Business
Andrea Owen is an author, global speaker, and professional certified life coach who helps high-achieving women maximize unshakeable confidence, and master resilience. She has taught hundreds of thousands of women tools and strategies to be able to empower themselves to live their most kick-ass life through speaking, her books, coaching, and her wildly popular podcast with over 3 million downloads. Andrea is creating a global impact in women’s empowerment with her books being translated into 18 languages and available in 22 countries. When she’s not juggling her full coaching practice or writing books, Andrea is busy riding her Peloton bike, chasing her two school-aged children or making out with her husband, Jason. She is also a retired roller derby player having skated under the name “Veronica Vain”. Most passionate about After about 10 years as an entrepreneur, I am focused mostly on speaking on stages and writing books. Andrea’s career and story I Have an interesting story that’s that involves my personal life ae well. I was previously in the fitness industry. I was in my late 20s and was in my first marriage, to someone different from whom I'm married to now. I had heard about life coaching. This was back in about 2002, 2003—very early in the infancy of life coaching as an industry. I was telling my then husband about it, and he was saying, “I think you would be great at this. ,However you need more life experience”. A couple of years later, my husband had a love affair with our neighbor and got her pregnant. So I got my life experience. My life experience got worse before it got better. I got into another terrible, abusive relationship. By the time I was 31, I’d had my rock bottom experience and decided to change my life. I took responsibility for my life. That's how the life coaching portion started. A couple of years into that, I decided to write a book. The university opened the doors for me. I got a traditional book deal with a small publisher, which got my foot in the door. Now I'm on my third book. It has all just fallen into place from there. Best advice for entrepreneurs You have to ask for help, whether that is with a therapist, your best friend, or your partner. Success doesn't happen in a vacuum. There have to be people who come to support you. That's what I would tell people to work on: Start there if they're having problems with something. This is probably something you've talked about on your show: You have to get very clear on who it is whom you serve and what it is that you do in your work. Don't be afraid to tweak and change this over time. The biggest, most critical failure with customers There have been several of them and they're all connected in my industry, in online life coaching. It's very scalable to offer group coaching. It's the one-to-many model versus one-to-one and it's the best way to scale your business. So, I started doing that and had some success, but for the most part, it wasn't that lucrative. I would say that facilitating group programs was probably my zone of competence. People would say that I was pretty great at it, but I really didn't like it all that much. I didn't look forward to it. It wasn't where I could really shine. For years I tried, and again, it was profitable enough, but not worth the energy I was putting out there. A few years ago, I decided, “I don't want to do this anymore.” It didn't make any sense because, from a marketing standpoint, it’s kind of the only way to scale. I just decided, “You know what? I'm not going to do it anymore.” Biggest success with customers My last book, which came out in 2018, was sold to Hachette Books, a division there. It’s a major publisher and the book ended up selling extremely well. It has been translated into 18 languages now and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Here's why I think it was successful. First, because I wrote that book and insisted on the title, because that is how I talk to my...