This CEO built a $100M-a-year business in her parents’ garage | Real Time Headlines

Lou was an only child in an immigrant family. She moved to Australia from China with her parents when she was eight years old.

When her family first landed in Australia, Lou spoke no English and her parents had to work odd jobs for several years as they tried to build a life in their new country.

“You don’t realize you’re poor until…some kid makes you realize you’re poor,” she told CNBC Make It. “My mom… was actually the janitor for some of the kids’ (households) at my school.”

“I was the only foreigner in school who didn’t speak English,” she said, adding that when she first went to school, she couldn’t go to the bathroom because she didn’t know how to ask where it was.

Lu said feeling so different from her peers made her uneasy.

Lou’s competitive spirit and nature drove him to always be an overachiever.

By her freshman year, she had already found a job at KPMG, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. She worked there for about two and a half years before moving to Ernst & Young in a corporate finance role while balancing her studies.

In 2009, one of Lu’s friends proposed a business idea to her: a pop-up store concept called “Fat Boye Group”. “With a silent ‘e,'” she said. The business idea eventually became Lu’s side business.

At that time, Lu worked in company finance during the day and handled business at night.

On weekends, she runs brick-and-mortar pop-ups. “The way a pop-up works is, it’s set up and packed every day. So, it’s like a lot of hand work,” she said.

She used her parents’ garage as storage space for all her business supplies and would use any other free time she had with her partners to hand out business cards, pitch their pop-up concepts to vendors and run the store.

As Lou realized she loved running a business, she also began to feel deeply unhappy about her corporate role.

“I just hated it. I found it so boring and dry,” she said. “I always used to think of my corporate job as financial security that would allow me and my parents to not have to worry about not being able to pay the rent or the mortgage…and then, all of a sudden, it was like a prison sentence. .

When the global financial crisis was in full swing, Lou’s day job became even more daunting as her favorite manager was fired.

In June 2010, Lu finally quit his job at the company.

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, you only have one life, and now I’m three hours away from death, what did I do? I did something so pointless that I deleted this circular reference,'” she said explain.

Lu decided to keep the decision a secret from her parents. “I couldn’t tell my parents that I had quit my job to sell clothes in a pop-up shop,” she said.

So for months, she would wake up early in the morning, put on a suit, have breakfast with her parents, and head into town with her mom, as if she were still in her corporate finance role. After his mother went to work, Lu secretly went to work at Fat Boye Group for a whole day.

Coincidentally, just a month after Ms. Lu quit her job to devote herself to the company full-time, her business partner returned from a vacation abroad and decided that her entrepreneurial life was over.

“She basically said, ‘Listen, Jane, I don’t want to do this anymore… I don’t want to be poor anymore. I don’t like the entrepreneurial life. I’ve been looking for a job since I was an entrepreneur. I’m leaving, I’m going back. Worked.

At this time, Ms. Lu lacked the confidence to run the business on her own, so she closed Fat Boye Group in July 2010.

“If you cut back to a month ago, I had everything my parents and I had been striving for: financial security, job security and a great job,” she said. Then, due to student loan arrears, business losses and other reasons, she found herself about $60,000 in debt.

“I was a loser… I felt embarrassed, ashamed, and I couldn’t find another job because it was during the global financial crisis. So I was very depressed,” Lu said.

Two months later, Lou was still unemployed and looking for work, so she contacted the only friend she knew who owned a business, hoping to land a job at his company. But instead of offering Lu a job, he offered to introduce her to someone he met in online fashion retail.

Lu met the girl, whose name she refused to reveal, and they immediately hit it off.

“Then maybe the third time I met her, and one too many glasses of wine, we came up with the name and the concept for the store, and then that night, I came home, still drunk, and built the website,” Lu said.

The new business partners decided to name it “Show Pony”, which was eventually abbreviated to “Showpo”. That same weekend in September 2010, they took their first photos, found a supplier, and made their first sale within a week.

Lou was still heavily in debt, so they couldn’t afford traditional suppliers or traditional marketing, so they had to get creative.

“We did traditional marketing for (the first business), but that just drained the money out of the business, which is why Showpo had no money and had to do social media,” said Lu, who credits social media for the business’s success. Made a contribution.

Additionally, “the fact that (Fat Boye Group) was a brick and mortar, I found it couldn’t scale, which is why Showpo came online in the first place,” she said. “That’s the best crash course in business – when you really fail at something, because I think that’s when you really learn something.”

After about fifteen months, Lou’s business partner decided to leave as sales began to decline.

“When she left, sales got worse and worse,” Lu said. “She had been running her business and it was doing better and growing, so she decided to quit.”

In December 2011, Lu bought out her business partner’s shares and became the sole owner of Showpo. Within his first month of running the company on his own, Lu doubled sales to $9,000 a month, and two years later, Showpo’s revenue reached $1 million.

For the first two years of Showpo, Lu kept his decision to quit his corporate finance job a secret. She worried about disappointing or worrying her parents, but by 2012, the company was growing rapidly and Lu finally decided to come clean.

“I remember we had $500,000 in inventory and I thought, ‘Well, worst case scenario, I can sell all of this and start another business,'” Lu said. “It was a very painful moment for me… (Seeing that) changed the trajectory of my career no matter what.”

On Father’s Day, Lu took his parents to a high-end restaurant in the Center Point Building, one of Sydney’s landmark buildings, and broke the news.

“So I told them and (said) I was going to buy them a new car because they only had used cars right now … and (also) I was going to pay off their mortgage,” Lu said.