She Prevails is a series of honest, personal essays drawn from twenty years of building, burning, exiting, and beginning again. Written for founders at every stage of the journey.
There’s a version of this story I could tell you that sounds inspiring and brave. The one where I saw a gap in the market, made a bold strategic move, and launched a company with nothing but grit and vision. That version is true. But it’s also missing the part where I was six months pregnant, had just walked away from a failed business partnership that left me with almost nothing, and was sitting at my kitchen table with $7 in my bank account wondering what on earth I was going to do next.
That’s the version I want to tell you. The hard one. The behind the scenes with no highlight real one.
I believe there are a lot of women out there right now who are at some version of that kitchen table. Maybe you have more than $7. Maybe you have less hope. Maybe you’re holding a baby on your hip while you read this, or staring at a business idea you’ve been talking yourself out of for two years, or you’ve just gone through something that blew up what you thought your future looked like — and you’re trying to figure out what comes next.
This post is for you.
I’m not going to give you a tidy framework or a six-step launch checklist. What I’m going to give you is what I wish someone had handed me at that kitchen table — the things I learned the hard way, in the years that followed, about what actually matters when you’re building something from nothing.
The $7 wasn’t the problem. The doubt that I needed more than I had before I could succeed — that was the problem.
1. The circumstances are never going to be perfect. Start anyway.
Pregnant, broke, a failed partnership behind me, a newborn arriving in three months. If I had waited for the “right time” to launch All Inclusive Marketing, it never would have happened. There is no right time. There is only now, and the choice of whether you’re willing to bet on yourself in the middle of the mess.
I started AIM from my living room. My husband Iain was beside me. We were both taking care of clients and our babies at the same time, and some days it was pure chaos and some days it was kind of beautiful and most days it was both.
What I needed to hear then: You don’t need to be ready. You need to be willing. Willing to figure it out. Willing to look foolish for a while. Willing to learn in public. Willing to make mistakes, fail, shake it off and go again. Readiness is a story we tell ourselves to avoid the vulnerability of beginning. Begin anyway.
2. Your “why” is not optional. It is your only fuel when everything else runs out.
In the early days, we didn’t have systems. We didn’t have team. We didn’t have a brand or a reputation or a track record in our own name. What we had was an absolute, bone-deep clarity about why we were doing this, and what we believed about how clients deserved to be treated.
That clarity became everything. It became our hiring filter, our client selection process, our reason to keep going through the 11pm feeds and the impossible quarters and the moments when I genuinely wasn’t sure we were going to make it. More than once. For years.
When your “why” is strong enough, it carries you through the “how”, even when the “how” is completely unclear.
I wanted to build a company that took immaculate care of people. A place where clients felt the way you feel at a five-star all-inclusive resort – like every single thing was taken care of, and you could just breathe. That was it. That was the north star. It sounds simple. But it shaped every decision we ever made for fifteen years.
What I needed to hear then: Write down your why. Not your elevator pitch. Not your mission statement. The real answer to: if this gets impossibly hard, what is the thing that will make me stay? Keep it close. You will need it.
You don’t need a business plan on day one. You need a reason that’s bigger than your fear.
3. The wrong partner will cost you everything. Choose who you build with like your life depends on it.
Before AIM, there was another company. A first attempt at entrepreneurship that I walked into with someone I trusted, and had to walk away from when things fell apart. I won’t tell you that story in full today. But I will tell you this: I left that business pregnant, exasperated, and with almost nothing to show for it, literally to save my baby’s life.
The wrong business partner didn’t just cost me money. It cost me time, energy, confidence, and almost my baby’s life. The warning signs were there. I just hadn’t learned yet to trust what I was seeing, didn’t know what to do about it, and I wasn’t brave enough to walk away until it was almost too late.
I did not make that mistake when building AIM. My partner was my husband, Iain. Someone whose values I knew completely, whose work ethic I’d seen, whose character I trusted without question, and who’s skills and expertise complimented mine. We built something together that neither of us could have built alone, and we did it on a foundation of total honesty and shared values.
What I needed to hear then: Be ruthless about who you let into your business. Not unkind — ruthless. Values alignment is not a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between something that holds and something that breaks. Ask hard questions early. Watch how people behave under pressure. Trust what you see, not just what you hear. Actions speak louder than words.
4. Ask for help before you think you need it. Pride is expensive.
I grew up in a home where you figured things out yourself, because asking for help or making mistakes felt dangerous. I carried that into my business for longer than I should have.
I white-knuckled through things I could have asked someone about. I spent months solving problems that a single conversation with the right mentor could have resolved in an hour. I thought needing help meant I wasn’t capable, and that I needed to be the smartest person in the room. What I learned, slowly and painfully, is that the most capable founders are the ones who are completely unashamed about finding people who know more than they do and asking for help, asking the right questions, and listening.
The people who helped me most in the early days of AIM weren’t investors or advisors with impressive titles. We didn’t have any of those. They were people who cared about me, about what we were building, about our values and mission, who’d been through their own version of this, and who took the time to answer my questions honestly. Some of them changed the entire direction of my business with a single conversation. I almost didn’t have those conversations because I was too proud to admit I didn’t have all the answers.
What I needed to hear then: Asking for help is a strategy, not a weakness. Find your people early — a mentor, a peer community, even one trusted person who has built what you’re trying to build. Then actually talk to them. Let them in. The cost of isolation is always higher than the cost of vulnerability.
5. Build your systems before you desperately need them. Future-you is begging present-you to do this.
This is the one I tell every early-stage founder and watch them smile politely while knowing they’re going to ignore it — just like I did. When you’re at the beginning, systems feel like bureaucracy. You’re scrappy. You’re responsive. You figure things out as they come and it mostly works because you’re still small enough to hold everything in your head.
Then you start to grow. And suddenly you’re trying to onboard your third employee using information that lives entirely in your head. You’re giving different clients different experiences because there’s no documented process. You’re the bottleneck for every decision. Your team is confused. Or left waiting. Or left to their own devices. And the thing that made you fast in year one is making you slow in year three.
Document your processes early, even when they feel obvious. Build your CRM before your contact list becomes unmanageable. Create onboarding materials before you hire someone who needs them tomorrow. Future-you will be so grateful. Present-you will be annoyed. Do it anyway.
6. The loneliness is real. You’re not doing it wrong.
Nobody told me how lonely it was going to be. The kind of lonely that comes not from a lack of people but from carrying something that nobody around you fully understands. The weight of payroll and client expectations and your own relentless internal pressure. The fear of failure. The fear of letting people down. Or yourself down. Smiling at dinner anyway, because the people who love you are worried enough already and you don’t want to make it worse.
I felt that loneliness deeply in the early years of AIM. And I felt it again years later, when we were successful by every external measure and I was burning out from the inside in a way that looked nothing like struggle from the outside.
Find your people. Not just any people. Your people. People who are in it, who understand the weight of it, who won’t flinch when you tell them the real version. The version without the highlight reel. This is why we are building Athena Collective — because I spent years wishing a room like that had existed for me, and finally decided to build it.
The $7 got me started. It was the community, the clarity, and the willingness to keep going that built something worth so much more.
If you’re at the beginning — or starting over — here’s where to put your energy first
- Write your why in one sentence. Not what you do. Why it matters to you, personally, at a gut level. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it on the hard days. This is your anchor.
- Audit who you’re building with. Whether that’s a co-founder, a first hire, or the people in your inner circle — do their values match yours? This question is worth more than any business plan.
- Find one person who’s been where you’re going. One mentor, one community, one honest conversation with someone who has walked the path. You don’t need a board of advisors. You need one real relationship with someone who gives a damn.
- Document one process this week. Just one. Pick the thing you do most often and write down how you do it, step by step. Use AI to help you. This is how you start building a business that can exist beyond you.
- Stop waiting to feel ready. Write down the one thing you’ve been talking yourself out of. Then ask: what is the smallest possible version of this I could begin today? Begin that. Today.
I didn’t know, sitting at that kitchen table in 2009 with $7 and a baby coming and a failed partnership behind me, that I was at the beginning of something that would become one of the best and most respected affiliate and partner marketing agencies in the world. I didn’t know it would take fifteen years of building and burning out and rebuilding and finally getting acquired and then starting all over again — differently, and with most clarity, wisdom and support this time.
I didn’t know any of that. I just knew I wasn’t done. I knew I had something more to give, and that the world needed it, and that my children deserved to see their mother bet on herself, driven by purpose and passion to help others again.
So I started. Back then with just $7 and everything I had left at the time.
Seems I had so much more. And perhaps you do too.
Whatever you’re starting with today, it’s enough. You are enough. And the story you’re in the middle of right now is not over. Who knows. It might even be the beginning of something great.
Keep going.
— Sarah
She Prevails is a series of honest, personal essays from Sarah Bundy — drawn from twenty years of building, burning, exiting, and beginning again. Published for female founders at every stage. Read more from the series →