In this episode, I go over my story. It all started back in 2009 with a really useless eCommerce course that taught me nothing except that there was something called dropshipping….
Entrepreneurship is not easy and I want to share the ups and the downs of this journey.
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Transcription:
My name is Emely Roman and I have a multiple six-figure marketing firm that has helped impact-driven businesses amplify their message and reach millions of people on a weekly basis. Last year, we surpassed 1/4 of a $1,000,000 dollars. Okay, I know that sounds impressive, but there’s a movement of unique female entrepreneurs that has been keeping me up at night. The rise of the modern-day huntress is the documentation of how I built a highly successful service-based business, the hard knockdowns, my transformation from being a solopreneur to hiring the right people to becoming CEO, and moving The Foundry into the corporate ocean.
I am also documenting every single step of building a second business, making it sustainable and then profitable. The tactics, the mindset, the theory, and the execution and the stories of women who are behind this movement and are building an empire of their own. Join me as we lift you up and transform the standards of the modern-day female entrepreneur.
Hey guys, In this episode, I wanted to share a little bit about my story on how I came into the online space, right?
And how I started actually making good money that obviously paid the bills and allowed me to grow.
I think that my journey started back in 2012 actually in 2009. I had just got married. I was trying to find work. I couldn’t find any jobs at that point. I was 19 years old, and, yes, I got married in 19. I couldn’t find any jobs. I was too young. I didn’t have experience and I wasn’t going to college at that time.
I had just recently moved back to the United States. I was living in Costa Rica before that for three years. I had a really hard time because, at 19, I had no experience, no actual corporate experience, and was super new to everything. I was getting really frustrated because I had no job experience and I was getting “no’s” left to right.
I had gotten like $1,000 from a tax return. I invested $900 on a course that was going to teach me how to create or build an online business through E-commerce on that course was horrendous.
Let me tell you there was no information on that course. It was just giving me a list of things and a couple of videos. I just didn’t know what it was. I knew that I had to go look for stuff from China. But I didn’t know how to market. I had no idea that the course was horrendous. If only I could remember the name of that course, I would say right now. But I can’t because I don’t really remember it.
I think I was so traumatized that I ended up just forgetting what the name was of that course. But anyway, it did not work. Fast forward, three years later, I finally kind of got my groove. I started going back to school. I actually started going to college. I was doing my 9 to 5. I was also going to college full-time. And then somewhere along the lines, I ended up getting into saying to myself, I’m going to try this whole job shipping thing again.
And what I did was I started contacting all these companies that had shoes. I found a company in New York that would sell like an entire palette of shoes and it would be like 40 pairs of shoes of all different sizes and all different styles. And around that time back in 2012, the whole E-Bay thing was happening. We were all like everybody was selling like brand name sneakers. I was like, I need to get on that.
But Nike, the actual Nike sneaker was so expensive. I remember one day, I actually thought I had found a wholesaler. Little did I know, actually, like the brand that’s Paris sneakers came from China, and it wasn’t a brand name. The Nike logo looks completely like it was not the Nike logo. Okay, so anyway, I bought the palate from these people in New York. I started actually selling on eBay, I did sell all of my palette. I made, like, two grand off of it.
But the problem was that I actually have spent like $1500. It was really all this work to package and it was just so much work. I gave up and then I went back to work. At that point, I just kind of said to myself, You know what? I’m just gonna chill like I just gotta work. I’m gonna try this whole career thing. I’m gonna do customer service and after that, I’m gonna do this.
I’m gonna move up the ladder. I’m gonna do my best because, you know, if you do your best, you’re gonna get rewarded for doing your best, which actually that’s not true, guys not in corporate. Not in real life. In real life, even if you do your best doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re gonna reap what you sow, right? I’m over here getting promotions, working my butt off. People get promotions that I deserve because I have more experience than them and I have a higher degree.
But for some reason, they got better promotions. Mind you at that point, I am like the top performer in my department, right? Always. I’ve always been like that. I’ve always done my best. I’ve always been a top performer. Not like, don’t ever question whether I try. I actually tried my best because I always do like that’s just how I am. Anyways, so fast forward, I ended up like finding this amazing company to work. I got a job.
I was working. I was getting rewarded for my work or so I thought. You know, every time I reached the milestone, they would give me a commission for it and they would give me more money. They would give me rewards, and I was super hyped. Then after that, they promoted me to as a business analyst. I was just like, living my best life, but then I actually wasn’t. I actually was super depressed. I just felt like there was something more for me. I just didn’t know what it was.
At that time, I actually ended up separating from my husband. We were just in a bad, bad place and for me personally, I was in a really bad place. I just was super unhappy. I feel like I was working too hard and I wasn’t getting enough rewards. I’ve always been that way. I need to make sure that I’m getting the same level of input back to me, right? Like if I give you this much I want to get back what I input.
I thought it was a balance situation in life where it could be that way. But anyway, so I ended up quitting my job. Once I quit my job, I had no idea how I was gonna pay my bills. I had a new car, an apartment, and I was living on my own. It was just really crazy so I did Uber and Lyft for a very long time for like three months or so. I think. It wasn’t really long time.
I did Uber, but I felt like it. While I was actually doing share rides, I actually, found out about blogging. And after that, I realized that in order for me to be successful in blogging, I needed to get into the whole sponsorships thing. So traffic revenue wasn’t really the price. The primary way that these bloggers were getting money. It was through sponsorships from brands. But in order for me to get a sponsorship, I needed to have an audience. And I’m like, OK, so how do you build an audience?
And I started researching about social media. I started getting tons of ads at that point on Facebook about being a social media manager. Even though I was actually looking at how to build an actual following. I was getting information about being a social media manager. So while I was testing all these things I was doing. I started my own YouTube channel. I started my own blog, obviously. And then I had on Instagram account that I built to like 2,000 followers at that point. If I wasn’t getting enough revenue, I remember the first time I got a check from Google.
It was $100 from four30 days worth of work because I had to share my blog. I had to do a lot of things to get that traffic for that $100 check. I did a lot and it wasn’t again fast enough for me. So I started delving into freelancing after that. I realized that everything that I had learned up until this point which was writing good content, making sure that I was providing value, social media, building a presence, all that other stuff like, actually, I could be a social media manager because I had the right skill sets to do that.
I had the experience, right? So I went ahead and I started pitching to clients. I was really, really bad. I failed at it time and time again. My husband and I – we came back together. My husband was working full-time. He knew that I was super sick, depressed, and he wanted to support me. He wanted me to find happiness wherever that was. And I was like Oh my gosh, like, how do I make at least $1500 is a month. Like I can do this, I can do this.
If I can get three clients at $500 a month, I can do this. And I did a lot of things to try to figure out how I could get these clients. But long story short, I ended up cracking the code on how to pitch clients, how to create my own system of filling my pipeline, which is, you know, really, the queue of clients. I got into tons of masterminds courses. I spent so much money. I think, last year, I spent like over $45,000 on education and self like self-improvement material.
Europe before that God knows what I spent, but I learned a lot of things along the way. I learned everything from actually feeling like you’re worth being invested in. I remember the first time I decided to get into a mastermind. I picked that mastermind over my mortgage. I said, you know if I can get what I need from this mastermind. I can actually rely on myself. I needed to understand that I could bet on myself and that you shouldn’t bet on anything in life.
But if you are gonna bet on something but on yourself because you’re never gonna let yourself down. I needed to learn about that. I needed to learn that lesson the hard way. I also learned a whole lot more like finance I am really bad at it. And I needed to hire the right people to take care of my finances to coach me too. Like, walk me along the way. Because as I started making $10,000, $ 20,000, $30,000, $40,000, and $50,000 like I didn’t know what to do. I started getting overwhelmed with that money.
Last year I wasted around $36,000 of my entire passive income of last year. I spend it and I don’t even know where I spend it. And that was when I realized that I needed to get a professional to start teaching me about finances and how to handle that. It’s something that I think a lot of people that start from nowhere from nothing have issues on. You know, it’s also one of those things that like if you don’t know your finances or how to manage them. You can’t expect to continue to grow in that particular department until you learn to master finances. You know, it’s really weird because it is I said it is Woo hoo stuff, but it’s true. If you want to be worth it making money.
If you want to be worth somebody giving you $5000 to $10,000 dollars for your services. You have to learn how to respect that money as it comes in. You have to really be able to master how that works. I’m still working on it, but I now have a professional with me that walks through it with me. You know that I’ve hired coaches that work with me on a monthly basis, and it’s based on the dreams that I have of buying a really unique property in Costa Rica and living in Costa Rica.
It’s about the goals of me being able to serve people at a different level and impact thousands, if not millions of people through the messages that I have. It’s a sob story because I thought that it is what it is. I come from nothing like I really do. I come from nothing. I was raised on a farm in Central America. I remember when I was little, I used to play barefoot and I would smell the soil. My grandmother would make Gallo Pinto, which is rice and beans, and my cousin and I would go out on these exploration adventures and stuff.
And as I grew up, I didn’t think that I was gonna amount to much. And as I started going up and became a young woman, I couldn’t go to college like everyone else. Chris and I didn’t have the money to afford to go to school and just focus on school. I had to go to school and do full-time work and somehow managed to pass those classes and to not be late for work. I had to do a lot of things in order to get to where I am today.
And there’s a big message that I need to just put out there that you know, no matter where you come from. Even if you feel like you come from a negative, you can change your entire paradigm. You can shift your mindset. You can shift the cards that you’ve been dealt with. You can use those things to actually empower yourself and actually push yourself to do something for yourself and again, like betting on yourself is the best spent, the most sure-fire way that you can do that.
Actually, it’s the best that you can actually count on. Do you know what I’m saying? So anyway, that’s essentially my trajectory. I wanted to cut it short, like these episodes of me talking are I don’t want them to be too long.
But that’s my entire trajectory from again being born in Central America in Costa Rica all the way to where I am today. It’s been a long journey. I have put tons of sweat equity in my business in my life. I struggle with self-worth.
I struggle with feeling like my worth being at the forefront of a movement on my worth. You know, pricing my services at the agency level for what it is because we started $3500 a month and we require a six-month contract, but it wasn’t always like that. You know, my husband is witness to what I struggled with were like a service that you know that you’d value at 1500. Emily would charge like $500 for it because I didn’t feel worth it off pricing myself that much.
And these were things that I needed to kind of like really breakthrough. Because if I didn’t break through these 15 pricing situations, for example, I would never be able to actually afford to hire out for, you know, this work to other people because even the least expensive person who provides just as an excellent standard off of results will charge $1500. That would be the cheapest, you know. I had to learn that in order for me to serve my clients in order for me to pay well to those that are actually by my side, I needed to price myself.
And again, you know, I’m still working on it. It’s not something that I have completely mastered because I would be lying to you if I said that I already mastered is. But it is something that I’ve learned. It is a lesson that I hold dear to my heart because even if I wasn’t a business owner, even if something, God forbid, happened today that tomorrow I have to go back to my 9 to 5. I know my worth now. I know that I’m worth so much that I can actually go out there into the marketplace.
And I feel like I’m extremely marketable now that I bring a lot to the table. I’m not afraid to raise my voice and actually say what I need to say and speak my mind on really position myself as the leader that I am supposed to be. But you know, it wasn’t always like that. And I wanted to tell you guys a little bit about my story so that you guys to position this podcast so that you know that I’m just not talking crap here.
My journey has been really tough. And even though it’s been tough and there’s been times where I’ve been extremely depressed. I’m in a good place now and I want to bring you guys with me on this journey. I want you guys to find the transformation, find the calling, and find that purpose in your life so that you feel so confident and so strong in who you are that literally nothing stops you. But anyways, end of ranting, I will talk to you guys in the next episode and stay safe.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Rise of the Modern Day Huntress. I’d love to know what the biggest take away for you was and for you to connect with me. You can find me on Facebook or Instagram at Emily Roman Phl. But if you really want to help me and love for you to go subscribe on iTunes. By doing this, the movement will grow and impact many more female entrepreneurs like you and me.
