinkedIn. The intellectual leap wasn’t enormous.

I offered profile rewrites, workshops, strategy sessions, ghostwriting, and basically anything else that somebody appeared willing to pay me for.

And it worked!!!

I made around $5,000 during my first month. Then $10,000. Then more than $20,000 in each of the following two months.

Fantastic! 😀🤓

Except…

I had recreated the exact thing I had wanted to escape.

I didn’t own a business.
I owned another job. 😑

Only this time, the boss was me.
And she had absolutely no respect for office hours.

By month four, my calendar was absolutely suffocating me.

So I did what any new entrepreneur experiencing a few successful months and a dangerous amount of confidence would do:

I scaled.

Very sensibly and gradually, obviously.
Just kidding.

I hired nine people.

Thankfully, they were contractors rather than full-time employees, because I had based this decision on approximately four months of revenue and blind optimism.

I assumed hiring would immediately free up my time.
Instead, I learned that hiring people creates an entirely new category of work.

Recruiting them. Training them. Managing them. Checking their work. Reassuring clients that everything was still under control. Then redoing things myself because I was terrified those clients might leave.

I had hired people to escape the workload and somehow created even more of it.

Then November arrived.

New enquiries slowed down. Apparently, people had more important things to think about before Christmas than optimising their LinkedIn profiles.
Rude…

My monthly revenue halved over the following two months.

The business was costing more, I was earning less, and I was utterly and completely exhausted.

That was my first major lesson:

Do not build a permanent cost base around temporary momentum.

A few good months are not proof that the line will continue going up forever.

Sometimes the line goes down.
Sometimes the line punches you in the throat.

Around this time, I kept asking myself one question:

What was the point of leaving LinkedIn?

It wasn’t ooonly to earn more money.
I wanted freedom!!

Yet there I was, working more than I had in corporate life and worrying constantly about where the next client would come from.

Earlier that year, when business had been going well, I had booked a ski trip to Norway for Alex and me. ⛷️🇳🇴

While Alex enthusiastically attended ski school, I sat in the hotel room working.
Wondering where I would find my next client whilst deep down knowing that I didn’t actually want another one.

One evening, while watching the sun go down, I pitched Alex my genius plan:

“What if you quit your job, we give up the London flat, and go live abroad?” 🤓🤓🤓

At the time, Alex worked in prime London real estate, and we were paying around $5,000 a month for our London apartment (with me covering the larger share).

Soooo…

If we moved somewhere with a much lower cost of living, I could pay Alex to work for me, we’d dramatically reduce our expenses, AND I could stop desperately accepting every client who appeared in my inbox.

We were incredibly fortunate. We had no children yet, and nobody depended on us.
If we wanted to travel the world, this was probably the moment.

Moving to Thailand changed eeeeeverything.

Ironically, the less desperate I became to land a new client, the better the opportunities became. I ended up working with fewer people but charged more. 😅

Because Alex now supported me and I had fewer clients, I was able to reduce the large contractor team I had built a few months earlier.

By March, I was earning more than $20,000 a month again, but with far fewer hours.

• Money

• Travel

• Freedom

• Success

Well……

The business was profitable, and the lifestyle was great.

But I still didn’t feel fulfilled.

Every day, I poured my best ideas, energy, and creativity into helping other people grow their businesses.

Meanwhile, I was neglecting my own.

I had originally started posting on LinkedIn because I loved writing and building a community.

But my clients’ work always came first.
One day without posting on my own LinkedIn became two. Two became three. Three became a week.

I had finally built a business that gave me more freedom, but it wasn’t giving me much joy.

That was the second major lesson:

A business can look successful from the outside and still feel completely wrong on the inside.

The goal isn’t only to build something profitable.

It is to build something you still want to wake up and do!! 🧡

Earlier this year, I started experimenting with Substack.

Nothing particularly strategic. I simply repurposed some of my best-performing LinkedIn posts into longer articles and slowly began growing my newsletter.

And eventually, the penny dropped... 👀

A client relationship is tied to one contract.
An audience can follow you through every pivot.

So…

What if I could monetise my writing directly?
What if the CONTENT ITSELF became the business??!!!

At the same time, brands started approaching me, wanting to promote their products through my audience.

Very relaxing…

Alex and I left Thailand, travelled through Japan, and then continued to Italy.

For the first time, I was building my days around work I genuinely wanted to do and spent my best energy on my own audience rather than saving whatever was left after client work.

And slowly, then very suddenly, it started working! 🤩

• My Substack publication became a global bestseller and passed $30,000 in gross annualised revenue.

• My LinkedIn audience reached 50,000 followers.

• Brands began paying me thousands of dollars to create content.

• Forbes featured me.

• Amazon booked me to speak.

None of that happened because I sat on a beach and “aligned with abundance” 🧘🏼‍♀️ (although I do like that vibe).

It happened because I finally gave my own work the time, consistency, and creative energy I had previously reserved for clients.

The opportunity had always been there, but I just hadn’t left enough space to see it.

Going all in on content also meant Alex no longer needed to work in my business.

For the first time in his adult life, he has the freedom to explore what actually lights him up when money is not the deciding factor.

Being able to give somebody I love that freedom means more to me than any revenue milestone ever could. 🙏🏻

You would think all of this would make me wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and think:

✨ You magnificent entrepreneurial genius, Alicia! ✨

HA!!

A few weeks ago, after achieving many of the things I had once dreamed about, I found myself crying on the bathroom floor.

My brain had decided none of it counted.

• Maybe it was all just luck?

• Maybe it was just fortunate timing?

• Maybe my ADHD meds deserved the credit?

• Maybe everybody would eventually realise I wasn’t actually very good?

I’ve met incredibly talented entrepreneurs who work just as hard as I do and haven’t been given the same opportunities. So yeah, timing and luck do matter.

But the problem was that my brain had gone one step further.
It had decided that timing and luck were responsible for everything...

And I was responsible for NOTHING!

Eventually, Alex found me, listened while I spiralled, and reminded me of something I had forgotten:

• I was the same woman who moved to England without speaking English.

• The same woman who worked her way into companies she once believed were completely out of reach.

• The same woman who had survived corporate redundancies, rebuilt her career, left a long-term relationship, and started again.

• The same woman who walked away from certainty because she believed there had to be something more.

Nobody else had built this life for me.

I HAD!!

Without question!!

Would I do it again? Tomorrow.
Has it been harder than I imagined? Absolutely.

• Change your mind.

• Outgrow the business you started.

• Stop doing work that makes money but makes you miserable.

You’d think after one year of chaos and generally making questionable life decisions, I’d give myself a nice, relaxing few months??

That would be the sensible choice.
So naturally, I am doing the opposite! 😀

On 3rd August, I’m launching my first-ever LinkedIn cohort!!!!

It is the biggest thing I have ever launched, and I want to help more people than I ever could through 1:1 work.

Which brings me to my next slightly ridiculous idea…

I’ve publicly said on my LinkedIn that I want this launch to generate more than $100,000. 🤯

Ironically, this year taught me that revenue, by itself, means very little.

The internet is full of people posting: “Here’s how I built a six-figure launch.”

Very few people are actually willing to let you watch while they’re building it before they know whether it’ll succeed or flop spectacularly.

So that’s what I want to do.

• Show the strategy behind the launch.

• Show the revenue numbers and how I’m tracking.

• Show the wins, mistakes, doubts and days when I question every life decision I’ve ever made.

Maybe I’ll hit $100k. Maybe I won’t. That’s not the part I’m most interested in anymore.

If documenting the messy middle helps even one other person build the courage to bet on themselves, it’ll already have been worth it!! 🙏🏻

Because if this past year taught me anything, it's that…

The best things in life always start with a decision that SCARE THE F*CK out of you!!!

CHECK OUT THE HYPE CHALLENGE NOW