What if the thing capping your income isn’t your skills, the marketplace or your bank balance? What if it’s a number sitting quietly in your head, holding you back before you’ve even started?
That question has been on my mind since I sat down with Firlie and Raegan from New Leaf Digital for the Digital Investor podcast. This Adelaide couple finished their first year in our Champions community on $154,000, within a whisker of the highest first-year result we’ve ever seen, and they went on to win the Ultimate Champions Cup. But I didn’t invite them on because of the money. I wanted them on because of what was going on in their heads all year. Watch the full interview below to hear their story in their own words.
If you’ve ever talked yourself out of something before you began, this story is for you. It’s about overcoming money anxiety, letting go of perfectionism and discovering that the biggest obstacle to a six figure online business is often the one you can’t see on a spreadsheet.
Starting Over From Zero, With Skills Already in Hand
Firlie and Raegan aren’t typical beginners. They’d spent close to eight years running a portfolio of e-commerce stores they’d built themselves. They knew websites. They knew SEO. Raegan in particular is deeply skilled across all things digital. On paper, they had everything they needed.
And yet 12 months ago they were, in Firlie’s words, in “a strange limbo kind of place.” The e-commerce work had left them unfulfilled, and they’d hit a ceiling. Every store they ran eventually faced the same threat: a big retailer like Aldi or Kmart releasing a cheaper copy of their product.
That constant uncertainty wore them down. So they sold the stores off one by one, worked through some big personal changes, and found themselves with zero cash flow and no clear plan.
Their backgrounds matter here. Firlie had been an emergency paramedic in Melbourne and left, as she put it, “very, very burnt out” with poor boundaries. Raegan had managed an F45 studio as a personal trainer, working 5am to 10am, building their e-commerce business in the middle of the day, then heading back to work in the evening.
These are two people who know how to work hard. That’s exactly what made their breakthrough so interesting.
Why Experienced Operators Went Back to Learning
A few clients had organically landed in their laps, and Firlie noticed something. She could talk to these business owners easily, understand what they needed and actually help them. That sparked a decision to focus on a digital agency strategy, and the beginnings of their agency, New Leaf Digital.
Around the same time, she tuned in to one of our three-day events, and joining the program became, in her words, “an absolute no-brainer.”
What I respect most is her reason for coming back to learn. She felt their skills had become old school. (If you remember the Divi theme, you’ll know what she means; hardly anyone uses it now.) Firlie felt a genuine responsibility to her future clients.
“If we were gonna have a conversation with a client and have them pay us to do something for them, I needed to know that I was offering them the best service, that I wasn’t offering them old advice.”
Firlie
That’s the mark of a professional. The digital space moves fast, and the operators who win long term are the ones who keep sharpening their tools rather than coasting on what worked five years ago. It’s the same reason seasoned marketers like Robert and Gabrielle added an extra $70,000 to their agency revenue in their first year with us.
A Digital Agency Strategy Is a Powerful Way to Start an Online Business
Here’s why I love this case study for anyone wanting to start an online business, whether you’re a complete beginner or an intermediate operator who feels stuck. A digital agency strategy forces you to build real skills, real systems and real leverage.
You learn to sell. You learn to deliver. And to grow, you have to outsource, hire and use AI well. Those lessons transfer into everything else you’ll ever do online, including buying and building digital assets.
Firlie and Raegan didn’t have a yearly income target when they started. With no cash coming in, their goal was simple: cover the household expenses as fast as possible. Raegan explained that breaking it down into weekly and monthly numbers made it manageable: “If we had set a yearly goal, we probably would have psyched ourselves out.”
That’s a smart approach I’d recommend to anyone starting from scratch. Big annual goals can be paralysing. Weekly targets get you moving.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I want the skills and support to build something like this,” that’s exactly what we teach. The Digital Investors Program gives you the strategies, coaching and accountability to start, grow and profit from online businesses and digital assets.
It’s where people like Firlie and Raegan learn to turn existing skills into serious income, and where complete newcomers learn the skills from the ground up.
The Deservability Trap: Capping Yourself Before You Start
In their final accountability report, Firlie wrote something that stopped Liz and me in our tracks. She described how she would cap things mentally before she’d even started, self-sabotage, and then prove it was never going to work. We see this pattern in our coaching all the time, and it’s rarely talked about openly.
For Firlie, it came back to deservability. A client would hand over their money and say, “I trust you, do the thing,” and she’d stall. “I’d procrastinate on getting started. I’d overthink it. I’d make it way bigger than it needed to be in my head,” she told me.
Then she’d leave herself no time to finish, because subconsciously she felt she had to put in far more work than necessary to earn the payment.
Perfectionism Dressed Up as Hard Work
This is the sneaky part. Overthinking and over-delivering can look like conscientiousness from the outside. Inside, it’s often fear.
Firlie linked it directly to a “time in versus money out” mentality: I’m not deserving of that money unless I’ve worked really hard for it. And that belief fed straight into perfectionism, procrastination and an inability to hand work to anyone else.
Isn’t that fascinating? Here’s someone brilliant at building and optimising websites, held back not by competence but by a belief about what she was allowed to earn. The moment she started breaking through it, the business began to take off.
Where Money Beliefs Come From
Raegan carried a similar belief. She wrote about “not truly believing you’re capable of and deserving of the wealth you talked about for so long.”
When I asked where that came from, she took us back to her childhood on a farm in regional South Australia. Some farms are very profitable, she said. Theirs wasn’t. Her mum worked full time to support the family and the farm and never took a day off.
The lesson she absorbed was that money is hard to come by, you must sacrifice to earn it, and there’s never quite enough. As Raegan put it, “Taking a break is a failure.”
In my experience, these wealth blockages are especially common in people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Nobody consciously chooses that ceiling. It’s inherited, and it stays in place until you deliberately do the work to remove it.
How Two Non-Salespeople Landed 19 Website Builds
Both Firlie and Raegan will tell you they’re not salespeople. Firlie’s own words: “Anything to not pick up the phone.” So how did they end up delivering 19 website builds in a year? Two very different lead sources, and a whole lot of hustle.
Raegan went to Airtasker. If you’ve never tried it, it’s about as cutthroat as lead generation gets. Customers want a bargain, competitors are firing off AI-generated pitches, and convincing someone budgeting $500 to invest properly in a website is hard work.
Raegan spent hours on it every day. The result? Well over $20,000 in revenue from Airtasker alone. They’ve since moved on, but Firlie suggests it’s worth considering for first-year operators who are willing to put in the work and stand out from the crowd.
Reps, Reps, Reps
I want to highlight what that grind really gave them. It wasn’t about the money. It was about repetitions. As non-salespeople, they taught themselves to sell through sheer volume, and they became extremely efficient at delivery because they built so many sites.
Raegan summed up the mindset perfectly: “What did I do to get that client? I’m gonna go and do it again. But twice as hard.”
Firlie, meanwhile, was working the networking side. Within a week of updating her LinkedIn profile and creating a page for the new agency, with nothing but a maintenance page on their website, she got an invitation to join a local BNI chapter whose website seat had just opened up.
The perfectionist in her wanted to wait a few months until their systems were ready. She went anyway. That’s the lesson for every perfectionist reading this: don’t think, just do. The perfect moment rarely arrives on your schedule.
The Scariest Decision: Handing Over the Reins
By Christmas, only a few months in, everything had snowballed. They had four website builds on the go at once. Raegan was drowning, Firlie was stressed, and on a walk together Raegan suggested a two-week deadline to hire some help.
They both, in their words, totally flipped out. Hiring someone was “the scariest thing you could have possibly said to us.”
But they did it. The first two contractors didn’t work out. The third did, and he’s now a regular part of their operation. Firlie described the shift: learning to trust someone else to get a job 80% of the way there, then finishing the last 10 to 20% herself.
They learned how to communicate, set expectations and manage someone. For two self-confessed control freaks, that was enormous. Raegan’s reflection is one of my favourite lines from the whole interview.
“The very thing that’s gonna set you free is the thing that you’re most terrified of doing.”
Raegan
If you want leverage in any online business, you have to outsource. There’s no way around it. And for Firlie and Raegan, letting go of control was what finally started to show them they deserved the results they were creating.
Overcoming Money Anxiety With Recurring Revenue
Before Christmas, Firlie wrote that even looking at their bank account brought up stress and anxiety. After nearly eight years of e-commerce uncertainty, that’s understandable. Raegan called it a constant feeling of financial precariousness.
The shift came when a website build turned into an ongoing SEO client. Suddenly there was money that would arrive next month, and the month after. Then a client issued a purchase order for a 12-month commitment.
“It was the confidence that the client trusted us as well,” Firlie said. That predictability changed everything about how they felt.
Proof of Concept Beats a Big Number
Here’s what surprised me. I assumed the turning point would be hitting $5,000 a month in recurring revenue. Not even close, they told me. It was only a couple of thousand a month.
What mattered was proof of concept: evidence that the model worked and that clients valued them enough to commit long term. They’ve since gone well beyond $10,000 a month in recurring income.
That’s good news for anyone starting out. You don’t need to wait for a big number before your confidence shifts. As I always say, the first year is a learning year, not an earning year (though Kim and Nick proved it can be both), but those small early wins compound into belief, and belief compounds into results.
Their pairing of website builds with ongoing SEO also serves clients properly. A site that keeps performing delivers a far better return on the build investment, so the recurring relationship works for everyone.
Landing a Five-Figure Corporate Client Through Trust
The biggest leap in their year came from a multimillion-dollar technology company in Queensland. Firlie, based in Adelaide, has never met them in person. She was introduced as an SEO through a chain of networking connections, and the company had a single-page website.
Picture Firlie on a Zoom call projected onto a boardroom wall, three or four senior people watching, diplomatically explaining to subject matter experts that their website needed serious work.
It started small: two new pages of content per month on their existing site. Even that pricing was a personal stretch, and Firlie worked it through on a coaching call with Calum from our team.
Then her main contact was headhunted elsewhere, and the project landed on the general manager’s desk. His philosophy was simple: trust the subject matter expert. He asked Firlie for her honest advice, and she told him to scrap the cheap theme and start fresh. He agreed.
That turned into a significant five-figure website build, a project they’d likely never have won through a standard tender process. The trust came first, then the bigger opportunity.
And two weeks into their second year, they’ve signed an even bigger client, again through networking. As Raegan said, having runs on the board lets you speak to prospects with real confidence about how you’d help them.
Confidence Comes From Doing
Raegan’s version of perfectionism was needing to know all the theory before acting. Many of you will recognise that; it’s a way of protecting yourself from imposter syndrome.
But she found the confidence she’d been searching for didn’t come from webinars or textbooks. It came from keeping an SEO client through four months of little visible movement and then watching results take off. “That confidence couldn’t have come from just someone telling me,” she said. “It just came from actually doing it.”
Daily Practices That Support a Six Figure Online Business
Hustle got them started, but it isn’t the whole story. About four months before our interview, Firlie and Raegan got on a coaching call with me expecting to talk leads and networking. Instead, we went straight to their abundance blockages.
I mentioned Louise Hay, and Firlie looked across at the bookshelf. Her book had been sitting right there for years, unread.
They both read it. Now their mornings are sacred. They’re up around 6am, walk seven minutes to the beach in Brighton, and spend an hour walking the esplanade while listening to Louise Hay affirmations and Paul Blackburn meditations.
They try not to talk shop until the turnaround point. Before this, Firlie said, working from home meant waking up and working straight through until bed, with “no quality of life.”
Raegan made a point I want every reader to hear. Many of us have done personal development before and think, “I’ve heard it all.” Knowing about meditation isn’t the same as doing it.
She also challenged the idea that you’ll prioritise this stuff once you have more time and money. The best practice, she said, is the one you can stick to every day, not the one you have to force yourself into.
Key Lessons for Anyone Ready to Start an Online Business
Firlie and Raegan had deep technical skills from day one. They could have charged premium prices at the start. What held them back wasn’t knowledge; it was mindset. If you’re talented but stuck, here’s what their year teaches:
- Break big goals into weekly targets so they feel achievable, not intimidating.
- Get your reps in. Volume builds sales skills and delivery confidence faster than theory ever will.
- Act before you feel ready. The BNI seat and the LinkedIn page didn’t wait for perfect systems.
- Hire before it feels comfortable. Leverage is impossible if you insist on doing everything yourself.
- Build recurring revenue early. Predictable income is one of the most effective tools for overcoming money anxiety.
- Do the mindset work, consistently. Awareness alone changes nothing.
Liz and I have a rule. If you’ve been banging your head against the same wall for more than two years, it’s time to get help, because the problem is probably on the inside.
That’s exactly what Firlie and Raegan recognised, and it’s why their story will inspire others in our community the same way Derek and Courtney’s $160,000 first year inspired them.
Your Next Step
The skills matter. The strategies matter. But the biggest lesson from Firlie and Raegan’s $154,000 year is that the ceiling is often in your head, and once you remove it, the results can arrive faster than you’d ever imagine.
They went from zero cash flow and a bank account that made them anxious to a thriving agency, a lifestyle they love and genuine peace of mind.
If you’re ready to build a six figure online business with the right skills, coaching and accountability behind you, join the Digital Investors Program. Jump, and let us be your net.
