If you could start a business with a mere $800, would you ever expect it to become a multi-million-dollar enterprise in less than two years? Sabrina Phillip envisioned what her life could be like and then set out to make it a reality. But how does a 29-year-old make a consultancy business that spans the globe and makes her a millionaire?
A Troubled Childhood Leads to Disaster
Philipp grew up in a divorced household, with her mom remarrying a man who was controlling and emotionally abusive. For years, he would withhold presents from her father and tell her that her biological dad didn’t love her. This emotional abuse would continue well into adulthood.
Philipp recalls a particularly distressing birthday when her stepfather told her that her father didn’t bother to buy her anything because he didn’t love her. This continued abuse became a regular thing for her and led her down a path of alcohol abuse. It eventually culminated in her dropping out of school.
A Breakthrough Moment and Making Up Her Mind
Most entrepreneurs have that “Aha!” moment that wakes them up to what they want to be and do. During one of her counseling sessions, her therapist told her that it wasn’t about what other people were doing to her that mattered but rather what she was doing to herself. It made her realize that many of her problems came from how she felt about herself.
Business is a personal thing that requires you to know and love yourself to move forward. That realization allowed her to push herself out of her comfort zone and see who she could be. The person she wanted to be was a six-figure business owner, someone who would take charge of the situation and make decisions.
Finding Her Niche and Her People
Philipp decided her role was to help others do what she realized she could do. She developed a consultancy business that would set the pace for her life and how she wanted to live it. This decision saw her book a one-way ticket to Bali with just $800 to her name. With this meager baseline, she started working to make her dream a reality.
Initially, Philipp thought that being a travel blogger and trading accommodation for reviews would work out in her favor, but the industry proved too tricky for her to get into. She pivoted quickly, shifting toward consulting. The internet was her saving grace, allowing her to spin up a business that anyone could connect with anywhere on the globe.
An Iterative Method for Landing Clients
Philipp’s success stems from her methodology for landing clients. Instead of coming up with an online business that she thought would work, she approached it from a customer-centric direction. For many new entrepreneurs, looking at it from this perspective is strange, but there are no rules in business, just a measure of what works and what doesn’t.
The approach that she adopted had to do with finding the people to whom she could offer her service. From there, she’d gauge what they would pay for the service and then adjust to find the route that best suited both her and her clients. Philipp is adamant that you don’t need to scrap an idea if it doesn’t seem to work; just tweak the details until you find a spot suitable for everyone.
Setting Up an Online Business
As open as the online business world is, Philipp realized she would need a proper business structure if she intended to work with clients. If working internationally, like she intended to do, she would need to understand the nuances of being a consultant in different locales. She advises newcomers to focus on certain areas at first. Set up the business with legal protections for those jurisdictions before branching out.
The second most important thing is locating where your clients spend their time online. Clients won’t know anything about you or your business approach, so you have to spend time getting them up to speed. Unlike a scattershot approach, locating and tapping into a digital hub gives you access to your preferred clientele directly.
Thinking Your Way to Success
When asked how she could scale up so quickly from a small enterprise to a massive multi-million dollar business, Philipp admits it was a combination of luck and preparation. Her mindset guided her towards building a six-figure business. She was already thinking like an entrepreneur, so it was just a matter of adapting herself to that level of business.
Believing it would happen was only the first half of the process. The second half entailed putting in the hard work. Her first job was running social media ads for a site for $12 an hour. Yet, from this humble beginning, she could make money and develop testimonials for her work that she could show others. Leveraging these low-paying jobs, she built up to higher-paying clients over time.
Scaling Up Through Outsourcing
Like other entrepreneurs, Philipp realized that she wouldn’t be able to do all the work herself and decided to outsource to scale up. Yet, for each employee she hired, she would ensure that they were as passionate about what she was doing as she was. The second part of her massive business growth came from leveraging consultancy with companies that trusted her expertise.
Before too long, she was efficiently managing multiple million-dollar businesses, running a consultancy business, and keeping up with the latest trends in social media. Philipp’s business made her a millionaire at just 23, but she’s exploded as a consultant, and her services are highly in demand from many different areas of the world.
A New Way of Doing Business
The thing that stands out about Philipp’s success is that she didn’t start from a well-prepared family business. She forged this herself through her own hard work and effort. She knew what she wanted to get out of life and kept that goal in mind. Today, her consultancy business is worth a lot, but she doesn’t intend to sell it anytime soon.
Instead, she works with clients she wants to, helping them to discover their own talents and build their businesses. At 29, she works less than fifteen hours a week and travels wherever she wants. Philipp shows us that one doesn’t need a million dollars from someone to build a business worth a million dollars. All they need is the right mindset and a little bit of luck.
