We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Fiona Wang a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Fiona, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of our favorite things to brainstorm about with friends who’ve built something entrepreneurial is what they would do differently if they were to start over today. Surely, there are things you’ve learned that would allow you to do it over faster, more efficiently. We’d love to hear how you would go about setting things up if you were starting over today, knowing everything that you already know.

There are 3 key things I would do differently now that I’ve started a couple of different businesses

1. Make sure you price your services and products to account for hidden costs, opportunity costs and your mental health. when i first started my. business I charged low to secure clients in the early stages, however this sets your business up for the wrong expectations, clients try to take advantage of this and you put yourself under a lot of stress.

2. Always test before you go all out, start with a small sample, or start with 1 product or service. Get the offering right for your audience and then increase your range and products. I made the mistake of ordering all the stock at the beginning and now I have lots of stock that wont sell.

3. Ensure proper systems and documentation of everything, no matter how busy you are in the early stages, make sure all your documents are in one place, everything you do is in writing, all the assets, work collaborations are organised properly. This will save you so many headaches and inefficiencies in the long term.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hey there, I’m Fiona! I’m a founder, content creator, and mentor whose most recognised for founding the Fluid Project and sharing food and travel lifestyle content around Sydney and Asia.

Over the past eight years, I’ve worked in corporate marketing while consulting and creating content for businesses of all sizes.

During lockdown I started creating on social media, and found my passion in using creativity to grow businesses and build a community.

Within 3 years I co founded The Fluid Project with a close friend and opened a UGC content creation agency where we service over a dozen clients every month. I also now share organic, storytelling style content to over 180,000 followers of my own and worked with brands across travel, hospitality, fashion, beauty and tech.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

The most important lesson I learnt on Social media is to show up and share moments of your business that your customers would not be able to see otherwise. We grew our businesses by sharing the very early stages, the planning, the build, the set up, all our challenges and how it happened. We have a dozen of videos online before the business even opened so that bought the audience on the journey with us. Social media is not a platform to sell your business, but a place to connect and build a community. If you build a community, you will create a presence.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I believe that there is a way to make a career out of everything. If you are good or passionate about something, there is always a way to monetize it and grow it into a career. When I started I still worked full time at a company and then slowly worked on my passion for content creation, taking freelance jobs, small collabs and supporting small businesses. Then I started turning some of those one off clients into more permanent long term clients until I was ready to take the leap and go into content creation full time. It’s important to remember that great things don’t happen overnight, its about small steps in the right direction.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.candidco.com.au/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heyfionawang/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiona-wang-b86353b1/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCulBamBziS_lGaKt6FtNJ_w
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@heyfionawang https://thefluidproject.com.au/