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

Madison, appreciate you joining us today. Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.

This is such a funny question because my parents and I have the ongoing joke that they deprived me and my childhood was so hard because they were the “mean parents”. This joke came about because my parents were always very serious about having good work ethic and earning things and not being handed things. In today’s day and age everybody wants a participation trophy it just wasn’t common to have parents who made you work really hard. As an adult, that work ethic has gotten me further than any participation trophy or handout would have. I definitely thank them for not caving and giving me whatever I wanted and making me too determined to quit, which is a huge factor in how I got to where I am today with my business.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Every single one of my side hustles, I have attempted to turn into a business. I don’t think that I was ever cut out to be the corporate single path career person that society loves to idolize. I mentioned earlier that I have had four failed businesses, each of those stemmed from some type of side hustle. I did Tumbler making during Covid and that lasted probably about a year before I realize the time effort and money that goes into it usually doesn’t pay out unless you’re doing big orders. I started an apparel business, which also did not last very long. I think that ran for maybe a year and a half. I have tried to run a home decor/homemade crafts, business, and sell on Etsy, which hasn’t gotten me very far. And my most successful to date aside from my marketing business was my photography business, which actually led me to develop this business.

Now I say those are all failed businesses, mostly because that’s what they would be referred to outside of my current work however, I do still do each of those things to some capacity because I love doing them, but they’re more of a passion project every once in a while and I’m not trying to make that my full-time income.

However, the saying, I’m not lucky, I just have failed more times than you’ll even tried rings very true in this instance. I have gained experience and knowledge from every single business. I’ve tried to make my full-time income and without each, and every one of them, I would not have a successful marketing business today.

Some major milestones that have gotten me here include quitting my full-time job with insurance and security of a paycheck to go all in. That was the scariest step, but I believe the most worth it to put the time and effort into my business that it needs and to show up for my clients with 100%

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

About a year ago when I was getting really serious about making this marketing, my full-time thing I was hired on by a major magazine company to provide them with some media content at a rather large event, and there was a dangerously large miscommunication on what the expected outcome was which really crushed my confidence for several months afterwards and gave me lots of second and third thoughts on whether or not I was cut out for this. Thankfully, after some soul-searching, I was able to snap out of it, and was consistently reminded of how much it means to me to help businesses and to not give up because of one bad experience.

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