When you’ve spent years building a corporate career, it’s natural to look there for business ideas. But my first online business generated high five figures while I was working full-time and raising two young children, and it came from my personal transformation. Sometimes, the experience you’ve gained outside your career is exactly what equips you to solve a problem someone else is willing to pay for.
My first online business generated high five figures while I was working full-time in corporate and raising two young children.
And it had nothing to do with my over a decade-long career in financial services.
It came from my own fitness transformation.
I wasn’t looking to become an entrepreneur at the time. I certainly wasn’t sitting around trying to come up with a business idea.
I’d simply found a way to make fitness work in my life as a working mum with two young children.
And that eventually became something other people were willing to pay me for.
It started with something I’d figured out for myself
About two years after my second daughter was born, I’d been consistently working out five days a week and had got into better shape than before I had children.
I was working full-time as a Private Wealth Manager at one of Australia’s biggest private banks, raising two young children with my also full-time working husband, and managing all the usual responsibilities that come with that stage of life.
Friends and colleagues started noticing the changes in my appearance and asking me questions.
How did I get into such good shape after having children? How did I find the time to exercise? How did I stay consistent with a demanding job and two young kids?
A few even asked me for my secret.
The funny thing was, I didn’t have one.
I’d just worked out how to make exercise part of my life, with a full-time job, two children under three and very limited time.
None of that felt particularly special at the time.
But the questions kept coming, and eventually I realised something.
Other working mums were struggling with the same things I’d already figured out for myself.
They wanted to get fitter, look and feel better about themselves, but they were finding it difficult to make exercise work around their jobs, children and everything else they had going on.
I understood that problem because I’d been there myself.
So I decided to get qualified as a personal trainer and nutrition coach and started helping other working mums.
The first version wasn’t the business I ended up building
I initially started with in-person personal training at a female-only gym close to home.
It seemed like the obvious way to get started. I’d completed my qualifications, I could help people with their fitness, and I could work with clients outside my corporate hours.
And I was earning money almost straight away, an extra 2K–3K per month working at the gym two or three times a week.
But there was a problem.
Every additional client meant another appointment I needed to fit around my job and family commitments. There were only so many hours available, and I was filling most of them with more work.
Six months in, I hated it.
I’d started the business to create another source of income and help other women, but I also wanted something that could fit around the life I already had.
So I moved my fitness business online.
That allowed me to work with clients differently, without having to be physically present for every session.
Over time, that online business generated high five figures alongside my corporate salary, with me working an average of 10 hours a week from home.
In the first couple of years of starting my own business, I learned so much along the way, about what I did and didn’t want from a business.
But it also showed me something important.
I could take something I’d learned through my own experience, use it to help other people solve a problem, and build a business around it without leaving my career.
And none of it had come from my professional background in financial services.
What I recognise now that I didn’t see at the time
Looking back, I can see why that business idea had potential.
It wasn’t simply because I’d gone through a fitness transformation.
It was because I’d achieved something that many other working mums wanted for themselves but were struggling to achieve.
They wanted to get fitter and feel better, but they couldn’t see how to make it work with their already busy lives.
And I’d managed to do it while dealing with many of the same constraints they had.
The questions I kept receiving were early signs of interest, even though I didn’t recognise them that way at the time.
Of course, people asking for advice isn’t the same as people being willing to pay for help. I still had to find out whether there was a market for what I wanted to offer.
But I had somewhere credible to start.
If I were approaching the same opportunity today, I’d be much more deliberate about understanding who I wanted to help, what they were struggling with most, what they’d already tried and what they would actually pay for.
I’d also think about the business model much earlier, rather than starting with something that required me to trade nearly every available hour for money.
Those are lessons I learned through building that first business, and they’re part of how I think about helping clients build their own coaching or consulting offers today.
Sometimes your lived experience is where the opportunity begins
When experienced corporate women think about starting a business, it’s natural to look at their careers first.
And often, that’s exactly where a strong opportunity can come from.
But it’s not the only place worth looking.
Think about the challenges you’ve navigated outside work, the transformations you’ve made, or the problems you’ve spent years figuring out for yourself.
Not everything you’ve been through needs to become a business. And having personal experience doesn’t automatically qualify you to help someone else.
But it can give you a deep understanding of a problem, particularly when you’ve also developed the skills and knowledge to help others solve it.
I’d pay particular attention to the things people already ask you about.
When someone says, How did you manage that? or How did you get that result?, what are they recognising in you that you might have overlooked?
There may be nothing commercially viable there. Or there may be something worth exploring further.
So when you’re looking for your own business idea, don’t just look at what you’ve done professionally. Think about what you’ve lived, what you’ve learned from it, and who might benefit from that experience.
You might find that one of your most interesting opportunities has very little to do with your corporate job.
If you’re wondering where to start looking for your own business idea, I wrote about that in last week’s newsletter, The Best Place to Look for Your Business Idea.
And if you’d like to explore what you could potentially build from your own skills, experience and knowledge, I’ve created a free workbook to help you identify and validate a coaching or consulting idea.