Starting a business is like starting a family. It’s new and overwhelming, and there’s almost never a perfect time to start. You’ll have thoughts like, ‘I’m not old enough’ or ‘I’m not young enough’ or ‘if only I were better prepared or knew suchand- such first.’ And it’s so easy to doubt yourself, get trapped in feelings of fear, or to feel like an imposter. But if you can embrace the newness, the I-don’t-know-ness, and go for it anyway, then you’ll open yourself up to so much growth and opportunity.” These encouraging words of Rachel Brownlow Lund smartly portray the essence of entrepreneurship, which is all about taking action. From Freelancer to Entrepreneur An avid entrepreneur, Rachel began her entrepreneurial career by starting a ghostwriting company during her last semester in college. She called it Rachel Brownlow Ghostwriting, and for the first couple years, she made a go of it as an independent freelancer, hustling to generate new clients and leads.
“I knew next to nothing about entrepreneurship, but I was dating someone at the time who was interested in entrepreneurship, and I had several friends who had started up small businesses and side-hustles,” says Rachel. Without those connections, she suspects she would have continued on to grad school or applied for a job, as many of her fellow college graduates were doing at the time. Fortunately, after some encouragement from her entrepreneurial friends, she took a leap and registered for her first DBA.
Over the next few years, she grew from the solo Rachel Brownlow Ghostwriting into a boutique ghostwriting company called Your Written Word, where she and her team worked on nonfiction books, blogs and articles, helping small business owners position themselves as thought leaders.
Becoming a freelancer and then an entrepreneur has been a series of big challenges and growth opportunities for Rachel. To this she asserts, “No one is born knowing how to network or hire staff or write copy or be an effective saleswoman. But you stretch, and you grow. You pivot, and then you grow some more. And all the while, you continue to impact more and more people.”
An Idea of Me2Lead
Currently, Rachel runs her company Me2Lead, where she helps women grow their businesses through strategic power positioning and business leadership coaching. She mentions that if she had created a 10-year plan for herself when she started her first business in 2009, it probably wouldn’t have included Me2Lead. “At that point, I was still figuring out a lot of fundamentals around business and leadership for myself,” she says. “I never dreamed I would be in a position where I could help other women grow their businesses.”
Yet that is precisely where her entrepreneurial journey led her. After years spent honing her business acumen through hard lessons, mentorship, coaching, business incubators, masterminds, hundreds of business books, workshops, online courses and more, she began helping friends fast track their own successes in entrepreneurship. Discovering that she had both talent and passion for helping women grow their businesses, confidence and visibility, she started the coaching company Me2Lead.