Why a Million Followers Can Still Make You Less Than $10K a Month

So welcome to Dawn Ovenu Era, the Billionaire Brain podcast. And today we have Lauren Tickner with us. She's built three seven-figure businesses, and she's going to do a little intro in a second about what she does. But we actually crossed paths, we were just thinking probably a couple of years ago through mutual friends.

And I think what's always interesting is how founders always support each other. And one of the great memories I have of Lauren is just really understanding that she would connect you with, you know, somebody you needed. She was always willing to really cross that bridge. So collaboration, as you know, is one of my key focuses, and especially in the female founder market.

So Lauren, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're working on right now. All right, Dawn, lovely to be here, and thanks for the— yeah, thanks for having me. And it was a pleasure to meet you. You have such a, like, a radiant energy, and that was something very cool to come across because I do think as female founders, sometimes it's, like, rare to meet people who are like-minded.

So I was really grateful that we crossed paths. So yeah, a lot's changed since we last saw each other, actually. AI has been insane. I've gone from 47 employees to four, and now what we're doing largely is we're helping other people install AI systems so that they can generate a significant amount more free time for themselves as a founder.

But then for the companies on the enterprise level, more efficiency, streamlining operations as it relates to client acquisition, building their brand, and it's been a really cool journey. And I think that things are just— it's so exponential right now that probably in a month from now, things are going to be even different, right, even faster. And so for me, I love it. It's exciting, and I think if you are into the tech stuff, it's a really cool time.

If you're not, I think you need to somehow dip your toes in. Otherwise, yeah, your business is going to be pretty clunky compared to others in literally just a month's time from now. So he became a millionaire at 23, but after sort of like 10 years in business and obviously these three seven-figure businesses, how has your definition of success changed? Because obviously when we met, you were in London, but you travel constantly.

I still do, yeah. For me, it's about having freedom. I think in the beginning, in the early days, right, it can be about wanting to make a certain amount of money. And I was talking to one of my clients about this just a couple of days ago, and she was saying like, Yeah, I just want to reach the next level.

I want to just get to the next level. And I'm like, What do you mean by that? And I'm like, How do you actually know if you're winning? And she's like, Oh, I want to make more money.

I want to have another house and another house in Switzerland, another house in Dubai. And I'm like, Okay, but what are you willing to give up to actually get that? And we got to this point where she realized that, no, she's very, very happy with where she's at. And so for her, it's about finding a deeper reason why to motivate her.

And so I'd say the same thing happened to me quite a few years ago. It's like at some point, money, just whatever, literally, it's not really going to change my life unless, I don't know, I want to fly on a private jet, which to be honest, I don't want to do that. Quite literally scares me. I actually really don't want to do that.

So I'm not really motivated by that. And so for me personally, I just like being able to wake up, do what I want to do, not have anything on my schedule that I don't choose. And to be honest, that's where I'm at. Like I had a client who wanted to meet in London today.

This isn't going to be aired today, so no one will know who it is. And I'm here to see family, had some personal stuff going on with my family, and I wanted to be there for my family. And they wanted to meet in London. And this will be a multi-six-figure client if I close the deal.

And I know if I go and meet them in London, it's more likely to close. But I just don't want to meet them, to be honest. I don't do business face to face. I do it all online.

I always have. In-person stuff, it's not really fun for me. It's not enjoyable. And there's this guy called Joe Polish, and he has this concept called easy, lucrative, and fun.

And ELF, right, that's what it is. And I always just run things through that, and I'm like, Is this going to be easy? No, it's like a lot of effort. I have to, like, go all the way to this place that I don't want to go to.

Is it going to be lucrative? Yes. Is it going to be fun? No.

Okay, well, obviously I'm not going to do it, because even if it doesn't check off one of the boxes, I don't do it. So I shifted my way of approaching success to be relating to things that are easy, that are lucrative, and that are fun, as Joe Polish advises. And to be honest, it's put me in a much better headspace. And now I like what I'm doing all the time.

And I'd say that's because, you know, when you get to a point where you build a bit of a, you know, platform for yourself, a runway, as it were, you can do that. And so I think I'm glad that I sacrificed the things that I did to build that runway, because now I can just pretty much choose what I want. I love that. And it's all about designing a life.

And this is something that we definitely have in parallel, because I've designed all my businesses around how I want to live. And I think what's really unique about Boundaries, who actually step out and say that, is that success isn't about just the money. Money is something that, in the beginning, we all strive for, and it's the foundation. It's the consistent cash flow to be able to grow, to scale, to do those things.

But it becomes far deeper. And I think having an enriched life, which I do, like, I choose to do my podcast online. Like, everyone's like, No, you have to be in a studio. You don't.

I still get 25,000 downloads per episode. So it's a choice, and you can make it work the way that you want to. Now, you've spoken really openly about becoming burnt out. While running the company with like 47 employees, and I really admire the fact that you've talked about it, but obviously scaled down.

And openly, people used to see it as a badge of honor by having all these employees, right? And having four now is like having a lean, streamlined business, doing business the way you want. But when was it that you realized that you built a successful business that no longer felt successful to you? Well, everyone on my team now—sorry, they're drilling, for God's sake.

Of course. As soon as I come in here, like it was so quiet and peaceful in here. As soon as we jump on this call, it's like everything went mad. I can't hear it, but the good news is when you were talking before, my dogs were barking, so it's all cool.

Okay, this is the beauty of AI. Yeah, so, I mean, my team, each member of my team now is the equivalent of more than what used to be 12 members on my team, thanks to AI. Because when I had 47 people, to be completely honest, we were making significantly less profit than we are now. I'm an open book, right?

I'm willing to talk about these things. Cool, we were making obviously more revenue, but we were making a lot less profit. And now it's nice because I don't have the, let's say, baggage, the operational complexity that things slow me down. So when we want to launch a new initiative, I can literally just, like, yap into my phone, my agent starts building it, and then I get it at the end to QC, because I have the agent spotting bugs, finding things that need to be fixed, etc.

That used to take an entire marketing team and a couple of developers. And so I would say that, like, relating to when I knew that the time was to come to scale back, personally, I don't actually look at it as scaling back. I want to put, like, a definition on terms here, because scaling back to me is like making your business smaller, right? If we're looking at headcount, yeah, of course, like that's making it smaller, definitely.

But if we're looking at, like, the actual business and what it does, to be fair, like I'm in scaling up mode right now, big time, and I feel so good about it. Back then I didn't, because I associated increasing revenue, increasing profit with adding more people, which back then was kind of the way to do it. It's natural. It's like you spend your time as a founder trying to find amazing talent, because those talent can then multiply the business.

And then— I, gosh, I mean, there's so many moments where I'd just be sitting there like, I cannot do this anymore. I have to just stop. And, like, that was the—I only could see that option. It's like either I completely stop or I just keep going and I kill myself on the process.

And I couldn't see any middle ground. And when I started using ChatGPT in, like, the end of, I think it was 2022, to write copy for my socials, I started getting some posts that absolutely popped off, got loads of leads, and I was like, huh. And then a couple months later, we decided to put together a training for our audience on how they could do it too, and they started getting better results. And I was like, oh.

So then with our private clients, we started training them on how to use AI to write content, and it compressed what used to take six months of coaching and training down to a week. And we were like, okay, we are onto something here. Let's keep exploring this. So I'd say there was, like, many moments where I was like, I can't do this anymore.

I have to completely stop this entire thing. But that, coupled with, like, the introduction of AI, made me get excited again. And when you run a business like this, when you don't have investors, when you don't have, I don't know, like, other business partners who are taking on other areas, like, as a founder, I think, again, other people may disagree with me, but I really believe that you need to be excited about what you're doing, and I wasn't. I hated it.

The clients were a complete pain in my ass, just being real. And I'll just be honest, like, I didn't like them. I didn't like the clients I was working with. We ended up refunding about 400 grand U.

S. dollars, by the way. It was like 430-something grand of refunds just for clients that we didn't like, and we were like, let's go all in on this AI implementation, haven't looked back since. So I think when you, like, there's a very fine line between— Pain of business growth and scaling versus, like, no, like I am burnt out as hell.

If I keep doing this, I'm literally gonna kill myself. And I had blood tests and all of my biomarkers were just off. And really for me, like, I started my first business, like a fitness, online fitness coach, built my brand there. And so for me...

That was like, whoa, like this is, that's the sign. So go get your bloods done, people. I know, and I just have. And I think the thing is, is I do it four times a year now because it's so critical.

I also get into a bit of hyper-focus of things, and I, like, when I'm loving doing something, I kind of get into that, like, love of doing, and you kind of start to hit a little bit of burnout without being conscious of it. So I have to kind of really check myself. I mean, one of the things you've said there, I totally agree with, because one of the founder problems that we probably both see a lot of the time is that a lot of people think you need more clients to scale, and this is kind of like what a lot of the online social posting is about. It's like, get more clients, get more clients.

And I believe totally in leverage, where you shouldn't need to get more clients, you don't need more resources, you just start working in a different way and you leverage what you have, and then you add additional revenue streams. So you've said that revenue is obviously vanity and profit is your freedom, and a lot of businesses will be adopting AI. One thing that I hear a lot is that AI has the ability to make mistakes, but also the ability to hide certain things that it's done wrong, and there's a bit of fear in the market still. What would be your take on that?

Yeah, well, to prevent AI from making those mistakes, you personally do need to still get involved and, like, review it, right? So I think if you're just blindly trusting it, then to be honest, that's completely stupid. And you wouldn't blindly, you know, trust an employee, would you? So why would you suddenly think an agent is any different?

A hundred percent, exactly. And so this is where, like, the interesting... Alignment of, like, human intelligence plus artificial intelligence comes in because if we just take away our human intelligence and just rely on the artificial intelligence, then, well, what are we left with, right? And I think ultimately I see the AI being able to take on the stuff that, you know, we don't want to do or that would otherwise take a lot of staff, etc.

Like, maybe it's easier if I give an example, right? So I right now, I'm not a coder by any means. I've literally never even looked at code. I don't know how to look at it.

I don't know how to read it. It's literally like looking at Japanese to me, which, by the way, I don't speak. So I can, as I said, just because I've spent time building these agents that can make stuff, they know exactly how I want it, the design, the user interface, etc., like, and what it should do.

I can now, because I've built an agent that's responsible for managing that project with multiple different sub-agents beneath it, I can literally just, like, send a voice memo or a text to it and it will go and build that thing. And then what I do is, like, I have a review agent review the copy, a compliance agent review the compliance, because compliance is a really important thing. And then from there, I have, like, a developer on my team who can actually review the copy and make it real. And so again, if you're building apps, if you're building tools for your clients, which I'm not trying to, like, sell the tools publicly, this is for client usage and for me to essentially white-glove implementation for clients, the developer can then actually make sure that there's no bugs and that it's actually built the right way and that we, you know, we have the right security in place, because, I mean, security is a huge thing.

So if you're trying to build AI tools and you're just vibe coding and then putting it out to the world, yeah, I mean, that's completely stupid. So you need to actually, you need to have someone on your team or yourself needs to actually look at what's going on. So that's kind of my answer there. It's like the social media post that we see.

I mean, you can tell when it's been written by AI. So simple things there that you can do is you can have a secondary agent make a very simple mistake. And to remove every em dash, replace it with a comma. So, and maybe put it some words in lowercase that should be capitalized, so then it looks like you wrote it.

Simple things like that. Yeah, I agree. And you see it with the language patterns and things like that. So you can remove the language patterns, and you can still use AI very much for ideation, but I think still the creation is always the human element that comes in.

Now, your personal brand, because I followed you for a while and we've been connected, has played a huge role in you building your businesses. So how does a founder turn their audience into a valuable commercial asset without becoming trapped as, like, the face or the salesperson or the delivery mechanism for everything? Yeah, well, building a valuable commercial asset is actually the key rather than building a personal brand. That's something I've changed my mind on in the last few years.

So just two or three days ago, I got my Instagram and Facebook accounts backed, and they were banned for three and a half months just for no reason. And a lot of people are having that issue right now. Spoken to so many people, even insiders at Meta, and basically Meta fired 8,000 people and replaced it with AI. And they're still learning, right?

It's still a company, right? It's not a magic thing. It's still learning and developing. So that's happened to me, a bunch of other people, and finally I got it back after a very arduous process.

But it gave me a lot of, like, time to reflect on, yeah, like, I actually never sat down and was like, this is the business that I want to build. That's, like, the company that I want to actually scale, because it kind of just happens organically when you have a personal brand. So it's like a blessing and a curse. And one of the ways, and I'll get to your question in a sec, but one of the ways to, like— For me, to decide what I want to do is extrapolate it.

So look 10, 20, 30, 40 years in the future and ask myself, okay, looking back, am I satisfied with that? And I saw myself even just 10 years down the line, like looking, if I just kind of maintain what I'm doing now, is that cool? Is it cool? You know, did I have a good time doing it?

And I'm like, yeah, it's all right, but it's not like really, like, great, you know? And so then what it made me realize is the personal brand is like golden handcuffs, because it can get you so far without you needing to build a cold traffic-friendly offer, without you needing to make sure that your product is completely so perfected like a SaaS product. And so I started thinking about different types of companies. Like I'd say software companies, B2B SaaS, right?

They have their customer retention dialed in. So how can I learn from that? E-commerce brands have their marketing dialed in. Like, how can we learn from that?

Then we have sales, sorry, door-to-door sales companies, like they've got their sales dialed in. So it's like, how can I actually look at how deep each of these kind of three different types of businesses have gone in those three different areas to then make my business like as good as that? And that's basically what I've spent the last three and a half months doing. And what it helped me identify is like, if I was starting again today, I wouldn't have been doing what I was doing, you know, four, five, six months ago.

And that's ultimately what's led us to go down more working with, as you mentioned as well, a smaller number of clients, much more intimately, doing more on one side and then enterprise deals on the other side. And basically, to answer your question, what it helped me see, and I see this in clients too, is that instead of building a personal brand, how can you build micro-niche authority? And there's a massive differentiator because a personal brand is like, and the reason why is because I think then you're able to actually build a company that you could eventually exit if you wanted to and, like, dominate in that space. Whereas a personal brand, it's really interesting, it's getting a lot harder now.

Like, I had a previous client that used to work with me. She started when she was a teacher, didn't have an offer or anything. Anyways, now she's got more than a million followers. She's making less than 10 grand a month from her personal brand.

She's come back to me now to fix that, obviously. But my point is, because there's so many personal brands now, and people launch all these different things all the time, there's not, like, clarity and direction. Whereas if you're building micro-niche authority, you could have different profiles, different presences for different topics, and you see people doing it. Hormozi's doing it.

You see MrBeast doing it. You actually see the big personal brands doing that because they know if they, like, just kind of launch something random to their personal brand, then it's not necessarily going to do as well if they've built an audience of those people who are specifically interested in that, like, one individualized topic. So that's how you'll see people with a small audience making a lot more money, maybe than people with a massive audience. Obviously, there are outliers, just like there's, you know, the football team that make it to the World Cup finals, right?

There's how many tens of thousands of others that tried to get there. So to answer your question, I think figuring out, you know, what is your offer, what are you selling, reverse engineering it from there, and the easiest thing to do is just figure out what problems do your prospects actually face, and you create content around that, and we can get really tactical on this. So let me know how deep you want to go. I love it.

No, I mean, I agree with this because I have multiple different Instagram accounts. I think we even have, like, nine. And the reason for that is there's different people attached to each account. So, like, the Billionaire Brain, you know, we're talking about neuroscience.

We're getting really specific about how highly successful people are doing things. We're getting into psychodynamics and things like that. But then on my, obviously, founder account... I'm talking about scaling founders.

On my agency account, we're talking about licensing brands. So we have different pots of people, but very lucrative. And I think it's actually having not a big account, but a mighty account of people who are highly engaged. Some of my smallest accounts have got the best engagement, but I'm actually talking with the people.

Like we're not broadcasting. We are getting into the DMs and actually having human, you know, conversations, which is quite unique in 2020, 2026. I love going down this.

of social media, because I truly believe that if social media disappeared tomorrow, my businesses would still survive because we built an infrastructure behind it. So, for instance, like my personal brand, I've started a Substack. Like three weeks ago, we've got 12,000 subscribers. Again, very niche in terms of what I'm talking about.

We have email lists of millions. And I think for me, it's—I didn't ever want to put my risk into one place because I get Instagram jailed all the time. Talking about making money, and, you know, it gets banned, and then we don't care for a few days, and then it comes back and we can talk to people. But again, having leverage across the multiple brands.

So in 2026, if you are a founder and you are scaling a business, like what is the one piece of advice on socials that you think someone needs to be like, I've taken this away today? Well, I lost my 128,000 followers Instagram page, my 50,000 followers Facebook profile, and my business was completely fine. And the reason why is because I aggressively generated leads from social. So I just see it as a traffic source.

Like it's business media and not social media. And when you think through that lens, you don't just grab your phone and take a picture of your lunch. Like I see founders doing stuff like that all the time, and I'm like, where is the strategy behind that? And so I actually asked them, like, when did you put together a strategy?

And they're like, yeah, like that's actually a really good point. Like I hired a VA or a ghostwriter to, like, write some posts, and then they're telling me, like, oh, but my ads aren't converting, my webinar's not converting, my social media is not converting. And I'm like, well, there we go. So.

To actually, like, have a lot of success, you know, on social though, I think switching that mindset initially, business media, not social media, putting a strategy in place is key. And the strategy ultimately comes down to knowing what you sell. It's to build your business. So if you know what you sell, which a lot of people actually don't, shockingly, they really think that they know, but they say that they do some consulting or coaching.

Have you seen that too? Oh my goodness, all the time. And the problem is, is the bridge is too far in terms of actually understanding what the key message is. So for me, I don't want my Instagram to be like, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale.

I want to be building relationships through there and having things like paid traffic that is just churn, churn, churn, churn, churn. And when you talk to a founder, there's two things that stand out all the time. They don't post with purpose. They're not actually looking at what they want the reader to think, feel, and do.

So again, it's just they'd be better off having a cup of tea and a Kit Kat. And then the second thing is, on a founder's level, when they're trying to sell the business, the core message cannot be repeated by someone else. You know, my message is always the same: scale founders, female founders to 100K months. Like, there's no kind of room for, like, ambiguity there.

Everyone kind of knows what it is. Yes, I do lots more things, but it's a very clear message. And when somebody comes to me on that call, there is multiple things that we would sell. It could be licensing, it could be a fractional CMO, CEO, it could be all of those different things.

But it doesn't matter. We don't get caught up in the semantics of what the vehicle is. We're looking at the outcome. So when you're thinking about founders, how do you get founders to connect to that message?

Because it's a big one, and I'm sure a lot of listeners are probably thinking, That's me too. Yeah, so to be quite frank with you, one of the, again, cool things with AI is like now we really just do it for them because they honestly, they just can't do it. Because I think it's because you're too attached to your work, especially if you, I mean, you've spent so many years building this business, thinking through it, working with clients and all of that. So the first thing is, again, I want to know what is the before and after that you do with your clients, with your customers.

That's extremely key. I'll give you an example. And the reason why I want to know that is because then I need to be, because then I can get into the psychology of who that customer is. So for example, like I had this one client who basically had less than 300 followers on Instagram for more than four years and had never generated a client from social media.

They just had to actually go into like these in-person networking events, getting referrals and everything. And I looked at what they were selling, and it was basically this vegan thing, okay? And I'm like, this is just never going to work. But they really wanted it to work because they were passionate about it.

You know, they were really, really passionate. And I looked at the problems that their clients were coming with, and basically every single one of them was coming with some chronic health condition. And I was like, bingo, there we go. So your positioning is obviously about helping people reverse chronic health conditions.

And in order to do that, we need to figure out what are the core, you know, three problems, because we want to build essentially content pillars that relate to that. And that was just really simple. The dude now, his username is Healthy Fit Bro. It's quite funny.

He's now got more than 40,000 followers on Instagram, and that was just a few months ago, and he's getting clients from social. That was the simplest shift ever, but it's because we looked at it like a business and not based on your personal values. Yeah, that was really key. And so I'd say for any founder that's struggling to figure out what your positioning should be, etc.

It's not about you. It's about them. And it's about what they want to see. And so one of the easiest ways to do it is if you take your sales calls, your transcript from sales calls, you can just dump them into AI and you can say, What are the exact quotes that these 10 sales calls, you know, said relating to their problems?

And then you can just look at those and you can spot patterns, you can spot trends. If you can't figure it out, get the AI to figure it out. And then you essentially use those words in your social, in your content, in your hooks. And I call that brainwave inception because then they feel like you're essentially reading their mind.

And that ultimately increases the trust in which they have in you because they see, Well, this person really understands me. They really get me. And one quick note on this as well, because I see it a lot, especially, funnily enough, especially with women who are posting content, and it's like they don't like speaking about themselves, so they just post their offer. And they post this really corporate branding, this really corporate visual.

I mean, I see it all the time, especially like on LinkedIn and sometimes as like Instagram graphics. I mean, just don't ever do that again. Why? Well, why?

Because then the platform sees like that's basically an ad, then they're going to penalize it. But also, like, if you think about the nature of social media, again, we're using it as business media, but our customers are using it as social media even if they're business owners. So if we think about it, what is the goal? Well, initially there are three goals, obviously: to get followers so that we can get leads, so that we can get clients.

But the first goal, if someone's a stranger, they need to see you, and then obviously we want them to follow you. So if we think about, like, imagine literally someone following you on the street, yeah, just as an example, would they keep walking behind you to chat about their problems if you're like, Buy this, buy this offer, join my cohort? Like, no. But if you're saying, Yeah, like, so...

You know, when you're going through this, like, I mean, I went through this journey and, like, here's how I fixed it. I mean, I don't know if it's going to work for you, but it might, right? Then they're going to be more likely to actually want to keep walking alongside of you, as it were. So I think just sometimes humanizing and not just thinking about it as, like, numbers on a screen is very valuable.

Exactly. And I think the thing here is, is with LinkedIn, it used to be my favorite. It took me so long to even move into the Instagram world. I've only been on Instagram like two, three years, and I'm loving it now.

But on LinkedIn, you know, I used to post a lot about some of my epic fails in businesses, and there was one post that I remember literally went viral because I was talking about a launch that should have made like a mil and did like 30K. And I was, like, really honest about it and, like, how much it hit me, and then what I did to fix it. Basically said, you know, like, I don't have all the answers, but you know what? I've had so many crazy epic fails, I pretty much know which things to navigate away from.

That one post within a day had generated people just reaching out to me to talk to me, booking calls, wanting to find out a little bit more, and that was an easy multi-six-figure post. And for me, I want to align to somebody so that they can relate to my journey. At the end of the day, if they're going to hire me, they want to know that I've done the thing that they're trying to achieve and that I can turbo speed it for them because I've done all the wrong things and hopefully I'll guide them on the right way. But I also feel like with social media, especially Instagram, there's a lot of the highlights and, you know, how amazing things are.

I talk a lot about some of the things that are pretty bad, and in this podcast, we talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. And this kind of brings me on to my next question, which is— There's always a time in a founder's journey that it was pretty bad, or like a decision or a setback that you really didn't think you were going to come back from, but it's ultimately put you on a different trajectory. It's like spurred you on. What was the worst time in business that you can remember?

Oh, I mean, I think there were so many. I mean, gosh, it's, wow. I think, well, there are obviously like simple ones, like what you just mentioned about the webinar, the tech not working. You know, you do a massive launch, the whole entire thing flops, right?

That's just kind of normal, honestly. Like, and I think the reason why I struggle to answer this question is because these things are like really normal. So yeah, they're like the learning curve, aren't they? But do you know what?

Some of my biggest mess-ups, like really stupid things, have been my biggest growth.

And if I hadn't had those, I mean, I remember once having, like, expectations around kind of, like, hiring a team and everything was going to change, and it was just an absolute disaster. But, like, who does it fall on? It falls on me. And it's until, like, you learn to drop the ego around these things and you're like, well, actually, I didn't brief them well, I didn't train them well, I didn't do the things.

What are the things then that you love failing about then? That's probably a better way of, you know, describing it. Well, no, I mean, I really like the initial question, and the reason why sometimes I struggle to answer this question is because, again, I do think at some point you do just normalize it. So if I put myself in my, you know, my old shoes about things that were just like, oh my gosh, as if.

I mean, I can remember one Black Friday, right? We made this entire campaign. I mean, the team spent months on it, and salaries-wise, I mean, it was hundreds of thousands that went into that thing. We launched all the ads.

I don't even know how much money we spent. And I don't know what, even to this day, we don't really, I mean, to be honest, if I was to analyze it now, I'd probably be able to figure it out. We literally made no sales on that thing. Nothing.

Like, literally nothing. And so, I mean, my team were extremely burnt out, and then I was just like, why are we selling this, like, low-ticket product? Because, like, we're kind of like a high-ticket business. And for me, that lesson was basically, okay, yeah, we just go with premium.

We don't work with beginners, because we were trying to basically get into, like, the beginners market, which was just completely off brand. And it actually really kind of damaged our reputation for a while because people were confused about, well, are we, like, a beginner brand or, like, are we going after these more sophisticated clients? I think that was, like, in 2021, I believe. And so, I mean, I just remember, and I'm not really explaining as clearly, like, I was literally, like, sitting on my floor on my laptop every night until midnight for weeks on end.

Like, really, I was working so much. I wasn't even, like, going to the gym. I was barely going outside. Like, it was really intense.

And the major one that came to my mind, which, I won't get into too much detail on, but I would say I hired a very senior person who was much older than me because I kept hearing, like, you need some adults in the business, right? Because I'm still, as of the time of recording, like, I'm still in my twenties. Kept hearing that. And so I hired someone, yeah, like, you know, a lot, a lot older.

And I didn't do due diligence on who this person was and what their track record was. And I was talking—I was actually just with her a couple of days ago, my former COO, we're still really good friends. Like, she ended up going on to start her own business, and she's absolutely killing it. I'm super proud of her.

We were chatting about it, and we were like, what did we learn from that experience? And the major thing is, like, well, he was all talk, but he didn't show the receipts. And we didn't ask for the receipts because we just, you know, he spoke really well. And because he spoke really well, we trusted him.

But we didn't actually ask for, okay, what's your track record? What have you done? What companies, like, us have you worked with? And that one was, I mean, to be honest, like, it still kind of hurts me even now because that one cost me, like, yeah, I mean, I did calculate the damages, and it was multiple millions just purely because of, like, opportunity cost and everything like that.

And it was a whole painful battle because it was just like the agreement went completely wrong, and unfortunately they, yeah. Anyways, I don't know how much I should and shouldn't say just because of this thing. I don't want it to haunt me anymore. I always love that when people are on a podcast, it's just like we're chatting again back in London because people forget.

I know. But this is good. You know, these are the gems, and I think it really helps for people to hear because some of the things are pretty damaging and, you know, they're very hurtful at the time. I always think 24 hours gives a different perspective on it.

I always try and move the problem as quickly as I can to try and get it rid of, especially with things like legal battles. I always say to people, like, if you can go back to someone and say, what would it take just to fix it, just to get it gone and just get the cognitive load out, then just do it because sometimes it's just not worth, like, you know, dying by the sword because you know you're right, but— Can you be bothered carrying it for another three months or something like that, just get it done. Well, three years or ten years, you know, crazy, one of these things. I completely hear you.

That's definitely a really cool lesson that I got earlier in my career as well, because I think, you know, it's like, for example, those clients that I told you earlier I refunded. You know, it's not like I didn't think I could get them the result. I knew I could. I knew it would have been painstaking, and there was like a potential risk in some of them based on their, like, kind of personality traits that they would have just been a complete pain in the ass.

And to be—pardon my French—but yeah. So I think just those things, it's like, how can you make this easier for yourself? Because our energy as a founder is so important. Like, we need to have a clear mind so that we wake up every day thinking about, like, that most important thing for the day, rather than like, oh, this problem, this fire, this person that is threatening something.

Like, and these things do happen. And I wish I'd known that it was a bit more normal, especially when, you know, let's say you're dealing with the United States. I mean, that's next level. Oh, and another one, just a quick one.

I did a promissory note, which is like a loan. Yeah. Basically, if you ever loan someone money, just know that you pretty much want to just write that thing off as a loss. Let's just put it like that.

That was a big one. I know, and it's hard. And I think sometimes we struggle with our kindness and our own belief systems and try and put that onto other people. I think the biggest thing I've learned is that my belief systems are my own, and I can't expect someone to be buying into the same level, especially in my own business.

So, you know, when we think back and we look at it, one of my favorite things to end on on my podcast interviews, because, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly is great, and obviously, you know, we've done great things as founders, but it always brings me a little bit of joy to find out what the most embarrassing moment for you has been in business. Because again, like my epic fails, I could literally write a book about these. I have done some crazy things. What would you say has been yours?

Okay, is it mostly women that are listening? Just to check. It is mostly women, but we do have men on the podcast as well, so yeah. Well, I want to tell you a— this one's just really funny, and it was really embarrassing because my cousin was working for me at the time, and, like, it was his first job and, yeah, anyway.

So I'll tell you another one after this, but this is, like, a very funny story. So I was, like, on a Zoom call because we used to do daily huddles every day with this giant ass team, you know. Thank God I don't do that anymore. And I always hated it.

I hated that call every day. I showed up, I was grumpy. I mean, to be honest, I'm sorry to all of my former employees because I was probably an absolute nightmare to be around. So we're on this call, and there's, like, a guy from my team who was, let's say, the role would be the equivalent of, like, you know, CTO, right?

But obviously it's a smaller team at the time, so not really a chief, but he's there, like, acting a little strange. And by the way, this guy's gay, so, like, I have no issues with that by any means, but this just makes it even more funny. So my cousin's there, and, like, this guy had always been a little weird. And we're on this team call.

We're on this team call, and next thing you know, the camera's pointing down there, completely everything. No. Oh my God, of course I had to let him go right after that. It was terrible.

It was so bad. It was awful. And my cousin was sitting next to me, and I was so embarrassed because it was one of his first weeks, you know, with my company, and I was really trying to, like, make an impression with him and everything. Yeah, so, I mean, that's not, like, me personally getting embarrassed, but it was just a very funny story.

And do you remember back in— this was in 2020— do you remember back in 2020, like, a few things like this happened? Because I was on someone else's mastermind call, and there was a girl, like, on there just getting changed and, you know, everything was hanging out. But yeah, so I was already, like, Zoom native back then, but I guess others weren't. But for me personally, like, the most embarrassing things— oh man, I mean...

In some kind of interesting ways, it may sound a little strange, but I actually don't really get that embarrassed because I just kind of do stuff and see if it works, and if I don't succeed at it, I just take it as, like, evidence of, you know, okay, let's just not do that thing next time. And I think when you're doing stuff online, there's literally no need to be embarrassed because you can always just delete something if you need to. I actually used to do this thing for a while when I was, like, on a personal development journey, where I would do something every day that would put me out my comfort zone and make me feel awkward. So as an example, like, I'd be getting my hair dyed, and, like, I'd walk out of the hair salon and then just, like, walk around, you know, while it was, like, baking in my head because people look at you like you're doing something weird.

Or, like, I would, I don't know, a simple example, one of the most basic ones is, like, go to a coffee shop and, like, ask, Oh, can I have the coffee for free? You do something that's, like, a bit awkward. So I kind of, like, made myself a little immune from embarrassment. So I'd say that the one that I told you, though, was definitely the most embarrassing one for me, because usually the things that we think are going to be embarrassing in the end are not.

Like, if you're speaking on stage and you mess up, in your head you're embarrassed at the time, but no one knows. Nobody actually has a clue what you were going to say. So internally, yeah, I felt embarrassed, but there's no reason that you need to.

That way. So. I love this. This reminds me of, like, you talking about doing these things that make you uncomfortable.

When I was in my, like, teens, early twenties, I used to do a thing every day, and there was a book. I don't even know what the book was called. I think it was called, like, Sow a Seed of Anarchy, and it had 365 days, and each day you had to do something that made you feel really uncomfortable, like, go into a supermarket and walk off with someone's trolley with utter confidence, like it was yours. Exactly.

Yeah, those type of things. Yeah, yeah. I didn't read that book. So this is a thing.

This actually existed. I'm going to have to find this book for you and see if it still exists and send it to you. Yeah, well, those things, I think, build resilience because, I mean, what, it's embarrassing if you're on a sales call and they hang up on you, or you make a cold call and they tell you to screw yourself. Those are kind of embarrassing, right?

But whatever, like, no one saw it, and you're probably obviously never going to speak to that person again. So what can you learn from that to do better next time? Yeah. I think some of my most embarrassing things, like, they, you know, I look back on them and I don't think I would be embarrassed about them to the same degree now, because I think you just, you create a different sort of identity around it.

But, like, in my twenties and things, there was some horrific things. I remember walking into a boardroom once, and it was awful of men, and it was, I was really struggling to kind of carve out in a woman in tech who was, like, 21, like, the whole confidence around me. I walk in and the door handle gets caught into my shirt. So as I walk straight to the boardroom, I'm like, Hi everyone, and, like, all the PAs are, like, rushing to kind of, like, do my shirt up.

But do you know what? I just carried on, and that was actually the turning point, I think, for people, because they were like, Well, do you know what? Like, she just came in and she did it and she didn't even flinch. It actually was the thing that just kind of got me settled into that boardroom of men, and they kind of took me seriously, even though I just flashed everything at them.

Oh, that's funny. But also, I think it's an interesting point because, for example, those sort of experiences, like I haven't really had those in-person interactions. And so I think that's why doing those things and forcing myself to do them was really important. Because again, like I've really always been online, and so that's why I'm very, like, online native.

And it's not really, nothing's really embarrassing if you're just kind of, like, behind your screen. Yeah, there's a distance between you, but when you're there in person, it is different for sure. Oh, 100%, completely. Yeah, yeah, that's very funny.

Well, there's plenty more. So if people are looking to kind of follow you, see what you're doing about AI, and they're interested in finding out more, where is the best place for people to find you? Yeah, on YouTube, I'd say you can type my name, Lauren Tickner. And then, I mean, Instagram, Lauren Tickner, LinkedIn, Lauren Tickner, Facebook, Lauren Tickner.

Pretty easy. Well, unless my Instagram and Facebook go down again. That's why, that's why, people, we've got to have this multi-platform agnostic strategy because, I mean, content is just content in the end. I always find it interesting when people obsess over, like, this one LinkedIn campaign or whatever, because in the end there's, like, small nuances, but words are words, and, like, the idea is the idea.

And if you actually build that social strategy, like we discussed earlier, it works on all the platforms, and sure, some you'll probably be more popular than others, but it's literally just putting the words in a different formation. Yeah, so it's just a different format, isn't it? It's like the same as Substack, like everyone's going crazy for that. But I've always liked writing, so for me it's just I'm just writing and then testing it out.

Some, like, go really well, some don't. And the first one that we sent out, we got, like, my first paid subscriber. I was like, well, hey, who knew? But I don't really put any attachment on the outcome.

I'm just, like, testing all the time. And, you know, even if you reached a small subsection of an audience on there, then it's kind of done its job for me. So what's your parting gift? One thing that you want to tell our listeners before we sign off.

So I'll give some examples of cool stuff that I've done with AI. So I just got a little, like, ding in the corner of my laptop screen right as you said that, so this will be a good one. So what I did is I wanted to basically find, while my Instagram and Facebook were down, I was thinking, okay, so what are some cool things that we can do now that we don't have those platforms to, I don't know, maybe just try and nudge some clients, bring in some sales, etc. So what I did is I went through our email list and basically identified anyone with a business domain or Outlook, because, I mean, Outlook is also a high-value one because it's usually bigger companies using Microsoft.

So went through that and disregarded any phone numbers that aren't really in the countries that we serve. You probably know the ones. And basically built a list of a few thousand really good quality prospects. Anyone can do this.

First step, AI did it all for me, to be fair. And after that, what I thought to myself was, okay, how can I get in touch with these people in the best way possible that they're going to reply or want to have a conversation? And what I did is I essentially set up an AI workflow, which takes their domain, looks at their website or looks at them on LinkedIn and finds something that they've just done recently or what they're all about. And then essentially sets up this agent, which on a daily basis emails 15 to 20 people, basically saying something along the lines of, Dawn, your new podcast looks really cool and your Substack article about blah, blah, blah topic is very inspiring.

Are you still looking to generate more leads and clients from social media? Because a few months ago you signed up to our AI content system training. If you are, I've got something that might be quite interesting for you. That email sent.

So it tailors it in person. It all automatically, completely automatically. And then three days later, it will follow up basically saying something along the lines of like, you know, are you no longer blah blah blah, looking to whatever it is. And so it also connects with what they've done in our CRM.

So this was really simple to set up. I just told it basically, you know, you could literally take the transcript part of this podcast and put that into your AI and be like, hey, build something like this for me for my offer, and it will build it for you. And so now, instead of like needing to do a cold email campaign or whatever, again, same process. You get the leads on your list, and then you treat them like cold, and it sends it one-on-one straight from my Gmail automatically.

So it's not sending from, like, the reason why this is cool is because it is not sending from my, like, whatever your email service provider is. Email marketing tool. It's like a business's usual one-to-one email. Yeah, it's literally like me actually sending it because it is.

I mean, it's my, you know, my AI assistant doing it for me. And so it's just like, I would say, if there's something that you want to do in business now, ask yourself not, how can I do this? but what would I need to tell AI to get them to do it perfectly? Yeah, and test it.

And no one's going to die. No one's going to die if it doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, that's a really good tool.

Okay, I might go try that. I might get one of our team to test that out because I think that is a really nice way, actually, of just kind of reaching back out, personalizing things. And I think in a world of AI, the more personalized we can get, the better conversions and things we're going to get. So thank you so much for joining us, Lauren, and lovely to see you again.

Hopefully we'll catch up again next time you're back in the UK or I'm in London. And yeah, just have a great day. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me, and thanks to everyone for listening.

Thank you.