Three burnouts. Four companies.
One stubborn belief about email.

I built a seven-figure business by saying yes to everything.

The first agency happened almost by accident. I was twenty-something, very capable, very tired, and very willing to convert "I can probably do that" into an invoice. I built it on hustle, late nights, and the kind of caffeine intake that probably has a Wikipedia page now. We grew fast. The numbers got big. And around year three I started doing this thing where I'd cry in the shower for ninety seconds, towel off, and then walk into a strategy call.

The shower-crying was the canary. I ignored it for another eighteen months.

The thing nobody tells you about a "successful" business is that the success and the burnout often share a hard drive. The same instincts that make you good at the work – over-functioning, perfectionism, never letting anyone down – are the instincts that quietly ruin you. I was great at the job. I was bad at being a person.

I burned out twice more before I noticed a pattern.

By the time I'd done it three times – three companies, three flameouts, three "this time will be different" speeches I gave myself in the kitchen at 11pm – I had to admit it wasn't bad luck. It was a shape. Every time I built something, I built it the same way: front-loaded, founder-dependent, with me as the bottleneck for everything that mattered.

And the thing that always went first? The list.

I'd build a list of thousands of people who wanted to hear from me, and then I'd go quiet for months because writing emails felt like one more performance I didn't have the energy for. I'd open the campaign tool on a Sunday night, stare at the blank subject line, close the laptop, and tell myself I'd do it Monday. Two months would pass. The list would go cold. The revenue would dry up. And I'd build something new instead of fixing what was broken.

And then, because the universe occasionally enjoys a heavy-handed metaphor, my house burnt down.

Not a small fire. The whole thing, to the ground. 2am, freezing Melbourne August, one working smoke alarm in the entire house – the rest dead-batteried in the way every busy person's smoke alarms quietly are until they aren't. I made it out the door with my phone and a pair of ugg boots. Seven fire trucks. Twenty-three firemen, all very buff, none able to save the laptop, the hard drives, the photos, the lot. I stood barefoot-in-uggs on a frozen lawn and watched a decade of work leave as smoke.

What I felt, standing there, wasn't grief. It was relief. Which is the moment you should probably stop and ask yourself some questions about how you've been living.

The third burnout came with its own complications – a difficult separation that became a long, expensive legal chapter I won't bore you with on a website. The short version is that I lost the next several years of my life to lawyers and other people's narratives, and there's nothing useful to say about it that doesn't make me sound either bitter or smug. I'd rather just say what happened next.

I ghosted my own list for seven years.

The same instincts that make you good at the work are the instincts that quietly ruin you.– Notebook entry, 2019

I moved 1,400 km from the city on purpose.

I made three decisions in the same year. The first was to move to a small town in tropical North Queensland, surrounded by rainforest, where the loudest thing in the morning is a bush turkey violating my banana tree. The second was to stop building businesses that depended on me being a hero, and start building systems that did the heroics for me. The third – and this is the one I don't usually lead with – was that I quit drinking.

Five years sober as of Anzac Day. I'm not going to make a thing of it on this page; if you want the long version, ask me on a call. But I will say this: a lot of what I used to call "hustle" was, in retrospect, self-medication with extra steps. The wine at 6pm wasn't the problem. The reason I needed it at 6pm was the problem. Take the drink away and you're left with the actual feeling. And the actual feeling, it turns out, is usually this is too much and I made it this way.

I bought a red LED face mask off the internet, the kind that makes you look like a low-budget supervillain, and I started wearing it from 6:45 to 7:15 every morning while the kettle boiled. Not because I think infrared lights cure anything – I'm not that woman – but because thirty minutes of doing nothing before email is the only productivity hack I've ever stuck with.

I cancelled my Slack. I cancelled half my clients. I cancelled, with great prejudice, the part of myself that thought being busy was the same as being valuable.

Email isn't a content problem. It's a system problem.

The reason I went silent on my list for seven years wasn't that I had nothing to say. I had plenty to say. The reason I went silent was that every time I sat down to write, I had to:

– remember who my buyer was
– figure out where they were in the journey
– guess what would land
– write something that sounded like me
– not sound salesy
– not sound boring
– do all of this in twenty minutes between calls

That's not a writing problem. That's a missing system. And the reason 7-figure founders quietly ghost their lists isn't that they don't care – it's that they don't have one either.

So, last year, I built one. For myself, first. A permanent email system that lived inside the AI I already used, calibrated to my voice and my buyer's psychology, that turned writing-an-email from a 90-minute performance into a 12-minute conversation.

That system is what I now call Sent™, and Out of Office Forever is the home I've built around it. OOOF is just over a year old. I have a handful of clients. I plan to keep it that way. The $12M in online sales? That's from my own businesses, before this one – including one single evergreen course that did $7M on its own. I'm not bringing those receipts in to flex; I'm bringing them in so you know I'm not making this up as I go.

The best sales happen when no one's selling.– What I learned from the rainforest

One hero offer. The rest is just weather.

I run Out of Office Forever from the rainforest. I'm one year in. I write the Tuesday/Thursday letter. I take a small number of Sent™ clients at a time. I run a beachside ice cream cart called Lady Licks in Airlie Beach because life should be fun and sprinkles are cheaper than therapy. There's also Keith – Irish, stoic, recently purchased an 8-tonne excavator and is therefore visible for approximately five minutes a day. He restored my faith in men, then disappeared into a pile of dirt. I've got the LED mask, the goanna, five years of sobriety, and a calendar with more white space than my twenty-five-year-old self could've imagined possible.

If you want to know what I believe about email, the manifesto is the short version. If you want to see the system itself, Sent™ is here. If you want to ask me something, the contact page is below.

And if you're ever in Airlie Beach: first scoop's on me.