I built a business I couldn't leave for a single day.
I sold it in 2011. That was the key experience, not the whole education.
I have run businesses online from the start, the honey had its own shop. Over twenty years I walked into every trap myself: the tools that promise to save time and cost a day a week, the systems that need you more the bigger they get, the offer that only becomes concrete in a call. Nobody ever built me a way out of those, so I made it my job to become the person who solves them.
And I have the strictest measure I could ask for at the kitchen table. Avianna tells me straight away when something we built takes more than it gives, because she has to work in it every day. A business that lets someone work from pleasure is not a slogan here. It's the standard I get marked against.
I started with honey, straight out of university.
A honey brand with an online shop and delivery to specialist food retailers. I sourced, I packed, I sold, I did the books. It grew, and the more it grew the more of it ran through me.
There was no week I could step out of. Not one. If I stopped, the orders stopped. I owned the whole thing and it owned me back.
The brand is still going. It's called imhonig, it's still made to my original recipes, and it still sits in places like the Viktualienmarkt in Munich. So the product held. What was built around it didn't.
I sold it, and for a long time I read that as a failure of stamina. It wasn't. It was a construction problem. Nobody had built the business so that it could run without the person in the middle, and that person was me.
A business you can't leave for a single day isn't a business. It's a room you locked yourself into.
Ten years in the yoga and personal development world.
Three of them running my own studio. Two non-profits founded along the way. I was inside the industry I now build for, on the other side of the table.
What I saw there, over and over: people with genuine depth and real skill, whose businesses were held together by their own constant presence. They had done years of inner work. Nobody had ever built them the structure to carry it.
I've gone down more than once and got back up. That's where most of what I know comes from. Not from a marketing course.
Avianna's brand is the clearest thing I've built.
She works on what carries a person. I build what carries their business. It's the same split I now build for other people, and we tested it on ourselves first.
She started with a few hundred private followers. Around a hundred women show up to the free session every week. She lives off this work now. No side jobs.
The sessions, the app, the referral system, the email sequences, the membership, the launches, the payments: every piece of that ran through my hands. It's public. Go and look at it.
I advise at exactly one point. Everywhere else I build.
A consultant tells you what to do and leaves. An agency does what you ask, even when it doesn't hold. The one point where I advise comes before anyone picks up a tool: what gets built in your business, and in what order. The offer and the price first, then everything that has to run behind it.
The deciding is part of it, otherwise I would be the agency. From the inside the missing piece is usually invisible, simply because you're standing in it, so somebody has to look in from outside once before anything gets built. After that you get honest feedback before you set off in the wrong direction, and at the end of the week the work shows up as something that exists, rather than a document about what should exist.
Pleasure needs something to hold it. That part is my job.
For ten years I took this for a marketing problem.
The people I describe above weren't bad at selling. What they lacked was a structure, and building one was expensive. A sign-up page, an email sequence, a checkout, a membership area: that took a quarter and a five-figure sum. With a niche of four hundred people it never paid for itself.
So it got built by those who already had money, and they usually had a different idea of what for. That shaped the world we have: what got built wasn't the best ideas but the most affordable ones.
About two years ago that stopped being true. I now put up over a weekend what I would once have written a proposal for and costed at a quarter. That's why I do this, and why I'm doing it now rather than in five years.
Whose hands these tools end up in has a say in what this place looks like in thirty years. I would like it to be people like you, working on others coming out more whole than they went in. Which is why you now get the same technology built for you that until recently only went to the people who already had money.