How She Built A $5K/month Business From Her Bedroom

This is Lily, an entrepreneur who owns a $5,000 per month business working entirely for herself. And my name is Simon Squibb, and I've been in business for over 35 years with my most recent startup being valued at over $50 million. In this episode, Lily's going to explain the exact steps she took to quit her nine-to-five and start her dream business, and I'm going to give her the steps she needs to take this business to $10,000 a month. And feel free to copy this blueprint. This is valuable no matter what stage you're at in building your dream. Let's go. Right, Lily, let's talk first quickly before we get into what you did and how you did it. What is your business about? So it's a wellness brand. I started out doing candles, and then I expanded to workshops. How long has it taken you from starting the business to when you first became profitable? So I started two and a half years ago in December 2022. And I probably became profitable around seven, eight months in. So seven, eight months in, using the formula we're going to explain to people now, you became a profitable business and you started with the savings you made while you were working somewhere else. We're going to go through now the six steps that you went through to make this business work, which people can learn from. So let's start at number one. What did you do first to make this business happen? The first thing I ever did to even think of this business is I got a candle kit off Amazon. I was going through back a bit of a rough time and I just wanted a time, like just something for myself to like take my mind off things. And I got a candle kit and I made one and my mum was like, I'll buy it off you. And I was like. Your mum became your first customer? Yes. That's great. We all need our first customer. That's it. So your mum became your first customer. That's amazing. So I made a Shopify account. Literally no experience, nothing. Just made a random website and I put my candle on there for $5.99 and she bought it. This is genius, by the way, buying it as a business. It's brilliant. I'm just very impulsive. And then my friend was like, oh, I'll buy one off you. So then I just started, I did a wholesale order of candle stock and I just started posting them and then my friends are buying them. And I literally just started from there. Straight away, this first lesson, let me translate it. It doesn't matter what business you're starting. You only need one client to get things going. So what happened next? So my local gym, I messaged them and I was like, do you mind if I do a pop-up store here? And I just messaged loads of places and they said yes. So then a month later, I went to my gym and did a pop-up store and I made £850 in one day. See, another great lesson in this. If you said, oh, I want to open up a shop, people's instinct is to go and, you know, raise big money on Dragon's Den and then go get a very high fixed cost location. You went and asked people if you could just use their kind of space, like the gym space. It's brilliant. So you went and did a pop-up. Oh my God, you sold £850 worth of stuff. What did you do next? Obviously, I did my social media at the same time. I remember my dad sent me an Instagram DM and he'd seen like an ad on his Instagram and it was like pop-up from Westfield and he sent it to me. And I was like, why would they ever accept my brand? I've literally been going for like six months. And I sent them an email like, hi, I'm Lily. Like, here's my brand. I'd love to be in Westfield. And they replied back like, yeah, we've got this date available. And I remember, I'm sure I've got the video on my phone. I was in my room crying. You overcame what could have been a limiting belief, right? Your brain said, why would they accept you? You're just new, but you tried it. So they accepted you. Then what happened? And then I went to Westfield. I was there for a few days and I did my pop-up store. Gained loads of customers. Gained more of a following. And I just kept doing pop-up stores. That was like what I was doing until I started doing the workshop. So I was doing that for about a year. Right. So you started your social media pages. You were doing these pop-ups. You were losing money though still at this point, right? Is this four months, five months into the process? And you're still losing money. You're starting to make money, but you're still overall cost-wise losing money, right? I was buying too much stock. I was getting excited. Okay. So this £400 budget got out of control. Way out of control. And so you started buying more stock than you could sell. Yeah. And that etched your savings, which caused you a bit of a cash flow problem, right? Okay. So then what? You started to learn to reduce the amount that you buy. Which again, another great lesson because a lot of people, they do do that. They do buy 10,000 t-shirts and then they can't sell them. If they buy 1,000 t-shirts and sell them and you work out how to sell them, then you can order 5,000 and then sell those and learn how to sell them. And this is where, okay, so he's not making money, but people like the product. What was the next thing you did? I kept doing my pop-up stores until I did a pop-up store once with someone and they were like, we should do a collab. And that would have been my first ever collab. And they have like a cafe and they said, you should do a candle making workshop. And I've never done a candle making workshop before with anyone. So I Googled like what I'd need. I bought all the stuff and it was about seven people. It was a really small workshop and I loved it. I just love teaching people. That literally, that day like changed my life. And that's when I started doing my workshops. So again, you said yes to an opportunity that some people might have said no to. Oh, workshops, I've never done that before. Most people say no then. So entrepreneur-minded people, don't have to be entrepreneur instinct people. Entrepreneur-minded people say, I'll try it. Then what happened? You realized you could charge for these workshops. And then tell us what the process for people to learn will happen next. So I realized that I'm making more profit from doing workshops. It's like over like 85% profit margins doing them. And I realized that's where my money is gonna come in. And I need to focus more on workshops. So yeah, I've got a little studio in the back of my garden, which I did up. Okay, so people started coming to your home and doing workshops, then what? And that's literally where I am now. So people are just coming and doing workshops. And you've just hired someone to help you. And you've just paid yourself a healthy, finally a healthy salary. So pretty amazing. One of the things you put here is you've been using social media. Was there any sort of hack or anything you can teach people about your social media strategy? I think just be yourself. Love that. And I think also rejection is redirection. I don't mind getting rejected. Oh God, great mental framework as well. I'm just myself. Okay, so look, this is the framework you've built to today. And I think a lot of people can learn how to build a business with just a little bit of savings and a little bit of gut and the right frame of mind. You can build a business where your salary is replaced by the business you love doing. And then no one can fire you, right? Only you can fire you now, right? And you're building a brand which has value. Lily started her dream business with £3,000 that she saved up while working at a care home. But I'm gonna give you the chance today to win £15,000 to make your dream a reality and transform your business. I've partnered with Adobe Express to create the ultimate pitch deck template that anyone can use to bring their idea to life. But first, you can pitch to me virtually from anywhere in the UK. All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning this money is submit your pitch deck on helpbank.com. The competition is open to anyone in the UK with a dream. Let me show you how to do the pitch deck. It's really simple. It's been designed to allow you to simply create exactly what investors want, what potential partners want. Luckily, with the Adobe Express ultimate pitch deck that we have designed, this is made super clear and you can remix the template to make it relevant to you. One way you could do this is using image generation to get your point across. You can use the generate image feature to do this. On slide 7, I want you to illustrate the size of the market opportunity. One way you could do this is using the charts and grids feature to create and customise graphs to illustrate your point. On slide 11, I want to hear more about you and your team. I use the remove background feature to edit the image to fit into my style. You can enter by creating your pitch deck using my template and entering by helpbank adobe lockspace using the password dreamofadobe. An independent panel will judge the best pitch deck and one of you will win £15,000 and help to fund your dream. Full terms and conditions can be found in the helpbank lockspace. Good luck. Let's talk now about what you want to do next. So there's three things you said you need my help with. Okay, so how to get partners, which I'm going to go through with you. Concept scale, how to scale and then community. I'm actually going to start with scale. Okay, because I think it's very important for people listening and I think for you to maybe just explain what does scale mean? Sometimes we build businesses and I built 19 companies, okay? And I have in that journey realised that I don't want to personally build a big company anymore. I think I can build a big company by having, in my company, I've got 41 people full time working on helping people with their dreams. But I have eight people that I work with and those eight people each have their own responsibility and they can go off and build an even bigger team. So I know myself now. I'm not a very good manager. I'm visionary. I'm a leader, but I'm not a manager. But I learnt a long time ago that scale can be a dangerous word because you can scale it into something you don't personally want. What does scale mean to you? It's important to define. What does it mean to you? So I just want to have a place or a few places where people can come and create their own candles. I want like a wellness area, basically. Right. So you kind of want a wellness centre. Yeah. And how many do you want? Like five. Why five? Just like a few in the main cities. I don't want to get overwhelmed with it at the moment. Right. Having five wellness centres will be quite an overwhelm. I think you want to ask yourself why. I tell you what, five physical wellness centres today, you want people to feel connected and so on. You might find, ironically, the community can deliver a lot of this. And these wellness centres don't have to be managed by you. It could be that you partner up with people that have spas, for example. And then you do a franchise as a concept. And you let each of these spas run this franchise, which does your wellness centres. So then you don't have to run them. You don't have to do rates, do the rent, fit it out, manage it. Now, of course, you can hire a manager. I would say five stores is maybe a bit small. You'd need to get like 10, 15. Then you can hire someone to do all that running around, a manager of all the stores. Five stores might be a bit tight. But I kind of think, how you built the business to begin with, I think you should carry on. Can you instead work with every spa in Britain to open up a candle wellness centre and workshop programme? So they make money in the spa. They'll know when their quiet times are. And you don't have to run it. You literally send them a kit, right, with your branding and your structure and your training video. And then, yeah, sure, maybe some of them you want to go along to. But you could have 100 of these operating every week. I've also thought of doing at-home candle making kits too. So that could also be part. Yeah, you go back to your roots, which is how you first got connected to this. My suggestion on scale for anyone listening and for you is to think about what you want to do. So you, right, and think about your working day. So for me, I'm building a tech platform. I don't want to be building any tech. I don't even want to be involved in the tech development. I like to meet people and help them for real. I like to make content that helps people at scale. And I want to be in the streets meeting people and understanding what they need. So maybe do this exercise for yourself too. And figure out exactly what you want to do. And then figure out, OK, if you want to scale, you're going to probably need someone that understands wellness centres. And they're going to come in as your partner and they're going to run them. But I think much more scalable, my instinct is, this kit partnership business with spas and then selling to consumers direct, as you say, kits. I think that'd be brilliant. So this scale conversation, once we understand your baseline, then helps you get partners, OK? Because partners are, let's say, I think, co-founders. They're brands. And there's other influencers. So let's talk about how to get each of these. Getting a co-founder, I actually think you're at the stage where you should think about this. Every business I've ever had that's worked, I've had a co-founder. Someone that has exactly the opposite skills to me. Same moral code, exactly the opposite skills. So personally, I'm not very good at accounts and finance. So I like to bring someone in that can take care of that side. So knowing your strengths and weaknesses is pretty important. And so at school, they teach you the opposite, right? They say, right, you're getting a D in biology. You've got to do more biology. No, if you're getting an A in something, double down on it. If you're getting a D in something, get someone else to do it. It's just not your passion. It's not your interest, right? So I think co-founder. And then write down the things you like to do, the things you think you're bad at. Now, when you have the things you're bad at and the things you don't like to do, you can begin to do a job description for your co-founder. Now, how to get a co-founder? You can go and look on LinkedIn, and you'll look at people who are running wellness brands, and you can go see who the number two is at that company. They probably don't own equity. And you can go to them and say, I'm going to build the world's most exciting candle wellness brand, and I'd like you to join me. Most of the time, number two is actually earning good money. They can invest, and they can work. And hopefully, they can do the things you don't love to do. And you've done the groundwork to kind of show a proof of concept. Workshops at scale could make money. Selling candles at scale could make money. So you've kind of taken a little bit of the risk out, because you've got a little bit of a formula there. Now you just need to put a system in place to make that formula scale up. Okay, brands. Brands are actually really simple to get on board. People always make it very complicated. Formula for getting a brand on board is very simple. What is the brand's objective? And how can you help them achieve it? So this may be the wrong example. Let's pick Nike, right? Nike could sell candles. Nike could do a promotion with candles. They could do, I'm sure they've got some relaxed range coming out. They're trying to compete with Lululemon, I'm sure, right? They're like, we've got a relaxed yoga line coming out, and we want everyone who buys our product to get a candle. So then they'll make branded Nike candles with you, and then either sell them in the shop or give them away. And if you walk around, you'll see advertising. You'll see what all these brands are trying to achieve. And then, like you just said about approaching a Westfield, you just message them. And you say, I see you're doing a yoga range. I want to help people relax while doing yoga. Would you like to do a partnership? And the worst thing is they'll say no. No, but they probably won't. Because they don't have the micro influence. They don't have the backstory you've got. And they're not in the candle business. They won't really want to do candles. Now, they might get into candles and buy you later. That's a whole different thing, right? But brands, it's very simple. You understand what they're trying to do, and then you reverse engineer what you have to offer to those brands. Any brands jumped in your mind? We can try and do a quick case study. Lululemon. Well, exactly what I just said. Lululemon. Interestingly enough, Lululemon, because they're doing yoga already, they should be doing it. Yeah. So go to them. But what's interesting is if you can go to Nike, who aren't seen as yoga, right, and you can help them be more yoga, you might actually get more money out of and more luck with brands like Nike. Now, if you can't get hold of the founder, then go to their marketing person. So like Gymshark. Ben Francis has founded Gymshark. Very busy guy. Try. Reach out to him. He'll love your story, by the way. And then you can reach out, if you can't get hold of Ben, to Noel, who's head of marketing. So I'm sure if you reach Ben or Noel, they'll probably want to do something with you. Now, they might say not today, maybe in six months' time. But reach out to them all and try. Right? And that's how you get brand deals. It's really, really simple, but no one actually does it. And then finally with influencers. I mean, every influencer is different. I believe with all my heart that influencers are the new big businesses. So influencers can launch businesses instantly with near zero marketing cost. It's already happening with Mr. Beast and Chocolate Business and all these YouTubers making brands that are launching and becoming big businesses. You know, Kim Kardashian launching Skims. Prime. Prime, exactly. But I think what not a lot of people are doing when they approach influencers, they're like, oh, here's a candle. I hope you like it. And then they may or may not do something about it. And then they might say, oh, I'll pay you 5,000 pounds if you promote my candle. And even then, maybe they will, maybe they won't. If you go to them and say, you're in the wellness space. I notice you love to do yoga and your videos do really well showing yoga poses. Would you like to be a part owner in a candle company with me? Now, there's two ways to do it. You can either give them equity in a whole range that you do separately or part of your business. You can actually get influencers brought as partners and then they can do the marketing for you and support you to grow whatever your final vision is. But again, I think influencers, the model is you send them something they like and they just support you. That's worth a try. Then you have an agreement where you pay them and they promote you and that's their job. Or, and I think this is the future, you get influencers in as business partners. So if you give 2% to Kim Kardashian, it's worth every day of the week, isn't it? And if she puts it in one video, you'll sell out every single day of the week for the next three months. I've had influencers have my candles before as well. And she posted my candle and I got about like 2,000 followers just from that one post. And so definitely try that model. But I think that's quite an exciting opening conversation. If you say, hi, can you please promote my candle? But if you say, look, you know, would you like to launch a candle range with your brand on it and you promote it and we share the revenue? Of course, why not? And that actually brings me on to community. Because community to me, there's two things important about community. Number one, the value you bring the community. It's not what value they can bring you, it's what value you can bring them. And the second thing is support. Right? Accountability. Nobody makes it on their own. Nobody. So you start it off with your mum and then your friend and then those friends of friends and then the people at the pop-up that bought into you in the brand. You have built up, or I'm going to guess, 200 people there that we call true fans. People that love you. You need 1,000 to build any business. I'm guessing you need 800 more. 1,000 true fans that all tell 10 people about you today. You can launch anything, do anything. But to get 1,000 true fans, you need to bring them value. So how do you bring them value? Well, I mean, this is a form of value, you know, where we don't keep the knowledge to ourselves of how you made it just so you're the only one in the world that's making it. Share it. Right? That's value. What are we asking for people in return for watching this video? Nothing. In my case, I make money on the YouTube video and I make money from my sponsor and I use that money to fund people's dreams. So everything I'm trying to do all the time is bring value to my community and I'm not extracting value. I don't say to people, oh, you can only watch this video if you pay me 10 pounds. It's not that you can't do that, but in a way, you're giving and you're taking. Right? So I can make money from you and then I take money from you. And what you want to try and think about with communities, how can you give value without value being extracted? Because that's how you build powerful communities. Now, it doesn't mean say you can't charge for your candles. That's your core business. Yeah. What can you bring to your community that's value? And then you start basically doing a mind map around this. So what is the community value you can bring? And it could be events. Let's say events, right? Okay. But don't underestimate behind the scenes. You know, just you showing what's going on, you know, your experience, what's happening. Yeah, you're making them. You're coming here today and you're feeling about it. Like include people in the journey, right? This actually has a lot of value. People underestimate it. They go, why would anyone want to know? People want to know. They want to feel a part of it. Make the community feel part of it, right? I think then for community, there's also like let the community talk to the community. So it's one-on-one. So you create a way of your community connecting to each other. So you can use platforms like Discord or WhatsApp groups, you know, a place where people can say, oh, I made this candle and then they share it with the community. And they go, oh, I made this candle. You're not even there, right? And suddenly there's a whole 200 people that turned into a thousand people all chatting in this community about the candles they made and inspiring each other and having fun. Now, you don't have to spend any money initially. You can use WhatsApp and any sort of free product like Discord. You want to create a place where your community can share their love of candles. That's my goal. So I want like an app where people can come together and even do like meetups so they can like meet each other. But you don't need to build an app straight away. Literally, take these 200 people and create a WhatsApp group. Start that as my base. And you basically say, share your candles. And all it is, is people posting in their candles. Keep it moderated, right, initially. It's not people putting in there how difficult a day they're having. You don't want any of that yet. You just want to get, if you can get a thousand people in a WhatsApp, there isn't an investor I know that won't want to invest in it. Now you've got a thousand people that are interested in your products and they're willing to promote you and they love you and they support you. You don't need to build an app yet. So what I suggest for this community piece is you spend time thinking about all the ways you could bring value that don't of course hopefully cost you too much. And I do think things like letting the community talk to each other. Behind the scenes you're going to do anyway. Events you're probably going to do one or two here and there. Because as entrepreneurs we don't have bosses but communities can keep us accountable and make sure we don't slip or get lazy. Yeah. All right. So that's my quick take on community. Useful? Very. I hope you guys got some value from this video. If you did, please hit the subscribe button or let us know in the comments if you have any questions and please follow Lily if you want to be inspired. Thank you so much for listening. We're off to have some chicken now. Do you eat chicken? Yeah. Okay.