Meet Olivia

Six months after landing a dream internship with Spotify as part of her university degree, Olivia was offered a full-time position with the company. But in that moment, she realized that what she wanted more than her dream job was to strike out on her own and create something new.

She decided to found an e-commerce gift boxing company, so she returned home to New Zealand and dove into a year of work preparing to launch Taken Care Of.

In October 2017, Olivia’s business launched to crickets.

“We did a lot of planning, and we validated our idea, but we didn’t have an audience of people to launch to.”

They gathered a number of corporate clients that kept the business afloat, but the small, one-off orders Olivia dreamed of fulfilling just weren’t coming in.

Meanwhile, Olivia was an avid listener of the Foundr podcast where she heard repeated advertisements for the Start & Scale course. Six months after Taken Care Of launched, she decided to give the course a try.

She diligently went through each module, grateful for each moment where they had done something right in preparation for launch, and tweaking things pointed out in the lessons that needed to be changed.

“Going through each phase, it was quite amazing validating what we had done right…and then maybe what areas we had missed a step and we could go back and go, ‘Oh well, we didn’t even think about doing that.’ And there was also that whole hindsight of, ‘I wish I had done this before I launched!’”

Throughout the course, Olivia learned the true value of listening to customers and using their feedback to grow her business, and she utterly changed the way she sources products for her boxes based on the information she learned in the lesson on finding manufacturers. She also found the module on branding to be particularly helpful, as she explored her brand’s persona for the first time.

But she says that the proof of the course’s value truly shined at Christmas time.

During their first holiday season as a business, they made about $13,000. In Taken Care Of’s first post-Start & Scale holiday season, Olivia’s business brought in $51,000 in sales, shattering the $20,000 goal she had set.

More than anything else, Olivia feels that she now has clear goals for the future of her business, and she can’t wait to see where Taken Care Of goes next.