"That which does not kill us makes us stronger." - Friedrich Nietzsche

They say 60% of businesses fail in their first three years (source: UK Business Mentoring). So when I hit year five in 2019, increasing my revenue year-on-year, with my biggest retainer client firmly secured in year four after a lengthy competitive pitch, I was pretty confident I was well on my way to being the proud owner and director of a successful and respected marketing and comms agency in the global tourism marketing sector. Never complacent, but worthy of the fruits of my labour.  

Success

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” — Bill Gates

I mean I damn well deserved it - I’d worked my arse off running someone else’s agency in London for seven years. Winning their business, keeping their clients more than happy, all whilst being paid a fraction of the huge client fees (ironically, for a reason you'll find out later in my story, one of my clients was Ontario Tourism).

So in 2014, I decided to take the plunge - take all that I’d learnt - and filter out all that I hated about big agencies - and I started my own small agency underpinned by hard work, transparency, integrity, and innovation. The first big client I landed was Destination St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador tourism - a dream client to call my own under my co-founded Yorkshire-based agency All About the Story Ltd.

My clients and my work came before my marriage, before my kids - it was, dare I say it, what I lived for. I gave, and gave, and gave some more. And it was paying off. I’d earned my stripes, and I had a great reputation within the industry as a tourism marketing expert in the UK. Travel and tourism brands wanted me to represent them, consult them and help them to be more creative, more innovative, and more visible. 

In 2018 I won a considerable grant from Visit England to develop a tourism business idea. And the blog I’d started in 2014 - called Girl About - where I blogged about why I loved where I lived (Yorkshire, England), and other topics such as my mental health after suffering in silence from post natal depression - was getting a lot of traction. So I recruited other women to write content for it, representing their cities and counties across the UK. 

Girl About quickly took off as a blogging platform and I saw a huge opportunity to build a digital brand that was fired by real women and mums across the UK. So I hired a coach to help me look at ways to grow it and monetise it. She advised me to niche down - she thought Girl About was too much to too many with no real focus - and with my strong tourism background, I followed her advice to focus only on travel - on making memories.

This probably was the first mistake I made, because the articles that were really getting the hits and engaging a demographic of women every brand was trying to reach, were those that were on topics which were much more personal than travel. And back in 2015, very few women of our age were talking publicly about mental health in such a relatable way.

Travel and tourism was - and still is - a notoriously crowded place online, with many huge corporate players with even bigger budgets. All dominating the first page on Google for searches in any way travel related. And this was before video content really came into its own and brought with it, a whole new generation of travel influencers and content creators, thus making it that much harder for a brand that wasn't focusing on one area of travel, or on one part of the world, but on making memories - anywhere, and everywhere.

Still, we had big ideas for something unique in travel, and I was happy with the direction we were going in. I was onboard with it and I was going to put all my energy into making Girl About Travel a successful commercial venture.

By mid 2019 it was all falling into place. My bank balance was healthy, my husband and I had completed our renovation project and were living in our forever home with our two kids. I was investing back into Girl About Travel and the women who were writing content for our website, with training, tech and an annual overnight retreat paid, in full, by my myself. And I was investing in myself and the digital marketing knowledge I needed. I’d employed a full-time social media assistant, I was paying an experienced travel editor, a PR manager, a web developer, an SEO specialist, and a lead-generation expert for Girl About Travel.

I had three lucrative retainer contracts and my own growing digital travel brand - what could go wrong? 

BOOM! 28th February 2020...

Ironically I was at The Hilton Park Lane in London’s Mayfair for the annual Travel Marketing Awards, collecting my gong for The Best Consumer Tourism Campaign Under £250,000 for a campaign I masterminded and implemented for my client - Newfoundland & Labrador Tourism. But there was tension in the air that night, whispers of something that would floor the travel industry globally if it took hold. I remember the event well, it was an odd evening with chitter chatter about a flu virus sweeping the globe. 

I didn’t think too much of it. A virus – it would be over and done within weeks. But London was eerily quiet that night – the hotel I was staying in, –  the five-star Montcalm that was - usually upwards of £500 a night for a room, had cost my business just £200. A sign that something was brewing, something that would affect the tourism and hospitality industry in a way that we could never have imagined…

A week later, I got the first call from one of my Canadian tourism board clients - my retainer contract would end in May after three years. Just like that. Word on the street was that borders would be closing, they couldn’t keep me on. And then the next call came in, and the next one, and within what felt like a nano-second I’d gone from turning over £250,000 a year to ZERO. Nothing, zilch. COVID kicked in and I had a marketing agency with no clients. 

As the director of a limited company, I paid myself the minimum salary of £8,000 a year, and the rest in dividends, and I worked from home. All of this meant I fell through every COVID support gap. I got sweet FA financial help in one of the worst-hit sectors in the pandemic. May 2020 would be the last time for 18 months that I would be able to pay myself. 

But, what I did have was my own little legacy in Girl About - and an army of amazing women across the UK - fondly known as The Girl About Blog Squad - writing content for our website, - girlaboutravel.co.uk. And after six months of business strategy coaching, I was, until the pandemic struck, on the cusp of launching a membership-based online travel club specifically for women. 

I was also supposed to be flying to Nepal and trekking to Everest Base Camp for my 40th year, alone, in May 2020. In fact, 2020 was supposed to be my year of success, solo travel, coming of age, comfort-zone-smashing - instead it was just a complete and utter nightmare.

But I refused to let a little thing like COVID get in the way of my professional plans and goals, so being the tenacious person that I am – I borrowed the bounce-back loan amount I was entitled to against my business - £20,000. I threw the large majority of it into all sorts of tech, advised by various people who convinced me that I needed this, and I needed that, and if I invested in these things I would be onto a winner with Girl About Travel and this idea of an online travel club. 

So I kept going, and I worked hard while it felt like everyone else around me was on furlough, baking bread, erecting tiki bars in their perfectly pruned pandemic gardens and building pubs in their basements. I took onboard all I was being told to do by the people around me who were kindly also giving their time to try and make Girl About Travel work. Women who were invested in Girl About Travel – trading their time and expertise for a cut of the profits one day. I was still working 12-hour days where I could, around lockdowns and homeschooling. 

The wonderful women up and down the UK who were the official Girl About’s in their cities and counties continued to write content for our website – documenting all the local walks, then writing about their favourite pubs and restaurants with outdoor spaces, and all the other activities we came to rely on in the pandemic. Girl About became the go-to brand women relied on for inspiration.

The Girl About Blog Squad ambassadors and content creators were amassing hundreds, thousands even, of new followers on their IG – women who wanted all the insights on what to do in their part of the UK throughout the pandemic. And slowly but surely, local businesses and some national brands were reaching out to them, wanting to pay them for sponsored content. Meanwhile, I was focusing on building a brand new, very robust Girl About Travel website and trying to get the Girl About Travel Club launched. 

But it was hard. No one really wanted to talk about travel for a good few months in 2020. However, when the conversation did turn back towards travel when borders were opening, we were there, handing out free expert travel advice to anyone who needed it. Building our audience, and growing our database along the way. 

Failure

“It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” – Ellen DeGeneres

By the beginning of 2021, I was hemorrhaging money. The bounce-back loan went on so much tech – too much tech, that was complicated and frustrating. And, in hindsight, a lot of that spending was a bad move. 

In fact, looking back, the whole travel club idea was the wrong strategy to commercialise Girl About. However much I convinced myself, and others, that it was the future of booking holidays for women and mums who wanted more than a fly-and-flop holiday, I was competing in an online space with huge players. And humans have short memories. 

However much upset these huge faceless online travel brands caused, however, many thousands of people got stranded, stitched up, and were out of pocket because of cancelled holidays and rubbish customer service, people still reverted back to booking holidays through these websites because they were, and are, the cheapest. And the Girl About Travel Club (rebranded into the Holiday Insiders’ Club last year in a last-ditch attempt to get it off the starting line), was never about deals, it was about content and humans – bespoke holiday itineraries, access to the on-the-ground experts and community.

Towards the end of 2020 after two lockdowns it was becoming tiresome, depressing almost. I continued to pour money into the Travel Club and Girl About in the hope we could turn a corner and get some traction. I looked at every opportunity for investment, support, and collaboration. But even when we did get some paid sponsorship money from tourism boards etc, it wasn’t covering the hours we had to put in to deliver on our proposals and it wasn’t covering the monthly running costs.

In fact one very interested collaborator - a national UK hotel brand - pretty much told me Girl About Travel would never make me money the way I operated it, which had always been led by the heart, rather than the head. Giving too much of my time, experience and resources away for free.

Still, refusing to admit defeat, in early 2021 when my husband was offered an amazing opportunity to transfer to Canada with his job, we relocated our young family to Toronto in August 2021 and for a year I continued, from my Toronto home office, to fight, to look at ways to generate revenue. 

We sold our 'forever home' we'd painstakingly renovated in Yorkshire, UK, because we couldn’t afford to pay our UK mortgage solely on his wage, and, the idea of living in another country - especially Canada because I was so familiar with it - really appealed to us. And it gave me a fresh perspective, fresh hope for Girl About Travel and the Travel Club without so much financial pressure.

I offered lots of free training to the Girl About writers in the hope I could equip them to generate some revenue, for them, and for the bigger picture just to cover costs. They didn’t want to sell sponsorship packages, they wanted to write, and anyhow, by now, some of them were raking in hundreds of pounds for sponsored posts on their IG accounts. For them, it worked. 

Heck, in late 2022 one Girl About writer decided to quit her job in childcare, take all I’d taught her and the tourism contacts I’d handed to her (by this point she was making a lot of money from creating content and sponsored posts on her Girl About Instagram account) and she set up a competing brand behind my back! That really floored Rebecca and I. In fact, that was the point when I personally started to really go downhill. I was losing the love I had for what I was building. Resentment was kicking in. I’d been played a fool and that hurt. 

A year into our new life in Toronto, my husband was on my case about me earning some consistent income. My convincing responses alluding to Girl About Travel and the travel club being on the CUSP of being all that I’d hoped, i.e. a huge commercial success story,  -  every time he asked what was going on with it, were quickly becoming less convincing. All whilst I was still forking out hundreds of pounds every month on overheads and subscriptions. And, by now, bounce-back loan repayments.  I was in a destructive spiral of isolation (working from home all day alone), wine, resentment and money worries.

Looking back now I’m convinced I’ve had PTSD from the impact of the pandemic on my tourism marketing and comms agency business. The idea of putting myself out there again and trying to secure new retainer clients within the tourism space filled me with dread. 

My confidence was on the floor, my anti-depressant med dose had been increased, and my only hope for success, or so I thought, was Girl About. I kept going and going. It was akin to being in a sad, destructive marriage, one I couldn’t get out of. But I couldn’t admit failure, I didn’t want to work out other ways of making a living. I was too scared and too depressed to try. 

I’ve always been fiercely independent, especially where money is concerned – for lots of deep-rooted reasons relating to my teenage years and a messy divorce-induced upbringing where money was always scarce and caused far too many arguments. Making my own money, supporting myself, and paying my way has always been very important to me. 

But here I was, for the first time in my adult life, relying entirely on my husband for everything – living in another country with no money of my own and resigned to the fact that I was now a kept woman. I convinced myself that it was ok. 

But I knew deep down that it absolutely wasn’t ok!

I was quickly falling out of love with the industry that I had, for so long, adored and felt so privileged to work in since leaving school.

By this point, I couldn’t even bring myself to switch my laptop on. I couldn’t bear the thought of logging into my emails to be faced with an inbox full of receipts from multiple monthly payments. And annual subscription renewal notices. 

Things got serious when my bank balance hit zero and I was in arrears with my bounce-back loan repayments. I ignored the texts and emails from my bank for a couple of months, and then I decided enough was enough. I had to do something. I wasn’t sleeping and my head needed removing from the proverbial sand.

I called my accountant at the time who was working on getting me some more money I was owed by the tax man. Only to discover that it had just been paid into my business account and the account had been seized by the bank. The tax rebate of £4,000 pounds had offset some of the loan and I no longer had access to my account. I was done. The only option was to dissolve my business. And in order to do that I needed £3,000, which I had no option but to take from our family savings. 

It was over. My business had failed*

But, there was a huge sigh of relief too –- I owed no one any money, and I could focus on something new. 

*Girl About Travel had failed commercially –- but it continues to be a successful passion project for many of the women who still write regularly for the Girl About Travel website today.

Resilience

“Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” ― Nelson Mandela

Just over a year into living in a new country (which we absolutely adore living in BTW), it was time to put on my big girl pants and turn this hellish situation I’d got myself in around. 

I have a ton of skills, a ton of transferable skills. If one thing the pandemic did equip me with, it was the time to focus not on my clients' work, but on my own brand. I made stupid mistakes, I invested in experts who, it turned out, couldn’t do any better job than I could do myself. I taught myself how to build a WordPress website and how to optimise it for Google. I learned all about lead generation, automation, building funnels and digital advertising.

I already had a lot of skills which enabled me to build a dynamic digital travel brand with Girl About – graphic design, great copywriting skills, social media marketing – and all the experience of working in a marketing agency for eight years and heading up the tourism marketing division for five of those years. Basically, I have every skill needed to build a service-driven business. Inside or outside the travel industry.

I had grown considerably throughout the pandemic. I hadn’t failed. IT had failed. I was, and still am, an incredibly talented, creative, and strategic thinker, with a huge toolbox of skills that would be an asset to any new business owner. I just needed to rebuild my confidence.

Reinvention

“Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.” – Richard Branson

When I posted a post on a local community Facebook group in my neighbourhood of Leslieville in September 2022 I NEVER expected the response I received...

From this one Facebook group post, I was suddenly out and about, meeting with small business owners who wanted to know more about how I might be able to help them. Talking them through my skills, and how I could help them. Realising just how much I know, that many small business owners don’t.

I listened to myself giving them suggestions, ideas, and strategies that they listened carefully to and I felt the rush of excitement course through my body –- I love talking to people about their businesses, and as I did so, I felt my confidence ease back into my being.

Some of these people had their own horror stories. Some had spent thousands of dollars of their own money on self-proclaimed social media experts which had led to nothing. Others had contracted agencies, only to be handed over to a young account exec with no real understanding of how to make an impact on a small budget. And some people just wanted someone like me to come in and take a good look at their small business from a marketing and comms point of view and give them some honest feedback, critique and support to help them understand how to communicate their services better and reach their ideal clients. 

A real estate agent, a non-alcoholic craft beer brand, an artisan candle maker, an events management consultancy, and an occupational therapist all invested in me and my skills as a result of that one post. 

Meanwhile, over in London, Rebecca, who is the co-founder of Nourish Communications and a top-of-her-game travel journalist, whose writing skills are simply sublime, was working for similar clients and we were passing projects back and forth across the pond –- I’d help her with brand marketing and design strategy, whilst she’d help me with copywriting strategy. Between us, we have an enviable skill set. There really isn’t anything we need to outsource. 

Two of the projects we worked on together were for three women in the occupational therapy space. Alana, - founder of Larchwood Occupational Therapy in Nature here in Toronto, wanted help with the branding and marketing of a new coaching project. Meanwhile, Autism Unravelled in London wanted help with their website. It was bland, boring and wordy, so we changed that, and they love what we’ve created for them.

It’s also worth noting that in the last 12 months, I’ve become very aware of my traits in relation to my business, and my life in general. Some of these include procrastination. Also being laser-focused in some areas of my work and life, and the inability to focus in other areas. The need for perfection in my work, and the buzz I get from an impending deadline. My chaotic working environment and acutely creative and sharp strategic mind. My addictive personality and a limited attention span.  It all points towards ADHD. So, working with these occupational therapists and learning more about neuro-diversity and mental health was something I thoroughly enjoyed. And I enjoy supporting these women and shining a light on the wonderful work they do.  And while they are incredible in their field of work, admittedly they have absolutely no idea how to market their private practices and the services they offer. 

And so with that, staring us in the face was an opportunity, a gap that needed filling. Rebecca and I decided we wanted to do more to serve these women, not just in the occupational therapy space, but in any well-being capacity – because we love nothing more than taking a complex concept and using our skills and experience to communicate it to those who might need or want it. 

So say hello to Nourish Communications. Our goal is to communicate the core essence of our client’s brand DNA – beyond logos and colour palettes – so that our clients can connect with their intended audience on a deeper level, and use language that resonates and empowers rather than alienates and daunts. We know what’s needed to build stand-out brands in a crowded space and we are passionate about mental health, travel and wellbeing so we’ve brought it all together to form a one-of-a-kind consultancy that delivers. 

Now that I have my mojo well and truly back, I am able to look back on the last three years with a level of gratefulness for the lessons I’ve learned and the skills I’ve gained and remind myself that if being a female entrepreneur is anything, it’s certainly never ever boring.

And remember - what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

Lyndsey x

PS - if you're thinking about starting your own business, Rebecca and I have put together a 10-step guide to how to easily set it up and start on your journey to being a business owner.

GET YOUR FREE GUIDE HERE > https://nourishyourbrand.com/new-business-set-up-guide