001. My Story: From Side-Hustler to Full-Time Entrepreneur

The long wait is over & my podcast, The Empowered CEO Show, is now officially on the air!

Welcome! I am so excited today because I really wanted this first episode to give you guys a bit of a background into who I am, how I got to where I am today, and a bit about what I do.

I thought I would first introduce myself for those of you who may be new to me or if you haven’t been around here for a while. So, let’s begin with that. I am Elley, obviously, and I’m a mindset and business coach for aspiring female entrepreneurs.

I basically help ladies to turn their side-hustles into full-time businesses so they can do what they love every single day. I’m in my early to mid-20s, and I live in Australia, so enjoy my Australian accent.

I’m a personal development junkie, I absolutely love, love, love personal development. I’m ever investing in coaches, programs, workshops, and I love listening to podcasts and of course, I love reading books on anything personal development.

I’m a huge believer that everything happens for a reason, and although we can’t control the situations that happen in our lives, we can one-hundred percent control how we choose to react to them. So, that’s the basic overview of who I am today. And next, I wanted to give you guys a bit of a background into the journey I took to get to where I am in my business.

What You Can Expect From the Podcast

Before I dive in with my business journey, I wanted to give you a bit of a plan as to what’s to come with the podcast. My plan is to have a mix of both solo episodes and guest expert episodes. We’ll talk about all things side-hustling, personal development, and business because, like I said before, personal development is a huge part of who I am. I really do credit a lot of what I have learned and who I am today to my personal development work, and I wouldn’t be where I am without that side of things. So, I’m going to be sharing side-hustling, personal development, and business.

I am not going to sugarcoat things. Sure, I’ll be gentle and nurturing sometimes, but sometimes you do just need to hear it straight or, you know, cutthroat as they say.

I’ll also be sharing lots of personal stories from my own life experiences, like growing a business from nothing, and of course, all that comes with that. We’re talking mindset struggles, imposter syndrome, accomplishments, dealing with negativity, and the rest of it.

This will not be a straight cookie-cutter approach. I am aiming to get a new episode out each week for you ladies, but sometimes that may just not happen. And I wanted to be really honest with you and tell you why. I am someone who prides themselves on delivering quality over quantity. It’s the age-old saying of quality over quantity, so if I’m not inspired or in my absolute best state to record episodes for you guys, I won’t.

I don’t want to push out half-assed, shitty content. I don’t want to give you subpar stuff. I want to give you wholehearted, really juicy, really quality-driven content. So, I want you to know that it is my aim to do that weekly. I wanted to let you guys know that and be really open and upfront from the very beginning.

I want this podcast to be a place where you can come and binge-listen to me in the car on the way to work, on the tram, wherever it is, or at night just before you go to bed so that you can soak up some daily goodness.

If there’s anything that you wanted to see or any guest experts that you would love me to host on here, send me a DM on Instagram.

Listen to the rest of the episode here:

🎙 Listen on iTunes – elleymae.com/itunes
🎙 Listen on Spotify – elleymae.com/spotify
🎙 Listen on iHeartRadio – elleymae.com/iheartradio

My Beginnings In Business

Okay, as I said earlier on, I really want to give you guys a bit of a background of my journey, and how I got to where I am now in business. If we go way back to the very beginning of my journey—we’re talking when I was 15 years old—I was in early high school and I got my first camera. (I promise you, I’m going somewhere with this.)

So, I got my first camera at about 13 or 14 years of age. Then I pretty much started shooting all sorts of random things (photograph shooting, obviously). I started taking photos of trees, photos of puddles, and cats and raindrops, and all these random things. Honestly, I still have pictures of all these things to this day, just to look back and reflect on. And laugh at it because it’s so funny to see how far I’ve come.

I didn’t do a university degree or anything like that. I basically got my first camera as a young teenager and started studying photography at school. I got into portrait photography from doing “editorial photoshoots” with one of my friends at the time who was doing that photography class with me. (Shout out to you, Erin.) Then I started getting asked by family and friends to do photography for their events, so birthday parties, christenings, new babies that joined the families, and of course, family photoshoots.

So, at this stage, I think I was about 14-15 years old. I started my first photography business at 15 years of age, and I started taking bookings. From then on, I did family photos, babies, editorials, and eventually, I went on to do weddings, which was just insane. So, between the ages of 15 and 21, I was obviously in high school for quite a lot of that and then working full time as well, but I worked with loads of different families and I ended up shooting around 10 weddings. All while studying at school and then working full time at a retail store. The retail store kind of ended up being a super stressful environment. It caused me to have panic attacks, to be physically ill before work every morning, and I left there crying every single day. And then, of course, I later had to resign.

That experience fueled the fire to get me to where I am today. I was only 18 or early 19 at the time. But I believe that age is just a number and you can start as young or as “old” as you want. So, it was really hard for me being in that super stressful environment at my day job and then trying to build a business on the side because of that toxic environment at that job.