Hi, I’ m Giulia

Somewhere in there, a brand paid me $9,000 for one Instagram post. Nothing about my following explained that number. Only my ability to ask for it did. That was the moment money stopped feeling like luck and started feeling like a skill. So when my “promotion” turned out to be the same salary, a longer commute, and a desk back inside an office, I didn’t sleep on it.

I said no, right then and there, and woke up the next morning calling myself something I’d never officially earned the right to: an entrepreneur. Six months later, I’d closed in on six figures my first half year in business. Nobody made me an entrepreneur. I just stopped waiting to be one.

I modeled myself after Instagram gurus instead of successful, serial entrepreneurs. The whole industry ran on the same script: girl boss hustle dressed up as “success” and scarcity sold back to you as an “abundance mindset.” I built a business that ran entirely on my own nervous system, every client, every message, every decision passing through me first, and called that discipline instead of what it actually was: a business with no spine under it.

Everyone warns you about hitting rock bottom but nobody warns you about the version that’s actually more dangerous: making just enough money to never be forced to fix what’s wrong. I was comfortable enough to keep coasting. But I knew, deep down, I wasn’t playing to my full potential and I was tired of watching my own movie.

I stopped watching my own movie and started rewriting the part I was playing in it. Everyone tells ambitious women to want it more, do more, be available around the clock. I did the opposite. I moved to Bali and started removing myself from the parts of the business I’d been holding onto for dear life. I hired instead of hoarding profit and started building systems instead of white-knuckling my way to $1M/year.

I made a video at 3am in the middle of January claiming my million dollar year, and by Dec 31st we crossed it, on the books it was $986,000 in a single year, up from $200K the one before, and for the first time, I realized being irreplaceable in the business was a liability, not an asset.

The first seven months of this year were the best I’d ever had on paper. Nearly $200K months, the kind of numbers people are messaging you all day saying “How are you doing this?” What didn’t show up in the P&L was what was holding it together: me.

I wanted more, faster, and had never actually learned how to lead, hire, fire, or train anyone to carry the weight I was still carrying myself. Everyone told me I was killing it but I’d never felt less like it. I had every external marker of success, including becoming a net-worth millionaire that year, and I still couldn’t unplug for a single day without the whole thing getting harder, not easier. I didn’t have a company, I had a very expensive version of myself that other people were paying to be near.

I walked into this year knowing it was going to be painful. I was running on fumes for years and calling it discipline. By the end of the year I realized it was just getting more expensive and less profitable to run my business. Finally, towards the end of the year, I decided to leave my ego at the door, regulated my own nervous system with the help of practitioners, and knew I was embarking on a journey that I needed to take.

I let go of anyone that I realized were making the business smaller. I wrote down everything that felt broken, which was a lot, and instead of trying to fix all of it before lunch, I fixed one thing at a time. From the outside, it probably looked like nothing was happening. From the inside, it was the first time in my entrepreneurial journey I was starting to build something on my terms, instead of just surviving it.

A healthy business lets its owner sleep at night. Now, mine finally does. It took months to steady what I’d created, and now I genuinely love our team, our clients, and the brand we’ve shaped together. I’m proud of it, and even prouder of the people who helped build it alongside me.

I finally became the leader this company needed, not just the founder holding it together by hand. Clients get real results because the systems underneath actually hold, whether or not I’m the one running them that day. It’s the first year that’s felt less like recovery and more like a runway.