School drop-out to 17 year old entrepreneur - my business story (389)
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In almost 400 podcast episodes I've told a lot of other peoples' business stories, but never my own. Until today. I love hearing peoples origin stories. It's equal parts interesting and affirming to be reminded just how messy and in my case - accidental - the early days can be.
Tune in to learn about the first business I began age 15, the reason I quit school to be a professional elf (seriously, that's true) and how a hotel breakfast led me to run a business at 17.
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Hello and welcome back to the podcast where I simplify the strategy behind building a business that you actually want. And we get honest about what growth really looks and feels like behind the scenes. I'm your host Alice Benham. I'm a business strategist, speaker and the founder of on it. Now, there have been almost 400 episodes here on this podcast, which is crazy to think about all of those hours of me chatting away and talking with other people on the internet. Now, what's kind of crazy as well is that in that time, I have actually never done a dedicated episode where I tell my origin story and talk about how I quit school at 16, started a business at 17 and now age 28, 28, 28. We'll keep that error in. I'm human. How I kind of got to where I am today. I've told a lot of other people stories. I've had amazing entrepreneurs on to talk about their early days and I love hearing about that often very kind of random way that we all find ourselves running businesses, but never done it for myself. So I figured what better time than now. I've had my August off break. I've taken a bit of time out to realign my marketing strategy, which is something I will speak about in a future episode, give you all the behind the scenes gossip and why I decided to do that, what it looked like to kind of quit my marketing and yeah, kind of how I'm now coming back, hopefully better than ever. But until that episode, let's dive into my origin story and hopefully give you something interesting to have a little listen to whilst you're going about your day. If you're on a walk or doing some work at your desk, I will say I'm not sure this episode is going to be packed full of practical tips and strategic insights. If you want that, go and scroll through the many, many episodes that we've put out over the years. Hopefully this is just an interesting listen. Maybe you'll learn something new about me. Maybe I'll also get you thinking about your origin story because I definitely found when I was prepping for this episode, it was quite emotional to think back to the very early days. I know for a fact that if my past self could kind of see where me and the business kind of are today, like she'd be so proud and excited. I mean, she'd be very bemused, I think, as to even what it is that I'm doing now. But I think it's good to remember that where you are today is something that your past self jumped off. So maybe this episode inspires you to have a little think about that as well, or maybe like me, you're just nosy and you love hearing about people's stories. But without further ado, let's dive in. As I mentioned briefly in the intro, I fell into the world of business when I was 17. I also quit school at 16. So bit of a kind of unusual route to working for myself. And I feel like there's a bit of context for my teenage years that kind of sets the scene as to why those were a set of decisions I ended up making. I feel like looking back, I can so clearly see that the person today that runs a business and absolutely loves it has just always been there. I can see myself as a teenager, almost just like bubbling away and loads of the things that I now do in my business today. I actually feel like when I was a teenager is when a lot of those things kind of started to come to light. I think the first thing to say about my upbringing and kind of me is that I have the most incredible family. I'm so grateful to be able to say that statement out loud. And my parents, particularly, I massively credit to helping me to do what it is that I do now. My parents are both very involved in running quite a large church. I grew up in a very church led environment. And for me, that was a really positive thing. I grew up seeing my parents not just have a job, but have something that they feel really passionate about. They were always kind of showing me what it looks like to lead with values and impact and kindness. There's definitely parallels, I think, between church and a business, like they kind of operate in a, you know, similar but different way. It's obviously a charity, but I feel like I saw a lot of that behind the scenes. And even just little things, like from a fairly young age, I was pretty comfortable on a stage holding a microphone in front of quite a lot of different people. You also naturally in that environment get very confident speaking to different people and being in different environments. So I feel like a lot of those kind of soft skills that I use in my business now were really honed when I was younger. And definitely seeing my parents do something that they were so passionate about kind of got me excited, I think, to not just kind of have a job, but build something that really felt that aligned for me in the same way that their jobs felt so aligned for them. Speaking of church,
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