135: She made 1 million in her side hustle but that’s not her definition of success with Fiona McKenzie
She made 1 million in her side hustle but that’s not her definition of success
Fiona McKenzie, a two-time participant in the Goddess Embodiment Sisterhood (my mastermind), shares her journey of creating businesses to address personal challenges.
She joined us for the Seven Figure Flip campaign last year, and today we delve deeper into her story.
We discuss how true success is not about hitting the seven-figure revenue mark but about something much more profound and personal.
We highlight the importance of being passionate about the problem you're solving, starting small with a minimum viable product, and iterating based on customer feedback.
Fiona McKenzie emphasises personal growth and family values and also stresses the importance of continuously enhancing their app based on user feedback to stay competitive and meet customer needs.
This is an inspiring episode you will get a lot out of!
If you LOVED the episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag me @essential.shift and @myfitprostream.
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KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS
How to define success
What it looks like to run a side hustle
Behind the scenes of running an online app and building a startup
SHOW RESOURCES
LEARN more about the Goddess Embodiment Sisterhood: HERE
FOLLOW Fiona on Instagram - HERE
Check Fiona’s WEBSITE: HERE
Join Fiona and many other women in business in The Circle Membership - HERE
FOLLOW me on INSTAGRAM - HERE
Find out more about how to WORK WITH ME - HERE
If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me @essential.shift.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Fiona has over a decade of experience as a digital product manager and has been a dance fitness instructor since 2014. She is the founder and CEO of My Fit Pro which is a live streaming platform built from the ground up specifically for fitness professionals. They are a Telstra Award Finalist for advancing women. Fiona is a mother of two daughters. She totally escapes and enjoys the quiet with a cup of tea and a chocolate or two.
Bless it be.
With love, Laetitia!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Laetitia Andrac 2:54
Hello, Fiona. Welcome to the essential shift podcast.
Fiona McKenzie 3:07
Thank you so much for having me.
Laetitia Andrac 3:08
It's so nice to have you again on the show. You came for our seven figure flips campaign last year and it's so nice to see you again for another episode and this time only focused on you. And your business journey was my fifth probe before we get into that nitty gritty conversation. Would you mind introducing yourself as a human beings to sharing anything about your energetic blueprint or your upbringing, whatever feels right for you to share? Sure.
Fiona McKenzie 3:33
So my name is Fiona. I'm a mom. of two girls, and that's a big part of my life. They're aged six and almost eight. I also have a fur baby who's turning 11 shortly as well. So that's my family life. I'm a Sagittarius. And from what I learned from a veteran business with you a little while ago is that I'm a Peter which is really interesting because I get very passionate about things and I always say to someone, I'm all fired up about something rather and then when I went there, Peter is like the fiery personality. It was just a perfect match. Oh, yes,
Laetitia Andrac 4:06
you're definitely Oh, Peter, thank you so much for introducing yourself. So today we're gonna talk about my FitPro which is a beautiful tech startups that you created. Before we get into more detail about your journey as an entrepreneur. I'd love for anyone listening to this to learn about your origin story, how my FitPro came to be, where does this idea come from? Can you share a bit more with us?
Fiona McKenzie 4:31
Yeah, so for my day job, I work in it. I'm a digital product manager and project manager and I've done that for 15 years now. But on the side, I teach a dance fitness class and I've done that for 10 years. I just celebrated my 10th anniversary last month but when we went into lockdown in 2020 I very quickly had to find a way to continue to teach my class for my customers, not just for their physical well being for but for their mental health to have that hour of fun to look forward to when you're stuck at home. But I tried all of the usual suspects I tried Facebook I tried zoom WebEx, you name it, I tried it and none of them ticked all the boxes for me in particular for using copyright music when you've paid very expensive licensing fees to be able to use that music. And with my background in it and my husband and co founder who's a web developer, eventually we took matters into our own hands and thought we can build something better. But originally it was just meant to be for me like to serve to solve my personal problem of finding it very stressful, finding a platform to teach my class and then I shared it with a friend of mine who's also a dance fitness instructor. And she said Fiona, you have to tell everybody, this is amazing. We are all stressed and we're tearing our hair out and we're crying and we're exhausted after every class. So I hopped onto Facebook into a Facebook group with another couple of 100 instructors in it. And I wrote this timid little message like oh, you know, I've built this thing and I think it's quite good and it's very nice. Is anybody interested? And of course they were all, you know, banging down the door wanting to try this thing. So I ran a quick demo for them. And straightaway there were dozens of them saying, How much does it cost? And I said, let me get back to you because I've not really thought about you know, this could be a business and of course we had to cover our costs. Because running a video streaming platform isn't inexpensive. But all of a sudden we had hundreds of people who needed our help and it became a business.
Laetitia Andrac 6:26
I love that I love that story. And I loved when we met you had already developed this MVP and having your you know first hundreds of customers on board. And I know that we started with a personal problem. And some things that you were really passionate to solve and what I always say to anyone who wants to create a startup create a tech business is you need to be completely obsessed and passionate about this journey. Right now as I'm creating a side hustle, which is around helping parents of neurodivergent children is exactly that we started developing this solution for us as a family. And as soon as I started sharing with friends on a road like this, wait a sec. Yes. And I think that's
Fiona McKenzie 7:11
exactly but you need to be your own first customer. And if you're not deeply passionate about what you're developing, and that's where the pedal fiery thing comes into it. If you're not deeply passionate, you're not going to love what you're doing and really want to throw everything into it. And for me, turning this into a business was all about helping my own community. So my community of fitness instructors knowing that their businesses were getting shut down and these are other people just like me were families and kids and mortgages and bills to pay. All of a sudden having no income at all knowing that we could help them survive through this really difficult time was such an important thing for me. And for my husband as well.
Laetitia Andrac 7:48
I love that. And when you started creating my feet Pro and witnessing the growth, what has helped you the most in the business journey in those moments of messy starting up or you know all of that what has helped you the most because I'm sure many listeners hear in that moment where they may have an idea or they may have a minimum viable product or they may already have a scalable product offering or software as a service like you always have to as a service business. What has helped us the most,
Fiona McKenzie 8:24
I think two things are actually the most helpful for me in my journey and looking back the first one you mentioned already is minimum viable product. Don't wait until you have something perfect and a beautiful logo and you've had a design and make it look all amazing and perfect launch with the very very bare minimum which we did we launched with no logo, no fancy branding, no nothing just a product that worked really well and people could see the benefit in and then you build up over time and make it look more attractive and all that stuff. But the second one, and I learned this very much the hard way is to have the confidence to charge what you're worth. Because when we started and I had these people asking me how much does it cost to use your platform? Alex and I, my husband, we sat down and we worked out okay, what's it going to cost us per user to be able to host their live streaming video and all the data and the bits and bobs that get connected in and then how do we make sure we're breaking even and maybe make a little bit on top because this might take up a little bit of our time and very quickly a little bit of our time turned into a full time job. But we priced ourselves intentionally very low to help these people because we knew how much they were struggling but then emerging out of the pandemic when people were starting to flourish a bit more in their businesses. And we realized this isn't going to be viable for us long term to keep going at this incredible fast pace and meeting all of their needs but earning next to nothing. We need to raise our prices and that did not go down with some of them well at all. So I think looking back in hindsight, if we charged what we were worth to begin with, I think everybody would have been happy to pay that and we wouldn't have set ourselves up for almost failure like we've put we've turned it around and it's all good now but that was a really tough time for us and a very difficult mindset to overcome this you know, charging what you're worth and not feeling bad about it was really hard.
Laetitia Andrac 10:16
Yes. And this is unfortunately a very, you know, a very real stories that's many listening to this podcast may face. How do you make sure that you're charging your worth and you're charging towards the impact that you want to have in the long term so that you create a sustainable business with sustainable profit and all of that, rather than trying to help everyone and please everyone, but I think you've changed everything so beautifully because you're adding new features and you you show them the value of paying more even though just should have paid straightaway this price but you've done such a beautiful job in people writing and everything. So do you want to explain to us how do you run this business? You mentioned quickly, Alex, but how does this business run? What does it look like? You are having a full time job running this business? Like can you explain a bit more the behind the scenes of course that I know all of it because I've been your mentors, but I love for the listeners to be able to understand a bit more the behind the scene. Yeah,
Fiona McKenzie 11:13
for sure. And it's changed over time. So when we started, it was literally me and Alex in the garage over a weekend putting together a proof of concept and then sharing it with a few people. But basically straightaway it turned into a full time job for Alex which was amazing because at the side of the pandemic, he had no income at all. He was a job keeper and we were thinking he's going to have to get a job at the supermarket packing shelves or something like what are we going to do? So that became his full time job and it really did take up seven days a week for him onboarding new customers and developing new features. I've always been there sort of in the background but also as the face of the business and taking care of the marketing and managing the product backlog and project management all that kind of stuff that I do in my day job I transitioned into doing that for my cute Pro as well. But the team had to grow quite quickly. We could not keep up with the amount of development work that we needed to do to make enough features to make sure our customers had everything that they needed. So we very quickly, I think within the first couple of months had to hire a second developer named Ian who actually lives in Scotland. So we're a very global team. But one of the key challenges that we have in our business is that the majority of our customers aren't in Australia. They're actually mostly in the US with a few in Europe and the UK and South America as well. So when our customers have support problems, and they need help, they email us and it's usually coming in when we're asleep Australian time. So we'd wake up in the morning to you know, half a dozen tickets or so. And we'd feel so terrible for these people that they've been waiting for an answer for hours. But in the meantime, we had this amazing customer of ours one of the instructors using our platforms named Laurel, who was always helping people out in our Facebook group answering people's questions and just super helpful and very, very knowledgeable. So we hired her she now works for us and looks after all of our support while we're asleep in Australia, and she works flexibly as well. She's a mom of three she homeschools her kids, but she's able to work for us, you know when she has time. If she's at a softball game, she can do it on her phone. If she's at home. She uses it on her laptop. So we're a growing team all working very flexibly from all parts of the world.
Laetitia Andrac 13:24
Yes, and you are back to your full time job. Ryan, do you want to share Yeah, you run this business? Well, having another job, and boy
Fiona McKenzie 13:35
I have lots of jobs donate. Yeah, so being the mom is you know, the most important job and probably the most challenging, isn't it? But outside of that I have a day job in corporate which I currently do three days a week while my kids are little. And then I do two days a week on my FitPro but it's I mean realistically it's not two I have two calendar days dedicated to it but it does creep into every single day of my life, which I kind of enjoy. And on the side as well. I'm still teaching my dad's fitness class. I have four classes a week three of them or at night and once on the weekend. So it's a it's a very busy schedule, but I managed to get it all in.
Laetitia Andrac 14:12
So that's very good that I managed to get it all in and you basically have to side hustle on top of three days full time job which is quite demanding one how would you get all of this without burning out?
Fiona McKenzie 14:27
I think actually last year, I was getting quite close to having a second burnout. And I was very lucky to have you helping me through this process and for a very long time. The goal was I need to quit my day job so I have time to focus on my side. Hustle, which isn't like it's not a side hustle. It's a legit business and it really does take a lot of attention. But at the same time last year, I had one kid at school, one kid at preschool only two days a week so she was home with me the other days and it was very, very hard to find time for all of it. So last year, with your help I did I took the courage to burn through all of my long service leave to prevent myself from burning out. And now that both of my kids are at school five days a week. I do have more time to fit it all in. So I think that was a really a saving grace for me to be able to take a step back from my paid day job really focus on my daughter before she started school, which was just you know, precious time that I'll never get back. And now that she's at school, I do have the time to manage all of it. And I think for a long time I was so obsessing over I need to quit my day job so that I can do better with my startup. But I've realized now that that was really a challenge because of not having five days a week to myself. And now that I do I actually do have time for both and I didn't want to quit my day job because I didn't like it. I actually really loved my day job and I know I'm doing really important work there. And that it's it's very important. It's very satisfying to me and I am contributing back to society with that job as well. And now I have the opportunity to do both which I really love.
Laetitia Andrac 16:04
I love it and thank you for sharing that Fiona genuinely and transparently because I have witnessed you going through those different phases. And I really know that a lot of people are trying to sell us this is a way of success. This is what your success look like working full time on your business generating a million dollar and this is what we call out as a seven figure flip campaign. This is what it is. This is all Allah when actually no, it looks different for each and every one of us and for you now it's I think this three day is is very impactful and positive impactful job that you have. plus running my FitPro press running your dance classes. It is all coming together and I'm very proud of you for doing that. So which guided me through the next question, which is all about what is success for you in your business? How would you measure success now that you've gone through this whole journey, you know this 360 full cycle journey? Because you were here for the second figure flip campaign where we're calling out Stop the bullshit about reaching seven figure. But actually a few weeks ago you sent me a screenshot of the million dollar in revenue since starting this business as a side hustle. And we celebrated that because we knew you reach that without having to do things that were unethical or burning yourself out or things like that. So would you like to share with us what success looks like for you in this business journey? Yeah, absolutely.
Fiona McKenzie 17:33
And I think it's really interesting that we recently did the seven figures flipped campaign, and we've been talking about how you don't need to have seven figures to be successful and that's all a bit bullshitting. Whatever. And then I've kind of accidentally done it. I haven't been tracking that number. And it wasn't until actually Ian, our developer in Scotland messaged Alex and I said did you realize we've just cracked over the seven figures and he sent us a screenshot and that's the first time that I realized, but I think all of that stuff out there about earning a million dollars and all that. I don't personally have a million dollars that's come in from the business. That's what the business, gross revenue has come in and generated. But basically all of its gone back into the business. So when people talk about how much revenue they've received, that's not how much they've got to spend on themselves. It's a little bit of, you know, spin, isn't it in a way, but for me, it's very much not about that number and I am super proud that I can say we're in the two comma club now for our business. You know, we've had that million dollars of revenue but for me, the big success is in firstly helping all of those predominantly female owned businesses survive and now thrive after the pandemic, but also running the business in a way that's in alignment with our family values and having time to spend with our kids while they're young and working flexibly. So at the moment, Alex and I twice a week, I go into our kids school to volunteer for literacy groups. So we're taking time out during the morning to go and help the kids learn to read and write that is so cool and it is so cute and the look on their faces. There's joy and absolute delight when they see mom or dad walk in the door to come teach in the classroom. That's something that I couldn't do if I didn't have my own business where I can set the rules around when I'm willing to work. And when I'm willing to walk away and spend time with my family and that I think is such a gift. And for Alex's in particular as well. When he was growing up his dad worked away from home he was sort of a fly in fly out situation. And he missed out on a lot of time with his dad. So for him now. There's this huge emphasis placed on being able to work from home and being able to walk the kids to school and volunteer at literacy groups and a couple of weeks ago, he volunteered at the school Mother's Day breakfast and made 500 croissants for all the moms at the school. And that's something that you can't do often. If you're stuck working for somebody else or you're working in a way that isn't in alignment with what's more important to you. And so for us, it's not just about pumping out revenue and making money and all that it's all about making opportunities for us to spend more time with the kids while they're little because they're only going to be little once.
Laetitia Andrac 20:10
I love that and thank you so much for inspiring. Everyone was listening to that interview around reflecting on what success looks like for you. And you know, it's my passion. I help so many other business owner reclaim their own definition of success. And it's love and learning a lot of programming has been done around what success looks like in business. And as you've said beautifully, I suppose some business owner will reach the eight figure and multiple eight figure but then maybe they make less profit than someone was just generating $50,000 Yeah, and, and all of that. So sometimes it's all about going back to why did you start your business in the first place? What are the values exactly what you got, you know through and then what is the real metric to success in your business and I love how you impact so many people by doing this business because it gives you the opportunity to stay in your day job to impact the school to impact those women led business and also to enable Alex to be a father with presence. So that's all Tick Tick beautiful signs parent. Let's get into your biggest business fucked up moments were like oh man, yes, the light golden moments in my book, which I was always no one's really like oh my gosh, nothing is going as planned. I need to just stop doing this. But actually then it's an opportunity for new growth cycle to happen or a new opportunity to emerge. So would you mind sharing with us you can share 123 Whatever. I know a few of them but you share the one you want to share with our audience.
Fiona McKenzie 21:49
I think I already spoke a little bit earlier about pricing ourselves too low in the beginning and Geez What a mistake that was. I'm not I'm not disappointed that we did it and I'm proud of ourselves, I guess in a way for trying really hard to help these people as much as we could. And I think it really did make a big difference to a lot of those business owners back then that we were so incredibly cheap. Sad for us great for them. But the one that happened more recently, which I think was an even bigger learning for us was that because we're very much focused on were bootstrapped. We don't have any outside funding. We're fully self funded. Everything has to be about minimum viable product. So launching with the bare minimum and when we very first started in 2020, to enable our instructors to be able to livestream using their iPhone or their Android phone. We needed an app, but we didn't have any money to build an app. And Alex, you know, Geniuses He is isn't an app developer. He's a web developer and we didn't have the money to outsource. So we found a third party app that was free. And we built quite a good relationship with the owners of this app. We encourage all of our users to use this app until we have enough money to build our own. And it took us a very long time to have the money but in the meantime, we were helping this third party developer with beta testing new releases of their app suggesting new features really helping them develop their products because we had a good relationship with them. And there was, you know, a little in it for them and a lot in it for us to help them with this product. But then about a year ago, without letting us know they sold their business. And I don't know you know, they were very lovely people. Maybe they had to sign some NDA, whatever. I don't know what the backstory is, but they sold their business and didn't tell us. And all of a sudden this app that we have, literally 1000s of people using became a paid premium service with a subscription model. And of course, our customers weren't happy about that because they're already paying us a monthly fee to use our service. And then on top of that, they're being told well also you have to pay separately this app that you've been using for free. So very quickly, we had to pour our own money into investing in our app to build in the features so that our instructors could live stream directly from our app, and we already had our own app, but it was primarily for their customers to log in and watch the stream instead of the instructor going live via the app. So big lesson, let Burien have a contract with people even if they're nice people and you get along so well. And there's a lot in it for both of you. Because we had no written agreement. We didn't have a leg to stand on. So we just had to hustle and build our own thing and investing our own personal funds to get this done extremely quickly, which I kind of thrive on like I live for thriving under pressure. So it was a little bit awful but also a little bit amazing at the same time, but really have a contract for everything has been the biggest thing I learnt out of that and never ever again. Well I rely on a third party for a critical piece of my business without having an agreement.
Laetitia Andrac 24:45
I love that and I remember that time you were part of the goddess embodiment sisterhood, the mastermind and it was, you know, everything could have gone very terribly. But the way we're refrained it around actually it's a way for us to develop this part of our business which we've always put in the back burner. And now you can stand on that and potentially at some point resell it as a white label or as a piece of software. So it can open new revenue stream. But you were also having enough cash flow to re inject in that which is not always the case for many businesses. So contract for sure always having a contract and you know that Fiona I'm very strict on contracts and on having everything written. That's
Fiona McKenzie 25:29
so important.
Laetitia Andrac 25:32
I love every of my clients dearly and some of them are very good friends and then they decide to hire me always sends a contract. So that's, that's a very powerful lesson. So thank you for sharing that with everyone. So what is coming next? What's next? Where's my FitPro? What's next with you? When is the next stage of growth of innovation? Where are you heading?
Fiona McKenzie 25:53
So for my fifth product, the moment we're really focused on continuing to vet to develop features into our own app, especially ones that that third party app doesn't have that feels very nice for us to be able to, you know, become better than them. Not that I'm at all competitive MI. So that's something that we're really enjoying at the moment is continuing to add features to our app. And a lot of it's based on suggestions from our own users. So they come to us with ideas. We build it and I love that so much that we have this two way relationship with instructors using our platform that they're not just buying this thing off the shelf from us were able to continue to work on it based on what they're telling us that they need. So that's what we're really focusing on from the business but we're also trying to branch out a little as well. The majority of the business owners using our platform own dance fitness businesses and so we're trying to branch out more into you know, yoga and pilates. We have an indoor cycle team as well. So there are so many other types of businesses out there that we want to help and now that we're in this sort of post pandemic world where people are coming back into classes in person, there's a real opportunity especially for those businesses who may be selling out there in person classes and they think, right, you know, I've maxed out the revenue that I can make, actually did you know if you live streamed, you could have as many extra people online as you want, without needing to rent a bigger space or have a new venue. So that's where we're trying to go in terms of picking up new customers and the growth of the business and the more we grow, the more funds we have to put back into developing new features. So it's this beautiful cycle of more customers more features without needing any external funding as well.
Laetitia Andrac 27:28
I love that. And I love this deep focus and connections that you have with your clients and I always say being obsessed with your customer is really a way to grow. What is really essential and you've done that beautifully with Alex and the team, but also this ability to step into this hybrid ways of exercising and generating new revenue. Income for those businesses, which shows that you really care about your clients. You're not just looking for the subscription and for them to pay you it's actually how can you give back to them by them growing their business. So this is this beautiful virtual cycles that I see in your business and in your value. So before I jump into the five fire question, I'd love to ask you because you know, I'm all about intuition and strategy. Can you share with us and intuitive courageous moves that you've made in business?
Fiona McKenzie 28:24
Oh, I actually think the fuck up we were calling it with the third party app and how that all came about. That was really a moment where I think we could have just gone not were done for what are we like we have nothing to do and that that leap that we took to invest our own personal money in the business was something that I just I felt very deeply that this was the right thing to do. And this was what we had to do for the business to survive. And I think for a lot of people, maybe that would have been a silly move, injecting all that money without a guaranteed return on investment. But I think sometimes you have to really trust your gut and that what was what I was very strongly feeling that this is what we had to do. And we had to do it immediately without thinking too hard on it because it was a bit scary. Like we're talking multiple five figures that get invested into developing features of that magnitude and that and that quality within a few weeks. It's not a cheap investment. So I think really taking that leap and listening to your body and it will tell you what you need to do.
Laetitia Andrac 29:27
I love that. Thank you Fiona for sharing and for anyone who is listening to this and they're like, Okay, so how did she stay on track? How did she stay aligned with her vision? How is she so clear and true about what she wants and the impact she wants? Would you mind sharing with them? What helped you in that process? Because there are many business owners who listen to this podcast and they may be you know, as I say, running like a chicken with a head does said I need to dance on a real so I'm going to do that and I need to you know create this so I'm going to create it so what is helping you I think so because you come up in this podcast and you know, having witnessed you in this journey of transformation. so grounded for a pizza person, very grand, very clear, but also having this clear vision of what you're going for what success look like and value. So what helped you the most in that.