I woke up without a sense of purpose, you know, I had a six-month-old baby and I was like, what else? You know, what do I cook today? And I know that I deserve so much more and I know I could do so much more. And so I’m like, let’s just find a way that I could make an income from home.
Michelle Hon
In today’s episode, I am speaking to Michelle Hon, Founder of MomBoss Academy based in Singapore. She is a mother of three, a published author and runs an award-winning blog – The Chill Mom and has been named the Top 10 Mom Influencer in the World by Zine.
Her business which started some 10 years ago has helped many mums build their own brands, and earn an income from home.
She started just like these mothers that she is coaching now. As a new mother with her firstborn, she felt that she needed to engage herself in something more purposeful at home and earn an income for herself.
She had initially started a soup and salad bar cafe but had to scale down to a kiosk in the food court because of a lack of foot traffic at her old location. That aside, she knew running a food business kept her away from her family.
When she chose to be a stay-at-home mom after giving up her food business, she knew she had to find a way to make money and so she started a blog dispensing motherhood and pregnancy advice. It grew into a maternity concierge business and soon other moms were asking her how she did it!
I really learned about how to brand myself now that I’ve already got this knowledge and the followings, let’s just turn that into something that people will pay more for. So that’s how the idea of that maternity concierge business come about because the knowledge is the same right before this. I was just sharing it on my blog, but now I’m just helping people directly one on one, but then it’s not like I need to go and learn extra. Yes. It’s just called like as long as I have built that framework, that process. And of course, there was a little bit of imposter syndrome who am I to start this? But once you have the first client, you’re like, oh wow. People really do buy this.
That’s when she began consulting and teaching other moms how to do what she did and still have the flexibility to stay home and be a mom while running a business. Until today, she has helped more than 150 of her students launch their businesses since she started Mom Boss Academy.
Michelle’s 10-year journey as a blogger, mompreneur, podcaster and author and entrepreneur has been fascinating. All she wanted from her blogging was to earn an income as a stay-at-home mom where she gradually learnt about branding and positioning.
She remembers her first paid blog post as $80 in store credit and knew that she had to differentiate herself or she’d just become another mommy blogger!
She stumbled upon a US$16K programme that was meant for larger businesses but through that programme (that she eventually paid in instalments) she was taught to turn her knowledge, the same knowledge she was offering for free on her blog, into products that people could buy.
What I like most about Michelle is that she evaluates business decisions through the lens of her family. Her priority is her family. If it takes away too much time from her family, she would say no.
She is inspired by many people – her mom, other mothers and the earliest influence – Barbara Walters. It is no surprise that her favourite quote is, “Mind over matter” because that was the title of the book she got as a birthday gift from her friend when she was eight years old!
My family wasn’t well to do when I was a kid. In fact, we were very poor. So I definitely had grown up with a scarcity mindset about you gotta work hot if not the money would not come. But I think over the years, you know, all the programs that I’ve been through and going through the transformation that I’ve been through, I learned that no, that’s not true. That’s a false belief that’s holding us back.
So today’s episode really shows that perhaps hard work and hustle are not necessary! Smart work maybe!
Today, she’s a food ambassador for a cloud kitchen, invests in her students’ businesses, and runs a membership site as well as two online programmes.
For Michelle, it’s about the effort that gets people to results and that is not always tied to how hard you work. She learnt this when she got really sick and found out she had dengue and she worked fewer hours than before and yet, her revenue grew bigger than the years before. So it flipped something in her head and made her realize some beliefs needed some serious re-evaluation. So what false beliefs are you harbouring? Maybe it is time to test them out!