Welcome to the Rich Man Podcast with me. Your host, corporate dropout, turned seven-figure CEO in 18 months, Melanie Aubert. I'm a business coach that's determined to normalize women and wealth. We are completely ditching the old, outdated boys club way of running a business. And I'm teaching you the new way of attraction marketing, soulfull selling and wealth embodiment. Instead of marrying the Rich man, we are the Rich man. Get comfortable, get ready and let's dive in.
Welcome to the very first episode. I am so excited. We have been working so hard behind the scenes to bring you this new brand, to bring you the podcast, to find ways to connect deeper to you and to be more vulnerable. And here is the podcast. We are so freaking stoked and to kick off our very first episode, thank you for being here. I'm going to give you increments of my story. One thing that I'm really adamant about in my life is innovation. So the way that we're going to position these podcast episodes are going to be a bit unique and they're going to be a lot of cliffhangers and be very exciting. So let's dive into it, shall we? If you don't know my story, most of you who are in my space have been around for quite some time. I've been an entrepreneur for two years. 2022 will be year three. So we're two full years in. And this has not been an easy road for me. For those of you who know I've been a child of drugs, drug abuse, chaos. I have five other siblings. So there's six kids in a tiny, tiny house. We were all on top of each other. Always. My dad was in and out of prison. It was just chaotic. It was so chaotic. And I was the type of child where I always knew that I was meant for more. I can't really explain it, but in my bones knew that I was going to do epic shit in my life. I was just going to do and pave the way for a bunch of people. I never thought it was going to be entrepreneurship ever in my life. I never wanted to. I think part of the reason why was the examples of entrepreneurs growing up was people who invented the toaster, right? We didn't have female entrepreneurs who are doing online coaching. That was not a thing when I was a child, obviously growing up in my neighborhood, most of us were grew up in poverty. So it was very rare that I saw anyone who was successful. So naturally, my escape in my life was going to school was reading a lot of books. I've always been an avid reader. I've loved escaping, like learning and going to school and being distracted with that was so nice compared to being at home with a bunch of yelling with a bunch of fighting. I didn't want to be there. So I was the kid who was in bed at 7:30 without being told to. I was the kid who got straight A's. I was the good kid. I was never celebrated. I was never rewarded for my hard work, but I wasn't doing it for them. I was doing it for me. I think naturally, as a child growing up in that kind of environment, you crave love, right? You crave acknowledgement. And I was the good girl, and I was never rewarded for being the good girl. The cool part is how I grew up has served me so well. Being an entrepreneur, I am so thankful for where I've come from naturally, doing a lot of healing work, a lot of inner work because I don't want to pass down generational trauma, but it ends with me. So what has been passed down when it comes to belief around money, belief around success, belief around whatever it is, it ends with me, right? I'm paving a new way for the generations that come after me, and that makes me really excited, very emotional. I love knowing that I'm doing that. But growing up the way that I did, I was never celebrated, right? Like no one patted me on the back for working hard. So I knew that my acknowledgement of what I was doing was enough and that kept me going growing up the way that I did, I never had the luxury to make excuses. I always say that excuses were the luxury I couldn't afford. Meaning in business. It was if I don't show up, I don't eat right. If I don't sell something, I don't eat. If I don't sell something, I'm not going to pay my mortgage. So I grew a pretty tough skin when it came to, I'm going to bet it all on me. I have nothing to lose when you are literally at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the bottom, the only way to go is up. And I would always tell myself that. So when you don't see any level of success in your life personally, like growing up as a child. To me, nothing was off limits. The mansion, the private jet, although it felt very far, it never felt impossible. So I always held on to that dream of being larger than life, of having so much money. I don't even know what to do with it all and just donating and doing all of the things. So my upbringing has really crafted and instilled a lot of values. The thing that this is the caveat to all of this is I was raised to believe that I had to hustle in order to make money. And for a time I did have to hustle in order to make money. But now I don't hustle to make any money and I still make a lot of money. So it's been interesting, like those beliefs fueling my success, but then not allowing me to get to the next level like I have to switch and write a new chapter and create a new belief in order to get to the next level. So it's really interesting how what got me here won't get me there. When I was younger, when my dad was in and out of prison, my mother had lost all of her hair due to stress. So like all of her hair literally fell out. So she wasn't working. She actually didn't work for quite some time. But me and my younger brother would pay her bills. So when I was working, my money would go to my mom and then my own bills. So I was the kind of kid who had prepaid minutes on a cell phone like I didn't have a computer. When I was in College, I had to go to the library to write my papers to do research. My mom had to drive me because I didn't have my own car. There was no bus where I lived to go anywhere. So we were very dependent on one another to survive. And when my dad was in prison, I was paying her bills. And there came a time when I was asked to pay more and I refused to because I was sleeping on the couch my whole life, I never had my own bedroom. So I said, I am not going to pay more. I can't. I literally don't have any more money to give. I was kicked out, so I was thankfully dating my now husband and I wasn't allowed to sleep at his house because his mother is very religious and of course I want to respect her household. So him and I would sleep in his car in the driveway. So I had most of my stuff in my car. I would wake up at three in the morning, sneak in, shower as quick, quietly as I could at his mum's house. And then I would go to work and sit in the parking lot. My car was $500. I think I paid for it, which was like astronomical to me at the time I've been through it all. I've been through it all. As a kid. I grew up hungry, like I was a hungry child in high school. I didn't have money for lunch and I would just watch people eat and I would literally eat their scraps, whatever they didn't want to finish, they would give to me and I would eat them. So I knew that when I was old enough to really work hard for a living, I was going to do that. There was no excuse. I've always had three ish jobs, and when I got into this space initially again, I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to climb the corporate ladder and do the same thing as we all do. So when I graduated from College, I got a job as a marketing specialist. I think was the title I was given, and I was working at a very male dominated company. So everyone there was all the high executives were all male, and it was very old school. So there was no room for creative expression. It was just do your job and keep quiet. Don't try to bring new ideas to the table. And if anything, who's going to listen to a what 22 year old girl, Lang, who just graduated College? What do I know? Right. So I would work my corporate job and I would go work at the restaurant at night. So I was working from eight in the morning till five, then from 530 to about like eleven at night, like every single day, minus the weekends at the weekends. I was working doubles at the restaurant. I was exhausted. And in my corporate career, I was getting very antsy because naturally, I'm a very innovative kind of person. I don't like to do just a status quo. I don't like to be bored. I think it's just a waste of time. I knew that when I would bring my ideas to the table, they were not welcome. So I started to look at Instagram was, like, newish, and I was watching these fitness influencers really take their knowledge onto the platform. And at the time, I was a personal trainer. And I had watched these women come on and teach fitness in a way that I naturally disagreed with. One of the things that I value is integrity. And I was watching them teach things I'm like, OOH, are you even certified? There's a lot of things that I was thinking about. So I felt like it was my duty for the people to bring my expertise onto the platform and share different perspective and share, like, a knowledgebased perspective and a certified perspective. So I started sharing my workout videos. At the time the algorithm was Fantabulous. I literally was getting about 3000 views on my videos. It was amazing. So I grew my Instagram account significantly, and naturally I was like, okay, I got to sell something because might as well maximize on this exposure. So I created a three month workout program that was three months long, and it was $25 in total for this program. And I would sell that online. I was making sales, right? But nothing astronomical. I quit the restaurant to take this on more of, like, a full time, part time kind of gig. And I started taking weekend clients people in the evening at the gym as my clients. And it was great. They were seeing results. I was gaining momentum and exposure. But I didn't love love the fitness piece of it. Not that I liked it, no doubt about that. But it wasn't, like, the sole igniting purpose. And I craved that, right. Because I knew I was always meant for more. So I realized it was the business building that I really, really enjoyed and not the fitness piece of it. Right? So I was like, okay, maybe we should stop doing that. And then I went into, OK, what piece of business has really helped me not only grow my account, but get clients. And I looked at that. The piece that really stood out was the positioning part, the content part. I really knew how to connect with my audience. I really knew how to create personalized connection. It's just something that's come naturally to me. And I think a lot of times we think that whatever comes naturally to us comes naturally to other people. It's not true. So I knew that the content piece and the marketing piece, specifically when it comes to authority building was what I wanted to teach in the online space. So I created a new account for my fitness one because I was so scared my corporate boss was going to see me teaching marketing online. And I was teaching content building. Authority building. I had one client who was actually a fitness coach who had asked for my services to help with creating content and writing her content for her. And this is actually where the cash can bring content cocktail was birthed. So if you have that program, this is actually where it came from with that one client. And I helped grow her page. I helped her land clients. And when her and I, our relationship kind of dissipated, I kind of took on a lot of roles in her business. I was taking all her brand photography. I was writing all her newsletters. I was creating the branding and the actual program itself. I didn't like that anymore. I didn't like being the Jack of all trades. It just felt exhausting. And I definitely was not getting paid enough. So when her and I relationship dissipated, I knew that I wanted to bring more into the space, to bring more marketing into the space. And that's where I came up with the idea of online Marketing Academy. If you guys know that program, that was the OG of my brand, it was such a pillar program. It was magnificent. The client results were amazing. And on a different episode, I'm going to talk to you guys about why we discontinued that program. But I created Online Marketing Academy when I was at my corporate job. So what I would do was I started going to my corporate job an hour earlier when the lights were all out. When no one was in there to just work on this program, I knew I wanted to bring something big into the space. That damn program sat in a Google Doc for six months, six freaking months. That program sat in a Google Doc one. I had my corporate job, so I always made the excuse of this comes first or this is more stable or this is that the other thing. And I knew that I wouldn't go all in on really making this business work. This program come to life. If I was still at my corporate job. I'm going to leave this episode at that. The next episode. I'll talk to you about why I quit. My corporate job. How I did it. What inspired me to quit. And then what happened once I did
Participant #1:
you.